Why would you have left FAF?

Game is perfectly fine for me, I've got no reason to stop playing it. I'm actually surprised how balanced it is, and how much QoL stuff there is in the client.

The reason however I'm playing a lot less than I would want to/don't bother starting up the client is simple: if you're not interested in playing Astro/gap/thermo/setons 95% of your games you can't play at my low level of rating. You can make your own server with another map, but it won't fill up unless you have an hour of spare time. With the game time of a match already being so unpredictable, making it difficult to fit in between making dinner and going to work, you either have to play a quick astro/etc/... or not play. Would play much more if more maps would be played.

Perhaps tie in player rating gain/loss to how much he played a map? Winning a match on a map that you've overplayed gives a penalty on rating gain, losing it makes you lose extra rating. Winning a map you've almost never played makes you gain extra rating while losing it gets punished less?

@CWSilk would you try Ladder or TMM? did you try hosting some mapgen?

@tatsu
I have played ladder and will do again, though the really big maps scare me away a bit. I do plan on playing more TMM, even got a friend into faf to play together with, but finding a time where both of us can be online simultaneously has proven difficult.

I have joined mapgen matches, have not yet tried hosting one. Is it your experience that it gets players more easily than specific maps?

I think the reason is pretty simple. This game is just not for everyone. Most players who stick around have played this before, some at release myself included. For new players it has a very steep learning curve, it's nothing like other RTS out there, which is a good thing. SC is a very good RTS probably one the best, but it's not new player friendly. So i dont think there is anything to worry about. People who like it will stay around.

As a relatively new player i would agree with CWSilk. Players who don't meet "1100+ no gray" requirements usually have no real options to play big teams except Astrogaps and other boring stuff. I totally avoid 1v1 in most games (not only supcom), i try to avoid 2v2 except the ones with premade team and voice chat, so i play big teams only and it gets hard to find/host a map which is not Astro crap. Tried to join some autohost mapgen lobbies, but these games fill really slow and usually unbalanced because of 0- and 1500+ in same lobby.

So what i would really love to see is big teams TMM (at least 4v4). With different maps and without dumb hosts who make "no gray" restrictions or just building their own dream teams to win. And maybe also remove gray colors and game number from lobby screen since it does nothing but aggression to new players and we have a whole generation of white ranked players with huge game number who have more unpredictable real skill than grays of same rank.

@CWSilk I don't know actually. time will tell. it's basically becoming popular as we speak so maybe. the interesting thing is that you can't have a refined Build Order for a map gen map in which case this kinda evens the playing field for newer players.

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

@SpatialDude Try the map 'Rainmakers' - turn down the difficulty to easy (in the options menu). It is quite similar to what you'd expect on a low-medium level ranked game:

• You have to expand and get those mass extractors
• You have to defend said mass extractors but can't do it with PD as the space you'd need to defend is just too big - you need units
• You need to defend from small raids (single units) to full-fletched platoons (16 - 40 units)
• There are various small objectives to help you out - they can make life easier once you succeed but are hard to get right for players that are starting out
• You have to reclaim or you won't have the resource curve that you need to survive for longer periods of time

Depending on the difficulty the game lasts between 25 - 35 minutes, assuming that you survive . Once the easy version is do-able you are free to switch up to higher difficulties and experience the resource curve by surviving longer, more micro by having more units versus you, more understanding of reclaim because there will be more units to reclaim, etc.

Make sure you play it with two other people - it is designed as a three player survival. Put the best player in the most north spawn - that is the hardest spawn!

nice plug

@tatsu well instead it becomes who can improvise a build order the best - much harder than just memorising one. Mapgen tends to have reclaim that effects the build.

@nine2 But that is exactly what we want. Improvising a build order requires skill. Just like adapting to what your enemy does.
Looking at top level players replays and memorize their build order for 20 maps is not skill.

It's like Chess vs Go.
On chess you can reach a certain level of skill without learning openings. But at some point you have to memorize all of them. I know this by heart, because I play chess in league for over 10 years and refused to do this memorizing task.
Go on the other hand has no fixed opening so it's much more difficult to get better without understanding how the game works.

So with mapgen you can expect equally rated players to have equal skills. Right now it's more like: If the player knows the build order he plays like displayed rating +300, if he doesn't he plays like displayed rating -300

I think it will be harder for people to learn the game on random maps as opposed to having a set pool. With a set pool, they can look up replays of higher-rated players on the map and see how they play it and what BO they use. They also get to play the map multiple times themselves so they can watch replays and correct their mistakes and then get another shot at it. With random maps neither of those things are possible, they just get one shot on the map and that's it. Random maps take away the quick and easy way to get good and force people to recognize what is good and bad without having the map be a constant factor.

@ThomasHiatt
I suppose it is just a matter of taste. I didn't enjoy learning bos or even standard tactics at all up to the point I got like 1300 global. Was still fun.
Now I don't enjoy learing bos but I accepted i have to do it to at least some degree. Or at least get a feel for the map/ knowing about the tactics that can work on the map.

Playing bad is still fun for a lot of people. But unfortunately not for the majority, as they are too afraid to leave the astro/gap safe space.

I don't think that the people in lower ranked ladder mind playing on unknown maps. They already are comfortable with a lot of maps.

Getting 100 games to stop being grey sounds hard... maybe we should count ladder and tmm games toward gamecount too?

not sure how that would work as with TrueSkill the Game Counts are Sepertate for each "Rank"

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

Getting 100 games to stop being grey sounds hard... maybe we should count ladder and tmm games toward gamecount too?

Yeah,we definitely need to introduce Tmm and ladder games as well in the game count though

Isn't the color of rating based on deviation (sigma), not number of games and thus this wouldn't achieve anything?

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

Getting 100 games to stop being grey sounds hard... maybe we should count ladder and tmm games toward gamecount too?

Not sure... I still haven't played real team games as exclusive ladder and tmm player, if I join I do it wrong.

Yes, it's depends on your deviation. You can significantly reduce the number of games you need for your deviation to decrease by playing games with fewer players.

Can we get the country flag removed, currently it's difficult as a south african based player to join custom games as the hosts (mostly russians, then the germans) kick you because of either A) they think you have a bad internet connection because the elephants in the streets are too slow with helping the giraffes maintain a fast connection, as in its a third world country so everything must be bad/primitive (but I've seldom triggered the high ping indicator bar in the lobby), or B) there is strong racism/prejudice because you as a player is supposedly a black nigger and they don't want to play with black/african people, will have to save screenshots next time as I only stumbled onto this thread just now while searching for hiding the country flag.

At the current rate there is no point for me to continue playing since I'm not welcome, I don't have the time to join lobbies, wait around, and then get kicked when it's full because of [country] reasons (all those dual gap maps titled "all welcome" are a lie). Need around anything between 5-8 join/kick lobbies on busy times before I get a host willing to let me play, the quiet times feels like its grudgingly accepted because there is no other player joining to make the game full (I get swapped to the hosts opposing team). And it's not exactly a cheap and easy solution to buy a plane ticket to europe or north america so that I can change my country flag and not get kicked in lobbies.

@MT_Switch

The "all welcome" lobbies all being a lie is definitely a problem and racism should of course never be excused.

Sadly, there is actually a non-racism related issue why many Germans can't play with many players in South Afrika:
Some of the most popular German ISPs throttle their connection speed to South Afrika to such an extent, that the game becomes straight up unplayable. Nobody knows why they do it, but afaik there is nothing the customer can do directly to lift that restriction.

I, as a customer of such an ISP myself, couldn't join any lobbies with South Africans in them due to that for the longest time.

Giving the Russians the benefit of the doubt (maybe a mistake, but whatever), I'd assume that they have a similar problem.

My working solution is to just use a free VPN. It's not perfect and does increase your ping by like 50 ms. But it turns the game from "literally unplayable lag fest" to "pretty good". I'd recommend Proton VPN, but many others are available.

If you want to do a connection test with a German having such a shitty ISP, just pm me and we can hop into a test game.

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

and racism should of course never be excused.

just FYI racism is not excused on FAF. if you see it you can report it and that person will be banned.

@MT_Switch I don't think removing the country flag is an acceptable solution, unfortunately.

We could try adding a co-turn server like we did for Australia. that really made a world of difference.

you'd have to create a gofundme for that though.