Why Forged Alliance Forever Isn't Currently an Esport
As you may have already read, there are several reasons why Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and Forged Alliance Forever (FAF) do not currently participate in what was once commonly called "cybersport" and is now generally known as esports.
This isn't necessarily because the game is unsuitable for competitive play. FAF has a long history of tournaments, competitive players, casting, and organized events. However, there are several technical and logistical challenges that make operating at the level expected of a formal esport extremely difficult.
Connections and Game Stability
One of the largest obstacles is connectivity.
As many FAF players are already aware, we continue to experience connection problems, disconnects, and desynchronization issues. These problems become particularly significant when attempting to organize events with high stakes.
For the tournaments we currently run, organizers, players, and casters do their best to work around these issues. However, that becomes much harder when prize money, sponsors, competitive rankings, or professional-level events are involved.
In a true esports environment, the outcome of a match should be determined as much as possible by player skill and decision-making, not by which player experiences a connection problem or technical failure.
If we wanted to formalize FAF competition to that level while eliminating many of these variables, one potential solution would be hosting matches in a controlled environment, such as a LAN event. However, doing that introduces another major challenge: our player base.
The Player Base Is Internationally Distributed
FAF has a unique player base. Rather than having large, established competitive populations concentrated within individual regions, our community is essentially a mesh of players from many different countries who collectively keep the game alive.
That international community is one of FAF's greatest strengths, but it also creates difficulties when attempting to organize traditional esports events.
Our strongest players may be located thousands of miles apart. A tournament could involve players from North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and other regions all competing in the same bracket.
For normal online tournaments, this is manageable.
More importantly, FAF currently does not have a sufficiently large competitive player base concentrated within every major region to easily support separate professional regional leagues.
In other words, FAF's competitive scene works because the world effectively functions as one community.
That model has allowed the game to remain competitive for many years, but it also makes transitioning from community-organized competition into a traditional esports structure considerably more difficult.
