The End of FAF
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Yes I was not expecting everyone to agree with what I wrote but I know for a fact that a lot of people are not happy right now and they are leaving this game. I emphasized the community in my post because the people who are quitting are essential members of the community in my opinion so I tried to voice their grievances and mine to the best of my ability and what they and myself believe needs to change to stop more elite players and community members from quitting.
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@maudlin27 said in The End of FAF:
Also while we have you saying FAF is dying because (amongst other reasons) the mods have cracked down on insults, we have the most active thread on the Supcom steam discussion pages prompted by someone saying people should stay away from FAF because (amongst other reasons) the mods do nothing about insults.
Sone excerpts from the OP of said post.
"Stay away from FAF
It used to be a great thing. As it is now, developers are completely incompetent: the real developers left long ago and what's left only add more bugs with every patch they release, not knowing the first thing about programming, and the moderation and community is, for the most part, just a bunch of mindless fascists.It's still one of the best RTS games ever made. Just don't fall for FAF. The people involved are toxic, rightist simpletons. Moderation is openly leading the persecution of people who are different in some way. It's just one big circle jerk of rednecks you wouldn't want to get involved with, if you're remotely right in the head.
I'm not one of those LGBTQ+ radicals, but I did witness how sexual orientation was brought into the "discussion" on discord for no other reason than a profile pic and a person got ganged up on by these pitiful creatures, attacked for what they are and then banned for trying to defend themselves.
Stay away from this filth. They are not worth the air they are breathing."
"Just from the top of my head:
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They broke the connection loss recovery (the most important part of the game). It used to be that you could still reconnect after a minute of silence or more. That hasn't been working in years now. A few seconds of silence and you're gone.
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Connection losses between 2 people in a match have become significantly more frequent at some point, not that long ago.
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Moderation doesn't give a
about griefers and abusers or flamers/harassers. The report system is still in place from the time when people who were actually competent were still working on the FAF client, but there are only clowns dealing with reports now. I had times when a player lost connection to 3 or more others, but instead of leaving, so the rest can go on, they just went silent and sat it all out until, half an hour later, all the others had finally given up and left. And they don't ban these or other griefers. They don't give a . -
Factory queues often don't respond anymore. They just broke it and never fixed it again.
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Artillery stopped firing uphill at some point for no apparent reason. Never got fixed either.
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The player score/rating system is an absolute joke. It's made for 1v1 matches, win or lose, nothing else matters - except nobody plays 1v1. Most people play 6v6 or other team vs team setups. As a result, ratings are just completely random and lobby hosts stack their games, instead of using opti (auto-balance), to ensure they don't drop to a 400 where they can't join any serious games anymore. Most games are decided by who has fewer disconnects anyway.
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The game still constantly freezes and crashes, usually on starting. Maybe 1 in 4 games started can actually continue at all, and that's a generous estimate. Rarely any of those also finish without several disconnects, though. When it's not the crashes, then it's lag from bad p2p connections beyond playability. I'm sure it would be possible to do a stress test while still in the lobby before starting and figuring out first-hand that the match is an unplayable lag-fest...
And on top of that, you can't even properly report an issue with bugs or balance without getting swarmed by the local redneck trolls on discord. It's mostly a place where idiots hang out, circle jerk, post funny gif memes or gang up on "woke" people."
"Everything I posted is factually right. Some fanboys jumping in trying to undermine someone's credibility without actually having a point - that can actually be considered trolling and adds to internet toxicity. You fit in nicely on their discord. You can howl and circle jerk with the other trolls there in mutual confirmation, if you aren't already.
"You can play something else", lol. I am... You can bring up that kindergarten-level argument whenever someone critcises anything. Only shows where you are coming from."That's some parts of the post in question. Makes you really wonder how genuine it is. Considering the man behind it seems pretty butthurt due to his own lack of understanding.
Honestly, just go read it: https://steamcommunity.com/app/9420/discussions/0/4336474207081809919/
It makes it pretty clear dude is a bad actor.
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I keep saying the fact I hit 2k says more about the state of the community than my ability. There's a definite drop in quality of players at the higher end, it's contributing to the rating inflation. And as Excelsior said, why try to get better when you're already near the top, even if the current top is far worse than it used to be. FAF desperately needs start making %1 improvements rather than -1% setbacks that are slowly but surely driving people away.
The only improvements I can really think about are on the actual development side:
- Jip improving sim speed so much over the last few years (You're a god for this tbh, easily FAF Hall of Fame)
- (Sorry I can't remember your name right now) trying to rebuild the ICE adapter in the face of all the recent issues
The list of -1% setbacks have already been listed elsewhere here & in the other thread. But it continues to grow, and we continue to lose valuable talent in the community. I mean shit, talk about a -0.5% setback, the maplist in the client no longer autoselected the latest mapgen but defaulting to the top of the list, something I made a thread about and got no attention for. Losing a player such as Sladow who is actually a high rated (not inflated) player AND someone willing to contribute back and train new players should frankly be a massive wake up call that shit is wrong.
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Honestly, there were waves of 2ks leaving in the past, just think of it as the survival of the fittest and faf evolution, prob 10 years into the future we get full gual gap faf and ladder would be treated as we treat dual gap now, who knows, if you dont want to be a part of it then dont, quite simple
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@thewreck said in The End of FAF:
Banning players for base control k, banning and censoring players who use words that individual moderators do not like, and lastly the username rule change updates. All of these policies are widely disliked by the community but they are enforced anyway.
THIS IS NOT THE PROBLEM.
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@thewreck said in The End of FAF:
Final Thoughts
An honorary mention that I did not include in this post is that a number of community members have also expressed frustration regarding the development and balance team in relation to things such as tele Billy and area reclaim but I will leave that for another post.THIS IS THE MAIN PROBLEM. BALANCE DESPOTS!!!!
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Yea there were several players that shared that sentiment.
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This thread is very confusing for me. It's very hard for me to tell who is telling the truth.
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@ganima said in The End of FAF:
This thread is very confusing for me. It's very hard for me to tell who is telling the truth.
Its not really about truth or lies its about differences of opinions in which case everybody is telling the truth.
It is clear that there are so many passionate people who are a part of this community and I trust that such debates will make the community stronger and that people who may have chosen to leave will return and help build it further.
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I totally agree on the point of selfishness of moderation, I have not really seen people, even the ones who NEVER got banned, that say that the moderation team is just. I will not name high-rated never(or very rare) banned players, who agree on the point that moderation team is not to be understand in most of the cases. One friend of mine who used to play a lot was banned for the nickname containing a word "Sex" (full nickname: Honey_Sex), which moderation thought is offensive. This is strange, cause I have never seen a person who was offended by his nickname (except for moderator who gave the perma ban). This is just one example of moderation team acting subjective, rather than acting objective.
Another reason for me is perma bans, I totally agree that the perma ban should exist, however I do not agree on some cases, which ppl receive perma ban for. Cheating should be banned forever in my opinion, however toxicity should not. I was the reason of perma ban once (my report), but when I found out that the person got perma, I textem him and mod team to retrieve my report, I know that it is not reversable, but I do not think that the person should be banned for toxicity, cause there are good mechanics in game that give you the possibility not to see the messages from the person, like foe or chat mute.
Another reason of perma ban being not relevant to FAF is that the community is not as big as I wish it would be, so in my opinion we have to consider that these actions are mostly held against very active players, which is also not as good for the bigger community. -
Honestly, I'm not sure what is the correct answer, as FAF operates on a decentralised communication aspect. I'm not sure how the other teams have handled it, but here's how we handled it when I joined the Personal Trainer Team:
- We drafted worthwhile topics.
- We had a meeting (with nearly 100% Trainer Attendance + Babel & OGW_PR_Outreach)
- We discussed these topics, verifying that the problem is commonplace and began to provide solutions and feedback (everyone contributed to each problem in some way, making sure we had every insight we possibly could have acquired)
- We narrowed it down to two insights that would work best for the problem, and then had a vote
- We documented this meeting, including all important notes and changes to start the shift for a slightly more centralised approach to keep each other up to date.
Now this won't work in larger scales, as this was meant to address several issues within the Trainer Team, although I think this is where Team Leads could possibly have a bit more impact within their respective teams.
I'd propose for most major changes to have a representative of most if not all teams to keep everyone up to date, as this should then allow everyone to keep up to date due to the flow of information from the teams to the community, or for the Team Leads to just be informed and then they forward it to us, and then we follow the same step in keeping everyone up to date.
This may have some flaws I cannot foresee due to conditional bias, and I think teams could have some pretty qualitive and quantitively varying insights to changes before it's published, hopefully lessening the impact of issues like this in the future.Another solution I'd like to put forward is newsletters or pings for discussions in this matter, as I think they already exist (correct me if I am wrong) in FAF development, but for changes regarding moderation changes and stuff like that, I think the outward communication before publishes may have a similar effect, and it may solve the communication on the moderation game dev or whoever's end, leaving it to the players to then keep their end of the deal of promising better two way communication.
Perhaps you'll disagree, and that's fine. But this is my opinion of someone who's seen this before and realistically the more insights that are provided the better.
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Thanks @Strydxr , I think the steps (1 through 5) you mention is exactly what the moderators team did. But they can't be as open about what was discussed exactly of course given that they are moderators.
Fun fact: It's also what the game team did yesterday
, but about different topics of course.@strydxr said in The End of FAF:
Another solution I'd like to put forward is newsletters or pings for discussions in this matter, as I think they already exist (correct me if I am wrong) in FAF development
We can create a news post about it. I'll ask Deribus when is the best time to do that.
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@plunder I agree and briefly touched on it in one of my posts that there are likely alot of players who are currently banned that deserve the opportunity to return. Take some of my early 1000 games and if people reported me I would probably have been banned because I was toxic.... More so I returned toxicity 10-fold to those who showed it to me which is not the way to go. My last 3,000 games I've been pretty chill and I feel I definitely deserve to be here. It would have been a shame if I got banned during that first stretch and would have never been allowed to experience this game the way I have over the past 3,000 games. I try hard now to contribute to the community as best I can when I can and I'm sure there are a lot of others who would as well if they had the opportunity to return.
Not sure how we communicate with people who have been banned to let them know they are unbanned and they can return but I think it's something that should be considered.
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@dorset said in The End of FAF:
I agree and briefly touched on it in one of my posts that there are likely alot of players who are currently banned that deserve the opportunity to return.
General info: perm bans are very rarely handed out. Players that have received temporary bans for particular offenses in the past will notice that new bans will be increasingly longer. At some point this leads to the player being discussed with the moderator team, the whole file being reviewed, and in some cases a perm-ban being issues. However, it almost never happens that a player accumulates enough tempbans that we decide a permban is in order; from the top of my head I can think of maybe 5 instances in the past year.
Bans can be appealed at any time, and we have previously revoked perm-bans in the past. They are seriously considered after some time has passed, but they have to be requested by the player themselves.
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Naughty Words:
Nobody should be banned for exercising their free speech rights. If you don't like it then you can block them. It is that simple. JT is one of the most toxic Setoners and several Setoners have responded by refusing to play with him. It is that simple. There is no reason to ban people. It is hard enough as it is to fill a lobby.Ctrl K base:
There is no reason to ctrl K your base. The proper procedure is to recall first. If the recall falls then you can ctrl k your com. And preferably you ctrl k your com outside of your base or near the enemy units although I have not always done this.No game is 100% lost. If you understood just how likely FAF is to desync then you would play on as long as possible. The losing team has every right in the world to play on in hope of desync. You may not consider this to be an "honorable" way of fighting but this is the way that FAF awards points. Don't hate the player. Hate the game.
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Not to mention jt actively reports people and the moderation team takes him seriously despite being blacklisted among most of the setons community.This is why I troll about the moderation team being consistent because if they were so many more players would be banned and there simply won't be any more games. However games are absolutely lost past a certain point in higher level games and 1 player can refuse to recall and waste everyone's time however the moderation team always comes up with something to ignore this scenario.
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Free speech is your right to say whatever you want (within limits, crowded theater & fire) without retaliation from the government, not the right to avoid the consequences for what you say by private entities.
Every online platform has rules surrounding speech, it makes no sense to not have any here. People are here to play a game, not deal with whatever vitriol people want to spew at them. It's not hard to not be a complete asshole. If you go through multiple bans just from saying shit, then you have some serious personal problems and anger management you need to deal with in your real life. But sure if you're worried about losing players due to bans, imagine not just how many you'd lose from an increasingly toxic community, but how many you'd never even gain in the first place.
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My main point from the beginning has been that high level players are not toxic to each other nor do they care about when people ctrl k their base yet some still get banned. The moderators have been told this time and time again but they still don't listen even when there are plenty of well known toxic players who are never banned.
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@accidental_aeon said in The End of FAF:
Nobody should be banned for exercising their free speech rights. If you don't like it then you can block them. It is that simple. JT is one of the most toxic Setoners and several Setoners have responded by refusing to play with him. It is that simple. There is no reason to ban people. It is hard enough as it is to fill a lobby.
Free speech is for governments to their citizens, not private companies or organizations to members of those organizations. FAF can and should to at least a small degree curtail speech if someone is being toxic, because that makes the community better overall. I have mixed feelings on the vigilante justice that's done to JT. Dude should probably just be banned more, and idk how mod team would take his reports seriously when he's 100% trolling the whole game whenever he gets mad enough to report anyone.
No game is 100% lost. If you understood just how likely FAF is to desync then you would play on as long as possible. The losing team has every right in the world to play on in hope of desync. You may not consider this to be an "honorable" way of fighting but this is the way that FAF awards points. Don't hate the player. Hate the game.
At a high level people know how to end games and if you mess up badly enough early the game is lost 99% of the time. Kinda dumb to stay in a game that's only winnable if the opponent either just quits playing or if they disconnect.
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@thewreck said in The End of FAF:
My main point from the beginning has been that high level players are not toxic to each other nor do they care about when people ctrl k their base yet some still get banned. The moderators have been told this time and time again but they still don't listen even when there are plenty of well known toxic players who are never banned.
This is just foundationally wrong. The only reason we action ctrlk bans is because they get reported by your 2k friends. I've seen numerous times where 2k+s get banned for base ctrlk and start accusing the 'obvious' suspect, get commiserations from their 'friends' who would never report anyone for that offence and it was the 'friend' who reported it. Players rarely ctrlk only because its time for the next game, they're primary motivation (from what i've seen) is because they're tilted the game isn't going the way they want and want to punish their 'bad' teammates.
With regard to toxic players not getting banned, are they being reported? We keep a log of every action taken against a user and gradually increase ban lengths for increased number of offences within a time. I've often seen players all agree to report someone or threaten to report each other and only one player actually actions it. In every case we try and look for how the offence occurs (including whether its provoked by the reporter) and act with consistency.
FAF is fairly lenient in our moderation, we don't trawl through replays, so if we take action against a game it means someone cared about the offence enough to report it. If it were the case that 2ks didn't care then there wouldn't be reports to action.
