Another dumb idea from Dorset

[Dorset]

I really love how that Aeon shield upgrade thread turned out. It started the same way many threads do such as the Novax or Billy Nuke conversations but it evolved into members of the community actually actioning it and the rest of us got to see as the problem was solved (well not officially)

It made me wonder if something similar can be achieved with other conversations. At one point in the Aeon Shield conversation the balance team chimed in (correct me if I am wrong) and gave the ok to move forward so long as someone who could stepped up and did the work on the animation and here we are the workflow seems to be coming to completion.

Concept-Design-Implementation.

The issue with the Novax and Billy Conversations is its much more complicated but the bones are the same.

So my dumb idea here is that we have FAF and FAF Develop. Both of those are not the place to play around with different ideas so I am wondering if a 3rd version could be made available that would fit in below FAF develop. FAF Concept or something like that, where anyone could make changes and test them live without having to get an idea to the point where it made sense for the devs to work on it.

The idea would be where those with the skills and desire could implement certain ideas and then the community could have a night or two to test these idea before it moved along the development path.

Take the Novax conversation for example. I agree with the people in that thread that my idea of Novax being able to target each other isnt a good idea...but I would still love to try it for a round or 2 because you never know how things turn out. The on paper idea doesn't always translate as we may think as is evident in the issue in the first place. On paper the Novax is not OP but in practicality it sure is because so many hate it. I agree with what was said in that thread Novax is a fun killer.

The big issue with a lot of these types of conversations is that there are so many ideas of what should and shouldn't happen that the threads just stall due to fatigue so nothing gets solved. (pretty sure the Aeon shield thread is really old and stalled until recently)

So FAF Concept would be available to all to rework and where changes could "quickly" be implemented and then tested.

Now I am a construction manager not a coder (whom I have the utmost respect for) so I wouldn't even try to take the FAF Concept app and make my Novax kill each other but there are many capable and responsible people that would be able and willing to try their idea or some of the more popular ideas and a community game night where we were testing Novax killing each other or SMDs targeting Novax or any other of the ideas would be pretty popular I think and all of that info could be shared in the forum thread where it got to the point that the balance/development team would decide to action it.

I don't know how all of this works or if its even possible code wise but I just think there needs to be a more open testing platform and a way to tap into the skills and willingness to help that many have around here but aren't able to because they cant be a part of the official process for one reason or another.

[maudlin27]

Wouldn't it be simpler to just do a mod as proof of concept?

[Deribus]

@maudlin27 said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

Wouldn't it be simpler to just do a mod as proof of concept?

That's what I've done with my past balance suggestions. Like the chrono rework I made as a proof-of-concept mod first

[Dorset]

Yeah I admit I don't know anything about how this is all implemented. I have no idea how the image ends up on my screen when I'm looking at my phone but I'm happy it does lol.

I guess the baseline idea here is just to have a standard one stop shop for these types of things rather than having everyone kind of doing their own version of it.

Maybe part of this is a standardized forum thread template so that the workflow follows some resemblance of a proper path. The initial forum posts are always beneficial even if they're scattered and it seems like we're all b****ing at each other trying to prove our own points because that's how you get all the good ideas to come out but at some point there needs to be some structure.

[BlackYps]

I agree with the others. Making a mod achieves what you want. The fact that we don't see many suggestions implemented for testing is not because there is no possibility to test things, but because nobody actually wants to implement it.

[Saver]

Hello everyone and hello to you too Dorset (@Dorset, I myself am, in real life, also a project and construction manager in the road construction / energy sector) I also think your idea is good and worthwhile. However, I can also agree with Blackyps that many aspects of the game are usually better off in a mod than in the normal game. Because there everyone can design their game according to their preferences. Again, the game has progressed over the years just through such ideas and improvements as it is now. I still feel quite new to this forum, but appreciate the will of many to develop this forum and the game. I can therefore only offer to support them with my limited knowledge if there are any requests (even if the answer sometimes takes a while )

[Dorset]

@Saver said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

Hello everyone and hello to you too Dorset (@Dorset, I myself am, in real life, also a project and construction manager in the road construction / energy sector) I also think your idea is good and worthwhile. However, I can also agree with Blackyps that many aspects of the game are usually better off in a mod than in the normal game. Because there everyone can design their game according to their preferences. Again, the game has progressed over the years just through such ideas and improvements as it is now. I still feel quite new to this forum, but appreciate the will of many to develop this forum and the game. I can therefore only offer to support them with my limited knowledge if there are any requests (even if the answer sometimes takes a while )

Nice to meet you Saver and without getting too off topic (geez I feel like I've said that a lot today lol) I am in the mining/extraction sector but began my career in energy/oil and gas.

I can solve all kinds of complex problems everyday on these large capital projects but I haven't a clue where to start when it comes to anything to do with coding/computing aside from me building my own gaming rigs

It seems like the mod path is definitely the way to go based on the people smart enough to know this type of stuff so I guess it just comes down to how that is implemented. The first step would be developing such a mod and issuing it as the standard platform for any who would like to tweak things with the game. Then during these community gaming nights where such tests were put through their paces everyone would just download that mod and go from there?

Again I'm not the one to be deciding on the best way forward here I'm just the idea man on this one. I would love to see such a mod and I would even download it myself thinking that I would know how to change things enough to get my damn novax to shoot at each other (cuz I have such a hard on for that lol)

Or is it a case of each individual change would need its own mod. So someone would have to write a mod to allow novax to target each other and a different mod would have to be written for smds to shoot them down and so on or are we talking a mod that is essentially just a different version of the game that could have all of its factors manipulated to allow for the testing of different things?

I would love that if there was one mod that allowed the Layman such as myself to be able to just tweak things without a whole lot of knowledge of how to write mods but I'm shooting in the dark here.

I would hope we could get to the point where we narrow in on some of these changes and are able to hand over the work to the actual development team. Similar to the t2 Aeon Shield thread I would imagine the development team would just speak up when the time was right in whatever forum post was tracking such testing and changes and then it would potentially make its way into FAF Development soon after that.

This is something that might take some time to actually establish but once we're able to get kind of a standardized format I think we could test and action a lot of really good ideas from the community in a short amount of time comparing them to each other in real world gameplay scenarios and I know for myself I would be on every different gaming night or such tests for being undertaken.

If I saw lobby that was specifically to test smds shooting down novax (or any other idea ) and the whole goal of that night was just to play as many games as possible kind of organically and see what the impact was then I would be there.

I think a lot of people would end up being surprised that their great ideas were crap and others would be surprised that their crap ideas were great.

I would imagine the next day the forum post would be ripe with experiences of different players in the game and how they saw such changes in real time.

It's always easy for me to say because I'm not the one doing any of the work I'm just the one throwing out ideas hoping I get to do the even easier part of testing them in game.

[Jip]

@Dorset said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

I would hope we could get to the point where we narrow in on some of these changes and are able to hand over the work to the actual development team. Similar to the t2 Aeon Shield thread I would imagine the development team would just speak up when the time was right in whatever forum post was tracking such testing and changes and then it would potentially make its way into FAF Development soon after that.

I don't think your idea is dumb. But, this is sadly not how it works in practice. Not only are mods unrated, which makes a ten fold less popular. There's a more deeper problem in my opinion. And apologies for the long post.

Historically, there was one game team. But at some point the game team was split into a balance team and a game team. Based on my experience as game team lead between 2021-2024 there's some significant friction the moment something touches the balance area. This not to jab at the balance team - it's just a fact. Some (previous) balance team members even stated this publicly in the past. And this split into two teams is a mistake in my opinion. I don't want to write up a post to ask for approval. I want to constructively discuss it, toy around with it and see it (not) work based on observations made possible by a proof of concept.

Pulsar example

As an example, there were talks in various places about giving the Cybran a unit similar to the Absolver. Because of a lack of ability to implement it by the balance team, it did not quite get beyond just talking. As a game team lead, I thought this was a great idea. The first prototype was the made in January 2024. I paid @Balthazar to make the initial prototype according to the specs of the Absolver. See also #5869. The Pulsar was born. Now, the Pulsar is by no means perfect. But it was a great start and it allowed us to test, tweak and tune it. However, now more then a year later the unit still did not see the day of light. And at the moment the balance team is talking about how the unit will never see the day of light. It was never given a chance to flourish.

Some may respond: you should (or still can) just turn it into a mod! But that's not the point. The point is that in order to implement some ideas it can take many hours or even days of work. Take the Pulsar, there's a time lapse. And that does not include the work by @Nomander and myself to tweak it after the initial delivery by @Balthazar .

Painting feature example

Another example, take the painting feature (#6725 by @Ctrl-K , alternative approach #6726 by me) took many hours to make from several contributors. Whether that is tinkering on binary patches (#111 and #112 by @Ctrl-K and reviewed by @Hdt80bro ), tinkering on the Lua implementation and/or reviewing and discussing the features. The same applies to making a unit (modelling, animations, setup the blueprints and weapons, scripting when necessary, iterations on all of the previous). It applies to almost any relatively significant change.

Why is the painting feature more interesting and engaging to work on for me? Simply because there's less bureaucracy. There's less talking to talk. It's more about the feature, it's more about figuring out how to make it tick. How to make it fun and engaging. How to make it work for other contributing teams. How can we make it so that moderators have an easy time moderating them? And how can we make it expressive enough for casters and trainers to use it with ease? And at the same time, how can we make it so that players can paint conveniently yet at the same time have the ability to mute users that take it a bit too far. So far, the discussions surrounding the painting feature has been super constructive and progressive. The fact that there are two competing implementations is/was also interesting and beneficial to the end product, regardless of which one is chosen in the end.

Mods

About the idea of turning things into mods. Yes, turning things into a mod initially is a great idea. But it's also a bit of an escape. As an example, Equilibrium was a (large) mod about various balance ideas. See also its changelog. A lot of these changes were made to improve the experience of the game. The changelog is also written from that perspective. I wasn't around back then, but apparently this entire mod was created out of necessity because the bureaucracy at the time would just prevent it from even being taken serious. Now, years later, a lot of the features that are described there have become part of the standard game mode. Yet, nobody who worked on Equilibrium is even around anymore. With maybe the exception of @speed2 .

Mods are a great tool to toy around with features and create a proof of concept. But then an similar amount of time investment should be expected from those that make the final decision about whether the proof of concept works and should be implemented into the standard FAForever experience. That's not the case at the moment, it's totally out of sync.

Which also brings me to this point:

@BlackYps said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

I agree with the others. Making a mod achieves what you want. The fact that we don't see many suggestions implemented for testing is not because there is no possibility to test things, but because nobody actually wants to implement it.

In my experience this is not true. There are numerous people willing to implement things. @Saver is a great example. So was @MadMax before that. And there's numerous other people that I can't possibly all list. Also look at the massive mod packs being made by various people, still now after more than a decade. As an example, take @CDRMV. Or just in general the amount of mod and map work being done by reviewing the vault.

I think it's just that the quality of the evaluation is not in sync with the quantity spent on something. It just sucks to get a 'no' without concrete feedback or a direction to improve and/or get accepted. And if you're lucky then the people in question even took the mod/changes for a spin, instead of the disapproval being based on hypotheticals. Meanwhile, you spent 20+ hours on it. That's just extremely discouraging.

User experience, bureaucracy and spread sheets

While we're throwing in what we do in real life - I've studied and taught game design as a student at the university. Game design is about creating an engaging experience for a specific audience. This contrasts with the average discussions here on FAF that's about spread sheets, statistics and hypothetical scenario's about extensive micro that only about 50 players can actually do in practice. Which brings me back to my first paragraph about the game team and balance team being two separate teams. The current approach and direction of the two teams is, in my point of view, fundamentally different.

As an example of the bureaucracy and the view being fundamentally different: mobile factories that actually work were already thought of and implemented in Equilibrium. It took years for the same feature to reach the standard game mode with #5227. See also all the other related work. Now all mobile factories have this feature... except for one. The Megalith still has the old build mode. You know why? Because the balance team thought it was unique. It already works different then the other mobile factories did before. And yes, it may be unique. But it's about the experience of the end user. Make it work exactly the same way as all other mobile factories for the end user. Wouldn't it be a ten fold better (user) experience if the Megalith would just poop out the eggs like the game team wanted to do? And - of course - it would still have its own smell... flavor and therefore still be unique !

Eventually this was done by mods. And they even made the pooping animation, which ironically is already implemented to some degree by @Saver and @Evildrew . You can find it in the vault by searching by author.

tldr: in my point of view the gap between the game team and the balance team make it impossible for these things to happen in a streamlined fashion. I already tried in the past and I still think that the teams should be combined. Just like it was in the original development team of the game. And that all members do not necessarily need to be good at the game, but instead have a good understanding of game design and the capabilities of the engine. To make the game more fun then the original, instead of just more balanced for the top 50 players. To be less about eSports, and more about a engaging experience for the average player.

While writing all of this, it reminds me of The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why. and Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros. And also why I am so excited about games like Tempest Rising. To me, that game is more about the average player and the experience of it then it is about eSports. Just like the original Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance .

And unrelated: I can highly recommend the earlier referenced interview with Chris Taylor by the University College Dublin as a whole. It does tend to jump around a little, but it's (almost) all interesting to hear to me.

And for those who read this and are wondering about the painting feature: we're actively looking for feedback on Discord. If you want a live demo of both implementations, just ask!

edit: writing a text is hard

[Dorset]

@Jip Thanks for your extensive input and shedding light on the reality of things. I suppose it would be more or less a complete culture change so to speak that would be required in order to move forward with this type of thing in a meaningful way.

I don't think that changes should ultimately come in the form of a mod as I personally try to run as few mods as possible but having said changes be tested within a mod that eventually got implemented in the main game similar many mods so far.

I guess the hope would be that if someone knows how to mod and decides they want to undertake it then whenever they were at the point where they wanted to live test it over the course of several games they would just have to organize a testing night and hope that as many people who comment on such threads as the novax threads come out to support the playtesting.

As I stated before I have noticed that so many ideas seem to stall within FAF and so maybe its time we have a look at the overall structure of how things are governed? If the balance team is so hard to deal with than why are they in their place?

I know I have chimed in on other threads about how the balance team needs to be governed by pros but maybe we should rethink that whole thing. What I meant at the time is that the competitive pros who I only ever see play in tournaments or in the 2k+ custom games should be the people making balance decisions but I admit maybe I was wrong with that.

Unlike Gyle I do not consider 1.5k+ to be pro level. In my mind it starts at 1.8k-1.9k. That said there are a lot of pro level players who don't play competitively and typically play in 1.2k+ lobbies so I don't consider them pros despite their rank. Maybe its these types of players who need to be given opportunities because they have the prolevel thinking and understanding but its coupled with practicality. Maybe the balance committee needs a variety of players from the 1.2k+ level

I typically have 100+ people under me in my day job and although the managers ultimately make the decisions on the path forward I find that getting the input from all staff is what gives the best end result especially when they have opportunities to be included in managers meetings and provide their insight.

Its always hard to change culture within any organization but its required in order for longevity to thrive.

I am not trying to be the one who comes up with a solution here but I am trying to rock the boat until we have a solution (or I get myself banned) I have already proven twice that I suck at being a smurf so the thought of me getting banned makes me cringe but holy hell it seems like there is some force within FAF that is hindering creativity and evolution so what do we do about it?

Is it the general consensus that the FAF is what it should be? At the end of the day if FAF the game stays as is without another single balance/unit change than really everyone would accept that and we would play on.

But FAF as the organization exists in public for all to be a part of so what's the point of having a balance suggestion section in the forum if its essentially a useless waste of every ones time?

I am sure this info is available elsewhere but are the development team, balance team and governing body all the same people? Is that the only three groups of impact here or am I missing any and if so are they the same people as these three groups?

Is there a lesser tier group that is below the balance team that acts in a similar fashion but say reports to the balance team?

What else am I missing here? Maybe I should just shut up from now on and play and be happy that we have FAF game at all....but I have a really hard time keeping my mouth shut as I am sure everyone has noticed about me by now.

[JaggedAppliance]

To the original point, there is a branch called FAF Beta which could be used for any kind of changes without the need to make a mod. You will need to use git however.

@Jip
On the point of EQ, it was a total overhaul balance mod. Every single unit was touched in some way, and many mechanics as well. The only way it could exist was as a mod. It even became a rated mod at some point. I had exotic_retard on the balance team and wanted him to implement things like the mobile factories. It is in no way the balance teams fault that mobile factories only made it into the game many years after they were in EQ. We never stopped anyone from implementing this feature, I even tried to get it made. Maybe you could blame us for not having the technical skills to do it. Should we have just let Ithilis balance the whole game himself? That's what having no bureaucracy would mean I guess. In the beginning it was a dictatorship with no bureaucracy, and we got engy mod and T3 MAA which moved FAF away from FA in a big way.

It's silly to characterise the balance team as some group dedicated to balancing only for the top 50 players and the benevolent game team is out here trying to make the game fun for all. You have no greater mandate from the players than the balance team does. Everyone who works on the game wants their stuff to get in. Someone has to be able to say no, especially to game content. Someone should have said no to the reclaim pausing feature for example, a broken feature implemented with an engine patch. Someone had to say no to snipemode.

Your development of a low stakes feature like a painting tool will of course be much smoother than introducing a whole new unit. If you think these things should work the same, we would already have many new units. We may even have Nomads implemented. Also just a note, the game is designed already. There is no role of game designer available. I was in charge of balance for a few years, I'm not a game designer and that wasn't the role.

I do think the balance team is somewhat dysfunctional, I think there are way too many talkers(who don't know enough) and not enough doers. I think there can be a no first approach rather than considering things and trying something. It's definitely frustrating to deal with as the game guy but I think it has to exist to provide oversight on what gets into the game.

I think there's a fundamental issue around what FAF is as a project. On one hand it is an open source development project that people want to work on and learn on but it's also a multiplayer lobby where substantial numbers of people have been playing for 10+ years. It's a unique situation.

[BlackYps]

@Dorset said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

As I stated before I have noticed that so many ideas seem to stall within FAF and so maybe its time we have a look at the overall structure of how things are governed?

From my experience, most things stall because people have ideas, but there is nobody to implement the idea. Then there is also the case that someone has an idea and implements it, but it gets rejected by others that think it is a bad idea. It's hard to tell if things went well or not in this case, because if it really is a bad idea the community should indeed reject it. Of course most of the time the original guy will still think his idea was good and be frustrated that other people keep him from making the game better. It could also be the other way around, but there is not really a way of objectively evaluating this. We can't automatically conclude that there is a bureaucracy problem from these cases.
The game is already very good right now, so every change has the real risk of making the game overall worse. As Jagged Appliance said, someone has to say no sometimes.

A general problem with listening to community balance ideas more is that, from experience, most balance ideas are pretty bad. And there is a lot of them. Answering them all in detail will take an enormous amount of time from people that are experienced enough to accurately explain how viable each idea is. When you want to create a system with more community engagement you have to find some way of filtering that allows the people that know what they are doing to engage with the good ideas without being bogged down by endless overhead. Recently there was talk in the balance team about wanting to engage with the community more. But how this can work out in the long term is still an open question. I am not trying to discourage you Dorset, I am just trying to inform you what the hurdles are that need to be overcome. If you have good ideas how this could be achieved, then I think there are good chances you can find some open ears for them.

@JaggedAppliance what do you mean with the reclaim pausing feature you mentioned?

[Brutus5000]

@BlackYps said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

From my experience, most things stall because people have ideas, but there is nobody to implement the idea.

I don't think this is correct though. My feeling is there are lot of people who could implement any idea, but why on earth would they spent time on the ideas of other people instead of implementing their own ideas. Implementing own ideas is the reason why most people learned coding or modding on the first place. So they are not to blame for it.

[maudlin27]

Personally my modding related contributions are down to the following factors:

• Wanting to implement ideas I like
• How difficult I think it would be to implement based on my skillset
• Admin and time related delays likely to see the changes incorporated
• Risk of changes being rejected
• Whether the changes will see any use

Partly why 99% of my modding has focused on AI mods - I get to implement my own ideas; they're achievable with my skillset; I can make updates live as soon as the changes are ready instead of waiting for the next quarterly FAF release; the only risk of time being wasted is if I decide my idea makes things worse overall, and enough people are willing to search for AI mods/play games with AI mods that I wouldn't be the only user (unfortunately it's much harder for other sim mods to gain much traction though).

The fourth point I think is of most relevance for balance related issues - if I think there's any significant risk of work being rejected I'm unlikely to consider because it's not worth spending potentially 10s of hours on a change only to find after spending all that time that it was wasted because someone vetoes it. I expect it's the same for others contributors, meaning you'd need someone very motivated about a particular idea (or the idea being very simple to implement) to likely want to take the risk that time spent prototyping/doing proof of concept may be on something not ultimately used.

Off the top of my head the only workaround I can think of to address this for this is some sort of system where certain features or changes are 'approved in concept/principle' by the balance team as being something they will accept if someone can figure out a way of implementing (and then people could always browse such a list if they were interested in contributing with confidence that if they can get something that works, it's highly unlikely to be wasted effort) - e.g. having an additional tag to the balance tax on github for issues and PRs to indicate this.

The problem this causes though is that there will be some ideas or features that sound good on paper, get approved, and then when it comes to playing in-game with the changes it's realised that actually it would be a mistake to implement. To some extent this is inevitable, but the key would be keeping such instances to a minimum.

There's also no guarantee that such a system would increase contributions (it feels like it should since it'd help mitigate a potentially significant barrier to people wanting to contribute, but each person will have their own motiviations for why they want to volunteer/contribute).

[Jip]

@Brutus5000 said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

I don't think this is correct though. My feeling is there are lot of people who could implement any idea, but why on earth would they spent time on the ideas of other people instead of implementing their own ideas. Implementing own ideas is the reason why most people learned coding or modding on the first place. So they are not to blame for it.

Based on my own experience you can motivate contributors to work on ideas that were not (originally) their own. I don't think this applies to all area's of development - but it definitely worked out for me while I was game team lead.

The (Lua of the) game is a relatively limited project with limited complexity. You get to see people play with your changes. It can be very rewarding, regardless of where the idea originates from.

@JaggedAppliance
I don't feel I implied that having no bureaucracy is a great idea. Or that a dictatorship is a great idea. I also disagree that everyone who works on the game wants their stuff to get in. . As an example, take my history of things that did not work out:

• https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aunmerged+author%3AGaranas

And that excludes the list of branches that are on my local machine. It's totally fine if things don't work out. What is not fine is that if you spent 20+ hours on something, but then are unable to have a normal, constructive discussion about it to try and see what it would take to make it work. That leaves a disgruntled feeling. This is what I tried to communicate. And that is the current status quo in my opinion the moment something touches balance.

I also disagree with your idea that the game is 'designed already'. I fundamentally disagree with that. In my opinion, all of the following is related to game design:

• Adjusting balance. After all, an unfair balance would not be as engaging.
• Adjusting path finding. We removed various annoyances to make path finding more predictable: 58f61afe and #4266
• Introducing new actions/commands. We introduced commands such as capping/ringing, spread attack that evolved intodistribute orders. Or the area commands, that we eventually not introduced because of game design issues.
• Introduction of new interactions/abilities, such as the Charge ability on the Loyalist and applying the (fixed) redirect ability to various Cybran naval units.

Even something as basic as the UI is related to game design, as the old UI was perceived as a window originally which would make the game less engaging. There are many more examples - almost all changes impact the feeling of the game. But what I find most interesting about your response is that back in your time your role was not to design the game. Maybe that was true back then. But if you take what I said here:

To make the game more fun then the original, instead of just more balanced for the top 50 players. To be less about eSports, and more about a engaging experience for the average player.

Make it a little less opinionated:

To make the game more fun, fair and engaging

Then you roughly end up with what's written in the team statutes of the balance team:

The main goal of the Balance team is the continuous balancing of FAF's gameplay to make it more fun, fair, and engaging.

Where balancing on its own is related to game design. As a few quick examples:

• Counter Play - Making Multiplayer Fun for the Opponent
• Perfect Imbalance - Why Unbalanced Design Creates Balanced Play

An interesting concrete example to me is the introduction of Nano Repair on the Cybran ACU. It traded some faction diversity (read: imbalance) for more balance. Was it good? No idea. Did it impact how people perceive the game? Yes! It created enough emotion for people to complain about it on the forums!

To circle back to the statutes, to make something fun and engaging are for sure a game design related task. That's what game design is all about. It's we all started playing this game in the first place. And it's why I think the balance team and game team should be combined. This separation makes things unnecessarily complicated in my opinion.

I do agree with you that it's not clear what the purpose and/or grand goal of FAForever is beyond just surviving forever. The statutes of the association state that it's purpose is the continued development of the game. But just as Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book about information networks that there's a many ways to interpret the written word of the Bible with many more consequences. So are there many ways to interpret the meaning of 'continued development' of the game !

[JaggedAppliance]

@Jip
It's not about implication, you said there should not be a balance team, there should only be a game team. I was just explaining some history.

I don't know what to say but it's completely obvious that when you work on things then you want to see them in the game. Why you would disagree here is beyond me. Linking a list of things which you made that didn't get into the game is irrelevant. I had plenty of things which did not make it too.

The pulsar thing is obviously the main point of contention for you personally here and I actually totally agree with you. It is the balance team's fault and that should not have happened. If I had been in charge I would never give it the go ahead.

Ok so the game is obviously designed already, It was released in 2007. Doing things "related to game design" is not the same thing as designing the game. Maybe this is an ESL thing, I don't know. Literally anything you do to the game could be said to be related to game design. Guess what, you're still not a game designer. Also please stop linking Extra Credits videos to me, I watched them all 10+ years ago until I realised they are a lot less knowledgeable than they let on. Just look at what the writer of the show has been involved in.

I'm not sure what the point was about the cybran nano. Just that that was game design happening? This is getting silly now but yes it's related to game design, but again it doesn't make anyone a game designer if they were involved. Also I think it was a bad change and damaged the identity of cybran.

Statutes are whatever. Let's be honest, it was probably written in thirty seconds. It reads like that anyway.

I'll tell you what I wanted to do when I was in charge. The first thing was to get other people involved so it wasn't just me deciding things. Before that it was Zock making all the balance decisions and to be fair he had a much deeper grasp on the game than I did. Then a lot of it was just improving shit units that nobody used like janus, mongoose, LABs, titans, blaze, obsidian, czar, satellite, restos, UEF destro(lmao), aeon frig, t3 maa, tempest, mmls and others. Very simple stuff, just make it not shit so it's an option. Some of these were very weak by the way, like you could be banned for throwing in this day and age if you actually built them.

One of my main missions was to keep an eye on what the game team was doing. I'm going to trigger people here but I wanted to protect the game from modders. Modders are often kinda crazy but very hard working and passionate. I wanted to try to find the line where we are still "developing" the game but we are also more or less preserving it. To me that means almost certainly no new units. It means watching for the next OP hotkey that's about to be added which will bust the game.

Sidebar on hotkeys or new commands, they're always presented as quality of life features for the slow playing masses but they are inevitably either useless or op and abused by the top players. Average players are not gonna add a new hotkey, they might not even use hotkeys.

So a big part of it was watching for stuff that was gonna skate through in the game patch and I did not catch everything that I probably should have.

When I talked about engy mod and t3 maa in the first post, what I really meant was this is what you can get when a modder is running the show. Zep put the changes in the game although he didn't make all of them. There would be no FAF without him so I have huge respect for him but he was also kinda crazy and he dealt with balance complaints by introducing new units, a new factory system and reworking every buildpower value in the entire game. And by banning by all accounts. It's absolutely a mod project from that point and it definitely meant losing a lot more players in the transition from GPG to FAF. It's impossible to know what the total effects are but I would've loved to see the game play out more without engy mod and t3 maa, Certainly the latter of those was not needed in any sense.

That's enough forum waffle.