What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?

@mazornoob Arch. (Insert meme here)

Im not sure its a memory leak, at least not the old one. There was one that was fixed (with crowdfunding no less IIRC). When I load up the client it knocks back about 980MiB and after while it usually settles down between 2-3GiB. Ive not seen a correlation between memory usage and it deciding to go zombie.

There are bugs I can repro with the subwindows and dialogs but I'm also using i3 as a WM which are not worth fixing since Im about 90% sure its an i3 bug those I really couldnt care less about.

OOM pretty much never runs for me, most of the time I have stacks of ram free. I used to have a chiplet run my background work while playing FAF but not any more since the client sits at 250-450% cpu usage now. Back then yeah OOM wouldve been a possibility but at that time I was in windows with its own ram and there was spare and nothing in dmesg.

Like I said, I have no idea whats going on or how Id go about try to repro. The trajectory in the last while combined with the responses Ive gotten on the topic are what has me concerned. The latter of which I am trying to address by following the instructions of "voice this on the forum".

@Jip

You're putting words in my mouth, which is rude.

I didn't say who said anything though. If you mean why you left, I'm speculating based on the information I have. Im not going to engage in calling out who I spoke to or what was said, and I think theres plenty of evidence to support my point that the process and communication on this issue is suboptimal anyway.

Yes it does , I'm not going to write down every bug people send my way.

Im not suggesting you should. All Im saying is that if there are people out there saying <x>, then its not going to be received well when sweeping statements come out elsewhere saying the direct opposite. Communication getting lost is not ideal but shit happens. This isnt a one off incident with anyone in particular or at any single time.

Im seeing a pattern, the trajectory concerns me and there was concensus that it should be raised very visibly in the forum. As Ive now stated a few times, I feel this has been accomplished so the next time it comes up again, I can move things forward since the current barrier is "it wasnt raised in whatever way is the way du jour".

I dont care if the issues are fixed at this point, as long as I dont have to listen to "mhhh yes, new release: there are no issues its great!" talk anymore whenever I make a meme about it. I was told it was unfair to call it out if I hadnt raised it here.
It has now been raised here. So the next person to jump in vc to say I'm being unfair to whoever because no one ever mentioned in writing on the forums that people are having issues is getting clowned on justifiably.

So it became pretty obvious that this whole endeavour was mainly to one-up the guys that you are apparently talking to, so you can now rightfully say that there are issues. In that case, good for you, I guess?

It's not really about coming to exactly the right place, many would work if were interested in working to a solution. You were self-sabotaging these efforts multiple times. You claimed that making too many bug reports would get you banned, you claimed that there is nothing useful in the logs etc. But it makes sense, because the important thing was not to solve the problem, but to gain the right to clown on your clanmates or whoever, that claim that there are no issues apparently. I am starting to get the impression that you are reading things into other people's behaviour because I have a hard time believing that anyone says "mhhh yes, new release: there are no issues its great!" either literally or in spirit, but I digress...

Anyway, I don't think I can be of any assistance here, so I won't try any further.

@blackyps

So it became pretty obvious that this whole endeavour was mainly to one-up the guys that you are apparently talking to, so you can now rightfully say that there are issues. In that case, good for you, I guess?

I was specifically, instructed to raise my concerns with the trajectory on this topic on the forum. This is what I was doing.

If everyone is so fixated on a sub-point not related to that point, nothing I can do. If you go out of your way to move the goalposts and avoid the point then theres not much I can do other than point out that you are missing the point.

You claimed that making too many bug reports would get you banned, you claimed that there is nothing useful in the logs etc.

Because the direct extension to "just file a bug report every time something you cant repro comes up" is that you file lots of bogus, unusable bug report which gets you banned from any sane tracker. I dont know what you want me to tell you. The bugs arent the problem, the trajectory of these becoming more common and the communication around bugs that exist but arent yet directly addressable is the issue.

When bringing this up I am running into a barrier. That barrier is that I did not raise it visibly on the forum. As I've written multiple times now, that is the point im posting about not the bugs themselves.

Anyway, I don't think I can be of any assistance here, so I won't try any further.

Youre welcome to discuss further if you have something to add to the actual topic instead of twisting it into what you want it to be.

You went on an awful lot of tangents about how the python client was better etc. if the actual point was how to discuss bugs better. So how should we improve communication about unsolvable bugs?

I have the strong impression that you are mistaking the opinions of more or less random dudes that try to steer you in a direction to get help for your problems with official communication by actual developers. And we can't solve that.

@TheCodemander just chiming in to say that I have never said the client is bug free and have always asked people to make bug reports on github, unless it was specifically for testing of an alpha release. I have never directed people to voice bugs on the forums. So when you talk about people giving you the run around I am not sure who you are talking to. I believe this is the first time we have ever interacted about any client issues.

Additionally from your comments to MazorNoob you say you are running in Arch Linux. Now it is known that the client has plenty of bugs both known and unknown on linux platforms due to the graphics library interactions. However, unfortunately linux is completely unsupported from an application development standpoint since I do not have the time to test across all the different distributions and setups individuals have. Likely in your case I would imagine there is some odd graphics driver interaction or environment constraints since it sounds like you have a technical background and likely have a more customized setup.

All that being said bug reports are always welcome but wanted to say up front that anything that is likely linux specific will go unaddressed unless some other developer takes up the case.

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

@mazornoob Arch. (Insert meme here)

Im not sure its a memory leak, at least not the old one. There was one that was fixed (with crowdfunding no less IIRC). When I load up the client it knocks back about 980MiB and after while it usually settles down between 2-3GiB. Ive not seen a correlation between memory usage and it deciding to go zombie.

There are bugs I can repro with the subwindows and dialogs but I'm also using i3 as a WM which are not worth fixing since Im about 90% sure its an i3 bug those I really couldnt care less about.

OOM pretty much never runs for me, most of the time I have stacks of ram free. I used to have a chiplet run my background work while playing FAF but not any more since the client sits at 250-450% cpu usage now. Back then yeah OOM wouldve been a possibility but at that time I was in windows with its own ram and there was spare and nothing in dmesg.

Like I said, I have no idea whats going on or how Id go about try to repro. The trajectory in the last while combined with the responses Ive gotten on the topic are what has me concerned. The latter of which I am trying to address by following the instructions of "voice this on the forum".

I'll probably piss you off, but

arch

Given this setup I have to change my mind, you are being unreasonable. Whatever issue you have is definitely not general to Linux, since most devs work on Linux anyway and even something more esoteric like Gentoo is causing me no issues whatsoever. I can only assume that's JVM related in one way or another, Arch has both the philosophy of being bleeding edge and of making minimal to no changes to upstream for purposes of fixing issues.

At the very least you should have the awareness that you're running an uncommon setup and that having other people tell you that it works for them is no reason to be indignant. Expecting your issue to be fixed after reporting it and doing nothing else is also counterproductive in these circumstances, nobody's going to go out of their way to install Arch and reproduce your setup.

Maybe we should think about producing an AppImage for FAF? That sounds like fun.

@blackyps

You went on an awful lot of tangents about how the python client was better etc. if the actual point was how to discuss bugs better. So how should we improve communication about unsolvable bugs?

Because I am aware of how the python client is viewed, and its one of the only reference points to ground the argument. Saying trajectory bad isn't as useful as trajectory bad, heres the points its crossing and why we should care.

I would like to address the process of janky issues which are hard to repro. I havent gotten that far because so far every attempt to talk about them has been "its not on git" "this person hasnt been told" "I havent seen it" "why dont you bring it up on the forum" and now "it needs to be on these channels in official faf" along with some other platforms.

I have the strong impression that you are mistaking the opinions of more or less random dudes that try to steer you in a direction to get help for your problems with official communication by actual developers. And we can't solve that.

If there are client blaming issues there should be a (read: one) process communicated and publicly available which says who to talk to, that handles issues that cant be preprod easily etc.

Additionally from your comments to MazorNoob you say you are running in Arch Linux. Now it is known that the client has plenty of bugs both known and unknown on linux platforms due to the graphics library interactions.

Agree 100%. This is why Im cagey about me being the source of bug reports that I can repro. It isnt relevant to faf or worthy of your time to fix my i3 jank. I will fix that. Issues where I have the issue and other people on supported platforms also confirm they are running into them but also cant repro or arent sure, those are I think valid issues we need to tackle.

Likely in your case I would imagine there is some odd graphics driver interaction or environment constraints since it sounds like you have a technical background and likely have a more customized setup.

I have said to people what is infuriating is that I wouldve liked to test on older client versions which I never remember running into these problems but I cant because often client updates are a mandatory version check.

I'll probably piss you off, but

arch

I find this pretty funny tbh. I am aware and this is why I'm not keen on "I have this specific bug". Where Im annoyed is that Im having bugs that I cant repro that other people are having too and at the moment there is no way to even start talking about these, let alone addressing them because the discourse on the topic is cursed.

I have however found consensus in the notion that once its on the forum, visibly, then a big current excuse goes away. It is now here, on the forum. The relevant people (I hope) have seen it, so we should now be past that step.

At the very least you should have the awareness that you're running an uncommon setup

If you read my previous replies you would be aware that I already acknowledged this and I have already stated that I dont care about my specific bugs.

The process of "this is jank for a good number of people, and there is no way to raise this because the process is dysfunctional with regards to this type of problem", I have tried raising this and the barrier is pretty much "it isnt on the forum, and even if it was no one has seen it".

I set out to post about that specific issue (again, not bugs, my bugs, specific bugs or whatever) so that we can get past this step.

If I have to deal with i3 and linux specific bugs thats fine, I dont care (as much). Where I care is that there are actual client and game breaking issues out there right now that impact a good number of games and hours of lobbysim/queusim which are currently unreportable, undiscussable even. I want that to change and a first step is to raise it here (which it now has been) and to fix the process around that (which I am hopeful for with the new community manager)

@sheikah Not to be petty but it is technically not the first time. I dont know if you were memeing last time but you said something to that effect.

I would search replays where we had a small back and forth and you came off being pretty dismissive but all the search functions of the client are completely borked right now.

Edit: Found it by clicking through every replay like an animal. I believe you said and I quote "you are welcome to maintain or create your own client"

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

If there are client blaming issues there should be a (read: one) process communicated and publicly available which says who to talk to, that handles issues that cant be preprod easily etc.

This is where the breakdown is because unfortunately there is no one process that can handle non-reproducible issues. In the big corporation ideal this would entail having a support engineer sit with the user and walk through their actions taking detailed notes or even having remote logging on their machine to take constant diagnostic to try and hopefully catch the cause.

The reality in FAF is that I just do not have the time to sit with every user who has a very niche problem that only sometimes happen. It would result in days of wasted time. Especially when the end user is not technical minded.

So that is really where the requirement of reproducible bugs and clean reports come from. Because otherwise it is truly impossible to fix without some miracle divine intervention.

@sheikah

I agree on the need for reproable bugs. This is literally 90% of the source of the frustration. If we know there are bugs, then you going around the place saying "I have seen no reports indicating so" is absolutely nuts.

Im not suggesting we hire people or go all out on fixing these issues. But in the meantime they continue to multiply and instead of fixes we seem to be getting a lot of new things that dont even come close to addressing them. And when we bring them up, being told to go write our own client is really not going to lead to anything productive.

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

Edit: Found it by clicking through every replay like an animal. I believe you said and I quote "you are welcome to maintain or create your own client"

Sure because that was after requesting that you make a proper bug report and then just complained about how I was only making the client worse with any updates. That is not a response I can do much about. And since your attitude seemed to be you could do better I was just stating anyone was welcome to do so.

Additionally it wasn't exactly the time for a formal conversation since I was just trying to play a game which is why I first suggested making an actual report where we could address the issues rather than having a conversation mid game.

@sheikah

I agree and Im willing to give plenty of rope. I actually really tried to jump around singling that interaction and you out when jip asked before. I dont have an issue with anyone here or the work they do. I take exception with what the process has ended up being.

Unfortunately that interaction has been typical of almost every interaction on the topic every time I've tried to raise it in the past year, and this thread really exemplifies things.

I don't know if the client needs to become unusable before the core functionality is fixed? The degradation of functionality over the past 18 months has been noticeable, and pointing it out used to result in apathy. It now results in really unpleasant interactions and yet it persists.

Maybe we need less features and less pretty? idk, and idc. Point being when it comes up again when things are worse if things continue as is, Im not going to take it well when someone comes up to me and says something along the lines of <shouldve posted about it publicly at the time instead of moaning to us>.

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

@sheikah

I agree on the need for reproable bugs. This is literally 90% of the source of the frustration. If we know there are bugs, then you going around the place saying "I have seen no reports indicating so" is absolutely nuts.

I literally go by the bug reports that come into github to determine what major issues there are with the client. As I previously mentioned I have to try and sus out what is specific to a certain user vs what is actually an issue with the application code itself. And most of the time the issues you are claiming people talk about are just people saying "lol this client is shit" or "Why is my client so slow". This is not an actionable statement as there is no context. So it isn't even a bug in my mind nor is it something I can even act upon. So that is what I mean when I say no reports have been made.

Even in the replay you mentioned your "bug" reports were that the UI/UX is bad and that the python client is unmaintained. It was in response to your comment that the python client is unmaintained that I brought up the fact that you could maintain it if you want, but that is outside the scope of reports on the current client.

@sheikah

Im not trying to single you or your work out. I have no issues with your work on the client. There are issues with it, issues that I dont blame you for since at the moment they are major but really not easy to isolate or reproduce.

I was going to go into specifics about that but its besides the point. I dont know how many more times I need to say this: I posted here in the hopes that the next time someone wants to hide behind the "its not posted visibly somewhere like the forum" I can point them here and we can actually have a conversation.

I do believe the process for handling weird issues at the moment is deficient and I really really hope the new community person can do something to officialise/streamline/improve it because at the moment getting this point across still seems impossible despite me spelling it out multiple times here and everyone being drawn to specific bugs like moths to a lamp.

I am still confused when you you talk about the process being bad. We have almost exclusively requested that people make bug reports on the proper channels when issues are raised. Additionally I personally get frustrated because there are times when I have hunted down complaining users to try and figure out what is going on in their systems. And my experience trying to engage people and help them get actual reports I can act on is normally that they don't have time or it isn't worth trying and normally ends with them insulting me in some fashion as well. Even as I am just trying to understand what their expectations are.

So it is a high barrier even for me as a developer to try and find the cause for all these niche issues. And yes sometimes I just don't have time and will try to indicate so but will try and circle back. But when all of this happens in a single chat channel that has poor search and history things just get lost which is why we ask to file a proper bug report. So that they can actually be tracked.

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

I do believe the process for handling weird issues at the moment is deficient and I really really hope the new community person can do something to officialise/streamline/improve it because at the moment getting this point across still seems impossible despite me spelling it out multiple times here and everyone being drawn to specific bugs like moths to a lamp.

What do you suggest the process be? Because I have tried many different things but it really does come down to being able to reproduce the issues people are having. But when the end users are uncooperative in that regard there is little me or any other developer can even hope to do.

What do you suggest the process be?

As a start having a page findable somewhere with what is and isnt a known issue might be a start. There have been instances when people in the FAF team have outright told me in VC to stfu because <x> isnt true only for a week later to find out "yeah nah m8, that was totally a big thing and we're fixing it" which is like wtf. Doubly so when those people double down or really start getting heated about things. Like Im seeing this happen, im asking other people who are also seeing it and all I want to know really is two things:

1. Are the FAF team already aware of this thing
2. Is there anything out there that might help me fix/work around/repro/report the issue.

At the moment, the communication on those two points does not exist and is actively counter productive.

If there was a single point of "these are things we know happen, these are things we need more input on, these are things we've heard about is it just these 3 people or is it more widespread?" I think we'd be 90% of the way to a better place.

I will say that is literally what the github issues page is for at https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/issues. Which is where I always direct people who have issues. Additionally we have the client-bug-reporting channel in the discord. Normally when people post a bug in the client-bug-reporting discord I normally respond with if it is known, fixed, or planned yet.

The issue is when people give vague bug reports like the client is slow. I cannot answer if we know about that because it is simply too broad, that statement can mean a million things to a million different people.

On top of that the technical help forum in discord is pretty active as well and most people get directed there where other users or some contributors with experience help them with their workarounds or fixing common issues.

And if you bring it up to me only when I am in a game yeah I am not going to give a full response but for specific bugs we have that tracking and communication already.

So what is it that you are looking for on top of these things?

I will say that is literally what the github issues page is for at https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/issues

Searching through all the github issues for something vague, that cant be reprod is not the easiest or most efficient thing.

The issue is when people give vague bug reports like the client is slow.
I mean, it is. It really is. I can load into a FAF game faster than the client appears, let along waiting for most of the pages to become usable. Specific bug though, besides the point I was making.

On top of that the technical help forum in discord is pretty active

Seems like a waste of peoples time if everyone has to ask over and over every time they run into weird issues.

I guess the difference with having a centralised page would be to inform people what new issues people are seeing and what is actually being worked on. Might be nice to have a way to discuss proposed changes too when someone suggest changing things that change how the client works.

It was unfair for me to use that interaction as an example, as I had prefaced: it was a bit petty of a technicality. It was however pretty typical of the responses I have had on the broader issue.

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

Searching through all the github issues for something vague, that cant be reprod is not the easiest or most efficient thing.

Well I as a developer run into the exact same issue. Which is often why things are handled one by one until it is clear they are the same.

I guess the difference with having a centralised page would be to inform people what new issues people are seeing and what is actually being worked on. Might be nice to have a way to discuss proposed changes too when someone suggest changing things that change how the client works.

I agree that this would be great to have. Unfortunately it would also be a monumental undertaking and require quite a bit of manpower to be done properly. This ultimately means it would be a choice between at least me working on the client and fixing things vs aggregating issues and posting them. I think actually fixing things is the preferred use of my time.

It would be great if someone else came along and took up that task but even then that is the kind of thing opensource projects and companies have full teams for, not to mention being a pretty thankless task.

Additionally that doesn't really stop the problem where people would still have to search that list. Even on the most advanced issues list you see people reposting the same issues again and again all being directed back to the main page. Which is similar to what we do here with the issues and technical help forum.