Co-op improvement suggestions
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I could not find any coop related tabs/topics on the forum or discord so i'm putting this here. No clue if it just doesn't exist or if i'm just blind.
This is a list of both client and co-op mission improvements i could think of. I've written this in a bit of a forcefull way since i was too lazy to add "imo" or "i think" everywhere, so just keep in mind that it's just my opinion
Client improvements:
Most important of all is that the leaderbord needs to be reset. Right now there are still top scores that had cheating enabled. It doesn't matter for more casual players who just want to play the missions together, but for anyone who likes to compete (speedrunning is a pretty big thing afterall) the entire leaderbord and by extent playing co-op to set good scores is essentially irrelevant which is a big shame.
Some less important improvement is adding a map preview when you host. You can see the map preview in the lobby regardless so it's not spoiling anything, but not seeing a map preview in the client makes it not only hard to select the right missions (usually you remember missions by how the map looks) but it also makes the co-op tab feel really empty.
I also have no idea what the impact of secondary objectives are. I know you don't need them to get placed on the leaderbord, but why should i do them then? Do i get a time bonus? The importance isn't that i know the answer, but that the answer gets communicated towards the player in the co-op tab.
There is also pretty poor communication of what is and isn't allowed as game options. If i host a co-op game i can turn adjustable gamespeed or cheating on. Which of these enabled/disabled will disable the ability to get on the leaderboards? I know adjustable game speed doesn't (or atleast it didn't use to) and that one, although less than cheating, still has a huge impact on the efficiency of playing the game. So either it should somehow be communicated in the host or players simply shouldn't be allowed to pick those options to level the playing field.
Missions improvements:
This section is mostly meant for people who make (or want to make) co-op missions (if there are still any left). Basically there is one big problem with the way current co-op missions are designed and that is that they all play the same boring way. It generally goes like this:
- Spawn into a half dead base with some remaining structures/units
- big first wave that's hard to defend
- you survive the wave, the map expands and there are some bases that send you units slowly increasing in scale
- you turtle until you can efficiently kill the base
- repeat the last 2 stept 2 times.
- the end
The problem with this is that the answer is almost always turtling. The most efficient way to end almost any co-op as uef is to spam novaxes and just go down the list of targets. Aeon does the same but makes a para first into arties, sera probably just makes 2 yolo's and who knows what cybran does, beetles i guess.
So co-op's need to be made less static for them to be more fun. To solve this in the most basic way possible is to disable game enders + novax to force people to actually fight with units instead of sitting in their base after walls of pd's. To solve this in a more interesting way is to force the player to not just stick to their main base (especially not early on). I have made a great co-op example including a beautifull map design
- You can spawn in a corner of the map, fight of the first wave. Map expands and you see you're in a valley. There's an 8 min timer before a gc + accompanying army comes to kill you, so you're forced to kill the enemy defenses on the cliffs take over the positions ans set up your new base there where the gc can't come.
- After the gc showed up and killed your valley base the map expands and it shows an allied base, it will start evaccing civilians to a gateway thats controlled by the enemy, so you have to protect it (make it get attacked by bombers or some shit as well, but don't make it too retarded like u lose the mission if u lose 3/20 or something) and secure the gateway.
- After they have evacced next map expand that shows you the huge scary enemy base with lots of shit. It sends a new big wave including air attacks from the cliff side. Now you just have to defend and kill the enemy commander(s)/base(s).
So now the player has spend a lot of time actually doing co-op missions instead of just sitting at home and turtling up. He has more incentive to keep using actual units to break the bases since he already has a better setup for it (since he had to make units to escort the civilians). You can furthermore incentivize him more by having the allied base be an actual ai base that sends units to push the enemy so you're encouraged to accompany his troops.
This is just one example how to make an interactive mission and far from the only way of doing it, but i feel the main difference is that this makes it an actual mission instead of it just being survival 2.0.
Now that i think about it adding timers to clearing out enemy bases could potentially also work to force the player to attack it instead of turtling (but it could potentially be obnoxious as well).
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@thewheelie There's a separate co-op discord where you can post feedback on missions; there are some people that are working on custom missions there, although as far as I'm aware there's no-one looking at client changes so I'm guessing feedback on client improvements would be better somewhere else. I vaguely recall someone posting some time ago (6m+ maybe) about improvements to the client for co-op, but it was probably just a suggestion (as opposed to someone with the expertise to make client changes).
Co-op discord:
https://discord.gg/tcP527dtvkOne partial (easier to implement) solution to the 'turtle up and build game-ender' problem you note is timed mission expansions, as if done right it can force you to be aggressive and take out the nearby enemy base quickly, and if you turtle up you risk the map expanding too quickly and the enemy eco outpacing your own. This is one of the game options, although only some of the missions currently support it.
That said, your suggestions on how to structure a mission may well be of interest to some of those working on custom missions (but it would be much more work to implement something like that)
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@thewheelie I'm not knowledgeable about the Co-Op maps, but just wanted to let you know that all the creators are on the FAF Campaign Development Discord.
As for the client improvements, I agree about having map previews as well as having a list of primary & secondary objectives. As for the leaderboard, I believe that's already in the works, but has taken a backseat to other high priority items.
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Clearing the leaderboards would be very easy to do by one of the server admins. It’s just a matter of deciding to do it. I haven’t seen anyone talking about it internally.
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We can clear the leaderboard anytime, however I am not aware of any changes that will avoid the situation of cheaters claiming the top positions. So it will looks the same after a few weeks.
He said, "I've been to the year 3000
Not much has changed, but they live underwater
And your great-great-great-granddaughter
Is playin' FAF, playin' FAF" -
Good points, the client could definitely use some love.
There's also this coop update with mission briefings that's been waiting to be fully released for over an year now.
As with the cheated times in leaderboards, while some things can be fixed, ppl will always find a way to cheat, so as with any speedrunning leaderboards, cheaters would have to be banned from them.
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@brutus5000 Fixing this would help for sure https://github.com/FAForever/fa/issues/5833
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In my experience making missions, difficulty/challenge is a very hard thing to implement. Because FAF's economy is exponential, it's basically impossible to keep a consistent level of challenge without harshly punishing success. That is to say, it would be easy to simply nuke the player's base if they achieved more than 50 mass/sec income, and this would retain the challenge.... but it's also such a bastard, asshole move to do
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@funkoff said in Co-op improvement suggestions:
In my experience making missions, difficulty/challenge is a very hard thing to implement. Because FAF's economy is exponential, it's basically impossible to keep a consistent level of challenge without harshly punishing success. That is to say, it would be easy to simply nuke the player's base if they achieved more than 50 mass/sec income, and this would retain the challenge.... but it's also such a bastard, asshole move to do
If that is the biggest problem one could just disable SACUs and mass fabs on mission level.
