I cri everytim

@pryanichek said in I cri everytim:

Ladder for beginners is too complicated at all, you still do not know the features of all units, each action takes 3 times longer, and your opponent will most likely already have hundreds of games and will easily kill you

I cri everytim a newcomer believes he can't play ladder because he will only face mega pros that will stomp them. You might get unlucky the first few games as the system doesn't know where you to place you, but after a few losses, you will definitely only play against people as good(bad?) as you.

(Of course, the real issue is that there might not be enough players of your rank in the queue)

Also, I do not know your timezone, but I see a good number of all welcome lobbies when I play, you should only be kicked if you join rank-restricted games (or if your CPU is bad).

Well you could try 2 methods
Stick
Have 1 day a month/week where no player can host a dual gap, astro creator, seton's clutch etc. Forcing players to try something new. (though i think users would just find a workaround)

Carrot
Offer rewards for trying new maps.

@pryanichek said in I cri everytim:

The problem starts with new players
I myself have recently started playing Faf (a little less than a year)
Until you have 100 games it is impossible to get on any map except dual gaps or astro crater, you will be kicked from the lobby

Did you try going through the campaign first? When I first got the game in 2007 I played through all three campaigns before going to multiplayer. That gave a great feel to the units and the game mechanics.
Now it's even better since you can play the campaign with the multiplayer balance modifications in place.

@arma473 said in I cri everytim:

Trying to control how other people play a game by shaming them as inferior, by telling them that the time and effort they invest into playing is less valuable than the time that you put in, telling them that their skills are crap compared to your skills, is not very nice and not at all helpful.

Yes, I agree that we should treat each other with respect of course.

An analogy came to mind. Let's say FAF is like football (soccer). With the original game, you are allowed to run. With turtle maps, you are only allowed to walk.
The people who run during the game, say hey this game is way more fun when you are allowed to run. There are many more possibilities. It's a shame everyone is walking and we have trouble getting enough people for the games where people are allowed to run.
Maybe the analogy sucks, but that's for me at least the sentiment, I am having with this situation.

@auricocorico said in I cri everytim:

Join the ladder army tatsu, forget about custom games, they are wrong

I think this is a good point, TMM will draw competitive players away from custom where dualgap remains. It is probably not as bad ass it seems.

Though I want to repeat an ironic but good suggestion by FtXCommando to make a Dualgap matchmaker. Back then I only saw the advantages of catering to the needs of a large group, but added to that now:

• Opportunity to at some point have a separate DualGap ranking
• Custom game lobby consists of more original games and is thus more inviting

After 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 I believe there are 2 slots free right?

After 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 I believe there are 2 slots free right?

The limitation of only 6 queues because of display reasons no longer exists in the client.

I think mapgen has been great. There's been plenty of mapgen games going up, and it's not hard to fill one if you host yourself.

But honestly I think the main problem is there's just no real easy way to learn the game for brand new players. They basically get shoehorned into gap, astro, etc. Then they stay there because learning other maps is a big step. Setons for example, you need to learn a build for every spot and most good players just don't want to deal with having a noob on their team.

I think FAF could really benefit from new tutorial system that teaches general build orders that can be used on a bunch of maps, especially mapgen as well as getting into more advanced builds for popular maps like setons, twin rivers, open palms etc. As well as tutorials on specifics such as manual reclaiming, unit build orders in factories, scouting, eco management, things like that. Ideally this would be integrated into the FAF client for easy access.

Obviously that would be a ton of work, but I think it would be great for players trying to learn. As it is, it's basically try a new map, lose a bunch, get bitched out a ton for being bad, watch replays of better players and try to work out their builds for yourself.

@askaholic said in I cri everytim:

@h-master said in I cri everytim:

Hopefully, the TMM 3v3 and 4v4 will be a big hit.

I hope so too!

@pryanichek said in I cri everytim:

I think if we could give motivation to the clans to actively recruit and train new players (for example for clan tournaments or other events), then the situation could change

Oh yea totally forgot those exist. They are so pointless in FAF except for giving you the cool brackets in front of your name xD.

@arma473 said in I cri everytim:

I wouldn't mind a client mod that let people blacklist maps so matches hosted on those maps don't show up in the custom games tab.

It would be interesting to have some more advanced game filters. Probably it hasn't been done yet because we don't really have enough lobbies at any given time to make it necessary. But TBH I don't think it would be too hard to program even for beginners so if someone wants to try adding it that would be cool!

Clan Features when bb

1. Most critics almost do not play global-but they want changes in it. Shouldn't you start with yourself and maybe others will change.

2. No matter how it was, but every year since 2016 and the peak of 2018, there are fewer and fewer players of the 1400+ level (strong).

3. Do not prevent the faf community from playing what they want, thinking that your thoughts are correct.

4. Put real maps for the global in the topMM list.

5. Create 4x4 5x5 6x6 tournaments on new maps starting from the download date 2019+.

6. If you don't like something today in the faf, try to mumble less and find another entertainment or game (don't become grandmothers at the entrance).

Personally, I want to add from myself. What I'm sorry is that the desired modes or global games on different maps are 1-3 hosts, and not 10-20 as with setoners, gaps and craters

Based map.

The appeal of astro and gap, is it the linear gameplay or the experimentals and late game units?

If it about the latter, then you could solve this with a ranked mod "Late Game Start" that starts each player off with 5 RAS sACUs. You can immediately build 4 T2 mex with storages for almost 100 mass income at like 1 or 2 minute mark?

@deletethis after the first 5-10 defeats in the ladder without a single chance, beginners simply have no desire to play it further, when there is a dual gap where they can at least do something + as you rightly said that the queues in the ladder are too long, especially for beginners who are not yet used to that
I ask you to believe the person who was just a new player and who has a friend who just started playing Faf
my friend has 70 games and 1000 games he is kicked from 90% of the lobby, calling him a smurf
or he gets kicked because he is gray and does not have 100 games even if the game has no rating limit

@h-master of course I went through the company
however, faf has its own specifics

@pryanichek said in I cri everytim:

after the first 5-10 defeats in the ladder without a single chance, beginners simply have no desire to play it further

It would be nice if the ladder algorithm didn't assume "there's a big chance this new player might be 1100 rated" and instead always looked for very weak opponents for the first 3 games.

It's a lot less burdensome to ask an 1100 to play against 3 weak opponents when they first join the ladder than it is to ask a 200 to play against 900, 1000, 1100-rated people.

Like we're worried if the next Blodir comes to FAF and gets on the ladder and the first 5 matches are too easy, he might quit. But we're not worried about discouraging hundreds and hundreds of new people who are starting at the bottom. And we're not worried about wasting the time of 1k-rated players by feeding them noobs for no reason.

Telling new players that their first 5 ladder matches are likely to be terrible so just grit your teeth and suffer through it is a meme at this point.

I play dual gap when I feel like a relaxing match where I don't feel like everything explodes the moment I make 1 mistake.

@arma473 Let’s please stop blaming the algorithm. It already tries to put new players against new players, and if that fails then it gives them a random opponent because getting any game is better than waiting indefinitely for a better opponent to come by, since this will at least give an opportunity to gain some data. The simple fact is that not enough players play ladder. Most are either 1800+ or in the ~800 rating range. Anyone with that rating will have no trouble crushing a new player. Even someone who has played enough ladder to get a rating of like 400 will probably crush a new player. There simply are not enough players on ladder to get balanced games for new players.

@askaholic said in I cri everytim:

@arma473 Let’s please stop blaming the algorithm. It already tries to put new players against new players, and if that fails then it gives them a random opponent because getting any game is better than waiting indefinitely for a better opponent to come by, since this will at least give an opportunity to gain some data. The simple fact is that not enough players play ladder. Most are either 1800+ or in the ~800 rating range. Anyone with that rating will have no trouble crushing a new player. Even someone who has played enough ladder to get a rating of like 400 will probably crush a new player. There simply are not enough players on ladder to get balanced games for new players.

Beyond that it's just a totally outdated narrative. When you go and ask people at peak times how their first ladder games went (yes, even entirely new dudes to Supcom itself) you find a pretty nice spread of people that, by their 3rd game, have at least won or came very close to winning a game in their mind.

Just about all the dudes that carry the "sick and tired of matchmaker" attitude come from timezones where there are like 2 or 3 dudes searching at any point in time, which carries the negatives you mentioned here.

Also, you market Supcom (and FAF) as a big boom robot smash game and then dudes get shocked when all the new people want to play big boom robot smash games, especially when some of the more prolific casters in the community feed into it. Not that I blame them, they're taking the most enjoyable part of FAF at first glance and feeding into it.

Want people to not play big boom robot smash game? Then focus on explaining why that isn't as fun as other aspects of the game or make those other aspects more enticing, team matchmaker is just step 1 in doing that where you give people the comfy nature of a social team environment, but there are a variety of additional steps to take if you want to overcome this.

@valki said in I cri everytim:

@auricocorico said in I cri everytim:

Join the ladder army tatsu, forget about custom games, they are wrong

I think this is a good point, TMM will draw competitive players away from custom where dualgap remains. It is probably not as bad ass it seems.

Though I want to repeat an ironic but good suggestion by FtXCommando to make a Dualgap matchmaker. Back then I only saw the advantages of catering to the needs of a large group, but added to that now:

• Opportunity to at some point have a separate DualGap ranking
• Custom game lobby consists of more original games and is thus more inviting

After 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 I believe there are 2 slots free right?

Half of the dudes that play dual gap are ready to begin an ethnic cleansing campaign against anyone with a CPU getting less than 3.2 GHz, you will never make a dual gap matchmaker appealing (nor any 6v6 matchmaker really) when you have 12 random assortments of potential lag points that can drag the game down.

Gap popularity is because that's what people like. Chilling and doing sim city for 45 minutes of game time, aka 1.5 hours at an average -3 sim speed. Not everyone wants to play much more challenging and stressful games. They could easily migrate to the common teamgame maps like canis, wonder, hilly, etc. if they wanted a non turtle team map, but it's not what they want. This is also shown by the lack of popularity for FAF itself: it's simply too hard and complicated to be preferable for many people. They would rather play fortnite or league of legends or SC2, etc. instead. FAF has major issues for people like the lag and pathfinding (it's almost 15 years old...), but the issue of network externalities is also massive (the more people that play the game, the more games of your preference you can find and the more you enjoy the game. E.g. I doubt you'd care so much about how many gap games there are as long as there are plenty of games that you want to play available!). But the network externalities issue isn't really solvable...it would require massive, rapid growth in the popularity of the game so that the growth can snowball, which just doesn't seem at all realistic given the market demand. The game is almost 1.5 decades old, and has fairly inferior graphics (albeit not horrible) to anything made in the last decade, and as we all know, a poor game engine leading to the performance issues.

Edit: So is there a solution? Unfortunately, none that I would put any money on. In this case I'm pretty sure pessimism is realism. Maybe you can convince all your friends to start playing, but if they are anything like mine they will try it and then quit for the aforementioned reasons. It's just not going to be many people's favorite game, and if they like it, it won't be too surprising for them to prefer dual gap anyway.