I don't know, that's why I am asking.

I've never really seen it as a FAF-specific problem. It is just another aspect of the very aggressive, divided, tribal culture that is accelerated and encouraged by the internet and social media. Similar to how at this point, Star Wars "fans" are people who go on the internet to create and watch videos hating on the latest Star Wars content that comes out and the people who make it.

Everyone wants to feel like they are smart and better than other people, and it is quick and easy to get that feeling by talking shit about what other people are doing. Joining a tribe that says how stupid and/or malicious others are and implying that they could do it better. Nothing is perfect, so people can always find flaws to point out to justify their toxic behavior. I think many people, particularly the type who spend a lot of time online, don't have very enjoyable or meaningful lives and that makes them more likely to engage in online bullying and tribalism.

I have been quite guilty of this behavior on FAF. I admit that I am an arrogant asshole and probably caused some harm to FAF by being mean to people. I do often feel bad after I write mean posts on the forums, which is why I pretty much checked out of the community entirely and tried to focus on my own projects.

The following paragraphs are intended to be some armchair psychological evaluation of myself and why I do not respect FAF and am mean on the forums. I do not claim this logic is objectively true in any way, or that it necessarily applies to any of the other people who write mean stuff on the forums. Being mean on the forum is less than useless and makes my life, and others' lives, objectively worse.

I have never had a very healthy relationship with FAF. It was just an addiction and coping mechanism for my own miserable and pointless existence. Even when I played every day for years, I never had much respect for the project, and still don't. It's just a video game that offers little more than a way to burn time. On top of that, nobody here even created the game. I never really cared, and still don't care, if FAF dies.

A big difference between FAF and the other games mentioned in the thread is that those games were actually made by the people who are changing them. It is their creation and they have the right to do whatever they want with it. There is reason to believe that the changes they make will be good because they come from the same people who made the game you chose to play in the first place. On FAF every change comes from some random amateur who appointed themselves the authority to change whatever they want without earning the right to do so. So I think it is reasonable for FAF changes to be met with more contention than normal games.

In response to criticism, these people will usually point out how they are unpaid volunteers keeping the game alive so we can all play it. It comes across as an attempt to gain some moral superiority as if perpetuating some useless videogame someone else made two decades ago is some kind of charitable cause that benefits humanity. Just because I waste my time playing this game, rather than some other game, doesn't mean I owe you anything. When making a contribution, you take on the responsibility for whatever happens as a result of that contribution. It doesn't matter if you were paid for it or not. This attempt to gain superiority and avoid responsibility only encourages further hostilities. I think it would be better to either say nothing or admit some responsibility which would then generate sympathy and make further aggression more difficult.

These points are even more true for moderators since they don't even have to have some coding skills or anything to contribute. They just get power handed down to them from the beginning of time that grants them the right to judge players and make up random new rules. I haven't personally had many conflicts with moderators though.

I can't comment on anything that's happened in the last two years since I haven't been participating in the community. I left as a result of my self-induced suffering, not because of any FAF issues or changes that were made.

I have noticed that there are almost zero casts of 1v1 games on YouTube anymore, outside of major tournaments, which are also quite rare now. It seemed to me that the focus of the community shifted away from 1v1 once mapgen and TMM became things. I also disagree with the ever-increasing shift for 1v1 games to be played on larger and more complicated maps. These factors mean I will never return to FAF since I play almost exclusively high-rated 1v1 games. Though my return is unlikely regardless. So those of you who dislike my toxicity can celebrate, and the few people who keep trying to get me to play 1v1 can be sad.

@Jip
I looked at the threads on the individual changes - in almost all the cases the design changes were out criticized or it was pointed out how the changes look ok but still make it harder to distinguish compared to the old models.
Iirc the changes were introduced without a big discussion on the forum or elsewhere. Then the team received a lot of backlash. Subsequently forum threads were opened with said feedback and ever since development stopped? Felt short-sided to me.
I got used to the new models - by zooming out more often, which makes any model irrelevant kinda, which I think is a bad direction to take. I still think the visual changes are making it harder to distinguish HQs and non-HQs.

I wonder: would you do it all over again the same way or would you choose a different approach (if so, how?). Is the HQ re-development concluded at this point?

@jip said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

@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.

You:

• Insult us as people incapable of contributive effort (including me and our community variant of Grubby, nice one btw)
• Exist in this "have your cake and eat it" attitude where FAF is both growing while stagnant but also it being stagnant is bad because it won't let FAF grow
• Decided you represent the general will
• Implicitly accuse Tagada of failing to uphold his contributor guidelines

I proceed to accuse you of the same, this ended up being considered off topic. Currently three weeks into my temporary mute, too.

@thomashiatt said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

I have noticed that there are almost zero casts of 1v1 games on YouTube anymore, outside of major tournaments, which are also quite rare now. It seemed to me that the focus of the community shifted away from 1v1 once mapgen and TMM became things. I also disagree with the ever-increasing shift for 1v1 games to be played on larger and more complicated maps. These factors mean I will never return to FAF since I play almost exclusively high-rated 1v1 games. Though my return is unlikely regardless. So those of you who dislike my toxicity can celebrate, and the few people who keep trying to get me to play 1v1 can be sad.

I agree, big & complex map bad. You can barely expect the top 0.01% of the community to even perform well on a 10km map. I hope to see you accept banani's BO21 challenge on small maps only tommy

@FtXCommando @Jip @Tagada After reading these posts It seems to me that there are two groups of people

Group 1. People who like Supcom the way it is, and thats what makes it great.

Group 2. People who want to improve supcom so that it can be as good as it can be.

these two groups are abviously polar opposites and will never see eye to eye.

The solution?

Just as a player can choose between FAF, FAF Beta & FAF Develop maybe another option could be FAF classic where all the changes that have been highlighted as controversial can be reversed and therefor preserved for everyone and regular FAF that seeks to improve the experiance.

@lowki It doesn't require separate game type. Area reclaim was perfectly fine positioned as a SIM mod for a while. Returning it as a properly working SIM mod would be a good (diversity & choice) solution and won't create any controversy about breaking SupCom whatsoever. And btw it would be a good way to test how the silent majority of 17000 unique players really badly wants this feature to make games more fun.

The problem is that the goal being formulated as "shaking the meta". The more backfire change proposal gets, the more it proves itself as a good shaker. Hence the whole polar opposites thing.

I dont really mind the meta shakeups as a concept, i think it can be done right. I also think they should come from a place of tension, where the game feels the most stale/shit to play, and not from a random "wouldnt it be cool if this feature existed?". For example, i wouldnt mind even some big sim level changes to t3 arties and gameenders to make them fun and not lame to play with and against, or maybe some changes to early transport rushes so they are less volatile, maybe even some changes to make spamming full t1 into omega agression on many ladder maps less viable. Area reclaim just seems to come out of nowhere, and i really fail to see how it fixes anything.
Also i think the jips post regarding the area reclaim reads as an analysis of some random 1k rated dude, no offense. Like i just really dont see the reclaim as being the most fundamental mechanic that somehow makes you a gamer god compared to the folk who dont appreciate it. Its just another part of macro, and not even the most fundamental. Like just having a economy that isnt collapsing all the time, knowing what your game plan on the map is and using your units smartly is the basis of the game ultimately, not clicking rocks to proceed to overflow all your reclaim. I really want to get into specifics, but currently im on my phone so its omega inconvenient.

@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

@jip said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

@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.

You:

• Insult us as people incapable of contributive effort (including me and our community variant of Grubby, nice one btw)
• Exist in this "have your cake and eat it" attitude where FAF is both growing while stagnant but also it being stagnant is bad because it won't let FAF grow
• Decided you represent the general will
• Implicitly accuse Tagada of failing to uphold his contributor guidelines

I proceed to accuse you of the same, this ended up being considered off topic. Currently three weeks into my temporary mute, too.

@TheVVheelie this is why it is relevant to add a link to your posts.

You can find the conversation on Discord.

I can highly recommend people to read the entire conversation that happened during the 9th of June. Then remember that the balance team is, to quote their own team member Turin, infamously inactive. Meanwhile almost half what the game team does touches balance related topics these days. You can imagine this to be frustrating after 2 years when your contributions are ignored for weeks. I'll let the posts talk for themselves.

I don't think I did anything wrong here, but do be your own judge.

@Exselsior
@jip said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Not everything happens over the forums.

See for example this message on Discord.

Just another example of random, useless harassment that has no real context. It adds nothing, it is within the rules but it's definitely harmful.

@ninrai said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

I wonder: would you do it all over again the same way or would you choose a different approach (if so, how?). Is the HQ re-development concluded at this point?

The only mistake I made was not mentioning these changes as highlights in the forum topic. I did not expect people to blow up about it and scare away the contributors working because of it.

@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Currently three weeks into my temporary mute, too.

Yes, the quality of conversation got so much better that it is a keeper if you ask me !

@jip said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Yes, the quality of conversation got so much better that it is a keeper if you ask me !

Sarcastic use of heart emojis and implicitly insulting other community members is the opposite of what I want to see in this thread!
It's obvious that you don't like him and that is fine, but please find a better way to deal with that.
Muting someone from discord channels when you are not a moderator and there isn't a rule breach is also pretty dicey in my opinion.

Thank you all for your input, it sounds like an empty phrase, but I did read it with great interest and Thomas, I really respect you for being so honest in your post!

I can't comment on everything in detail, but I did read everything. Below you can find a part of my notes that I took that are half-finished reflections on some things that were mentioned here.

Top players that basically only play in tournaments still manage to stay at the top. Does this mean we need to change the meta?
It's a bit absurd that people manage to stay at the top with hardly any practice. People complain about rust all the time and doing anything on a high level requires you to regularly do it or you will get worse over time.
One problem is that medium-good players don't have anyone to practice against, because the top players are so afk.
In this way the problems in the top-rated scene are indeed self-inflicted, because they could partially fix it by being more open to playing with new people. But raising your own competition is irrational if you want to stay at the top with little effort.

We could maybe solve some of the problems with low activity by experimenting with tournament formats that require playing the game more, but we have almost zero tournament directors.
I suspect directing tournaments is unfun and takes a lot of time.

Do we need to shake up the meta to encourage more high level activity?
It's true that many games use regular changes as a way to drive engagement.
Chess is a popular game and doesn't have any balance patches. Chess is even a solved game in the sense that we can have computers play it better than humans ever could. Still, many people start playing chess.
My personal take is that many games that changing regularly is not necessary. It can be used to cover up mediocre games, because then you can paint over the fact that the core gameplay loop is not very engaging or that there are serious disbalances in the game with the rush of discovering something new and that many op things are not found out yet.
Still, we do have the problem that many people say there is no reason to play the game.

@thevvheelie said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

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

Can you elaborate what you mean by that? Doesn't the person with the better plays win? I don't really see a way to reward good play inside of the game other than winning the game.

Changes/new features get introduced and it doesn't seem like it matters what kind of feedback people give -> people feel powerless.
We're stuck in a vicious circle where the powers that be say that they are open to feedback, but the feedback is of too low quality. The people at the bottom don't think it's worth it to put in a lot of effort, because they have seen no change even from feedback that they see as good enough to should have passed.
The powers that be spend less effort explaining changes, because they feel how much they get shit on is not a sensible metric to inform their policy, so they go on doing whatever they personally think is in the best interest of the community.

When people argue against something and then the original plan gets executed anyway it feels to them like it was all for nothing. How can we encourage them to still voice their opinion next time? Sometimes the feedback changes the long term plans or leads to changes in subtle ways that don't get communicated explicitly. For example I originally was in favor of scrapping global rating entirely. Having read various arguments against that, my opinion is now much more nouanced about this topic. These arguments didn't actively reverse any changes that have been made, but they prevented me from working on things that would have been a bad idea. So it definitely had a positive impact, it was just completely invisible (So thank you people, whose names I unfortunately forgot in the meantime because some of these discussions are years old). I'm not sure how we could improve this.

A general problem with explaining reasoning is that it takes an ungodly amount of time. This is true for both the developer and player side. I wonder if it is actually more time-efficient to take the time to compile relevant arguments once instead of repeatedly arguing with arguments that are only half-formulated each time. Still, doing this takes a lot of time and can't always be done in advance. Nobody expected that changing the HQs would be such a hot topic, so it just got mentioned in a changelog as a minor feature. Somebody was actually complaining that the feature was "hidden" in the wall of text of the rest of the changelog. It's obviously a bit ridiculous to demand that each feature has to be prominently displayed at the top for the people that stop reading after the first paragraph because that is literally impossible to do for each feature. So for every change you have to guess how important it is, to decide how much effort you put into promotion and explanation. You inevitably get it wrong sometimes and then people say with the power of hindsight that feature X should have oBVioSlY been promoted better and sometimes it's really hard to discern if you indeed made a mistake there or if it's just an entitled ass speaking to you.

In general we can't know what the average player wants, we can only do educated guesses. It seems the most sensible way to decide changes is to collect arguments for and against it and then weight the arguments.
Having multiple people complain about something does have utility because it makes it less likely that the person complaining is some sort of outlier and is just claiming that everyone else feels the same. But it doesn't make sense to define some sort of threshold as in "if 10 people complain it gets scrapped".

So I'm just a retired old man who is as much removed from FAF as the average FAF player is from normalcy. Though, being this absurdely old (and obviously exceedingly wise as well) I want to give my extremely valuable input:

1. It is impressive as hell that the same discussion that was held in 2013 and 2015 and 2019 and basically every year still is ongoing. A very motivated dev (what specific name this dev has has always changed throughout the years) comes up with amazing new ideas for the game/balance/whatever, and gets pushback on some of those ideas, from whoever the remaining top players are at the time.
   Usually, as a result, some ideas get stopped in their tracks, some get implemented. Then at least one or so of the top players get depressed, or more depressed than they already are, and eventually the little drops of accrued depression lead to them leaving the game (usually permanently, or in steps of decreasing activity, inversely correlated to their depression).
   Hence we have the same development year after year: The top playerbase gets thinner and weaker (not just physically). Yet the argument keeps getting made "the game has to change with my amazing ideas, it will finally get new top players, more activity, etc). How the actual banana is that STILL the argument, after more than an entire decade of this cycle repeating over and over? This is so insane it made me write a forum post.

2. Now you might ask, oh, smart and sarcastic BC_Balkheart, what to do?? Well, the game does NOT have to change much at all, as none of those old tasty legendary games have to. (Supcom, Aoe2, Chess as my personal fetish games)
   Tons of changes make comebacks for old players more difficult than they need to be (e.g. me), and are irrelevant for the grand total playerbase, which is weak enough to not even realize what was changed. Changes that are greatly appreciated are things like better sim speed (FAF has done quite a bit with this, its really good), balance fixes that pertain to the egregious issues (absurdely OP unit XY). Things that are also greatly appreciated are tasty tourneys with cool casting and fun settings. It would feed the nostalgia, which is one of the absolute main "selling" points of FAF, cause face it, this game is old as fuck and has very obvious weaknesses that won't disappear. What it has is amazing mechanics that are appealing to a small group of nerds + a great nostalgia factor for old people like myself (and there are more old people, not just me, although that might just be the dementia speaking).

On a final note, how deranged does a person have to be to think they know whats good for the game, if they dont remotely understand it (sub 2500 rating or whatever is equivalent to 2013 rating of 2000), and dont have appreciable experience in high lvl play in other RTS or games. Although I think this attitude of thinking they understand the game is mostly why those people suck too. Rant over.

Good luck boyas (postivity quota; fulfilled)

nice one blackheart, the only sensible post in this whole thread. the area reclaim idea has been played with at least once in the dim past already and rejected

FaF has continued the development trajectory of NOT prioritizing mechanical execution as the primary differentiator in player skill. This is a mistake and has resulted in reduced skill expression and reduced strategic depth. This kind of design in not appealing to competitive players.

Could you elaborate what you mean with that? It sounds interesting, but I can't follow. Do you have examples for me?

@blackyps If you are interested in this idea, then here is a detailed write-up.

What is considered a “UI mod” here would get you instantly banned or produce a large player outcry if implemented by the developers of other RTSs. Implementing a mod such as adv. target priority into StarCraft2 would instantly make the game less interesting and cause large balance issues. This is not even mentioning the competitive integrity aspect.

ATP literally increases the depth of unit interaction. It enables choices that are not mechanically feasible without it due to how the game works. It was a problem when it was applied to all units universally because the game is not built for a 4 second ACU misposition resulting in game over because a shift+g of 40 tanks ends up taking 10k hp from your ACU and forcing the minimum of a draw.

SC2 and FAF are different enough mechanically that I don't think the targeting priorities are even comparable. Not to mention, actions in SC2 are near instant, whereas in FAF they have a 500ms delay. Microing targeting is far more feasible in SC2 whereas in FAF it's just an infuriating experience where by the time your attack order processed and the units stopped moving they're probably already out of range of what you targeted. Or you're telling your GC to manually target power so it stops moving and then doesn't even fire (A frequent experience lately) vs using ATP and it killing power while continuing to move.

There are many things I'd argue are pushing the limits of what should be considered a UI mod, but ATP should honestly just be made part of the game.

I'm an average player. I can't say recent or not so recent departures of top faf players have affected me negatively in any meaningful way. The fact of the matter is they do best what all other members of this community do: play the game. When they leave, another good player replaces them, tournaments don't stop happening entirely, there's just a drop in quality that's imperceptible to someone like me. Maybe if these players also happen to be amazing streamers or TDs, the impact of their departure is more palpable.

But devs are not like that. There isn't always someone to immediately replace them. I don't even know who it was that handled lobby server development before they left, but apparently nobody has filled their shoes a year or more after the fact and development on features that require such a person has stopped entirely. Such departures affect me a lot more, since basically all of the best features to have come about in the last few years have relied on very few key individuals being motivated enough to implement them. And they don't just affect me, they affect every player, no matter their rating.

I wouldn't trade TMM or mapgen or 20% sim speed for 1000 2500+ rated players because I wouldn't be playing faf today without people like Ze_PiLoT, in spite of all the pros that had already stopped playing before he stopped developing. The ideal would be to have good communication and understanding between both groups, but sometimes it seems like each are focused on different goals and no amount of communication can fix that - what's needed instead is compromise. And when such compromise is not offered, I would urge you, devs, to consider ignoring feedback that's not constructive to your goals, before you consider halting your contributions or leaving.

As for features where gameplay and balance overlap, I would urge both the dev and balance teams to consider that yes, this is an RTS game and micro is important, but what's very specifically different about this particular RTS should be emphasized. I think the flow economy is one example, but a more relevant one to recent conversations is the focus on the big decisions and away from accurate micro evident by the unprecedented level of automation (at the time) the original devs went to great lengths to implement.

@Ganima that's an interesting article, albeit a bit confusing at first because the author includes "reliably remembering to do things" and map awareness in mechanics. So it includes physical mechanics (clicking buttons) as well as mental mechanics (not forgetting about the units you sent to raid, not forgetting to scout, actually noticing the HQ upgrade that your scout reveals etc.). That is a broader definition than I think most people have in mind when talking about mechanics because I think most people primarily think about the physical part.

In this game most people struggle with the mental mechanics.
I'm not a very good player, but I can't think of anybody that I would consider to have mastered the game mechanically.
I also don't agree with everything the article states. Poker doesn't have any mechanics that you need to practice but still allows for different strategies, something that the author seems to rule out.

Anyway I don't think we have to discuss the article in depth for the further discussion, can you give me some examples where in your opinion "FAF has continued the development trajectory of NOT prioritizing mechanical execution as the primary differentiator in player skill"? I would still like to know.