Why would you have left FAF?

@khabume
Personally, those chokepoint maps like astro craters, gap of rohan, dual gap, and wonder were my favorite when I first started playing. I think they are fun maps for noobs to learn the basics. They are simpler to play, and forgiving of mistakes. I think they should include them in the 1v1 ladder pool for players less than 500 rating.

Honestly, dual gap very fun for chill games. Its gotten old for me, but for years It was my favorite map.

Supreme commander is such a complicated game, and simple maps like astro make it accessible for new players.

I remember, a while back when I first tried FAF. I was one of the noobs that played with my friends against AI and steered away from multiplayer because of the steep learning curve and my lack of experience made me not want to be a burden to my teammates. I did this for about 2 months. Once I went to give multiplayer a go, you can guess that I got absolutely steamrolled and because of other commitments I didn't have the time to find out why e.g watching replays, watching top player builds and eco calculating. So I continued to stay away from multiplayer and after a while, got bored and left.

I came back to FAF about 2 months ago after a year of not playing, however, I watched basically every video of BRNKs from the last 4 years (Skipped a few phantom videos, they don't help a lot) and then tried multiplayer, still got beaten 3 times before my first win and then got beaten more after that. I reached out on Aeolus and paid someone to teach me a basic multiplayer build and tech times etc. Now I actually win games, still lose a few but I know how to analyze myself.

As for your question, new players either don't have the time or want to put that much effort into learning the multiplayer mechanics by themselves. However, if I had a solution, create a Tab in the client for teaching/learning.

Players can sign up as teachers after 100 games (White ranked) with a rating over 600 and get paired with new players that want to learn the basics. Change the registration forms to include a preferred language option and when the new player logs into FAF create a notification asking them if they would like to be assigned a teacher which will then notify the teacher of the new player's request to learn. Moderation for teachers can be done by the new players based on reporting and rating their teacher.

Maybe add something like a "!review" ping list like the ladder list or seton's list, so any player can ask aeolus for a replay review and then the chatbot will tell people who sign up for that list. And then encourage new players to use that feature. Like someone in aeolus should say: "it's great that you're asking for a replay review, that's the best way to learn." Any then if they feel like it's beneficial, they should tell their friends to also ask for a replay review now and then. If asking for & receiving replay reviews happened every 15 minutes in Aeolus a lot of people would get a lot of training and it would create a culture of people just asking for help. We have a lot of untapped energy in terms of people ready to do replay reviews for players who want to get better, but we aren't being asked to do it. Then one of the automated messages in aeolus could be telling people to use the !review chat command. I'm genuinely curious how often someone goes to aeolus to say "I had a tough loss, what could I have done better in this match" and NO ONE responds to them. My perception, and it might be warped because when I see that I usually respond, is that there is a lot more supply than demand (more people willing to spend some time reviewing replays and giving feedback, than people seeking it out).

People get paid to teach? Could have made a small fortune, but instead I only got a bunch of "Thank you" 's on discord. B(

That tiny discord button seems to run into an unhandled exception

@nine2 I have talked to a group of ''low rated'' players between -200 and 600 rating. Their main issues were:
-Small map pool (create a map pool specifically suited for low-rated players?

• Not having a tutorial divided between easy / medium difficulty / hard difficulty
• lag
• No Instructional videos from the big casters (Jagged, Gyle etc)
• Make the FAF client more accessible to people, now it just looks and feels like something build by and for coders.
  Personally i think that it would be useful to use some sort of analytics tool in FAF to see why people leave, what they play etc.

I've had an idea, it might be bit leftfield but hear me out.

Firstly, I don't know if this is possible. Secondly, I'm not a coder so I wouldn't be able to help build it.

Caveats aside, what is the biggest stumbling block? It's the damned economy, especially power stalls and also mass overflow. Somebody mentioned that Starcraft warns you when you're low on resources or whatever, and perhaps we could adapt that and make it a soft training tool.

If there was an algorithm that looked at the buildings under construction (and their projected completion times) and could give the player a message that said "IN 35 SECONDS YOU WILL POWER STALL. BUILD POWER GENERATORS NOW" that would help to avoid the situation of being down at the bottom of a hole with no resources coming in. As I say, not a coder, but it does strike me as being pretty complex to figure all that stuff out so may not be viable.

Also you could have messages like "YOU WILL REACH MASS STORAGE LIMIT IN 20 SECONDS. BUILD FACTORIES OR ENGINEERS NOW" and "YOU ARE POWER STALLING. TURN OFF AIR FACTORIES AND RADAR AND BUILD POWER GENERATORS"

Now, I don't envision these being obligatory for all players. Perhaps new players would have them for a certain number of games, or they could be toggleable (default ON). Also, and very importantly, they would be obnoxious as fuck. Flashing text in the middle of the screen, klaxons etc. Without consciously realising it, the desire to get rid of these annoying intrusions would guide players towards more efficient play. Instead of hurting people's egos by having a person tell them where they're going wrong, we use psychology to steer them in the right direction. I don't want that damned annoying klaxon so I'm going to make enough power gens before I make my air factory. Ha! Beat you, you stupid system!

And then without realising it, they've learnt without realising they were learning. And everybody hates a school day.

@FtXCommando is there a case to make that a default mod then?

EDIT: it would need to be smart though. Instead of just triggering at say 20% energy it would need to predict if an energy stall was imminent, and that would need some clever maths.

@FtXCommando Thanks I'm going to give that a go and see if it's worth trying to convince people to make it standard.

While at it, can the end-game score screen also somehow show stall and overflow events?
Or total time spent stalling overflowing?

Now you have to go to replay to see if power stalls factored into your loss.

Hey there,

sorry i didnt read the whole thread, maybe my points where mentioned before.
I play sup com since 2007 with breaks. Starting agianst ai, later so lan with friends, sorian ai and with the pandemic i started loud.
so with the new pc in december i finally started playing faf. I think the learning curve is not the thing although its hard.

one thing is, and there cant be done much about i think, that there are always disconnects, desyncs and hard lags, so a 40 min match lasts in real time 1 h 30 min. often players write into the chat that they dont want to anymore and suicide bcs your monkeylord on dual gap needs 20 minutes to the other side.

Another thing is the team balance. Noobs like me want to play fast and some more experienced players exploit this. i often see, that some 500 - 700 players with summed up 1000 matches are together in one team against all grey noobs. the game balance shows 86% or somewhat because there is someone with 22 games and a 900 or so. When u mention this u get kicked. Its not very rewarding to play such an autoloose match against those seal clubbers because they are hard trying to get 800 rating.

sometimes there are hosts with like 800 rating and a few hundred matches and they hosting matches like: only noobs <500 <100 games, this is just stupid.

i admit i dont know what can be done about this, you need at least maybe 50 matches too recognize those problems and speak about it in the lobby.

but anyway, i played now 60 games and im here to stay=) the all grey kindergarden idea is nice its a like a safe space =D

thx too all for keeping this game running

lobbygames
I tell you i dont understand why i still have 1200 global rank as i didnt play a team game for at least 3 years. I cannot join a game without ruining it for someone else(which i wont).
proposed SOLUTION = rank decay, or hard rank reset on inactive accounts

ladder
think about how much time does a new player need to be properly prepared, to know all the races, maps and tech thats in ladder?
new player is thrown into a pool just after 5 games or so and then they get demolished.

• losing a game because its the first time you encountered a zthuee, or didnt know about 1k reclaim, or didnt have a proper BO for that map, or didnt know the map is fucked and the terrain behaves differently from what you expect from when zoomed out, or lose otherwise won game because of enemy guncom... i imagine it can demotivate

I know there already is a limit on maps in the ladder pool, based on players rank, but i think its not enough.
proposed SOLUTION = for the first 100-200 games, there should be different approach to matchmaking. Less races, less tech, small maps(carefully selected with intention to ) only.

Something like:
#gamesPlayed
1-5 only 1 5x10 map in the pool, only UEF ACU available
6-10 + 1 Map 5x5
11-15 + cybran enabled
16-30 + water map
31-60 + map 10x10 that is good for hover + Aeon enabled
.. you get the idea. slowly adding things to learn about the game, not overwhelming anybody. and smurfs would maybe get bored
for this league, there should be a page reflecting each of the steps (level-1,level-5,level-11) with description of newly unlocked things, and tips and tricks about them, BOs for unlocked maps, common tactics, tricky things about new tech...

and promotion in the client. the first tab opened should be one with matchmaking 1 button away from a game. new players should play ladder, thats the place where they can learn how to play.

It would be nice to have a "baby ladder" where one player is always UEF, the other player is always Cybran, and you don't get to choose your faction or anything else. Let's say there's only about 3-5 maps for the baby ladder and they don't change month to month, just the most absolute classic maps with no weird amounts of reclaim or navy/water other than maybe a pond to hide in.

All T2 and T3 tech (including HQs, T2 mex, ACU upgrades that correspond roughly to T2) is disabled. If the game lasts more than 20 minutes, call it a draw.

It would force players to make an effort to spam T1 and learn what is possible at the T1 stage. There would be less incentive to turtle. Later when they get into the real ladder they can do whatever they want. But the baby ladder would force a certain mindset of spam/expand/make t1 work for you.

Cybran has a disadvantage because ACU has less HP? UEF nano gun ACU beats Cybran gun+stealth ACU? don't care. At that level, faction advantage/disadvantage is going to be a lot less important than everything else. And fairness isn't really the goal, it's to push them to learn a certain style with less complexity. And cybran has jesters. Even if Cybran has a winrate of only 35%, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Players could feel extra good about winning with Cybran and it's not exactly a tragedy if a bad player manages to win a game because they have an extra 2k hp on their ACU. Bad players want to win sometimes too.

When a player starts crushing it too hard on baby ladder, or when they get a good enough rating on the real ladder, stop letting them queue for baby ladder.

EDIT: I made a mod, called "Stone Age." It's in the vault. It limits you to T1 tech, no mass storages, and it limits the ACU upgrades you can get. With the mod on, the only way you can really spend your mass is to spam factories and spam units from the factories. The idea is that you can learn all of the fundamentals of the game (economic balance, aggression, raiding, defense, scouting, radar, reclaim, etc.) without any of the complexity added by T2 tech, and without the temptation to spend your mass on T2 mass extractors. It forces you to spend the mass immediately on making more factories. So it is a tool to encourage people to learn how to spam and to learn game fundamentals. I am especially interested in hearing from new players if playing some games with this mod helps you to learn.

@FtXCommando said in Why would you have left FAF?:

@kokoryba said in Why would you have left FAF?:

ladder
think about how much time does a new player need to be properly prepared, to know all the races, maps and tech thats in ladder?

Zero.

0 time needed to get to know all the maps, races, tech...? doesnt sound right, sorry

@FtXCommando said in Why would you have left FAF?:

Why do you guys think that new people in ladder are facing 1600s?

why do you think "we guys" think that new people in ladder are facing 1600s?