Read-only sections on the forum

TheWeakie

i dont think you know what quite a demand means

archsimkat

I think it's quite pedantic, and irrelevant, to argue whether or not a demand exists (did demand for smartphones technically exist before they were created?), but it's clear that the community stands to benefit from such a change. Instead of members of the community having to guess at reasons behind why balance changes were made, the reasoning behind balance changes can be accessible for everyone. Instead of the most prominent balance suggestions on the forums coming from less experienced players, the discussion of pros from the balance team will be front and centre. This is especially important considering forum threads will exist for a long time. Players from the future can visit and view these threads, and see the thinking behind decisions that were made.

TheWeakie

@archsimkat said in Read-only sections on the forum:

I think it's quite pedantic, and irrelevant, to argue whether or not a demand exists

You're the one who brought it up my man

biass

Doing all of this is useless if the team doesn't use the channels, this is the most likely scenario - there isn't much of a gain for them to move and they probably don't get any value from reading yet another derailed forum post discussing their discussions.

I think a more eloquent solution is a github feed or just someone to make basic posts on the forums. That's more of a promotion thing.
Second option is just more basic moderation, we've been crying for that for weeks now.

Jip

I understand that if they don't want this that it won't be used and therefore there is no need. I feel that someone from the balance team should explicitly state it if this is the case - assuming here that you (biass) are not part of the balance team.

I think your (biass') alternative approaches to this are okay - but in my opinion far from perfect. I understand that seeing your suggestions to balance being derailed (in another topic) is annoying, but to me that feels as an inherent part to a community and the original topic can be guarded from being derailed.

I'd like to back up @archsimkat that right now the popular and 'prominent' balance discussions on the forum (which is the center of our community - after all it is linked to by the faforever.com website) is from players that I believe are not part of the balance team. This is a bit odd because these will be the threads that will be visible in years to come (!), where as they do not represent the thinking and realizations / insights that made the balance into what it is today.

And last, I feel we already have an example - given the discussion from Moses about T3 being being nerfed a few years back. Without starting the discussion as to whether it was a good or bad change - where are the insights that caused this change written down? Because I feel it could've changed the discussion after 1 post containing a bunch of references to the corresponding change.

FtXCommando

Balance team was already approached and offered by Gieb to self police the balance forums. They did not want to do it. I imagine they also will not feel like obligating themselves to fill a forum restricted purely to the handful of dudes on the team.

Personally I don’t really see why it’s necessary. Balance team aren’t going to post what they discuss on the forums so all you’ll really get is a giant forum that serves the same purpose as the current patchnotes + balance feedback threads serve.

Jip

Thanks for coming in - does this mean that all their insights are lost over time again?

FtXCommando

How are they lost?
Good insight -> becomes balance change -> is a part of FAF

In addition, the team itself isn't some committee set up by the Balance Councillor but rather more of an association in itself. This means that there are always old dudes around that can say why certain things were ignored/discarded/whatever to the newer members that get recruited. Not to mention having the game competency to recognize insights independently is kind of expected of someone joining the team.

The forum would just serve as another thing for dudes to read, digest, and ignore because their cheese got nerfed and they don't really care about the 1000 pages of reasoning you wrote explaining the necessity for it (almost like people already do that on the balance forums). Same as people do for current patchnotes with their synopsis and same as people do in every balance patch release thread.

I mean the real solution here is active/heavy-handed moderation of the forum so things going in circles stop in their tracks. That's all that's really necessary.

Jip

I firmly disagree. Just proposing a change without providing some insight as to why you change it means the insight is lost in my opinion. Especially when time passes by. I don't know how to derive their train of thought from these changes:

Yes - of course there are other members that can tell you why it happened. But why would you burden people with the same questions, over and over again? With the same discussions, over and over again? Having some reference with even the tiniest trace of the reasoning of the change allows someone to simply reference to the trace.

I'm not entirely sure what you are referring to in your second paragraph - I'm not promoting people to join the balance team. I'm promoting the idea that the insights that are made by better players and / or players with more time on their hands would be interesting for the community as a whole to be able to read - considering that they found them worthy enough to change the balance. I'm not asking them to write a book, I'm just asking them why they thought the scout needs to cost a tad more.

As an example: a sentence or two can be sufficient and will take up less time than what they are writing right now (https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3192) which is a duplicate of the change log of GitHub - written in their own format.

Yes - there will be people that will ignore them from some perspective. But isn't that a minority, people that can be counted on one hand?

Without dragging Brutus into this discussion, I'd like to take his blogs and announcements about changes as an example:

They provide insight to the changes and are interesting to read. Given: I may have a bias because I tend to think myself to be a developer.

ThomasHiatt

The insights are right here: https://content.faforever.com/patchnotes/

Jip

Well - I wasn't aware of that . That is exactly what I think there should be. How would you navigate towards that page? Because I'm quite confident that I've never seen it before.

ThomasHiatt

Type "FAF patchnotes" into Google, or your favorite search engine.

Jip

Right - I understand - but how to do it without my favorite search engine. Because I tried to find these on the pages, and all I found at some point was the changes described in-game.

ThomasHiatt

I don't think there is any way to find them besides that, FAF is a mess.

Jip

@ThomasHiatt Thank you for joining in, I was completely unaware of that part of the website.

I still think that the discussion of the balance team should be more public, but I won't drag on the discussion. I've said what I wanted to say.

Is it an idea to make a (sticky) post per patch in the balance suggestions forum (or somewhere that makes sense so that they can be found) that only includes the introduction and then a link with the rest of the changes? As an example:

The post has that introduction copy-pasted, and then references the patch for more details. They'll remain at the top due to the stickiness. Lock them after creating so that they do not encourage a discussion (in that topic). With that, the information is present where it matters. Edit: I'm willing to do this myself, just need to know if people agree and if someone can lock the topics afterwards.

Props to whoever made this - it looks great.

Zokora

Just promote that page more aggressively with every update somewhere (news, FAF client popup)

Whoever is responsible for that writing and images of the page is doing a great job. I love to read through those changes.

FtXCommando

There’s like 1-2 balance patches a year. Promoting it aggressively during patches won’t make it any more known. Particularly since it’s linked to in every patch release thread which is made every patch.

Someone could pin it in balance forums I guess.

speed2

Would this help? https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3210

Jip

@speed2 Yes! it would help. Not all those patches are balance patches however - some are dev. I like the pin / sticky idea in the balance section of the forums too - just to make sure that it can be found where it is relevant.

moses_the_red

If the balance team isn't communicating things to the community, it probably isn't because they don't like using the forums. Its probably because for whatever reason they don't want to communicate things to the community.