What would it take for Nomads to be FAF's 5th Faction?

also offtopic comparison, dota and lol add new heroes and items all the time, their additions enrich the greater potential for balance. dota2's introduction of talents again gave more room for balancing. with a 5th side actively considered for the overall balance of the meta, even if no one chooses it, it's affect on balance will still exist. i see this as a good thing, and i can empathise with those who do not. it is truly a double edged sword and i believe in the long term it is worth it.

speaking of microsft... halo infinite as seasonal content update for MCC would have avoided the entire mess they've got on their hands... halo5 crossplay splitscreen... i love when all the things get added, and cry when they dont... but what a mess. FAF does a good job of avoiding messes. FAF actually gets things done.

I've been in plenty of Nomads lobbies where no one picked nomads. I think statistically this is the most likely scenario. In most matches most people wont pick nomads, well no more nor less than any other faction not getting picked in an 8v8. And this is the pvp context for my personal appreciation of nomads, it adds more flavour to the chaos, without getting silly like blackops and mayhem.

We must remember that ultimately FAF is viewed by many as just a mod. Arguably the greatest supcom mod. I view Nomads as one of the crown jewels, it just needs to be cut and polished.

How about nomads as a lobby option, disabled by default?

Love the essays, keep them coming

That would require loading Nomads content every game, for basically no reason

@deribus are unused assets really loaded into memory?

it would certainly make initial installation of FAF take longer.

@cunnismeta said in What would it take for Nomads to be FAF's 5th Faction?:

We must remember that ultimately FAF is viewed by many as just a mod

it may be viewed as a mod, but last I checked, as a mod to continue the support of the original game (supreme commander: forged alliance) and improve it, not change what it is as if it is some kind of unofficial sequel or fan game/spiritual successor, unless it changed, the point of FAF, as I understand it, is to make the base game the best it can be, you can't do that if it is no longer the base game, these additions (mods), however amazing, must remain completely optional

and it is not an excuse to deviate "because we are already technically a mod, so it doesn't matter how far from original we decide to change it" nor should what people see FAF as change what it is, I can't check, but I think many more people come to/stay on FAF not because of how far it deviates from original, but because of how close it manages to stay to it while improving to the point where the game is unplayable without it, I know I do, nomads (or any other modded faction) just can't fit into that no matter how good it is, because it wasn't in the original game (SC:FA) and thus should remain optional

before you mention units that FAF added, those were added (again afaik) because of existing gameplay necessity (t3 maa) or other kind of improvement of some aspect of existing gameplay (engy mod), nomads aren't needed for gameplay, they are a completely optional addition that base game doesn't need to function, they may be great and all but they are great as an optional mod, not as part of base game

FAF does a good job of avoiding messes.

this is why

In my opinion the "crown jewel" of FAF you speak of shouldn't be what it adds into the base game whether you want it or not, but what it allows to be added to modded games if you do want it, but the base game should remain base, a crown can be taken off

Updated my post with more accurate numbers, with thanks to @Sheikah

I look at the numbers and think "How many more people would play with Nomads if they were more complete?". Playing coop is the same content only the objective has changed. Nomads puts additional functional ("Functional") content in that adds more.

Unrelated, I didn't know so many people played coop.

Just a total lack of man power, if Nomads and Balance team had a full staff, maybe it could be possible, I’d be happy with a fifth faction to add more spice to the game.

However, this would need a dev staff for nomads, and for balance team to have much more time in their hands to balance all of these things.

Afaik Nomads development stopped because most devs either stopped working on it or don’t want people changing Nomads. I recall some people I know trying to contribute but being met with a lot of bureaucracy from nomad devs about their vision and what they want implemented…

@Mach whilst i agree entirely with most of the points you make, some people feel this way about seraphim, i know i sure did for the longest of time.

@jip that's much clearer. 35k unique players playing 2.5million valid pvp matches? in one month is impressive. what are the stats for 1v1? and other matchmaming queues.

@TankenAbard i think the same thing, and i think the same of SCTA.

@Femboy yes, gatekeeping by skeleton crews helps no one, least of all nomads.

the massive difference is that seraphim were added by original developers of the game, they are canon and part of the game no matter how anyone feels about it, they were also introduced like less than a year after original game afaik, they were basically part of it from start so idk how anyone could have a problem accepting them, unlike nomads who are completely fan made in every way more than a decade later and unofficial and having nothing to do with original developers

I also found seraphim confusing at first and I still can't tell the difference between many of their units and buildings as easily as for other factions, but they are part of the game that always existed for me, and for anyone else coming to FAF, literally the intro of FA shows seraphim and the entire story is about seraphim, everyone who played the game anywhere knows about seraphim because they are everywhere in it from start (even original supcom mentions them repeatedly, some critical stuff in story is literally seraphim), same can't be said about nomads or other potential fan factions, many probably don't even know nomads mod exists, especially those just coming to FAF

@mach to be fair, nomads is as old as seraphim. considering the emphasis modability was given prerelease, isn't no surprise a group of fans immediately set to work creating a 4th faction. Coming from TA, Aeon will always be the new faction in my eyes.

maybe i need to rewatch all of the cinematics, does vanilla supcom truly reference seraphim repeatedly? would be insanely cool if the cinematic videos could be played directly though the FAF client at any point. seem to be in some weird format... the videos play through VLC... with no audio...

As long as SCTA under my steward, SCTA will never be ranked

@cunnismeta said in What would it take for Nomads to be FAF's 5th Faction?:

does vanilla supcom truly reference seraphim repeatedly? would be insanely cool if the cinematic videos could be played directly though the FAF client at any point. seem to be in some weird format... the videos play through VLC... with no audio...

original supcom intro mentions seraphim as origin for aeon, aeon intro also mentions them, naturally, in the story itself seraphim artifacts are a plot point in cybran's second mission and exist as real objects in game, brackman himself talks about them in some cutscenes, I think QAI does as well, idk how many other times they may be mentioned in story cutscenes

in "secret" outro of each faction shows seraphim arriving on Earth in different ways even if for few seconds, example of UEF, and cybran, (for some reason it is very hard to find an isolated video of those on youtube)

so yes seraphim were very canon from beginning

I would like to clear out some of the missinformation about "gatekeeping" people from contributing to nomads. That was never the case, people are welcome to help out with the mod and they are given pointers if they are unsure how to do stuff.

You can see all closed PRs here https://github.com/FAForever/nomads/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed
and you will have hard time finding PRs that got rejected.

But as with the main fa game repo that Jip is managing, Nomads also have certain quality requirements for the things that get added. That applies for code, models, effects.

So people are getting feedback on their work and pointers on what to improve and how.

I hope this help to clear some things out

So gonna make a fuller response now about SCTA and Ranking/integrating:

1. Most of the SCTA Models simply aren’t the “proper” quality needed. And most don’t have LODs more than 1. Now I set many to phase out, but that different issue.
2. Fundamentally TA Factions at there core are not balanceable vs Supcom. You can make them ‘fair’ but not balanced. There is 1001 reasons for this, between the different scaling of Eco, lacking certain “techs”, and having abilities that are simply not replicable but Supcom Factions.
3. Fixing 2 would fundamentally change the mod at its core premise. Which is about enabling a way to play Supcom vs TA in a somewhat reasonable fashion AND allowing folks to see where Supcom franchise had spawn from. Why is there only 1 “Engineer” type? Because juggling 3-5 different types are infuriating (for example).

Which basically covers it, but I wanted to be clear on that.

No point in balancing Nomads until models are finished and some units cut or replaced or reworked. Before that happens, all you can do is make things look less worse. Original team wanted to implement some really weird things in mod and some of them exist to these days.

One thing is certain: mod needs thoughtful approach of "balance team" and "model team" to make things happen. The amount of work to make models of required quality is absurd. And FAF balance team wouldnt handle this job given how slowly they fix things in original game and how ugly they do their job. Quick example: loyalist missile redirection was fixed in EQ in 2016, now the question is the fix in the main game?

In any case there is one major issue with mod: its intellectual property. It doesn't belong to FAF, it doesn't belong to Exotic's team, nor 2-3 teams before. It belongs to Brute51 and he set some restrictions on how we could change the mod. We certainly crossed the border a little and it cost us a shitstorm a couple times. I personally would scrap 1/4 of what people call "faction identity", but i was not allowed to do so. Orbital bombardment that was mentioned here is one of those things. However one thing is random russian noname doing small things and other is legal entity from Europe changing everything completely.

My conclusion is FAF does not have resources to implement mod.

This project was cool, but right now its barely living corpse or better say cadaver. When i first saw Sanctuary trailer I noticed familiar style, concepts and assets there. Why do you think EDA was the first faction you saw on screen? Fair to say Nomads will be finished. In other game...

@siwaonadaphnewen I did not know that this was the reality of things, that is terrible.

how exactly is something created in someone elses IP (supreme commander, owned by gpg, square enix now) claimed by some random third party person as their IP? afaik everything here including FAF itself only exists because the real owners allow it to, they could come any time and say "delete FAF or lawsuit" especially if someone starts claiming a mod is their IP

Just like every other map and mod creator has the copyright to their work.

@mach they could come any time and say "delete FAF or lawsuit"

GPG induced people to buy SC:FA by promising that FAF would be a substitute/successor to GPGnet. When GPG turned off GPGnet, it told people they should go ahead and still buy copies of the game, if they didn't already own it, because they would be able to play online through FAF

GPG made money because of this promise

FAF people relied on this promise in purchasing the game (if they didn't already own it before GPGnet went off) and in contributing to FAF (whether by making maps, mods, administering the community, balance patches, or just by showing up to play which contributes to other people being able to play multiplayer matches)

promise + justifiable reliance = estoppel

FAF really doesnt need another Faction. The game is perfect as it is.