Why does everything suck so much right now?
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@jip i get it with the harsh comments part, the communication and getting more points across in a nicer way could be a lot better. but do you not think that sometimes the reaction is genuinely warranted with the way that some mods and contributors respond with. communication goes 2 ways and neither side does it anywhere near perfect. however i just think its unfair to slate that "small vocal group of players" as if they do nothing for the community especially when in fact they do quite a lot for the community. we all want the best for the game.
in addition to a lot of the changes, imo and i think quite a few others from that "small group of vocal players" might agree is that i think one of the biggest problems is that players should be but aren't getting rewarded as much for making better plays whether thats micro or macro. rts's aren't supposed to be easy all the time. I get it that you want to make it more accessible for newer and lesser skilled players, and it make sense but the direction of the game in my eyes feels like we're seeing less reward for being a better player and i dont think thats how rts's should be balanced and in our case, it shouldnt be the way to solve a lot of the problems. however i do like the idea of meta shifts in terms of game balancing as it adds to the game and keeps it fresh. but changing entire mechanics of the game (area reclaim) isnt exactly what id call a great change either, for the reasoning being of what i said before.
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@thevvheelie said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
@jip i get it with the harsh comments part, the communication and getting more points across in a nicer way could be a lot better. but do you not think that sometimes the reaction is genuinely warranted with the way that some mods and contributors respond with.
Please be specific and link the posts that you are referring to.
A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned
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could you respond to anything else i have to say before i do that
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@blackyps the main problem is frustration in the game. for me it's when 3 uef vs 3 cybrans, one team together builds fast novax and the other team can't counter it at all. of course there are still disagreements with balance overlords. there are more examples in the game, I don't like how the new scatis works, hives are too weak now, harms is also too weak and all that was needed to counter harms was ground fire, T2 ARTY omg reverse this nerf, wtf, but balance overlords says it's not like that. they have some of their own parameters that follow. just compare the strong points of the factions against the weak points of the factions and there you have the frustration doubled. for me it is nothing more than that. that's why now I play bar and dual gap. but balance overlords does well as far as the external aspect of the game is concerned. sorry if anyone got mad.
i forget to add , no hover for cybrans, it is super frustrating when you are the only player on island and all the others all sera.
conclusion, we need to make a great revolution, the reds will rise again!
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Not about to write an essay, but I do agree and have said it before that the balance changes in this game are way too small and way too slow to happen.
There's nothing wrong with meta shifts other than some people won't like it and some will. I think FAF is in desperate need of a big shakeup lately. I'd love to see a shift away from the arty spam that most large mapgens turn into. And yet again I'll advocate SMDs shooting down Novax's. Because why not? Give it a damn shot.
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@snoog i like SMD idea to conter novax. tx comrade
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When the attempts to change the game cause enough of your high level scene to change that there wasn’t even a high level game to join this Saturday afternoon/night. When the inability to compromise causes TDs to retire and stop hosting so that now we are down to 1 tournament every 4 months due to the fact there is 1 (now 2) active TDs. When discussions ultimately end in some appeal to silent majority fallacy regardless of the criticism leveled against it.
I never really had that bad of an experience with the ddos connections except for maybe a few very early months. I also play within a bubble of reliable and tested connections along with players that can compromise if disconnects happen to make things fair, like not using an ACU when it happens.
My distaste for FAF lately just comes from the fact it just hardly seems like anyone matters. You have some completely inconsequential matters that would be an excellent PR matter of just conceding because they genuinely do not impact anybody much at all and instead they need to be turned into total war because unless you can quite literally ensure there are 0 supporters of a change people will hyperfocus on those few examples to justify their mindset.
Take this “casual player” justification of area reclaim. They are saying it’s cool because
- new things are cool
- automation is cool
- they think they lose games because they don’t reclaim fast enough
No the problem is that they
- are not spending their mass at all (so manual does not matter)
- spend way too much time doing manual reclaim (losing everywhere else due to focusing on a matter that is extremely low relevance)
This change primarily changes the game at the level of play where genuine questions need to be asked about what you are spending attention on in build orders. This is not happening below like 1500ish rating. I have not once in years of training ever told somebody below 1000 rating about manually reclaiming. Just send more engineers out with attack moves to resolve the problem, that’s all they need to adjust.
The problem is the change totally destroys part of the game complexity (the several reclaim management methods) while adding nothing but a new strictly optimal eco management style that isn’t even enjoyable to utilize at a high level.
This is why nobody cares about area attack in comparison. It isn’t destroying the potential for game complexity, it adds to it. It enables aggression to be rewarded and might enable new methods of unit usage. High level players enjoy changes that add instead of remove strategic diversity. People liked ATP, they didn’t like snipe mode for all units. One made the game more complicated, one made it more simple.
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I am not involved with the inner politics of the FAF Dev team, so I can say from a outsider point of view, things have greatly improved over the years.
Matchmaking, Performance, Mapgen, Bugs, Mods, Client, game play features have all noticably been improved, bumps along the way are unavoidable even with large multi million dollar companies, so dont spend too much time thinking about these issues.
A good thing to do is look back a year and think what is new or has been fixed in that time and you will quickly see all you have achieved.
the only thing in my opinion holding FAF back is the size of the player base, as most "high" level players state it is hard to find games, even for most players there are parts of the day that just arnt very active, when you log on ther are just some astros being hosted.
FAF is very much a PVP environment, so when youve exausted yourself in PVP and played against or with the same people several times that week or even in a day is gets a bit same same.
I used to spend hours trying to get a quick time in the campaign and seeing where I placed in the leaderboards for particular missions trying out different strats, there have been several additions to this but i feel they dont quite hit the spot, some are extremely antagonizing to play if you expand you get bombed, then you build aa then you get rushed by land they kill the aa, then you get bombed again and its very frustrating to play.
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So, I want to reply to a few of these points that particularly stand out for me
@jip said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
Top-rated scene problems
Meanwhile, here at FAForever one can decide to not play the game for months (or effectively years) and still manage to come up on top in tournaments. How's that even possible?
And this is where the controversial part starts
.In my humble opinion the gameplay experience that we created in FAForever has two fundamental problems:
- (1) There has been no fundamental shifts in how the game plays and/or is perceived the past decade.
- (2) The current meta is extremely volatile.
The problem with (1) is that once you learn and understand the trick that works then you can keep applying that trick. You discovered it, you use it and you win. It's as simple as that - there's no more challenge and you stop playing.
A lot of games that still receive updates they are often so large that suddenly certain tactics no longer work. As a few examples:
And the reason this is important is simple: each time such a big shift happens it levels the playing field. Through novelty you allow players to discover new tactics and new approaches to the game. And by doing so existing high rated players may actually find a fun and interesting challenge against players that they would previously utterly dominate. Every game that is still maintained does it. It keeps the game fresh and allows you to find new challenges. It's just good practice. And we're not doing it.
Other than Ashes of Singularity and Warcraft 3 (because i don't know much about them balance or change wise) these examples are beyond bad.
It's not like the game suddenly decided "ok, lets change balance". It is the fact that new content releases and thus the balance has to change accordingly. The area-command for example is not new content. It is a fundamental change to core mechanics, which is (kind of) considered for no reason (coming to that further down).Then the problem with (2) is reclaim rate.
- A tech 1 engineer reclaiming wrecks produces as much as roughly 12 tech 1 mass extractors (!)
- A tech 1 engineer reclaiming props produces as much as roughly 25 tech 1 mass extractors (!!)
- A tech 1 engineer reclaiming tree groups produces as much as roughly 2.5 tech 1 power generators or half a hydrocarbon (fine to me)
It's absolutely volatile, and it completely removes various aspects of the game. The idea of 'fighting over a reclaim field' effectively does not exist.
Let's take several small patches of reclaim fields of about 300 to 400 mass each. This is not unusual, especially with the rocks that are worth 38 mass. If you manage to defend your engineer and snipe the engineer of your opponent then within mere seconds you suddenly have 25 additional tech 1 mass extractors (!) over your opponent.
Well first of all, you don't "fight" over 300 to 400 mass. That is way too little to even consider "fighting" over it.
If your opponent snipes your engi, and he gets the mass, he also invested more to do this. Also, he doesn't get "25 addition mex", he gets the mass, for which he also needs the energy for. Yes, you probably just didn't formulate that correctly, but it's still a bit ridiculous comparing the 2 things like that.And when you take an engagement you better not take a bad engagement too close to an enemy engineer that manages to survive. If the engineer is nearby the fight then within seconds it can start reclaiming and your opponent suddenly has 12 additional tech 1 mass extractors (!) over you.
I'm sorry but i just have to be sarcastic about this. You better watch out where you fight! Otherwise the enemy will "abuse" micro in a micro heavy beginning of a game!! And what's more; the opponent gets rewarded for better micro?! Ridiculous!
Compare that to the rest of the game, take this distance:
It takes roughly 55 seconds for Mantis (one of the fastest of tech 1 units) to cover this distance (right to left). If this is your response to try to contest a reclaim field (of any type, but specifically natural prop-based reclaim fields) then by the time you arrive the patch of reclaim is long gone. It's not even worth trying.
Ok? And the enemy spawns in the reclaim field? He has to walk there aswell. Even if you sent an early raid that didn't work out, it feels like it's more of the players fault that he doesn't have a follow up?
This feature is so volatile on its own that the moment you understand this and what reclaiming means that you will instantly win all of your games until you get to the point where you play against players that also understand this. After all, a single engineer that is able to reclaim roughly continuously can support between 4 to 12 tech 1 land factories depending on what you are reclaiming and what the factories are building.
There has been a lot of recent discussions about area commands, both public and in the private balance team channels. And personally I think it's been a long wish of more casual players, as an example:1 2. The reason is simple: area commands make the game more approachable. It becomes easier to convey your intentions. You feel less 'blocked' by the UI.
Meanwhile, any casual player that I show the feature to is exciting about it
. And as @phong mentioned , they're not as well represented in the forums. They're not as invested in the game to spent three hours to write a post such as this. They just want a fun gaming experience. And they're right.Well, it is a given that a casual player is "excited" about it. If somebody shows me a new mechanic for Stellaris or whatever, I would be excited aswell, because I am a casual player and not invested enough to care.
But as somebody said in some other thread; "balance should be focused around high rated play / games". Maybe not always true, but I feel like this is true for balance and change-wise.Medium recap
And last I think a lot of the problems that are perceived right now on the top-rated scene are self-inflicted. If the game remains the same you'll remain at the top. And no other player with a reasonable budget of time (and there are enough of those - look at the other 17k unique players playing 400.000 lobbies each month) can ever match your play time and experience with the current meta. They'll always look bad. You'll always look good. If you're also against change, then enjoy being there alone when life moves on, players move on, but nobody can manage to catch up to your understanding of the current meta.
As you mentioned earlier; there is some sort of "trick" and you figured the current meta out. That is just completly wrong. I myself slowly grinded my way up to 1600 by just playing the game. At that point I started to watch streams are notice the descision making of high ranked players; and because of that I started to actually think about my descisions and analyze what I am doing - and then I was 2k.
So what I am saying is there is no trick, but just look at your own plays / mistakes and think about what to do better. Has nothing to do with the meta or it's understanding directly. -
The moderation and dev team is in complete denial about the state of the game right now. They are to self absorbed to even acknowledge the problem much less do the hard part an admit that it's their fault.
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@thewreck said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
The moderation and dev team is in complete denial about the state of the game right now. They are to self absorbed to even acknowledge the problem much less do the hard part an admit that it's their fault.
Precisely the type of empty message that adds nothing to the discussion but negativity. Please take the time to expand on it, add references and create a meaningful contribution to this conversation.
Oh, and don't attack the contributors and their intentions while you're at it too
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See what's left of the game I have given up on having well faithed arguments about changing unpopular decisions no one admits that the 2k community is dead. No cares that they left. No one wants to change what made them leave. Furthermore don't pretend the administration would listen even if the argument was presented in a less blunt manner because I already know this has not been the case see username change rules update if a reminder is needed.
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This thread is to gather the people that have not given up on well faithed arguments. The administration is not a monolith. Coming in here and saying "You are in denial and I won't tell you about what" is helping nobody. If you have something to say, say it, even (especially) if you think it should be obvious, because it probably isn't to everyone. But if you don't want to do that, please leave this thread. I don't want this to turn into a shitshow.
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Well the whole reason things are bad right now is because well faithed arguments have been ignored. The username change rules update was downvoted 40 to 10 and no considerable change was made to the proposed change. Then the people in favor of the change suggested that a phantom silent majority was in favor of it when so many expressed why it was not a good idea in good faith. They also constantly tried to suggests that people feelings on the matter where invalid or not "constructive". As for myself when I wrote about the state of the game people who were not part of the 2k community where trying to imply that I had no idea what I was talking about when I said that the 2k community was pissed off and leaving. I don't want this to turn into a shitshow either but I know for a fact that urgent changes are needed and it's becoming increasingly frustrating when nothing is done.
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A couple things I also want to clear up about meta stagnation and high level players being a cornerstone of that problem.
FAF is not similar to many RTS because the strategic variety is heavily centered around map variation. The general meta of gameplay provides you with a toolbox which in turn must be correctly applied to the blueprint of the map/faction/player you are facing. People drastically underestimate how complicated you can make the game with “relatively inert” general meta. Back in the good old days Blackheart and Petric would spend a week sandboxing with one another to just get 5-7 maps worked out at a level they are comfortable with. They would do this and come up with a totally different build on maps people had been playing for a year or two on ladder. Farm and I could spend up to like 20-30 minutes talking about a map during teamgame tournaments. If you want strategic variety play maps and setups that encourage it. And no, 5v5 map gen slop is not gameplay variety just because it’s on a “new” map generation. It’s comfy and chill in its own way though which isn’t a problem.
Beyond that, I’d like to say things aren’t as simple as the high rated players that want to keep things the same vs the devs that want to shake up the game. I am probably one of the biggest advocates for bigger adjustments to the game yet I’m also one of the biggest opponents to many of the recent changes Jip was talking about and also one of the named toxic troll mumbo jumbo goons. Which I just find funny considering what I’ve done for FAF (had to divide my old role into 4-5 new ones after all).
But changes I advocate for have been blocked for what I saw as no coherent reason ie telebilly after the bug fix for it. This was by the proponent of “meta shakeups” here. I proposed the addition of Cybran absolver. I wanted jamming given to UEF t3 air while still advocating for adjustments to UEF spy plane to make jamming more viable since we can’t add it to ASF. I also tried to give ideas on what counter-intel Aeon and Sera could utilize. Same with trying to make mongoose/hoplite more viable by enabling them to shoot from transports. I want to remove false choices from the game, that’s what I work from. UEF teleport was a false choice, as in the current Aeon one. Mongoose was mostly a false choice. ACU drone is a false choice. Sometimes things are a false choice because they are too strong and sometimes it’s because things are too weak.
And don’t get me wrong, there is some asinine pushback from balance team sometimes. The fact it took like a month or two to argue about whether sparky being able to build radar and facs would “break the game” was nuts. But my margin for what would break the game is much wider than some of the conservative dudes on balance team but it’s definitely way tighter than Jip’s.
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@maudlin27 said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
Case in point (of how people can be the biggest obstacle) - the Blinky Lights saga, which came before the DDOS/Connection issues, and shows how even a seemingly innoculous change to a feature that the majority of people didn't know existed can still generate resistance to change:
I remember that being worse than what it looks like now to me. I thought I remembered more people being toxic trolls about it, but skimming back through the blinking lights thread it didn't seem too bad. The worst part in it was @Jip having to repeat the same thing multiple times because people couldn't be bothered to read. Yeah it's a bit silly the people arguing to keep something in the game that they didn't even know was there in the first place, but it's not entirely unreasonable to learn about something only when it's about to be removed but then think it's pretty cool and want to keep it. Even then, unless I missed something on my quick skim I don't see anyone feeling too strongly about it.
Segue that into a response to some of the other posts, since I think it's a great example of a point I want to make.
@jip said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
What is different between the type of contributions of these two paragraphs? Nobody disagrees with improving the performance of the simulation and therefore all was good. But the moment you do something that people (individuals) disagree with it feels a post is made immediately based on their imagination to make all sorts of accusations and demands
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As a quick example, take this topic or this one, or for example this one where I had to write an entire f'ing post in response to bust the bullshit that people imagine happened surrounding the changes of the Tractor Claws, instead of just asking about it or looking for themselves.I read, or at least skimmed through every example given here and also was around for all of them as they happened. I don't really remember many people making a big deal about the GC tractor claw fix, it's a random player and Thomas making any sort of fuss about it, and the lower rated player gets meme'd on a bit + was reasonable other than the edgy comment about testing. Thomas is Thomas, and even then he had less of an issue with the change vs how the change happened if I'm reading that correctly. Outside of those people you're largely supported in those threads, both explicitly through comments made and upvotes.
The more controversial one is the HQ changes. This one is interesting and I think a bit unfortunate how it played out for all involved. From what I remember from following that when it happened + my brief skim through now this is my take away:
- Game devs wanted to improve the shaders on the factories, this part was very well communicated and everyone was onboard
- While working on implementing these upgrades devs realized that it wasn't going to work how they wanted, and ended up more significantly changing the the model than they thought they'd need
- These larger than expected changes went live without really being communicated
I am more involved than most and I knew that there was being work done on the PBR shaders to improve how the factories and was supportive of that. Despite me being quite active in the community, I still had zero idea that the factories had changed as much as they had. If I'm missing this, especially in March 2023 when I was extremely active, then most people are missing this.
Frankly, most people in that thread were quite reasonable all things considered. Looking at the dates, the specific posts talking about the factory model changes came after Ninrai's post where they were already live. It just seems like there was a communication lapse at an important juncture here where otherwise things were very well communicated.
Other than the HQ changes, these have a theme where there isn't a large number of higher rated players against them, and that's a key difference between these examples and what's happening recently. It's also why I tied everything together in my first post here around things being particularly bad for higher rated players now. At no time in the past do I remember changes being so universally disliked by more experienced players while still being pushed through and these examples only serve to reinforce that impression.
I'll make a post responding to the rest later.
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This is another thing that I feel the need to touch on if 5 or 10 players spend a considerable amount of time writing a rebuttal of a proposed change and the change is done anyway what does that say? How many of these rebuttals are required for something to be implemented or reversed? Is there a number sufficient to get a change done? On subjects such as area reclaim and the username rules change there have been tons of well written responses about why these changes are not good but they are still being implemented. People don't have endless time to write lengthy forum posts.
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@exselsior said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
I read, or at least skimmed through every example given here and also was around for all of them as they happened. I don't really remember many people making a big deal about the GC tractor claw fix, it's a random player and Thomas making any sort of fuss about it, and the lower rated player gets meme'd on a bit + was reasonable other than the edgy comment about testing. Thomas is Thomas, and even then he had less of an issue with the change vs how the change happened if I'm reading that correctly. Outside of those people you're largely supported in those threads, both explicitly through comments made and upvotes.
Just to chime in real quick between your posts. Not everything happens over the forums. There's also various separate topics about the matter that I could not find anymore. In general, people express their discontent through Discord, Aeolus and even lobby titles. I'm not joking:
It was fun the first time, but every time I see that lobby in the custom game list I just close client and go do something else, wondering why I am even here.
The HQ example was a quick example, not aimed about the second chapter of my post. The example shows what happens when you attack contributors and their intentions directly. It's counter productive to what everyone is hopefully trying to achieve - the forever part in FAForever.
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People will show discontent about anything. I'm not even sure that dude is being serious. Regardless the hq was a very simple change but things like area reclaim completely change the way the game works and that is not hyperbole.
