Why would you have left FAF?
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@FtXCommando it is less toxic than any other gaming community today.
It is substantially more toxic than it was in 2012. What changed?
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2012 players are built different
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@Wainan is it actually substantially more toxic now or are we just being nostalgic for the past? If it's more toxic I'd say it's because we're bigger now if I'm not mistaken, but even then I'd hardly consider the community as a whole toxic especially relative to other gaming communities. Sure there are outliers and people who are toxic or rage easily, but imo it's the exception and not the norm.
The most toxic thing I see in FAF usually is people spouting their ignorant political bullshit which I can see having gotten significantly worse since 2012 but that's also par the course for any online community.
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@Exselsior I don't recall people getting angry about losing in the same way they do today.
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Then what's different? Maybe you are just older and not able to take as much after coming back home after work? So you tend to take words harder than you used to?
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@RandomWheelchair You've made an awful lot of assumptions to back up what you want to believe.
There's absolutely no reason for players of this game to be obnoxious to each other, and back in the more innocent days before social media weaponised trolling and used it to effect worldwide political upheaval, FA players were nice to each other, and were interested in helping each other get better, and did want to share the experience of this most marvellous of games together.
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Don't get what you mean. When I played gap in 2014 I probably had every 2nd game end in salt and every 5th one end in stuff closer to death threats. Granted it takes two to tumble and it wasn't like I was fully innocent of causing the atmosphere back then.
People forget how pervasive smurf accusations were prior to steamlink. There was a time where like 5 of the top 25 on the leaderboard were just various smurfs of other people. No action was taken against them anyway since you would only get banned for it when you intentionally played like shit AND the account was linked back to you.
In fact one of the largest things about "why do new people leave FAF" back during those days were those precise smurf accusations by people that were stuck at a plateau at 600 and couldn't fathom someone watching a few sup com vids and being able to outperform them.
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What indication do you have that RandomWheelchair is wrong and your memory is right? There is strong scientific evidence that our memory of things is more positive than it actually was.
And yes, there are reasons. People can shield themselves from the realisation that they made a mistake and the following feeling of inadeqacy by focusing all their attention on their teammates' mistakes and raging at them to vent their emotions.
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And the reason I didn't come back for so long was because I didn't want to get banned for making a second account!
@blackyps RandomWheelchair is in no position to say what I do when I come home from work or what state of mind I might be in.
I have a very good memory for people being obnoxious.
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I left to play Planetary Annihilation, around the time engie mod was introduced. That predates the examples you're giving
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So you've debunked me because my thread is from 2015 and not 2013? The user growth was marginal between 2013 and 2015; it went from like 5k monthly users to 7.5k monthly users.
People were toxic in the past my man, your nirvana FAF never existed except maybe back in 2012 when FAF was a dozen dudes with a specific closed beta invite from ZeP.
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You remember obnoxious people for a decade? I would be glad if I forgot them quick. Anyway this discussion is leading nowhere.
You: The communitiy was less toxic earlier.
Someone else: No
You: Yes...
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If I accept that there have always been arseholes, would you accept that we've always been better off without them?
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No because many would consider me an asshole and I would imagine I've done a good bit for FAF. Many might even go and consider Downlord, the central developer for our current client, an asshole.
I'd rather have a team of assholes that care enough to hate something than some apathetic dudes that may or may not be motivated to change something.
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I think watching people fight, be toxic, and get mad is very entertaining. I probably wouldn't spend nearly as much time on FAF if I couldn't watch and participate in it. I do not think it matters if people quit because of it since there is an endless supply of new players anyway. It makes no difference to me if there are 10,000 gap noobs getting mad at each other or just 5,000. I only care about the players who are able to stick out the toxicity or improve anyway.
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@FtXCommando You've got an attitude, but you also make constructive points. You aren't somebody who rages and lets his ego take over. You're mature enough to recognise what is important for the greater good and I have a lot of respect for you because of that.
@ThomasHiatt is there an endless supply of them though? What sort of people come to play FAF? I reckon that somebody who was 12 when FA came out is probably the youngest person who would be interested in FAF and they would be 25 now.
I got into RTS games with Dune 2 and followed the evolution of the genre with the kind of excitement that only a teenager can have. Every new game had innovations and made big steps forward and then Total Annihilation came out and it was just so much better than everything else. And for reasons I can't explain Starcraft became the popular subgenre of RTS and TA got kind of forgotten.
yadda yadda yadda we are now 13 years after the launch of SupCom and RTS is a dead genre. We aren't going to attract any kids. Do we want to make the finite amount of interested people decide that this is too much effort?
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Plenty of the people active around my rating level are 16-22 years old. I don't understand why people think the FAF player base is only old people. There aren't many options for people who want to play a good RTS game so they have to come here.
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Nah don’t think FAF is that terminally old playerbase wise. First off, I’m 22 so I’m already under that expectation. But we also had TURBO and pepsi in the semis of LotS last year and both are either 19 or 20 from what I recall.
Anecdotally I’d say the players around the 1800+ part of FAF probably have a median age of 23. They’re all mostly around 20-25 from the people I’ve talked to.
No idea how to gauge age at wider rating brackets, I just know I’ve seen everything from 12 year olds to 70 year olds playing the game.
Worth noting that this doesn’t mean I’m agreeing with any of the conclusions Thomas arrives at.
Even developer wise I think we are quite young (mostly the same 20-25 age bracket) with a few developers in their later 20s that have been here for a while and act as veterans.
