Player Councilor Election 2021

[archsimkat]

I would like to start off by saying I have respect for each of the applicants as players, as individuals, and as members of the FAF community. Having serious and healthy competition for councillor positions is a good thing—elections give the incumbent councillor an additional incentive to do the best job he can do, aspiring councillors can contribute to prove their worth to the community, and the community as a whole only benefits as a result. With that in mind, I’d like point out what I think are issues with the applicants’ platforms.

@Suzuji, are you aware that:

• the player councillor is not the promo councillor and the player councillor role is not the one to “reach out to different media, and potentially hook them to FAF to a higher extent”;
• the player councillor does not have any special moderation authorities and a person does not need to be player councillor to “address forum topics accordingly, surveil FAF activities in general...” but the the player councilor does not have any special moderation authorities and cannot “...intervene if necessary”;
• the player councillor does not act as a CEO of FAF and cannot just unilaterally “reallocate development resources in a more necessary direction”.

These are just things that are either not within the power of the player councillor, or just not related to the player councillor role, or just not possible in general.

Furthermore, are you aware that you do not need to be a player councillor to any of the following things you’ve listed? Training people; doing replay reviews; creating maplists; writing new matchmaking algorithms; finding replays for casters; hosting middle level tournaments; and helping TDs run tournaments. It would be more convincing to show stuff that you have previously done than give promises on what you would hypothetically do.

Finally, are you aware of the irony of saying “I will aim to combat toxicity in the FAF community. Since I see it as something that hasn't been properly addressed before”, when you yourself have been banned multiple times?

As of right now, I am left wondering—how I can know that you will keep your promises, considering that your promises amount to a full time job’s worth of work into FAF?

@Francias. I just don’t think someone that has been permabanned should be legitimately considered for player councillor, sorry.

@Morax, it seems to me your bid for player councillor was well thought out, so I am glad you spent the time to write this up. Since, in my eyes, this is basically a contest between you and FtXCommando.

You want LotS to feature a second unrelated tournament for lower rated players. By all means, go ahead and organise this—which, by the way, you can do even if you aren’t player councillor—but I just don’t see the point. It’s basically just a rating restricted tournament like any other. It doesn’t affect the main tournament, and since the coverage of LotS doesn’t even feature all the games from the main tournament, I can hardly see this changing too much from a viewer perspective.

Regarding the matchmaker, you were a part of the ladder team, and then left of your own volition. Are you trying to impose your vision of the matchmaker via an election instead of trying to collaborate with the rest of us on the ladder team?

The biggest issue I have with your application actually is with your history of withholding prize money. When Blodir and Nexus won the Shared Army Tournament 2 tourney in 2019, you withheld the prize money—that you had you had already pledged to donate. The fallout, where FtXCommando can be seen cleaning after the mess you caused, can be seen here:

This occurred again for the Dark Heart Tourney, once again the fallout can be seen below.

Not only that, this is clearly a recurring problem that is still ongoing because you also tried to take back the money you had already committed to Swkoll weeks in advance for the Spring Invitational in 2021, after the tournament was already underway. Will people have to be afraid of what they say around you? Can the community trust you to be responsible with the funds for tournaments and show matches?

Out of all the potential player councillor bids, FtXCommando's seems the strongest to me. He has spearheaded initiatives that have been a massive net gain for the community. Ladder league. FAFLive. League invitational tourneys. They have all been successes. Top level ladder activity is way up—just watch JaggedAppliance’s recent streams and see how much ladder content is available. The upcoming Division system is also promising. The key is that he has proven to able to put in the time and execute his vision. Why would I gamble on an unknown entity, when FtXCommando he has shown that he can do the job of Player Councillor, and do it well?

[biass]

So obviously as a councilor I do have questions for new appilicants. I also have some responses kind of like how FtX went about it just above me here. I'm going to ask a single item for the first round and then i'll dive into the real grilling later.

---

First, why are you here?
You've answered what you want to do. But why are you applying exactly?
Are you applying to do these things specifically, and why are you not doing them already?

---

Second, and more importantly;

More often than not, the primary role of the Player Councilor is to act as the beat-stick. The "Main tank" if you will. What i'm saying is that in the role, you'll cop a truckload of literal shit that you can't actually do anything about.
Examples:

• If you get a bad map in ladder, FtX takes blame for it
• If I flaked out on making promotion material for LOTS, FtX would have taken some blame despite there being a councilor role for it
• FtX constantly takes flak for balance choices (hello inspector_kot)
• If your suggestion doesn't get included because it was made in 30 seconds, FtX takes blame for being a tyrant
• If someone in FtX's remotely close social circles gains any form of reward for work invested, FtX gets blamed for dishing out cash to his friends.
• Someone who is a trusted mapper (including myself) makes a flaw in a map that is within a pixel of error and causes you an inconvenence, FtX takes blame for it
• If the pool doesn't get swapped in time, FtX takes blame.
• If you don't get money from the patreon in time, FtX takes the blame despite not holding the patreon

We can go on for a few hours but I think i've made my point here.

FtX has proof of his ability to tank for all this ignorant hatred, because of his current status AS the tank.
New applicants do not.

How do you expect to fare against the tide?
Do you think your past history as contributors here will reflect well on your chances?

---

Also, because i'm not going to be bothered to do this later:

Feather:
FAF is a constant burden on my mental health. This was always the case even before I became a councilor.
It is a burden because at it's heart, the lack of integrity and honesty on the platform is so low it borders on the sociopathic.

Even if you were a "changed man" who is unworthy of your current permaban,
and even if you had made some solid points in your application (you did not);

Your road to redemption will not start with you lying to my face.

I could see a councilor or maybe even a board member pulling a suicidal play to allow you to run because they had something against FtXCommando, so I actually considered perhaps responding to some of the points in your application. However, I would honestly rather just quit.

---

Please answer the questions promptly, so I can ask you more questions. Thanks boys.

[BlackYps]

What even is the problem here? The split was agreed upon by the players. There were other showmatches that got a 100€ price pool. I guess the one without one was because the players didn't ask for one, because I can see no match in the showmatch thread being denied money. Also what will you do if FtX simply answers yes to your last two questions? 4head

About the shaming: It happens regularly that someone has an idea that is not well thought out. E.g. separate rating for Astro or Dual Gap. When FtX points out that it is not feasible or not desirable then he will say so. Proceeding to whine about "dictatorship" will accomplish nothing. The reality is that FtX listens to arguments, but they have to be good, if you actually want to convice him. I have not seen yet that he denied proposals without a good reason to do so. Or even blocking people from contributing for that matter.

Your and Suzuji's application feel like you just don't like the current player councillor and want to get rid of him. barely anything of what you wrote warrants to be PC to be able to do it or even falls in the area of responsibilty of the PC. So please answer biass's questions, because I feel they are very relevant to this thread.

[FtXCommando]

Morax Response:

Since your post is concrete I do not feel the need to do a point-by-point refutation of things. Instead I will first go through your credibility for the position and then proceed to talk about the adjustments you plan on doing for each segment of PC responsibilities.

Ethos:
Your ethos can be broken up to three central facets. First you point to your time as M&M Councillor as well as the time you have invested into the variety of these duties. I have no qualms with what you have said related to these details. However, none of it is relevant as this is the Player Councillor election and not the Creative Councillor election. All this facet of your ethos is good for is evidence that you have consistency on FAF and will not just peace out as soon as you meet the slightest level of pushback.

The second facet relates to the tournaments you have hosted. Since you brought up your past history about tournaments, I feel it’s only fair to go into those tournaments. Your tournament history essentially stops at 2019 which was around the time period where you became a councillor, which is totally fair. I say this to clarify that I’m not ignoring more recent tournaments of yours where you have cleared yourself of any worries about your methodology surrounding tournaments but rather looking at the most recent information available to me. So, archsimkat’s post has touched upon most of my qualms when it would come to you being responsible for managing TDs and assuring people a baseline of integrity in the tournament process. You have a history of completely canceling events because of criticism towards your format or reneging on funds due to being unhappy with tournaments for whatever reason. Of course, doing that is totally within your rights as a private donator, but it is also an action that has consequences in people’s views to handle FAF funds impartially.

Beyond that, I do not think the funds you have put towards FAF is relevant. That plants the seed in my mind that you are using your money as a “pro” for your application and a failure to be elected would result in you not funding anything. Once again, that is your right, but the position is not something up for sale and therefore I would like this fear to not cast a cloud over people’s decision making as they cast a vote.

Finally you have the ethos of being a past member of the Matchmaker Team. This is probably the strongest area of credence you have towards the position. However, you left the position and to me it seemed like you left because you generally left every FAF Discord you were part of and wanted to entirely distance yourself from any contributive element after you left your position as a councillor. You have now informed me that you left because archsimkat failed to communicate with you about the 1v1 pool but I have no real information about the reality of this whole situation.

Tournaments:
None of the tournament adjustments you have proposed are anything different to current policy. It is simply you stating that if you were PC you would keep what I currently do and will into existence the manpower hours and funds to support lower level events. I will assume that the magic manpower and funds will come from you directly. If so, why are you not doing this now? Nothing prohibits it. You know nothing prohibits it because all of the active, regular TDs (including me) have told you they would love to help out where they can but they are simply at capacity in hosting their current responsibilities.

LotS:
Your LotS suggestions ultimately boil down the same problem: manpower. Let’s assume by an U1900 LotS you want a real LotS event. This entails things like operating league invitationals, advertising these invitationals to lower rated players, having new seasonal tournaments, and having mini-LotS events prior to this new LotS. Of course all of this also carries implicit things like casters, money, and organization. You have provided zero reasons for me to believe you would be able to not only do what I currently do with LotS but in fact double the workload (actually more as it’s much harder to organize 1300-1800 players than 1800+) so I discard this as your intention with your plan.

Thus, if these things do not exist, then it isn’t LotS. It’s a U1900 one-off tournament that is just taking place at the end of the year. Is that a problem? No. I would love more tournaments. But this begs the question of why you are not doing such a thing now; it’s not hard to attach such a thing to LotS as an off-event to cover the month before or whatever. But it’s not exactly a “LotS Event” and making it sound like it is after all the work I have done to make LotS a serious community effort bothers me.

Ladder & Team Matchmaker:
My problem here relates to the feasibility of your ideas. Regards to polls and threads about new maps, I do not think the community is going to test and review maps proactively. What you’re essentially saying is to remove the current responsibilities of the Matchmaker Team and outsource it out to random dudes that deem it worth responding in forum threads. I do not understand why this would lead to anything beneficial, the people interested in helping me out now are going to be the people that are responding in this thread. You’re just shifting them around so that they are responding on the forums instead of on Discord and adding additional noise from players that were not vetted.

I’m willing to reimplement polls in order to collect player opinions after having a new map in the ladder as this is where new players will get exposed to the map. This poll, provided decent participation, can then be used as a relevant statistic for categorizing new maps as either classic, common, or experimental.

I also don’t really get your transparency stuff, it just sounds like vague platitudes meant to appeal to the generic user that thinks “more open is more gooder.” What matters is mappers having a pipeline to vetted players that are able to provide feedback on why a map is or isn’t competitively viable. If you want to be considered a vetted player, apply for it. Why add needless noise for mappers to accommodate? Jip has already posted in this thread about how everyone and their mother has a different idea about a map. I want to concentrate as high of a level of people that, while they have varying ideas about what is GOOD gameplay on a map, are able to coherently explain why X or Y decision would lead to worse gameplay in THEIR OPINION. Jip saw me and Tagada argue for like 4 hours about his new 2v2 map about specific pointed things on his map rather than 4 hours of “map is trash I like more open stuff.”

And this carries over to your problem with numeric polls. Let’s look at what I imagine a functional system is:
A qualified team of players that I trust as able to identify solid maps and pinpoint issues maps may have.
Polls to collect information about general player attitudes towards a map in practice

You can promise to poll all 2000 dudes on the ladder I guess, but what I expect you to be polling is like 5 dudes that are highly rated and play ladder a lot. Then you’ll find they say maps are either always ok or are bad. Once again, if these people wanted to give pointed feedback, why don’t they just join the team where that’s what you’re expected to do? Of all your points here, this is probably the one that just makes me ask “why bother.”

Your reset point just reads like it’s generally immature both for discarding resets as an option while also failing to really address any reason why I did the reset. I know you know why I did the reset because I had a several hour Discord conversation about it with you and I also had several discussions with you both on Zulip and Discord about it where you were present.

So let me explain it here for a final time:
TMM was intended to have itself built around global rating from the start. Miscommunication about the features that we needed in TMM prior to a public release resulted in a public release prior to this part of the code being ready. Therefore, rather than simply removing the feature after a public release was made, we simply kept it up and would include it later.

Months later I’m presented with the decision to either include it with a cleanse of the current TMM data or keep the current data while attaching the soft reset on top of it. The logic of removing the current data stems from current information about the issues around 1v1 rating and the deflationary element of it. A lot of the deflation seems to stem from a biased initial sample pool, I wanted to remove any possibility of this happening for the 2v2 matchmaker.

With this consideration in the back of my mind, I began to weigh the quantity and quality of the data available to me related to the current tmm rating. To do this, I got a data dump of all 2v2 ratings from Brutus. The first thing I did was actually review how many people had a sigma under 200 (which is hardly real certainty for a TrueSkill rating) and I got about 90 people. This is not that significant of a data pool.

So with the fact that there was hardly any decent data attached to TrueSkill and the general risk of potential issues that I wished to minimize, I went forward with the reset. I was essentially asking people to play 10 placement games, I didn’t think it would be such a big deal. As it turns out, it’s the end of the world for some players.

Training:
You don’t do any of this. Full stop. As far as I’m concerned I put you in the same box as Suzuji here. I do not care if you promise to upload 60 billion new videos in 1080p and 144 fps.

I am ridiculously active in the training channel to answer questions and help out with general management. I have also written 2 different guides, motivated BH to write his guide, and reviewed some of the guides that were posted on the old wiki. You have done none of this.

In the end I don’t think there’s anything wrong with collecting 50 videos to make into a list, but that sure isn’t a productive way to train anybody. You putting this as your sole action here does not inspire much confidence in you actually training anybody for me.

Also about your new player engagement, let me give an example of how that works. I went through the entire #newbie channel, so about 200 or so people, and directly pinged each and every single one of them. Why was that? Well I needed a <300 player to play with me and Farm in a tournament. I messaged them to ask if they were interested in getting some training. I got 3 responses. Of these 3, I spent several hours going through basic bos and how to look at the game. None of them logged on again. Then I got a random guy on the day of the tournament to play with us.

Training requires will to get better. How do you find that will? You wait for people to be proactive about it. Insert proverb about not being able to make a horse drink water here.

Collaboration:
Promo Councillor:
Want to know why I manage FAFLive? Because nobody else was going to do it. You trying to push the responsibility on somebody else just makes me think you’re going to do that for a ton of the rest of my responsibilities which are technically the responsibilities of other councillors but I do because nobody else wants to do it.

Balance Councillor:
I’d argue there is nobody MORE capable of voicing community feedback to the balance team than me considering how incredibly close I am not only to the councillor but several members in the team itself. Whenever I don’t understand anything about balance patches and need Petric to explain it to me so I can in turn explain it to others, I have zero trouble with it.

With regards to your tournament, that is once again nothing you couldn’t be doing now. You will never get Petric to agree to mandating tournaments to push a patch and I don’t even understand why you would want to mandate that. Push a patch when it’s ready to be released, end of.

The rest of your collaboration stuff is stuff I already do so I don’t feel a need to go into it.

[StormLantern]

Only Morax's pitch seems to make any sense and can compete with FTX's rationale. But since I have personally experienced Morax to display bouts of childish behaviour when it comes to losing his own games, resulting in him repeatably blaming me of being a smurf and threatening to get me banned, with absolutely 0 evidence or even the slightest reason to suspect me, makes me not at all inclined to give him any real influence. He might have good ideas but as far as FAF concerned he seems somewhat emotionally unstable, unreliable and incoherent. Also FTX did way more and better than can be reasonably expected of a role like this, so why change a winning team?

[biass]

You’ve failed to answer these questions pointed at candidates and instead are just choosing to troll the thread and throw abuse from a position of moral superiority.

It’s frankly a stain upon the organisation of this election that you’re even allowed to be here, and the way you speak proves how you’ll never truely change for the better.

Debating platforms is the right of any user on faf, the only person who would possibly benefit from no open discussion on platforms is you yourself, because it gives as little a chance as possible for awareness to be spread about who you are and what con you’re playing.

[biass]

@robustness said in Player Councilor Election 2021:

if there is no open vote, this election will be nothing more than finding out how long Vladimir Putin will be my president. Our hearts demand change. It does not matter who will pull the strap, as long as it is a general vote. No one forbids you to conspire and support one person with your votes, to act in an organized manner. And I do not understand why no one cleans unnecessary messages in this topic!!! Leave only the applications of people and do not spam your thoughts that prevent others from judging the applicants more independently!

The position will be an open vote and you’re allowed to discuss platforms until the 21st. I expect the other candidates to be in here discussing stuff shortly.

If FtX lied about something in this thread, you wouldn’t be saying to not “spam your thoughts” but be taking the opportunity to call it out as loud as possible.

Please don’t associate the election to an authoritarian regime only because you don’t like the current incumbent.

[Valki]

@FtXCommando For me this election is like a referendum in you, you score 5/5 stars in every category... but when I first ventured back into FAF last year after many years you almost made me leave on day 1 after posting something on the forum - (admittedly I wasn't doing good mentally at the time).

Do I want a Player Councillor who gets things done and is rough to (new) people, or do I want a Player Councillor who is nice to people and we hope for the best on the rest?

1. How do you think your social mannerism has or has not affected the FAF community?
2. Do you have any plans to improve this?

[FtXCommando]

Of all people on FAF, I think I'm the most known entity with regards to how I interact with people. All I can say is you get what's on the container. I don't plan on changing the way I act and after 3 years of being in the position I don't think anybody would have a reason to believe any statements I give about changing my behavior.

If that's a dealbreaker then it's a dealbreaker. All I can say is that I have always worked to reciprocate the tone I receive and I consider that to be a feature not a bug.

How has my behavior impacted FAF? Not really sure because I don't focus on behavior really. Requires far too much work to "engineer" into going into a totally different direction, all you can do is slightly nudge it onto one path or another based on the direction of the zeitgeist. I would hope I created more of an environment where people feel free to discuss FAF ideas since I'm pretty much always around to give an "official" answer to questions or concerns.

When I was around in 2017-2018 there was a lot of latent toxicity around the way FAF ran itself because everybody had no idea what was happening where and there was a whole narrative of FAF devs just putting things in with zero regard to how it impacts player experience. I'd like to say I've generally dampened that by squashing these complaints with proper explanations for decisions while also working with developers to ensure there is minimal friction between the expectations of players and the reality of development.

Mannerisms of players towards one another? Uh, well, I don't think anything has changed really. In 2013 people were complaining about smurfs, about rating manipulation, about people being racist, and everything else under the sun. It still existed in 2018. It still exists now. I don't really see what you can ever do to change that stuff, it's a game community with a lot of teenagers and young adults.

[Valki]

@ftxcommando I figured as much and that is the choice before us. I also want to emphasize that I said rough, not bad. SInce I got to know you better it is very clear you mean well and are always available to people who need you, but I have seen a number of new player interactions that made me cringe.

Would you consider choosing 1 or more moderators who will delete your interactions with new players that THEY consider to be harmful; without consultation, shame or repercussions?

Or what would you think about having 1 or more "deputy councilors" who act as spokepersons between you and new players?

[FtXCommando]

Moderation already has the ability to do everything including banning me from FAF. I'm not above moderation and so if they thought I was being too much of an asshole they always had the right to do that stuff. Of course I'm going to be mad about it when it's entirely unjustified, I have quite a history of fighting overreach by moderation. No one on FAF should operate without repercussions, consultation, or shame, including me and moderators.

Don't mind having people that want to act as "PC delegates" or whatever they would be called. Such a duty carries quite vague responsibilities that would need to be worked out with said interested parties. But the existence of them wouldn't really result in me stopping any direct communication with FAF. I mean, look at this thread. I'm already accused of running FAF with my close clique of friends to launder money to them while ignoring what the real playerbase wants. Creating some Chinese whisper game with people that are supposed to act as the middleman between me and players is just going to exacerbate this stuff.

What I would say the real utility in such a position would be is explaining things in other languages since I cannot reach these areas personally.

[Valki]

@ftxcommando said in Player Councilor Election 2021:

Don't mind having people that want to act as "PC delegates" or whatever they would be called. Such a duty carries quite vague responsibilities that would need to be worked out with said interested parties.

Saved as election promise.

I will consider offering whether to assist in that role myself after I settled in my new job.

[Morax]

@archsimkat said in Player Councilor Election 2021:

I would like to start off by saying I have respect for each of the applicants as players, as individuals, and as members of the FAF community. Having serious and healthy competition for councillor positions is a good thing—elections give the incumbent councillor an additional incentive to do the best job he can do, aspiring councillors can contribute to prove their worth to the community, and the community as a whole only benefits as a result. With that in mind, I’d like point out what I think are issues with the applicants’ platforms.

Arch, this may singlehandedly be the top reason as to why I am running: give a chance for at least some good debate and historical viewing. I do not believe this takes place as well without an official election, so in the end we will at the very least get to see some good details on thought process and ideas generated. Win or lose, this will serve as a good direction for the position.

@Morax, it seems to me your bid for player councillor was well thought out, so I am glad you spent the time to write this up. Since, in my eyes, this is basically a contest between you and FtXCommando.

You want LotS to feature a second unrelated tournament for lower rated players. By all means, go ahead and organise this—which, by the way, you can do even if you aren’t player councillor—but I just don’t see the point. It’s basically just a rating restricted tournament like any other. It doesn’t affect the main tournament, and since the coverage of LotS doesn’t even feature all the games from the main tournament, I can hardly see this changing too much from a viewer perspective.

Hmmm.... I think you and I are seeing this differently and am unable to really think of how to explain it better than what I wrote.

I would REALLY like to discuss with Legend of the Stars (the guy who funded and started the whole idea) on how to better incorporate this. He does not appear to have an account on this forum, so it will be difficult to get in touch as he is rarely online. For me, I think it makes sense to have some official recognition in tournaments as the experience and thrill is something that motivates players to improve. My idea would simply be two, separate brackets running in parallel to get the thrill of "being part of the whole thing." I know you might say "well, not really because they are not playing in the top brackets," so I will counter and say that as that may be, it gives a glimmer of "hope" for those who know they are not ready for the top bracket. If you look at the tourney history, most of the lower-rated players just get squashed out within the first round or two, and rarely does someone make it to the actual tournament.

An example of why it is nice to be in a tourney that is not the "top tier," was way back in 2015 when a person named Greenio used to hose these "Average Joe's" that had good visibility as it was casted by Speed2, Blodir, and ExoticRetard. I was kind of a "nobody" back then and once these guys started talking about stuff it made me feel a lot better about improving and playing the game.

Will this work for everyone and will it spawn motivation for people to improve to the top level? I do not know, but from my perspective it can only help.

So I ask you please join me in celebrating the idea as something that is part of the event rather "separate" as that gives it a negative association.

Regarding the matchmaker, you were a part of the ladder team, and then left of your own volition. Are you trying to impose your vision of the matchmaker via an election instead of trying to collaborate with the rest of us on the ladder team?

I do not believe that there was much collaboration in the team matchmaker. I pointed out issues with maps and in advance knew the community with have issues with some. This has been proven as of recent with the surge of complaints , including JaggedAppliance, who has offered to help you with future ones.

Certain things like not knowing to check map versions with the author before release became apparent, and I even wrote this message board post about it here: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1488/complaint-about-tmm-and-ladder-pool-rating-brackets/27

I do not understand what is so difficult about testing a map with an author beforehand to show it works. One of you (ftx or yourself) could have loaded the map up with someone, spend five minutes tops, and see there is an issue beforehand. I am fighting for people like @GrunttiNoob who waited patiently to see his map in the pool. It became apparent that he had created "a confusing amount of versions of the map," but when I asked him what they did to ensure they used the right one, he stated that neither of you reached out to him about the issue.

You do reply to my questions and suggestions in time, but it does not seem to be taking effect. I think FTX and you are kind of resistant to take feedback so that is why I am against your running the pools.

As someone who knows how to create maps and debug, I think it would be a lot easier to run the check on quality before entering a pool. I offered to help with this but you were never really showing maps beforehand, just posted the pool and it went in. It would be a lot more effective to discuss "potential maps" beforehand with the team rather do a "post analysis."

The biggest issue I have with your application actually is with your history of withholding prize money. When Blodir and Nexus won the Shared Army Tournament 2 tourney in 2019, you withheld the prize money—that you had you had already pledged to donate. The fallout, where FtXCommando can be seen cleaning after the mess you caused, can be seen here:

This occurred again for the Dark Heart Tourney, once again the fallout can be seen below.

So a little history here: During that dark heart tourney was my first time encountering massive resistance to some of my rules for 'anti-smurfing.' It came with some kind of less-than-ideal support as you can see in biass' reply that he stated

"people are now having to spend hundreds of hours playing through a half broken system just because you cannot handle social interaction outside of your comfort zone or out of some form of smurf paranoia."

What the hell is that?? Sure, maybe my requirement was a little over the top but good lord. We have a standard with moderation now where threads are kept clean of this kind of harshness because it is really discouraging to people trying to host something.

Now, you may think the thread was not that brutal, but conversations in private and everything else got really frustrating. Rather than bother wasting everyone's time I decided to sideline this. I don't think FTX posting a meme was constructive, either, and just derailed the thread further.

As for the refusal to give @Blodir and Nexus money for their tourney in the 2v2 shared armies: I admit this was a fault. I talked to Blodir for awhile yesterday and was not aware that we never settled this issue from back then.

Blodir and I were a bit at arms with each other over "bashing mappers" via stream and other issues. I gave him several warnings leading up to that point and said "please do not participate in my events until you fix this." He said he is forgetful in remembering these things so perhaps what happened is that I did remember and he did not, so in frustration I decided to him in the wallet.

Was this the right move? Maybe, maybe not. Read on to hear my final reply to what you wrote below.

Not only that, this is clearly a recurring problem that is still ongoing because you also tried to take back the money you had already committed to Swkoll weeks in advance for the Spring Invitational in 2021, after the tournament was already underway. Will people have to be afraid of what they say around you? Can the community trust you to be responsible with the funds for tournaments and show matches?

In short, yes, I was disappointed with how things went this event and some structure. But, in the end I did not withhold the funds. After thinking about it and talking to Swkoll, I realized that was not the correct thing to do. I want to aspire to be like Legend of The Stars and selflessly donate going forward, let the players run things as they please and just enjoy things. I may not agree with everything in terms of "trashing," but hey, I get heated during games myself and it would be criminal to not think this happens with other players.

As far as tourney funds and show matches, yes I think you could trust me with that. If I were to abuse handing out funds from the FAF patreon or other donors that would be grounds for expulsion from the position as player councilor in my opinion.

In stating this, I do hope you look at the other events I helped run, the work I have done for the community, and realize I have 8+ years of that to hold up my "ethos" as FTX likes to use to describe it. These mistakes I made were certainly not good on my part, but things happen. If you can find it in yourself to forgive me for those, and see that I bettered my thinking after Swkoll it would be greatly appreciated.

Blodir said he does not trust me fully again - yet - but it bettered our understanding to resolve problems. I cannot convince anyone in text here, but do hope over time that is healed and we are on good terms again.

Thanks for your positive words above in regards to my application.

[Morax]

@stormlantern said in Player Councilor Election 2021:

Only Morax's pitch seems to make any sense and can compete with FTX's rationale. But since I have personally experienced Morax to display bouts of childish behaviour when it comes to losing his own games, resulting in him repeatably blaming me of being a smurf and threatening to get me banned, with absolutely 0 evidence or even the slightest reason to suspect me, makes me not at all inclined to give him any real influence. He might have good ideas but as far as FAF concerned he seems somewhat emotionally unstable, unreliable and incoherent. Also FTX did way more and better than can be reasonably expected of a role like this, so why change a winning team?

Stormlantern I am sorry but you used the "draw bug" against me during ladder matches even after I gave you a kind warning. I made a thread about it here to check and it does seem to at the least be EXTREMELY frowned upon: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1501/make-the-draw-bug-a-bannable-offense/44

When I discussed this with you, you did not reply to me, and each game we played you never wrote back to me when I typed "hf gl," or "gg."

Since this incident, it seems in our matches, and in general, we have started to exchange some discussion so I think things have improved. I don't know why you would not say anything to me beforehand but saying I have "childish behavior" in reaction to your abusive tactics is unjust.

[JaggedAppliance]

I went through the applications and some responses for almost 3 hours on stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHyXQUIZNU

TL;DW I believe FtxCommando has a proven track record and has put forward by far the strongest platform. Morax's application was also solid and reasonable. Suzuji's application shows that he does not understand what the PC position is actually about and he is promising things which are completely unreasonable in terms of hours. A lot of his commitments are personal ones and they are commitments to things which he has no track record of ever doing before so they are not believable. Francias is the alt account of Feather and has no business even posting on the forums, let alone applying for this position.

[FtXCommando]

@morax said in Player Councilor Election 2021:

So a little history here: During that dark heart tourney was my first time encountering massive resistance to some of my rules for 'anti-smurfing.' It came with some kind of less-than-ideal support as you can see in biass' reply that he stated

"people are now having to spend hundreds of hours playing through a half broken system just because you cannot handle social interaction outside of your comfort zone or out of some form of smurf paranoia."

What the hell is that?? Sure, maybe my requirement was a little over the top but good lord. We have a standard with moderation now where threads are kept clean of this kind of harshness because it is really discouraging to people trying to host something.

Now, you may think the thread was not that brutal, but conversations in private and everything else got really frustrating. Rather than bother wasting everyone's time I decided to sideline this. I don't think FTX posting a meme was constructive, either, and just derailed the thread further.

No.

The history is right here: https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=15335&start=20

First, the quote you gave is not some random statement by biass that was a causal impact for anything. Biass posted this after you posted that I was singlehandedly causing this rule to exist because I made a meme pointing out that it blocked Farmsletje from playing.

On that note, my meme did not derail anything because you made this new rule up and then I made the meme literally 10 minutes later. There was nothing to derail because the train hasn't even left the station. The thread perfectly stayed on the rails because every other response in the thread was a response to your justifications for keeping this rule in place.

1. You make the rule
2. I make a meme about it
3. You say this meme will now be the reason this rule exists out of spite and that if I didn't make the meme then the rule would not be applied because you let rules slide in other tournaments (citing one EcoNoob was part of)
4. EcoNoob says your recollection is wrong
5. You cancel all your events, not even just this event. This is not tabling an event to have further discussion about a rule. This is just getting frustrated with pushback and lashing out.

What the hell is that?? Sure, maybe my requirement was a little over the top but good lord. We have a standard with moderation now where threads are kept clean of this kind of harshness because it is really discouraging to people trying to host something.

The standard for moderation is me because I'm the one that moderates the Tournament section. There is also nearly no enforcement, I have probably deleted a total of 2 posts and they were both from bennis. Nothing that was posted in that thread would be deleted by me because it's people calling out bad rules.

The reason that threads are clean is because either Swkoll or I spend the time to review tournament formats prior to them being posted so there is rarely any reason for arguments.

[Anachronism_]

The PC position is important enough that I’d suggest the conversation be shifted away from discussing previous moderation, and be refocused onto more important things for determining who the next PC is.

And so:

I have read this entire thread, and it seems to me that there are some misunderstandings about the powers of the PC. @FTXCommando, could you post a relatively comprehensive list of all of the “responsibilities of other councillors [that you] do because nobody else wants to do [them]”? Perhaps a better system could be put into place to handle some of them…

@Suzuji , you brought up many good points/ideas for using the PC position to make FAF more inclusive and to better-serve many underrepresented parts of FAF, but you seemed to have misunderstandings regarding the PC position. Could you post an updated application based on the feedback from FTX and others regarding the realities of the PC position?

FTX, a lot of your platform/stance/activity seems to cater to the 1800+ and 1500+ crowds while giving a disproportionately small focus to the wants/needs of the large majority of FAF players. I don’t presently know who I will vote for, but I would like to vote for someone who will give more value/weight/focus for the desires of the majority of FAF players, which is what I thought the PLAYERS’ Councillor was supposed to do…
For perspective, the current focus for things like ladder/TMM map pools, forum attitudes/rhetoric, tournament funding/attention, etc, seems to cater primarily to high-level gameplay for the top 1%-5% of FAF players, while giving much less weight to the 77.1% of players with less than 1000 rating. AFAIK, most FAF players play FAF to have a good time, which generally involves playing a fun game with people in a friendly environment.

Giving a lot more weight to the desires of the lower and mid-level players will create a better experience for the thousands upon thousands of noobs and mid-level players rather than catering to the <1% of players who are 1800+ players or even the top 5.2% of 1500+ global FAF players. Having a PC who is focused more on improving the experience of the ‘normal’ FAF player would help FAF to grow more and retain more players.

Some current statistics from today’s leaderboards (using unrounded ratings for players with 10+ rated games):

For 1v1 Ladder:
1221 players with 10+ games = 100%
26 players with 1800+ rating = 2.1%
63 players with 1500+ rating = 5.2%
~941 players with <1000 rating = 77.1%

For Global:
8782 players with 10+ games = 100%
83 players with 1800+ rating = 0.9%
342 players with 1500+ rating = 3.9%
~6,053 players with <1000 rating = 68.9%

I think the numbers speak for themselves.

Things like ladder/TMM map pools for lower-rated players should be changed to be a lot more like what the bulk of those players would actually like to play, or an additional matchmaker queue option should be added for them. (Currently, the lower-rated players’ map pools seem more like they’re designed as feeder-pools to weed out everyone who doesn’t like the basics of the types of gameplay enjoyed by high-level FAF ladder players and to get them experience with that sort of gameplay. While this isn’t the worst thing that could be done, it’s far from the best, and it doesn’t prioritize regular player preference, fun, playerbase growth, and new player retention anywhere near as much as it should.)

So, I presented a lot of stuff… what’s the point?

TL;DR

The right Player Councillor with the right attitude could have substantial positive impact on the FAF community and community growth, not only by making changes that benefit more of the players, but also by helping to change the atmosphere on FAF (in Discord, forums, etc) to be more friendly and less dismissive/toxic to noobs and to new ideas.

The PC should put a lot more time/effort into improving the experience of ‘normal’ FAF players by:

• Not using a toxic/derogatory attitude/rhetoric on the forums and elsewhere (this is a real problem that discourages participation and creates bad feelings associated with FAF)

• Changing low/mid-rated players’ ladder/TMM map pools to better match what is desired by the players in those brackets

• Actually polling a lot more and taking greater efforts to reach regular FAF players with the polls (this could be as easy as getting weekly or monthly news posts for polls and a polls channel on the FAF Discord)

• Making greater efforts to bridge the big language barriers on FAF (this could largely be done by actively seeking out translators more)

• Having a new channel created on the FAF Discord specifically for discussing ladder/TMM map pools, the maps in them (and their gameplay), and the processes used to determine what maps are put in the pools

• Actively giving more (useful) feedback to map authors when they submit a map for ladder/TMM and it doesn’t make the cut (oftentimes, people submit maps for ladder/TMM and get basically no response from the PC or his team, even after several months… this is obnoxious/frustrating to the mapper and it lowers the odds of the mapper creating good maps for ladder/TMM in the future)

I encourage the candidates to embrace this perspective and to put much greater emphasis on improving the experience of ‘regular’ FAF players, as that would be better for growing FAF and better for getting more votes.

[epic-bennis]

Why don't you run for pc emperor, your angle seems to be the right one for the job.

[FtXCommando]

The normal FAF player is a 300 rated AI Player that plays for approximately 3-5 hours a month. They do not care what I do here. This entire election is literally irrelevant to them. For the VAST majority of FAF nothing I do here matters whatsoever. They don't care if I host a tournament for them, because they don't read about tournaments. If they did, they wouldn't participate. They don't care about training or getting better. They are here to play against AI or with some friends whether from real life or online.

The people that DO care about the vast majority of actual PC responsibilities are competitively inclined players which coincidentally are higher rated players. And what a coincidence, the people in this thread and the people talking about things like training, tournaments, and things like TrueSkill are focused on that player element. And yes, this element is hugely important. The people that spend the hours investing to get good in this game have a high correlation with the people invested to spend the time on literally every part of FAF that isn't development (though some developers are also quite high rated). This part of my job is not only creating a stronger competitive scene but to literally keep the blood that are constant new volunteers pumping through FAF.

"But FtX what about your ladder choices?" Yeah people don't care about that either in the grand scheme of things. There is a good 7 to 8 years of data about ladder. Activity at lower levels doesn't change when we have them getting 15 maps with a 20% chance of a 20x20. It doesn't change when the pool is 5 maps. It doesn't change when it's 7 or any other number in the sky with any number of 5x5/10x10/20x20. The only time there was any general uptick in ladder participation was during the choice pool under Zep but even that was just a few percentages of more activity.

More rating = more 10x10, more 20x20, less 5x5

Follow that, and you're at the optimum. Map style hardly impacts it. Whether it's Williamson or desert arena, the 400 rated guy isn't gonna reclaim enough and will win the game when the opponent walks into 40 tanks by accident.

And before that paragraph gets misconstrued let me say that this is built on basic map principles. The lower the rating pool, the more strict the map rules must be followed. This is why experimental maps are not given to lower rated players. Likewise, neither are new maps. They strictly get the classic maps that DEFINE good map design for FA which have been played for years if not decades.

So what do I do? I address the larger playerbase through structural adjustments. These involve things like the Division system to remove the misunderstandings about TrueSkill held by players while leading to there being less general reason for trashing on players for a singular game (your high score isn't being visibly lowered anymore). Beyond that, I intend to make a global-rating based matchmaker to overcome the bump of the catch-22 faced by new players in needing experience to play games but every host kicking them. IDEALLY I’d like to work to remove steamlink and stop the absurdly horrible bleeding of players that results in.

Also, FAF does not have a retention problem. Like at all. I fail to see why this meme continues to live on. If anything FAF is an example of retentive success. Doesn't mean you can't improve the new player experience but I also recognize people getting lost searching for El Dorado when I see it.

Once again, I do not plan on changing my behavior and I don't really see any problem with how anything operates on any of the FAF communication mediums. You being a new player does not result in you getting protection from calling a spade a spade.

Don't see a point in a poll every month. If I needed to poll the playerbase for every issue there wouldn't be a point to a Player Councillor, everything would operate through referendum. You elect a person to make the right decisions for FAF. Sometimes that involves polling, sometimes it doesn't.

The solution to me needing to pick up slack from others isn't the creation of new council seats. It's making old council seats do their job or get replaced by someone that will.

[Valki]

OMG @FtXCommando can you try harder not to get the point @Emperor_Penguin is making?
@Morax do you care to respond to your view on the points @Emperor_Penguin is making?