Why would you have left FAF?
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@jip said in Why would you have left FAF?:
@seaeagle1 said in Why would you have left FAF?:
As a player who really likes the Supreme Commander style of gameplay, there's a couple of reasons that have kept me from really getting into FAF:
x First one I haven't seen mentioned yet: There's a MASSIVE amount of meta that players take for granted, but is next to impossible to find out somewhere. Simple things like knowing which position on a certain map has certain jobs to do, standard movements, less-than-obvious counters to frequent strategies (ie. tele-defence for example). Learning these as you go is a huge timesink, since it requires encountering these specific situations and figuring them out or watching dozens of streams. And not knowing about it can often be instant loss. Which in turn promotes playing the same maps/positions.
x I enjoy the cooperative play of multiplayer not the competitive, so 1v1 ladder has never really been attractive to me. I'm curious to try out the new TMM sometime.
x I've always been surprised that there isn't some pre-start allies-chat/lobby thingy. This is supposed to be a strategy game and being on the same plan really helps. Communication within random teams is already often rather limited and as soon as you jump in the game you're busy with getting that critical first build going. For those who can do their build orders in their sleep this is the perfect time to chat strategy, but this is a high stress moment if you're trying to figure out what to do on this position on this map.
x There isn't much to promote finding a group of like-minded, same-time-online players to play with regularly. Which means that the 'community' you play in as a starting player is the entire FAF community, including its toxic elements.
A lot of your points come down to watching a replay of a given map before you join it. In general, watching a replay of 1.5K+ players playing can't hurt - it will immediately allow you to see what positions require what roles and how they approach it.
With that said, I do agree that there is a lot of hidden meta. Especially on a map-per-map basis. But what can you effectively do about it?
apply neroxis mapgen to each map:) Somwthing easy like a script which randomizes reclaim(rcosk/tree) EACH game for map will fuck-up predetermined builds and meta.
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And kill a big part of what people love about the game. That is being capable of getting ready for the games before they even start.
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Meta and build orders are slightly different concepts. Map gen will still have meta in the sense that some positions will have some obligations based on map layout. You can’t just randomly decide to go air when you have a ton of mexes near you open to frigate raids. People that do that will still get yelled at by teammates in new player games “for not knowing what they’re doing” etc.
Of course, you won’t have 15 minute long sentons build orders.
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it is a very hard game,such as 1v1 have a big gap:(
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@zukko i think restricting game options or gameplay for beginners just facilitates bad habits which will be hard to overcome later. it will be hard to include reclaim when you are not used to it since day 1.
im still fallen in love with the idea of challenges, that will teach you basic strategies and moves. they can be easy to pass but hard to master. so beginners will understand fast and pass with bronze, but pros will struggle to get platin and compete for the best time / results (like in trackmania) maybe a little 5 mission campaign before you can play ranked. Or thin out the existing campaign to a existential tutorial.
i mean some beginners got friedns who are pretty good in the game and they learn fast. but mine still try to convince me from league of legends and i know no one personally who plays this game.
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@zukko yeah, you are just dead wrong my man. I don't mind playing with complete novices who literally just bought the game and have no idea how any of the units work. I don't expect them to play as pro players and refuse to flame them for playing like hot garbage-they are new, that's just how this game works.
But I won't coddle them either and tell them that their gameplay can't improve or trying to break them of their habits if they desire to improve-you act like everyone here desires nothing but to put the new guys down and thats just not true. If a 300 rank player doesn't desire to improve thats ok but the 300 rank player can't turn around and flame the 600 rank player for wanting to win in a game that has other 600 rank players-this is not pro level play but nobody likes getting smashed either. If I'm in a game and I see a questionable decision from the team I'm going to call it out. This game isn't 4 1v1 games in the same map, it a 4v4 map.
You don't need to be a complete boss at this game to enjoy it or to be welcomed in the community-the majority of players in FAF are below 1k rank and that is ok-hell even I don't desire to play pro, that entails a level of effort I'm strictly not interested in providing for a game
But if you are so casual that all you want is to build a giant army and blow stuff up, there is a mode for you-its called campaign and in my opinion its a pretty good one or skirmish with AI
You can't have your cake and eat it too, you don't get to be a bad player and complain when the players you get paired with desire to win in a competitive setting regardless of the rank of your teammates-I promise there are players in low ranking that really REALLY want to win and dominate, they simply lack the skill
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We are going slightly of topic now, the question was why would you leave FAF, the answer for me would be that it is not an easy game to just pick up and play, it takes a lot of time to learn the details.
In my original post the idea was so see if it was possible to create a seperate slightly easier eco balance version of faf that you could toggle between that and regular FAF, making it easier to pick up for new players and for regular players that want a more relaxed game experiance similar to supcom 2 without the crappy research tree.
So if your new you can play on easy mode and if you think your good enough and want to play more seriously you can play with the big boys on the harder mode.
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@zukko said in Why would you have left FAF?:
the question was why would you leave FAF, the answer for me would be that it is not an easy game to just pick up and play,
Hey, I did a rough poll of the responses in this thread and you are indeed correct. Most of the responses in this thread mention the learning curve of the game as one of the biggest reasons why people leave FAF.
While i'm not going to suggest any massive changes to the game that defy the mission of FAF (to maintain the mutiplayer service of the orIginal game) I would recommend making a second thread to discuss learning-curve ideas seperate from here. I think this thread has served it's purpose.
It is possible to make a balance mod with an "easier" balance. It would be on you to make one though.
I made a guide for doing just that:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/739/guide-creating-a-basic-balance-mod-with-a-merge-blueprint -
@hurtmuch If people were trying to learn how to play this niche game then wouldn't people help each other more? But no its completely the opposite, a gatekeeping community. Plus everything is hard to learn and there's a very low amount of guides (it gets better but still).
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@mylaur said in Why would you have left FAF?:
@hurtmuch If people were trying to learn how to play this niche game then wouldn't people help each other more? But no its completely the opposite, a gatekeeping community. Plus everything is hard to learn and there's a very low amount of guides (it gets better but still).
It seems like we have more trainers than students. Or at least, we have more training capacity than there is demand for training (because obviously a trainer can teach more than 1 person at a time).
If you're willing to accept training from people under 1500 rating, there's essentially an unlimited amount of 1-on-1 training available to basically everyone. I know I have no backlog in terms of replays people have asked me to review. Literally you can ask me to review a replay and I can go into voice with you and talk about what I'm seeing, or I can just watch it, take notes, and send you 5-10 sentences of my analysis of what you could do better. It takes people like 3 minutes to submit a request AND read my feedback once I send it, and I do that for free, and I only get about 0-1 people per month asking me to review a few of their replays.
I don't think we're even talking about higher-rated people (like 1200+ at ladder or 1400+ at global) but my impression is that those people can always find some instruction from higher-rated players whenever they want it. (And of course people at any rating can pay Jagged for lessons)
A lot of what people perceive as "gatekeeping" is unwanted advice, which is basically unwanted training.
Training really does work as a good way to grow in skill. But the community over-estimates how much people actually want to participate in training.
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Training is not as good as the game being intuitive or at least helpful.
As I said early in this thread, in Starcraft 1, if you had insufficient Vespene Gas the game would say in audio "Insufficient Vespene Gas" and display a message:
Supreme Commander does absolutely nothing to help a player see what he is doing wrong or subtly correct them.
A UI & sim mod that does not affect the high-level experience, but makes the games complexities more intuitive might be a worthwhile project to undertake.Example for an intuitive power stall.
- UI-only: let the game say (audio) "Power Stall detected", display text "Not enough power... Pause aircraft production and turn off shields."
- Sim-too: if a building has too little power let it randomly EMP itself for 30 seconds, now lower rated players experience fewer issues with power stalls as they are self-mitigating, but need to master it to efficiently produce aircraft. High-level play is 90% unaffected.
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@biass thankyou for the response.
I have been playing around with my own mods for some time now and realised just how complicated things can get, i will attempt to create an "easy" eco mod for FAF with some subtle changes that aim to reduce the learning curve but it will take me some time and i will probably need some help with the more complicated parts.
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@valki said in Why would you have left FAF?:
- Sim-too: if a building has too little power let it randomly EMP itself for 30 seconds, now lower rated players experience fewer issues with power stalls as they are self-mitigating, but need to master it to efficiently produce aircraft. High-level play is 90% unaffected.
I like the other stuff you said, I don’t have an issue with some extra audible and visual prompts that you can turn off in the options regarding low resources, but I don’t like this as much as a built in game feature. Eco manager does this and it’s not great at times. Sometimes it’s worth it to powerstall and I don’t think it should be mitigated as long as it’s obvious things are building slower and that it lowers your mass income as well. Making it self mitigating just feels like dumbing down a core feature of the game too much.
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Hello all.
I have created a thread called FAF Lite, to discuss and ideas you may have for a mod designed to reduce the learning curve for new players, if you have any ideas please feel free to share, thankyou.
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/2049/faf-lite-an-eco-balance-mod
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@exselsior said in Why would you have left FAF?:
@valki said in Why would you have left FAF?:
- Sim-too: if a building has too little power let it randomly EMP itself for 30 seconds, now lower rated players experience fewer issues with power stalls as they are self-mitigating, but need to master it to efficiently produce aircraft. High-level play is 90% unaffected.
I like the other stuff you said, I don’t have an issue with some extra audible and visual prompts that you can turn off in the options regarding low resources, but I don’t like this as much as a built in game feature. Eco manager does this and it’s not great at times. Sometimes it’s worth it to powerstall and I don’t think it should be mitigated as long as it’s obvious things are building slower and that it lowers your mass income as well. Making it self mitigating just feels like dumbing down a core feature of the game too much.
You are making the game easier to learn, and the only concession is that instead of powerstalling EZ-mode for 10 seconds building that transport - you need to manually pause and unpause things including the factory for 10 seconds. Ultimately the construction time can be the same whether you stall or micromanage your power grid.
Also it is not dumbing down. You are still punished by woeful air coverage if you rely on self-EMP's to manage the power grid. Lets suppose the average 500 rated player will rely on the self-mitigation, but one 500 player adjusts his playstyle so the self-EMPs trigger 20% less often. His factories are more efficient, he has significantly more air units, and his rating will improve.
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@valki It does dumb it down though, it defeats the point of a streaming economy where the game lets you spend whatever you want to spend regardless of income. It turns it into something closer to supcom 2's economy which no one on FAF wants.
I'm not even sure how this helps learning, the default stall behavior along with better notification of what's going on makes more sense to me for teaching newer players rather than an automatic handhold.
I don't know, perhaps I'm wrong here but I don't think auto pause is good for learning. I used it for a while (at least 100+ games, so a good amount of time) when trying out eco manager and I still feel like I was worse off for it. It really messed up whatever power management skills I had leading up to using it. After turning it off I started improving my eco balance a lot more quickly.
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@zukko I apologize if I came off as aggressive, I wish you luck with the mod, I haven't any experience with modding or I would help
Good luck!
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Hi, I'm very new to FAF, having only joined 2 days ago. I did however have some experience with SC1 and SC2 before
I have to say I am already considering quitting for one specific reason: Bad UI
The biggest problem I see is with the manual reclaim "feature" - it is absolutely necessary to use manual reclaim to be competitive on a decent level, especially since you get punished by the game for using the attack-move order to reclaim. There's two problems with that:
- Clicking on rocks and trees is not very interesting
- This makes the game require much more APM for no good reason. Instead of managing your armies you have to focus on battling the outdated UI.
I've seen the forums and I know it's been argued over to death but I'm fairly certain small things like this scare away new players regularly
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@optymistyk Try hard manual reclaim is only a necessity at the highest levels of play. Anyone telling you that you have to click on all the rocks and trees is making things up. Sure there are a few maps where that's not true, but those are the exception and not the norm. Even then with those maps as long as you're reclaiming some you can get to a decently high level.
I dislike it how some people - not you, the people who made you feel like you have to do this - make it a black and white thing, because then new players like yourself are worried and feel like you have to click on all the rocks and trees.
I mean yeah if you want to start playing in high level tournaments then you gotta click rocks if the map calls for it, but outside of that? If you don't want to, it's not going to limit you that much.
