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

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

It's not necessary to be inflammatory or negative. You say you have been trying to get visibility for a while, but what detailed non-toxic forum posts did you previously make for this issue? I don't recall seeing any...

As I also previously said, multiple times, in this thread I am putting it on the forum now. You wouldn't be asking this if youd read the thread.

Alternatively or additionally, more people can make forum posts for issues they think should be given more attention.

Which reinforces my point that what we end up with is lots and lots and lots of potentially related issues that are vague which someone has to sift through and sort later. The page that was posted by magge that FAF has might be a good and cheap way to do most of what I'm suggesting and it already exists.

I dont think I'm going to keep replying to people who are asking things that the answer has been written to mutiple times and just feel like arguing for the sake of going round the roundabout one more time for funzies.

Java

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

@thecodemander

There is literally a wiki page on reporting technical issues, a wiki page on connection issues and solutions, a forums section on support for client and account issues, and a tech support Discord forum.

@Sheikah So about that 'fragmentation is rather low' thing?

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

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

@thecodemander

There is literally a wiki page on reporting technical issues, a wiki page on connection issues and solutions, a forums section on support for client and account issues, and a tech support Discord forum.

@Sheikah So about that 'fragmentation is rather low' thing?

I respectfully disagree with your post.

I just want to clarify a few things.

For those reading along the main summary of this thread is that bugs which are not easily reproduced or only happen on specific systems/environments are hard to report and hard to fix. Ultimately we as developers cannot fix these bugs without both notification from users and some degree of reproducibility or cause. It is just unreasonable to expect anything else. Without a report we have no way of knowing what the actual cause is so can't even make any statements on the issue.

It would be nice if it would be easier for users to report these ephemeral issues but the reality like most things is FAF is that it is limited due to manpower. We can't go and bother every person for bug reports or possible issues they have because otherwise nothing would get fixed. So we need buy in from users to help us fix things. And this does not mean making inflammatory posts and insulting developers. More often than not this will simply get you ignored because it is rare anyone has the patience to deal with that.

the evidence suggests that we've gotten somewhere much faster now as a result of it than politeness has achieved for many months previously

Your posts have not gotten a response because they are inflammatory. They have gotten a response because they are posted in a place where we ask for feedback. And is one of the places where we direct bug reports so they can be tracked. It is not appropriate to expect developers and others to respond to your requests when you message them in game or randomly ping them because that is not how we track issues. Those conversations will be forgotten and nothing will get done.

In regard to the multitude of places that help information is posted. Each of these was created by a different set of users or contributors because it was most convenient for their use case. The ultimate problem is that everyone will look in different places. But largely they are all duplicates of each other. Given this I do not understand how the idea that adding another source of information will bring more clarity. xkcd even has a wonderful comic illustrating the well known problem https://xkcd.com/927/.

Ultimately the best solution is for user bugs to be reported in the technical help locations that are widely advertised like the forum or the discord. More well understood issues should be posted to the respective git repository for better tracking. This will ensure that the issues have visibility to the technical help and developers. Any other reports are not guaranteed to be seen and if users are unable or unwilling to help us find root cause then there is very little we can do to resolve their issues.

All that being said, I believe everything that could be gained from this specific topic has already been said and it would be best if this thread is left open for others to discuss other ideas or opinions they may have.

As you did not address your comment to any specific poster, I will respond to the sections I believe relate to my comments.

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

In regard to the multitude of places that help information is posted. Each of these was created by a different set of users or contributors because it was most convenient for their use case. The ultimate problem is that everyone will look in different places. But largely they are all duplicates of each other. Given this I do not understand how the idea that adding another source of information will bring more clarity. xkcd even has a wonderful comic illustrating the well known problem https://xkcd.com/927/.

I was initially going to include that comic. Now I feel silly for not doing so

My argument was that there needed to be a centralised location. Any 'new standard' would have to replace the relevant sections on the forum and discord would have to be removed. Ideally, github would have to be merged or synchronised with that centralised place.

All that being said, I believe everything that could be gained from this specific topic has already been said and it would be best if this thread is left open for others to discuss other ideas or opinions they may have.

Then, for my last comment on this topic, my condensed answer to the original question of OP as spread out over the previous comments, and final suggestion:

I believe it is unclear, to non-dev players, which (non-individual) issues have been identified or reported, acknowledged, diagnosed, worked on, or fixed (issue tracking).

In my view, this problem is because:

1. The information on these issues is fragmented over several platforms;
2. Some of the platforms used for tracking these issues are not fit for that purpose.

Several Devs have expressed their opinion on whether or not having four (five? Six?) platforms for issue tracking is a problem. Few non-devs have participated in this discussion. XKCD's 'Average familiarity' comes to mind.

@Kazuya
To avoid getting hit over the head by Jip once more for implying I might have an insight of what goes on in the FAF community, I would like to suggest that you poll FAF players on their views, taking into account that only a select and specific subset of the community actively participates in the forums and discord.

Custom games are dead unless you wanna spend 1h doing nothing. 4v4 died for even worse game mode.

@kazuya I think the MOST important problem right now is player disconnects that, in my opinion, are caused by the server. In almost EVERY game for the past month, at least one player experienced a disconnect. The game I played last night was the worst EVER. it was a 6 V 6 on dual gap. One by one, five players experienced disconnects until we were down to 3 vs 4. I had completed my yolo and was reining nukes down on the other team. My second nuke killed two more players on the other team, so now it was 3 VS 2. Right after my fourth nuke, I disconnected. We would have won and both teams were calling me the MVP of the game. But when I logged on today, my rank had decreased indicating that my team had lost the game. This is INFURIATING. Several players are ready to stop playing in disgust. PLEASE fix this server problem or FAF will lose a lot of players.

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

@kazuya I think the MOST important problem right now is player disconnects that, in my opinion, are caused by the server. In almost EVERY game for the past month, at least one player experienced a disconnect. The game I played last night was the worst EVER. it was a 6 V 6 on dual gap. One by one, five players experienced disconnects until we were down to 3 vs 4. I had completed my yolo and was reining nukes down on the other team. My second nuke killed two more players on the other team, so now it was 3 VS 2. Right after my fourth nuke, I disconnected. We would have won and both teams were calling me the MVP of the game. But when I logged on today, my rank had decreased indicating that my team had lost the game. This is INFURIATING. Several players are ready to stop playing in disgust. PLEASE fix this server problem or FAF will lose a lot of players.

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/6182/addressing-severe-connectivity-issues-what-has-happened
Long story short, we are experiencing DDOS on our coturn servers making the connection of players relying on them quite iffy.

I am not a programming Geek! What the hell is DDOS on our coturn servers????

The servers managing networking are experiencing heavy load for an unknown reason. I might have simplified that to the point of being wrong but it’s close enough to get the point across.

It’s not easy to fix and everyone working on this project is a volunteer who gets no money from FAF and has their day jobs and personal lives to contend with. It will take time.

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

What the hell is DDOS

"digital denial of service" a form of attack that involves sending increased traffic to disrupt services

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

"digital denial of service" a form of attack that involves sending increased traffic to disrupt services

Distributed* denial of service but yes

@kazuya said in Addressing Severe Connectivity Issues - What has happened!:

the coturn servers are being DOS-ed

In this case DDOS is not the correct term. DOS fits better.

Would it be a massive task to add a "report a problem" button to the client?

What should that button do? Point you to the GitHub issues list? Or what do you expect? (Serious question)

@brutus5000

Link to a place to report an issue sounds like a good easy start.

A strong follow-up would be some kind of automatic logging, but I don't know what that would entail to be either implemented or useful.

The automatic logging was discussed, but eventually nobody will really go through all the errors. It's too many kind of errors in depth and breadth.

*Automatic in the sense that the "report a problem" button automatically gathers information from the client and attaches it to the manual report, instead of relying entirely on reportee input.