Why does everything suck so much right now?

Thanks @archsimkat you saved me the trouble of writing that.

@phong, two related things in response. The first being that rating is a bell curve and it doesn't make sense to add a huge number of people to one extreme end of the bell curve without padding the rest to maintain some reasonable average. Hence both my comment and presumably FTX's comments about there needing to be a lot more "average" players for there to suddenly be 1k top pros.

For the second, let's ignore what I just said and pretend it really just is 1000 new top players. This ties in heavily with what Arch said and what I was starting to type up before I saw Arch's post, but top pros bring in a lot of new people and do a ton for community engagement. What do a lot of pros, including top FAF people do? They stream. Streaming drives engagement and awareness for the game. Streaming gets new people interested in the game. 1000 new top pros means, what, 100 new active streamers potentially? That would be huge for FAF. It also means far more tournaments, and far more competition in those tournaments. Which means more official streams that draw in more people. Which in turn makes the viewership goes up, which in turn means more people get exposed to said streams that might not have been otherwise exposed to it. There's a reason most big games have a vibrant competitive scene, and why many times they'll start to decline as the competitive scene declines.

It also means more casts get made, and additionally casts consisting of actual high level play. Again, refer back to Arch's post regarding this since that's identical to how I feel. For me, watching Yudi in particular was huge motivation for me to get better.

Edit: I'm actually not sure if I'd be getting back into playing some FAF right now if not for Farm's stream honestly. Watching it makes me want to play, and also shows where there are some high rated games going on. Having more active and skilled streamers is huge for any game community.

As a side comment, I play a bit of Apex, and while I'm over a decade past my prime on FPS games and am complete trash, I'll watch highlights of pros or top streamers and get motivated to play as a result. I'm reasonably sure that both myself and my irl friends I play Apex with wouldn't be playing it if not for the competitive scene and the streams + highlights from it.

@ftxcommando, thanks for eloquently expressing what input high rated players had to those features I mentioned. They're definitely the more fruitful collaborations. Please note, though, their help was not essential in the sense that if it hadn't been them, some other players rated 200 lower would have provided much the same support. And I think Sheikah was equally sensitive to what average players thought.

Not so much the case for the devs and mappers who actually made things happen. I've seen the code for the mapmaker, that thing alone took hundreds of man-hours of work to build, and had one of the devs decided it wasn't worth the hassle, it would probably have been years before someone else attempted it. Contrast that effort with a bunch of dudes just sharing their thoughts, and you can't really blame me for valuing this less than doing the actual thing, can you?

That's without even mentioning all the other moaners that aren't even good at the game. For some reason, nobody took issue as I suggested they should be ignored as well past a certain point, because it's only the higher rated players that should get a say in what the devs don't do, right?

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

I would've played regardless because I just wanted to one day be good enough to 2v6 some scrubs on Dual Gap, you know?

did you ever end up 2v6ing scrubs on dual gap?
actually didn't we do like 2v5 or 2v6 and lost?

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

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

Damn. This was from 7 years ago, but change some of the names and examples and this could be written today. At least we have divisions now!

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.

Yes, more or less.

The vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t even read the forums, so I think it’s silly for people to use negative sentiment on the forums as an accurate bellwether of the playerbase. Moreover, treating the majority of the playerbase as largely indifferent to any changes so just cater to what the highest level players say isn’t a necessary corollary to this. Why not actually have polls on the client news page for potential changes?

@archsimkat a bit of charm can go a long way, potentially making up for a less extreme drive to victory. Besides, nobody likes whiners. If we really cared about these top players drawing in the noobs, we'd all be doing more to censor their public tantrums even as we pandered to their whims in private.

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

If we really cared about these top players drawing in the noobs, we'd all be doing more to censor their public tantrums

Actually, I agree and have said as much before, for instance my first paragraph here.

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

The vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t even read the forums, so I think it’s silly for people to use negative sentiment on the forums as an accurate bellwether of the playerbase.

The majority of high rated players do visit the forums and most of this thread has been centered around the high level scene for better or worse.

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

Moreover, treating the majority of the playerbase as largely indifferent to any changes so just cater to what the highest level players say isn’t a necessary corollary to this. Why not actually have polls on the client news page for potential changes?

Most of the discussed changes do exactly nothing for mid level and lower players. Apparently this is controversial, but area reclaim falls into that category as well. We could make sweeping stat changes to a whole bunch of units and if it wasn't announced I doubt random <1ks would even notice in game. I wouldn't have when I was sub 1200 or whatever. Unless balance is absurdly bad it's just not that noticeable until you hit a certain level of game knowledge.

@exselsior I can't square what you're saying here "most of the proposed changes don't affect mid/low players" with what I thought the criticism for auto-reclaim was in the first place, that it would level the playing field between low and high tier players. Those can't both be true at the same time, can they? Maybe you don't agree with the latter, or it makes a disproportionate difference only past 1800 or what? I haven't kept up with this particular conversation, honestly.

@phong My general take is less that it levels the playing field between low and high rated players and more that it somewhat lowers the amount of skill expression available at high level play. And when I say high level, I mean higher level than me. There's zero chance that this magically makes me beat, say, Bully, let alone lets me beat Farms with any meaningful level of consistency. Also goes the other way, there's zero chance it would mean a random 1500 is going to start outplaying me. Consistently at least, flukes happen and I'm rather inconsistent.

Anyway, what this does mean is that in high level tournaments for example there's simply one less avenue for someone like Yudi to flex his apm vs Nexus or whoever you want. It lowers volatility in a way that I don't think I like, for example early aggression is made weaker because if it fails then perhaps you at least canceled a bunch of reclaim orders or something like that. You can argue that early aggression is too strong, and you might be right. I disagree with this as a fix though.

Right now you have to make a tradeoff with your attention, and it's a tradeoff that only truly exists at a very high level. There are decisions they have to make - Can I spare the apm/attention to manual reclaim? Is it going to result in me getting the mass too quickly so I actually can't spend it? Do I need the mass asap or can I just attack move vaguely in the right direction and move on?

I'm making too many mistakes in my play for those choices to really matter 99% of the time. I have never in my thousands of games played lost a game because I didn't manual reclaim enough and my opponent did it more than I did. It simply hasn't happened. I've probably lost because I didn't attack move reclaim enough, but that's different. In those cases I'd probably still attack move reclaim and not area reclaim anyway.

Really I think I will largely ignore area reclaim if it goes live. The scenarios I'll choose to use it are relatively niche and mostly involve getting a bit more mass from a hotly contested reclaim field with my acu when I'm lacking apm. I think anyway, I haven't yet played with it much. Otherwise I find clicking rocks kinda fun, sue me. The other issue is the huge nerf to rock reclaim that's apparently associated with the area reclaim and seems depressing to say the least. I can't ignore that one like I can area reclaim.

So if it were somehow a bit worse than manual reclaim the same way factory reclaim, attack move and patrol technically are, this whole argument would stop? Why not do that?

Matchmaker from the beginning was a completely collaborative process on how to make things function fairly but also fun. For example, if we wanted to be totally tryhard, we would have no party system. I had people complain to me about that idea during the planning stages. Most people understood that it was a tradeoff worth having, though.

Oh how merciful of you to relent and grant us this basic feature that every game has of playing with your friends. Truly we are blessed for such a collaboration. Did you write any code or no? "if we wanted we could have made it utter shit" I guess that's your way of saying you listen to feedback ?

So if it were somehow a bit worse than manual reclaim the same way factory reclaim, attack move and patrol technically are, this whole argument would stop? Why not do that?

Well at that point why even have area reclaim? It's confusing to have 5(?) different methods of reclaim with little to differentiate them. Attack move and patrol are the same except patrol doesn't stop when there's no reclaim left, but then what's the difference between area reclaim and attack move? Slightly more focused I guess? Then you also have to understand why factory attack move is different, and I'm pretty sure that difference only exists as a game engine bug funnily enough. It would be confusing for new people and ignored by more experienced players which is kind of the worst of both worlds.

@exselsior at that point why oppose it? if it made someone happy and nobody unhappy? Why refuse to try it? Why quit the game over it? It makes no sense except as a power play.

How would you make area reclaim worse than manual reclaim?

@thewheelienoob I already told you: as worse as other options are, to shut people up about it.

Yeah but how would you functionally achieve that?

I am certainly not quitting over area reclaim? But in this scenario where it's somehow worse than manual reclaim my point for opposing it is simply that it makes things more complicated for no reason. Why have it if it's attack move with extra steps? It's just confusing. I'm also not sure how you could somehow make it worse than manual reclaim like @TheWheelieNoob is saying.

@thewheelienoob by reordering the reclaim commands such that the engineer has to travel some amount between them, as when it does so it gets closer than it strictly needs to be, thus wasting time. The width of the reclaim strip can be widened as well to achieve this. By making sure it stops to pick up every little speck of dust if need be. Some combination of those factors.

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

Matchmaker from the beginning was a completely collaborative process on how to make things function fairly but also fun. For example, if we wanted to be totally tryhard, we would have no party system. I had people complain to me about that idea during the planning stages. Most people understood that it was a tradeoff worth having, though.

Oh how merciful of you to relent and grant us this basic feature that every game has of playing with your friends. Truly we are blessed for such a collaboration. Did you write any code or no? "if we wanted we could have made it utter shit" I guess that's your way of saying you listen to feedback ?

I bet I’ve written more code than you for FAF. Aren’t all you good for is hosting games for random new dudes? Why are you even here typing as though you even matter with your stupid contributive mentality lol, go away.

If that’s not enough, I’ve probably put more hours into this project than like 5 total devs in FAF history, if that. I don’t gotta wait for my FAF pity thread for my effort, just people like you to tell me I don’t do anything. Garbage.