New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements

For clarification: I am the main developer of the division system. It's not like FtX is pestering me to work on it, I myself had the motivation to start working on it. Of course I worked out the details with him. The division system will come regardless of who will win this election. At this point most of it is worked out already so I think there won't be much further input needed by the PC anyway.

Guys, im still waiting for your replies to this question here:

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1589/player-councilor-election-2021/16

@shaileen said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

a) Division system is not something that will have a big impact. Hundreds of games use Elo or a variant thereof; League uses the division system and I don't think they reported big improvements

Just about every major competitive game uses divisions in some form. CS:GO, LoL, SC2, etc. Likewise, FAF had it in the past and it was quite a fondly remembered feature. The point is that it gives a more coherent goal based on a cool new symbol next to your name that shows off to other people. What TrueSkill currently operates as is a high score, in fact one of the reasons we have the system round up or down in global lobbies is to at least somewhat address this reality and stop people worrying about every single game's impact on their rating. That solution wasn't the most high effort attempt to do so granted, but it showcases that this has been a problem recognized in FAF since even before I was around.

b) for some reason you seem to be needlessly aggressive and like to argue a lot. I recognize it from myself. The problem might be that although you could do some good work, you're neck deep into personal conflicts which will eat your time (see: your own proclamation what you will do as your first action - call out other councillors? Like what is that supposed to achieve?)

Aggression? Probably, but I will put the political spin on and call it "being direct." Not really much for me to talk about for this I think, either you like or don't like the way I communicate everywhere. There's probably like 1500 pages of text logs to comb through and find me expressing anything and everything in any way. A FAF Tower of Babel.

I can only cite my work with current FAF contributors. I argue a lot because I'm the official FAF voice on the forums/discord/aeolus giving answers to ideas and suggestions in like 90% of situations. I need to argue, it's the job. People say something is bad and give reasons why, I retort with why this was rejected in conversations elsewhere. I am ultimately the negative dude that needs to explain why things don't happen the way people wanted it to happen. I don't like it when I give feedback and get told "it will be taken up for consideration" and then I'm left in the dark; I'd rather get told my idea is bad with the reasons why.

I don't really think I'm neck deep in personal conflicts. It's only a couple!

I worked with Giebmasse on reforming the Discord and inform him about things pertinent to moderation. I work with Sheikah, Askaholic, BlackYps, and Brutus across several developer projects. I work with Petric, Swkoll, Jagged, Farm, and arch on FAFLive management and also general tournament creation. Likewise, I work with most of those said people for matchmaker pool creation. New people come to me to talk about helping out with training, run some tournament formats by me, who to talk to for x or y issue, and whatever else. I don't really think anyone got upset at me for anything except when I said I wouldn't let them get or do something.

@gingerbreadman said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

Are people who decided to rip through the applications and credibility of Morax, and the now removed applications of you know who, going to do the same for FTX? From reading through some previous comments, from an outsider it almost comes off a bit biased in this 'discussion/debate' and i am sure there are many people out there and who have participated in these threads already who know and have followed FTX's ruling so should be in a wonderful position to pick his application or credibility to continue.

Nothing stops the anti-ftx legion from doing so. I would love to explain everything I do and plan to do over a 100 episode podcast. This is an affirmative answer to your idea of a live stream discussion, provided it operates like a legitimate debate.

TMM was a great thing but its effectively dead right now unless you want to wait a long time and possibly be matched with a grey or low rated player. For the 'top players' they do not touch it and havent for a while, and the 'active competitive' group which could class as 1300-1800 have mainly moved back to custom games. The multiple resets, and the timing of these killed the momentum it had in my opinion. Possibly there are 'stats' that say other wise but i would be surprised if they were specific to 1300+ rating.

There was only 1 reset. My answer to this can be found in the locked PC thread in which I responded to Morax saying he would never reset ratings again. You can read the rationale for the decision there. Long story short, hardly any good data existed in the first place. I want to prevent long term integrity issues with the rating system. I didn't expect 10 placement games to be the end of the world for so many players.

Sure it is nice to see and hear of possible 2v2 tournaments (no idea why these havent been more of a thing) but once again mentioning 'selecting top players' to take part to promote it means essentially fuck all to players that are far more active but just miss out on this 'top elite bracket'. Oh great we get a twitch stream of a tournament that will either be poorly casted with a range of streamers who didn't seem to confident on how to even stream or set it up for good viewing... but most likely these top players, some of which only show up for tournaments will get a potential financial reward.

Manpower.

I just wanted to point out that we linked to FTX's current workload here:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1571/an-election-will-soon-take-place-for-the-player-councilor-role-apply-here/2

FTX's current workload is not the criterea for this election. Candidates don't HAVE to fulfill every single point in that list to be elected as Player Councilor. However as you will be running against FTX you might want to consider his points.

What you describe as workload I describe as a long list of words. Ftx is the master as typing alot of words in a grammatically and orthographically correct manner and forces people to engage in lengthy word battles, but the actual real world outcomes of his actions are seldomly talked about. If you have a good point you don't need 50 forum pages to make it .

I think the player base don't really give a damn about who is going to be the new PC or the old one,all we are willing to see are actual changes and progression,most players that i know hate Ftx for being harsh but he does his job and there is a huge track of what has been done,same goes for Morax,would be nice to see more participants as well.

@askaholic said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

Who exactly are these people? Because I certainly was not included in any such discussion and it would be me who is in the position of having to implement a large part of your idea, or ultimately, spend a lot of time reviewing and maintaining the code.

My TMM plan is designed to improve the user experience a lot but largely utilizes the underlying (already created) architecture to do so. It can be done in a way that largely uses the existing code as it was designed to be used, but implements it in a way that gives TMM players a lot more options for a better TMM experience. I talked with different developers for different things, but for the bulk of what you're worried about, I talked with Sheikah. I'd be happy to discuss the details with you further in pm. I'd rather not bog down this forum with extensive minutia detailing how coding it is actually feasible and can be done reasonably.

@emperor_penguin said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

My TMM plan is designed to improve the user experience a lot but largely utilizes the underlying (already created) architecture to do so.

How? bloating the TMM ui doesn't improve the UX. Infact it makes it more complicated and adds more sticking points. Unless you think a new player is going to know what these options even mean?

@biass said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

How? bloating the TMM ui doesn't improve the UX. Infact it makes it more complicated and adds more sticking points. Unless you think a new player is going to know what these options even mean?

Different players often want to play different things and many people are often interested in playing particular varieties of different games but want an easy way to play something that is convenient and will actually fill quickly. A TMM with a variety of good options helps solve this issue by providing a convenient way for users to queue for the types of games they actually want to play. Part of the logic for making TMM appear to have a universal queue with options is that the proper UI for that would use space a lot more efficiently than the alternative concept of listing every desired combination of queue options individually as a separate queue. Appearing to have a universal queue would actually result in a relatively condensed UI compared to what TMM might otherwise become once more queues are added, and it would have a better UX as well as more options. And yes, I think players understand the meaning of things like "1v1", "2v2", and "fullshare". To clarify, my sample options list above was not the UI design, but was simply a sample list of some potential options.

Some history:
Fullshare is a false option (in that it be a choice of not being a team games cause its shouldn’t be choice at all).

For 2v2 and argueably higher match makers it should always be full share. Now before you say “But intended!”
In GPG the standard share didn’t work the same as it does now. Specifically anything someone donated before they died DOES NOT get crtl-K and frankly speaking that was used extensively.

Specifically if you died you would donate your base before you went kaboom. Meaning the most basic team game scenerios, were functionally speaking fullshare.

And different players want different things? You mean we are not all clones, utter madness. What if we had a portion of the client where you could create a game, click the map and condition you wants.

Even turn on the sim mods you desire. And for balance we make a rating specific for it. Also let you define the start positions were desired. But alas you can only play TMM or ladder no option for such...so what should we call it custom game perhaps?

Madness, man we really should implemented that yesterday.

I like the idea to have options for a queue. People could opt in in the higher rated pools if they want to. However I see two serious issues here: the map pools for different team sizes are fundamentally different. It makes no sense to put everything into a "mega" queue. The other thing is that you have no way of knowing if your selection will give you a game anytime soon. Some of these options are mutually exclusive and you could isolate yourself without knowing it. Think of "2v2, share until death, mapgen only, only new players"

Full share and share until death are not built to work for the same type of maps so that's already going to be doubling the maplists.

@dragun101
With that sort of logic, you could say that we shouldn't have ladder or TMM at all.
Ladder/TMM options gives the advantage of convenience as well as not having to deal with things like hosting, bad hosts, various custom/global rating-related problems, etc. It also allows players to join the queues for every available option that they feel like playing at the time, as opposed to only joining one custom lobby and hoping it fills quickly. My TMM proposal would give users the ability to do what is almost equivalent to automatically joining every lobby they're interested in simultaneously and then leaving the extras once one is full from people doing that. With users queueing like that, the result would be much faster waiting times than we often get for custom lobbies.

@blackyps @ftxcommando
The behind-the-scenes code in my TMM plan actually makes it possible to set up map pools that essentially have subcategories for different option combinations. So, any particular combination of options could be set to use the particular maps in the pools that are desired for that particular combination of options.
There could also be something like a 'quick match button' which queues the user with recommended options if you want a simple guided choice for users.

Actually, the Full Share discussion stems from a problem where a team joining as a party has 1 bored member... or an uneven rating team apparently wins because they lost the lowest ranked ACU.

I read something about a "Demoralization" victory condition. I cannot find much about it. However if it means that you remain in control of your buildings and stuff after your ACU dies, and your team only loses when all ACU's are dead, then this also solves the problem in an even better way for party-based play especially.

...Aside from not seeing half the enemies stuff explode which remains anticlimactic

Demoralization is you and your team quitting the game via Ctrl-K.

FYI, I have now discussed my proposed TMM plan with Askaholic in more detail, and he said that it's not much work for him on the server (since it largely utilizes already created coding architecture). So, from a technical standpoint, that shouldn't be a problem.

Askaholic is becoming Answeraholic as of recent with this PC election...

Anyways, I am going to answer @biass questions now. I would like to respond to a couple others, especially FTX response to my post soon but am awaiting some more answers.

Biass, you asked:

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?

I am here because as someone who has played the game for close to 15 years I want to continue to support it and the people that around it. My ideas for accomplishing tasks as the player councilor are very close to FTX's but I believe in certain key areas I can do it better, for example map evaluation for ladder and TMM pools.

I am applying to do these things not only because I could do them now, but set a protocol and open, transparent policy on how they are done. As stated in @Aulex post here there is a need to focus a bit more on some other areas of the community. I want to do that and not distract myself with what should be other's responsibilities such as the promo council not working on FAF live.

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.
How do you expect to fare against the tide?

Do you think your past history as contributors here will reflect well on your chances?

Easy: I was M&M council for awhile and was beat up all the time by anyone and everyone, including you @biass . The only reason I stepped down last year was because the pandemic caused a lot of stress on my work where it was a last-ditch effort attempt to save a small company I was working for that lacked funding/resources to operate under such harsh conditions.

FTX may claim that experience as the M&M council has no meaning to being a different council, but I say otherwise as it taught me a lot about how to interact with people here, who are the devs, how to use Github and find severe issues to work out, and so much more.

I think emperor penguin is the best candidate. He seems to be s genuinely nice person who wants to integrate all the strata of faf. What a nice thing to have someone like that running for the job.