Why does everything suck so much right now?

FAF is the direct result of the inputs that went into modifying SC:FA. If you concluded that FAF sucks then you know based on who made the decisions to change it to what it is has the culpability. You point out a lack of vision, well it does not seem that the people making decisions about the game were selected based on the vision they presented or got overwhelming support to do what they set out to do and are actually doing.
I can only say the process of selecting the Balance Team is the culprit and all other reasons are an extension thereof. There is this famous saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Showing the community that power when forcing through bad changes irrespective of the opposition is just asking to ctrl-k your player base.
Contributors come up with good ideas sometimes that just don't fit the game but if there is no stated vision then how would a developer know that his idea while functional would be a waste of time? I personally do not see any reason to get involved as a contributor with the people who have the final say at the moment, others probably took longer than me to see the light but eventually we all see the light

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.

Is vanilla supcom just as good as FaF? The need for all the accumulated changes that turned the former into the latter speaks to the goals of those that made them, over which different people might disagree. You can't define NEED universally, but the discrepancy between these 2 player bases is evidence that the improved version is preferred by many, evidence that those goals were aligned with what the players wanted, and thus that the changes were, in this narrow sense, needed.

This is easy to see with the benefit of hindsight, and glossing over details. Of course it's harder to see before each change is put to the test. Many such changes were rolled back after their drawbacks were realized - something that is always an option. But if nobody made the changes in the first place, we'd still be stuck with vanilla supcom.

It's better to have devs motivated to try things out even if they turn out not to work, than to have no devs.

I must admit I’m not that interested in defending my opinion. I have been a part of some other open-source games, and I don’t look back fondly on such discussions, since they usually lead nowhere.

I will answer only @blackyps since you read the article. Some examples: auto overcharge, target priority, selection deprioritizer and now possibly area reclaim. I think I saw a "UI mod" that automatically launches tac. missiles.

PS: poker has a lot of RNG

@Jip

The FAF community has always been conservative regarding changes that touch gameplay in any form. And parts of the community have always been rude, ignorant or lacking empathy with other people's opinions when discussing anything.

The "Grubby attitude" will never be the majority here. And FAF will never have a balance team that has enough authority and consensus-making ability to push through meta-changes in quick succession.

If think there is no choice than to accept this as fact. It might change in the future, but i doubt any single person can really impact this, and i also don't think it is necessary to be happy as a contributor / developer.

If a FAF contributor wants to make changes to FAF gameplay (even if they have a perfect technical solution), what they DO NOT necessarily have is community consensus.

Pushing things through without "enough" consensus is the path to burnout and unhappiness. If a contributor wants to keep having fun doing things around FAF, this is the one thing that they should not do. The technical solution that the contributor has built here does not really matter, other than that it works! It is the consensus that matters and the consensus alone that has the power to bring that change into standard gameplay in a way that everybody is happy with.

And here is in my opinion the common pitfall for contributors:
Contributors burn out trying to create consensus for their proposed change.

The reason for that is that trying to create consensus in a short amount of time is often practically impossible. No amount of playtesting, putting things into news, letting Gyle talk about them or making a forum posts will be able to convert a change from "controversial" to "generally looked forward to".

In my opinion, the only way to really do things happily is to do them primarily for yourself. Make a gameplay change that YOU want to play and play it together with people that also like it.

And i believe that good changes will eventually mature into having consensus to be put into the game (might take years but still). However, let other people argue for that. The contributor's job should then be to market whatever they made, so that other people can find it, but thats pretty much it.

This is for example how map generator got into ladder without a lot of problems. It took a lot of time, and in the eyes of many that is a good thing.

If a contributor absolutely wants to (and is motivated by) bringing changes to FAF quickly and in short succession, they must indeed only make absolutely uncontroversial changes (like the performance improvements).

A UI mod that automatically launches tac missiles would not be allowed, can't comment if such a mod exists in reality.
Thank you for providing examples

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

I wouldn't trade TMM or mapgen or 20% sim speed for 1000 2500+ rated players

That might be the easiest decision I’d ever have to make regarding FAF. Even including trading all 3, really. One is something that will never happen, the other is things that obviously can happen. The one that can’t happen also includes 1000 people that are evidently highly invested in the game and have a much higher rate of contributive participation than other pools of players so they have decent odds of implementing the evidently implementable so you have your cake and eat it too.

This is without factoring in that to have gained 1000 2500+ players you had to apply said growth to the rest of the FAF population pyramid and have also proceeded to increase the playerbase by two orders of magnitude.

Considering a large goal of things like mapgen and TMM is to keep FAF alive and the community engaged, I can't think of a better trade than getting 1k new Tagada/Farms/BH level players. That magically happening would do more for FAF than basically anything I could think of, beside the number being even larger than 1000.

For me, the big negative is seeing people leave that we have played with for years and look like they will never return. (Recent people being Sladow and Terarii). I'm still fairly new to the high-rated scene maybe around 2/3 years which isn't that much in regards to others. As there are only a few 'decent' players we all play with each other 90%+ of the time, which has resulted in making some good relationships. So seeing these people just pack their bags and leave is sad and negatively impacts the high-rated community.

Not that long ago you could easily get high-rated games on the weekends and sometimes during the week. The above results in the only time there is a decent game is when Farms is streaming. Even at the moment when Farms is streaming, it feels like few people are playing.

I have no intention of quitting FAF, as I have very fond memories of this game (this is the first game I ever remember playing as a child). The only reason I'd quit would purely be because of a lack of games, or if the game is just too unstable for whatever reason.

I think the community is still great there are always new people trying the game but what can we change/revert to entice old players to come back, without losing new/existing players?

The question why the high rated scene is dwindling while the rest of the community is growing is indeed very interesting and warrants its own thread. I wanted to start that soon, but if someone wants to go ahead and open it, feel free to do so. I will then comment my thoughts there

@ftxcommando well I was exaggerating a bit haha. Maybe you can explain how this deluge of high-level players, or the lack thereof, would improve or make things worse for you? I tried explaining why I don't think it affects me as much, but maybe as you lay out your reasons, something resonates.

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

I wouldn't trade TMM or mapgen or 20% sim speed for 1000 2500+ rated players

I would trade all of those for a thousand 2500+ players in a heartbeat, and if you wouldn't, I think you've lost the plot a little. The ultimate goal of making these features (TMM, maps, simspeed improvements) is to get new players and retain old ones in the first place.

If we have a thousand 2500+ players, then, assuming we maintain the same monthly ratio of 2500+ players to total players as we currently have (likely a very conservative assumption), we would have more than a million active players within a given month. Can you imagine what FAF would be like? Just for reference, OSRS has less than half a million unique monthly gamers and their biggest content creator earned $1,354,805.74 between Aug 2019 to Oct 2021. FAF would be absolutely booming. Tournaments, content creators, streamers, new maps, new features, everything. It would mean that FAF is one of the largest competitive games in the world. So if any of you happen upon a genie that offers this trade, please take it.

@phong FTX's last sentence already covered that:

This is without factoring in that to have gained 1000 2500+ players you had to apply said growth to the rest of the FAF population pyramid and have also proceeded to increase the playerbase by two orders of magnitude.

You now have tens (hundreds?) of thousands of new and active players to play with at lower levels that necessarily now have to exist to support the 1000 new top level pros.

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

The question why the high rated scene is dwindling while the rest of the community is growing is indeed very interesting and warrants its own thread. I wanted to start that soon, but if someone wants to go ahead and open it, feel free to do so. I will then comment my thoughts there

Would be a good thread potentially, I only have at best bad ideas on how to address this unfortunately but I did make a post here covering some of how I feel about it.

@Ganima @BlackYps I remember an old post from Tagada talking about UI mods which directly addresses that mods like ATP actually increase strategic diversity. I think FTX somewhere talks about that in relation to area reclaim as well but can't seem to find it now.

Competitive players do not draw in casual players, competitive players are born from casual players. And casual players exist because of a good game with good infrastructure. I think it's good to give this video a view:

• Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros

I'd recommend that to @Blackheart too, since being good at a game does not make you a good game designer, and being bad at the game does not make you a bad game designer.

And in general, I can highly recommend people to watch this too:

• The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why.

For the average player the value of matchmaker, the neroxis map generator, the vaults (seriously - these are so important it is unreal), coop and AI development create much, much, MUCH more value than the small group of top faf players. And I'd pick those - or another Brutus, Sheikah or P4block or two - over the additional 1000 top faf players at any moment in a heart beat.

Don't get me wrong - players that contribute (constructively) in discussions or via teams create value to the community. But just because you're a top faf player does not mean you make value. It just means you're good at the game, and nothing more.

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

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. (...)

I think your post is spot on, all of it - including the part about developers. Imagine not having Brutus, Sheikah, P4block and the like during the DDOS attacks. We wouldn't even be able to have this discussion on the forums right now .

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

The question why the high rated scene is dwindling while the rest of the community is growing is indeed very interesting and warrants its own thread. I wanted to start that soon, but if someone wants to go ahead and open it, feel free to do so. I will then comment my thoughts there

https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15548
I don't even have to write anything

The difference now I guess is that ladder isn't dying but dead and tournaments are almost dead, but I can't comment much on this since i now have been inactive for years.

Reading through all this I can't help but wonder if it would make sense to have a pro level version of FAF. Kind of like we have FAF develop, Nomads and xtreme wars could we not have a pro level game type that used the preferred settings of all the 2K plus ranked players? FAF Pro? This game mode would still be ranked and would allow a suitable place for people who hit a certain level where they actually notice the difference between an early engineer dying or not or the difference between manually reclaiming and attack moving or patrolling. It would also allow lower ranked players to play that game mode if they so chose or to join in on a Semi-Pro level game such as 1400+ plus lobbies or something like that considering top level players tend to host such lobbies regularly. I personally would love to try a version of FAF that is more indicative of the way the game was played 5 to 10 years ago or whatever the Holy Grail of FAF is that the pro level group tends to reminisce about and would not have a problem if my rank was affected if I lost such a match similar to how I will play nomads or Extreme wars from time to time knowing my rank will be affected.

I personally can't imagine the game without advanced Target priorities, auto overcharge and even some of the implemented eco tools such as auto ringing/upgrading mexes and radars because my APM just won't allow for me to play the way it used to be and still enjoy myself but I do think that perhaps it's not ideal to have one standard set of rules that apply to pro-level and to the regular folk.

I'm sure all of these high-ranked players who keep speaking up about how everything is going to crap around here would have no problem being part of a committee to come up with the optimal set of rules for pro-level players and then it would just take some development time to create that game type.

How hard would it be to make another game type such as nomads or FAF develop?

@exselsior I don't really understand your meaning about players at lower levels. I guess I can understand that it takes a bunch of players to find a few good ones, but my point was rather that if push comes to shove, I'd rather lose a pro than a dev. No offense intended, and not talking about anyone in particular: it's just that the latter seem more irreplaceable and their contributions have impacted me more and seem more lasting overall.

They are also more likely to consider the needs and wants of average and new players than the former, in my experience, which affects both how many new players we get and retention to a larger degree than catering to the veterans, at least while the player base is growing. I think player base growth and nr of games played are the actually meaningful indicators of dev performance, and by those metrics, things do not, in fact, suck so much.

Ideally dialogue would not be painful enough to drive either away, but it seems things are not ideal.

I like that this has slowly morphed into “hey so who would you hypothetically shoot in the head, the dev that is here for the casual gamer or the high rated pro also there is no overlap between these groups at all ever”

How about we just don’t do bad changes for the game/community? People are frustrated because things are happening that don’t have a justification beyond “it’s cool and new” or because some players said “they want it” ergo 17,000 players actively want it whether developer or moderator or community related.

I can stomach people doing changes that I dislike to a point, but I also am not here to deal with slop at all times and I have hit my slop point. That’s the point of the thread.

@ftxcommando sure. As long as agreement about what "bad" means is reached without driving people away, should be a good strategy. Failing that, I'd rather let the devs have first say, trusting they'll come around once the evidence is in either way and revert bad changes.

Getting back to the thread topic, things do not suck, in my opinion. The fact that the title assumes they do makes me worried BlackYps might be bending the ear a bit too much towards the moaners. I urge him to start ignoring them if it ever becomes too much to bear, instead of stopping his contributions, if that thought ever crosses his mind.

@ftxcommando nobody is shooting anyone in the head here so don't be so dramatic. Phong is making a pretty good point.... I get paid a good salary to do my job and sometimes the complaining and whining of of the masses makes me wonder why the hell I do it.... I can't imagine being a Dev for FAF doing it all for free...

I don't think anyone wants anyone to leave... But if we lose the devs we have nothing.