FAF for Casual Players

@brutus5000 said in FAF for Casual Players:

My suggestion is a way to match players to AIs of different strengths without finding a "correct" global / tmm rating for each AI and without interfering the existing leaderboards.
If people want PvE, we can just keep it out of the competetive leaderboards.

Do you want to elaborate? I haven't properly understood your suggestion yet i think.

Missions in this context is a term that could be applied loosely - you dont need to have lots of new content generated, you can just have a handful of maps/AI setups picked for each AI , and those are then ordered based on difficulty and the client has some sort of tracking feature that takes you through each sequentially and (ideally) gives an achievement when you complete them all. The main work for this would be on the client side, but the actual content (AI and maps) already exist.

So for example you could start with a simple 1v1 Easy AI on a 5km map, and work up towards say a 1v4 custom AI on a 20km map. It could be a way of showcasing both custom FAF maps, and the AI at the same time (since PvE players are less likely to have seen the maps that feature in the main matchmaker). It could even be combined with other mods (where they're compatible with the AI), such as the survival mode mod, or mods that add new units.

it sounds like what we need is... galactic war

I tried a few coop missions recently, and the experience is... not great.

• SupCom/FA campaigns: these are decently made. Didn't really test group balance. Not so fun replaying due to long cutscenes.
• FAF additions/player contributions: variable. Usually some effort has been made in the design, at least somewhere, but quality and style varies. Some seem to deliberately be a slog.
• No rating system/feedback for campaigns.
• Coop balance: at least one of the additional campaigns I tried hits you with large amounts of spam early regardless of the number of players in the game. Hard to deal with lots of spam without the extra ACUs.
• Intel: in general, you are reliant on mission commanders briefing you on what is coming when in order to choose between eco and defence. Usually this intel is useless.
• Additions often have a script with commanders talking at you, but without voice-over you either ignore them (potentially missing information) or stop what you are doing to read. Not a great experience. My recommendation if there is no voice-over would be to cut text to the absolute minimum.
• Campaigns have annoying cut-scenes in general.
• Fail conditions may be too strict (e.g. any commander dies), making coop less fun. Sometimes the mission doesn't even say why you failed.
• Arguably the most important sound in the game, Commander under attack, seems to be broken in coop?

The biggest improvement I'd like to see is some sort of community feedback/rating on missions: quality, style, length, special considerations. There's a bunch of them and it isn't obvious where to start.

decrease the difficutly, hard means hard my man, it's supposed to be punishing

It should really be default on medium tbh if you expect it to be an onboarding system

@blackyps said in FAF for Casual Players:

A well thought out mockup massively increases the chance to attract a dev in implementing it. And even if we do not immediatly find someone to do it, then we at least have a concept that can be picked up at any point.

Okay ill give it a try. WIP

Why did you include matchmaker and custom games as well? I would just leave them as is

I think a consistent design has to include the entire play tab. However, this is really just a playground for my ideas, and i expect it to change substantially over time, so i would like to discuss it later, after i have iterated on it a bit.

@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:

Do you want to elaborate? I haven't properly understood your suggestion yet i think.

Let's put aside the problem how to integrate the multiple AIs we have.

Create a standalone PvsAI queue with standalone rating system. We predermine the ratings of several AIs (e.g. by having them fight it out themselves in a truskilly-environment).
These AIs will never learn and never change, thus their rating is fixed forever.
All other players start with a default rating just as today.

Now people can play and grow against them. Not sure if this only works for Player team vs AI team or mixed as well.

@Brutus5000
I don't think having a skill rating in a PvsAI is helping anybody much. The only reason why rating even exists, is so we can create fair matches. But the entire point of PvsAI is that matches don't need to be fair. If i wanted fair matches, i would play PvP.

If i am a PvsAI player, and i want to assess my own skill, i just need to play two or three matches against different difficulty AIs (assuming we have good knowledge of AI rating) and then i know what i can beat, i don't really need anything more finegrained.

So while a PvsAI queue would certainly not hurt anybody, that would be a very low priority feature from my point of view.