FAF for Casual Players
-
Hello dear FAF player,
today i want to ask two questions:
Question 1:
Do you want to see FAF putting work into making FAF awesome for the average casual RTS player?According to the video "The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why." (highly recommended), around 77-80% (!!!) of Starcraft players are "casual" players (players that only played the campaign and never touched multiplayer). Starcraft is one of the most competitive RTS out there, so we might assume that the ratio is even more imbalanced for Supcom FA.
So my personal answer is YES!
More people means more ideas and creativity, more work put into FAF, more fun, more donations, more everything! And some of those casuals will naturally become salty, competitive tryhards by the nature of this community, providing more spice to the flow!
Question 2:
If yes, how could that be done?Well, to know that, we have to forget ourselves and put ourselves into the shoes of a casual player. Luckily i am somewhat casual. You want proof? I only play bot matches in Dota 2 and I tried playing that game with a controller. I still like to play the FAF campaign from time to time even though it is way too easy for me at 1100 global rating. Hopefully that qualifies me as casual enough!
However, if you are even more casual than me, i want to hear your opinion!
Now lets talk about what causal players want. The key difference is quite easy to understand:
Casual players do not want to compete, casual players want to progress!
Chapter 1: Difficulty
The idea of creating an auto-balanced queue for casual players, where players win/loose 50% of the time thanks to Trueskill like in TMM would be stupid. Why?Because casual players to not really want to be challenged by a competitve opponent. Casual players want to instead have a fun and satisfying gaming experience, which for them means having a feeling of PROGRESS, and while this can include personally improving at the game, it does not need to.
However, how easy exactly should it be? And the answer is different for every player. Some players can stand loosing against opponents more often than others. This is why in gaming there is the very popular concept of "game difficulty". Difficulty allows players to decide what the "skill gap" between them and their AI opponent should be.
This skill gap preference is different for every casual player! There are games that do not have difficulty settings, which are usually explicitely marketed at "hardcore" players like Dark Souls. However even Dark Souls has built in "difficulty" by allowing players to farm stats and play in Coop. I know it because it had to farm against the O&S boss, because I would have been too bad to beat it otherwise.
(difficulties in AoE2 DE)
Chapter 2: Progression
So our casual player selects a difficulty, the game should not stay that difficult the entire time. There should be a diffiulty progression that the player can keep up with. This is straighforward to handcraft in a RTS campaign, but how does difficulty work in RTS skirmish matches against AI?
Well, the progression in a skirmish against AI is to select a harder difficulty at some point. Lets say i played against Dota 2 bots at mid difficulty, at some point i might feel like im skilled enough to turn it up a notch and try playing against hard difficulty. The turning of that nob, if i win, is what is satisfying as a casual! This is why RPGs with auto-scaling difficulty are hated by quite a bunch of players, but thats a different story.
Chaper 3: FAF custom games vs. AI
Now that we know that the casual player desires to set the difficulty in a vs-AI game, why is this a problem in FAF? Don't we already have Sorian with various difficulty levels and a bunch of alternative AIs?
Well, the problem is that selecting a difficulty in FAF sucks. In fact, it is hardly possible for a casual player:
- The actual new good AIs are hidden in the mod vault and lengthy forums post, where a certified casul does not ever dare to look
- There is no readily accessible information about how good any of the AIs really are
- Even the AI authors do not always know how good their AI is
- AI performance changes as balance patches and AI patches hit, causing the performance of AIs to swing
- Some AIs are somewhat broken on some maps, the whole AI marker situation is a thing that casual players should not have to deal with - if possible, it should "just work
". - There seem to be no balanced steps in difficulty. How much better is Sorian Adapter compared to AI Easy? The casual player has no good way to find out if he should try Adaptive after Easy or if there is something in between
- The AI developers themselves have no incentive to create modifications of their AI for different skill brackets (nerfing the AI to create an easier AI variant, adding a cheating variant, finetuning the cheat multipliers etc.)
Creating a consistent concept of difficulty for FAF AIs
As a solution to these problems i propose the creation of "AI skill brackets". These are rating brackets that AIs are sorted into and that effectively define what "hard AI" etc. means on FAF. The numbers here can of course be changed, but something like this might work:
How AIs in each bracket should perform expressed in global rating:
- under 200: Very Easy
- 200-400: Easy
- 400-600: Normal
- 600-800: Hard
- over 800: Very Hard
This would allow us to simplify AI selection a lot. A casual user can just select one of these brackets and automatically get an AI implementation that plays acoording to that skill bracket. If AIs get better, they might change their bracket, allowing casuals to have consistent difficulty without thinking about how AI authors change their AIs.
If the casual user wants more control, they should still be able to select a specific AI in a specific bracket. If he doesn't, then just select a good default or a random AI from that bracket.
It should be noted that if an AI is exploitable with a very specific hard to find exploit, this should not be factored into the skill level of the AI. We can assume that a casual player never finds those exploits, or that they can quickly be fixed if found. The goal here is not to give an exact represenation of AI skill, but a consistent system that is usefull to the casual player who doesn't play very often.
The hard part
All of this until this point is just mostly client/lobby implementation work, nothing that i think would be too hard. Were it gets hard, is this:
How do we know which AI belongs to which skill level? How do we measure the skill of AIs? There already are multiple ideas, as expressed in the "AI in matchmaker queues". And there are other ideas like regular AI tournaments that could be used to manually asses AIs capabiliy. However first i want to know:
Should this be the next big project for FAF? Making playing against AIs easy, consistent, and a generrally pleasurable experience? Do you think creating well-defined skill brackets for AIs is a good idea? I think this would substantially improve FAF, but that is just my casual opinion.
-
K Katharsas referenced this topic on
-
K Katharsas referenced this topic on
-
K Katharsas referenced this topic on
-
K Katharsas referenced this topic on
-
K Katharsas referenced this topic on
-
K Katharsas referenced this topic on
-
K Katharsas referenced this topic on
-
Nice, structured post!
There is just one thing I don't understand. You say that casual players want to progress, not necessarily improve, but then you only talk about improving at the game as a way of progression. You say that the player should be able to select the difficulty of the AI but then you say
So our casual player selects a difficulty, the game should not stay that difficult the entire time. There should be a diffiulty progression
How does this work? You even say that auto-scaling difficulty is quite a hated feature.
-
In theory you just throw the AIs in the mix in a beta phase and have their ratings sorted out by truskill. Once defined, I'd fix their rating forever (to avoid rating inflation over time).
Everything afterwards happens in a dedicated truskill rating not interfering with global rating. -
I think the best version of any game is the pro version. Just like how I play my sports. I am never going to be pro level but I prefer to play on their fields with their rules and their standard equipment. That's what it means to be a casual....that and using mods and custom game modes but never altering the core for the sake of the casuals. That is wrong thinking if you ask me.
-
Is the division system ever going to be properly finished and brought into the foreground rather than being some hidden background thing? Where you get an after action report and have some animation where you gain or lose a point or move up to the next division. The whole idea was to have it reset every season so people can level up again and have some sense of progression right?
EDIT: Maybe this is already a thing? I do see there's an "After game review" notification that I disabled a long time ago, so I don't know what it contains currently.
-
If you actually watched "The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why." video, which is very good and accurately diagnoses the problem and offers a solution, then I am confused why you are proposing some AI PvP system as a solution. The video explains how a good casual game, RTS games included, acts more as a social platform containing many different types of games and most importantly a social community where the games facilitate said social fraternizing. FAF for casual players is more along the lines of PhantomX games and Survival maps, or the Battle Royale mode, than just making a ladder match easier for casuals. They aren't casuals if they're playing a ladder match with the 1v1 tryhard mappool. They're just low skill competitive players.
-
Just to clear this up:
PvP is the heart of FAF and this will and should never change!
PvP is what the success of FAF is built upon. This means that divisions, TMM, balance etc. will always be more important than PvE at FAF. However i would like to see more love and time to be given to PvE and casual play.
No, most casuals are not lowskill competitive players, which is one of the main arguments of that video. I know its hard to belive that some people just have no interest at becoming better in PvP, but its true!
Most people that played SC2 never even try to play multiplayer. The majority of RTS players has no interest in ever touching PvP, at all, not now and not in the future.
And we already have social features, so we don't need to fix that. We should fix what we don't currently have, which is good skirmish match vs-AI experience.
PhantomX games btw. are not for causuals, they are PvP. Sure they are maybe not what your typical ladder tryhard would enjoy, but a "true casual" will neither play ladder nor PhantomX. Survival and campaigns are the only PvE experiences that are somewhat consistently fun currently.
Well, a sense of progression can be enjoyed by non-casuals as well, so divisions are great, but it is still PvP, so irrelevant for the certified casual.
@blackyps said in FAF for Casual Players:
Nice, structured post!
There is just one thing I don't understand. You say that casual players want to progress, not necessarily improve, but then you only talk about improving at the game as a way of progression. You say that the player should be able to select the difficulty of the AI but then you say
So our casual player selects a difficulty, the game should not stay that difficult the entire time. There should be a diffiulty progression
How does this work? You even say that auto-scaling difficulty is quite a hated feature.
Well, if you ask any somewhat higher rated player if playing against AI makes you a better player, they will tell you that playing against AI will in fact make you a worse player at some point.
And from the point of view of competitive play, they are probably correct!
The causual player still likes the feeling of becoming "better" just like a competitive player would, it is just that their definition of "better" is completely different from a non-casual. So i use the word progress to differentiate "improving your skill as defined by a competitive PvP" from the causual point of view.
the game should not stay that difficult the entire time.
This was badly worded on my part. This is meant longterm, as in "over the curse of 20 hours, the game should become harder". THe trick ist to try to still adhere to the preferred skill gap selected by the casual player, and keep this gap static as the player improves at beating the envirnment.
You can think of it like this: A PvE matchmaker (which i am not convinced is better idea than just improving custom match creation) should match me with AIs that are offset from my rating by a static amount, and i should be able to adjust that offset.
For skirmish matches, all of this is irrelevant, because skirmish matches are so short that we do not need to change the difficulty during a single skirmish match (unlike an imaginary multi-hour PvE campaign, which should get slightly harder towards the end). So we can just leave it up to the player to change difficulty whenever they feel like.
@brutus5000 said in FAF for Casual Players:
In theory you just throw the AIs in the mix in a beta phase and have their ratings sorted out by truskill. Once defined, I'd fix their rating forever (to avoid rating inflation over time).
Everything afterwards happens in a dedicated truskill rating not interfering with global rating.I think that Trusekill is not really a helpfull mechanism to facilitate PvE play. What exactly does Trueskill matchmaking achieve for PvE over players selecting AI opponents themselves, if we assume that it is clear at which skill level each AI plays at?
Additionally i don't think that making a queue like with TMM is possible if we give casual players all the options that they should have.
So i would not advocate for a PvE TMM queue. PvE TMM queues are not the right tool for the job, or they would be so different from PvP TMM queues that they should have a different name (like "coop team finder"). Custom games are already closer to what would be ideal, if we can make the experience of hosting vs-AI matches not suck.
-
@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:
No, most casuals are not lowskill competitive players, which is one of the main arguments of that video. I know its hard to belive that some people just have no interest at becoming better in PvP, but its true!
Most people that played SC2 never even try to play multiplayer. The majority of RTS players has no interest in ever touching PvP, at all, not now and not in the future.You are contradicting yourself within 10 seconds of speaking. If casual players have no interest in ever touching PvP, then yeah, people on the ladder are not casual players even if they are 200 rating. I am agreeing with you but you are confused. No casual player wants to simulate a PVP skirmish game vs an AI instead of a human player. They want cooperative, non competitive, or campaign content.
StarCraft 2 casuals don’t just play ladder matches on the current map pool vs AI. They play mini games, coop, or missions.
-
You did not point out any contradiction, but ok. There are plenty of games that don't have campaigns or survival and those games are liked just fine by the casual audience. And you are correct, something like Starcraft Coop would be even better than skirmish, but we don't have that. And at its core, Starcraft Coop are skirmish matches with more interesting victory conditions than just domination, just like Civilisation 6 or Stellaris. If we could have something like that in FAF, I would be excited! But designing something like that is not going to be easy.
But even for FA, if you read Steam forums, Steam reviews and reddit (which i do very often), you will notice that people play a lot of skirmish, and if they play skirmish on FAF they almost exclusively play against Sorian. None of them install any AI mods, which is just a sad state of affairs.
Btw. i am not against making campaigns and survival better! In fact i post campaign guide videos on my Youtube channel (which are pretty bad, but hey i am not a professional content creator). But i think skirmish has the biggest potential for improvement. Campaigns just need people creating more campaigns, so that seems to be quite straight forward. Survival is fine i would say.
-
@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:
If we could have something like that in FAF, I would be excited! But designing something like that is not going to be easy.
FAF does have coop missions though? There are also some mini-game type maps like zone control. All the tools already exist to create more coop missions or more mini-game type maps. I don't know if anyone that makes these things still exists on FAF or is interested in continuing though.
Obviously it would be good to integrate these other AI and give them a difficulty rating though, that seems fairly straightforward as well.
-
I was a casual player, although I wouldn't fall into that category anymore for FAF given I play a fair bit of TMM, but going back to when I was more of a casual player the thing I would play the most would be the SC and FA campaign, and before I even considered trying to play custom games I'd play a number of vs AI games (I had no idea custom AI existed so these would have been vs the standard AI).
Some if the things I think FAF could improve to appeal more to casual players who play PvE would be:
- Improved interface/client for the campaign side of the game - it's not obvious/intuitive that you can play solo games through the SC campaign (but with FAF balance and UI), or that there are a bunch of custom missions/campaigns, or the order to play these in.
- Improved visibility/prominence of AIs, including AI selection - many players won't know custom AI exist and will assume there's only the default AI available. Even if you know custom AI exist, unless you happen to go looking for it on the forums you won't easily find them, or know how difficult each of them is.
- Some sort of 'challenge mode' and/or tutorial - e.g. C&C Zero Hour had the general challenge which I found great fun and kept me going back to the game time and time again.
Of these the last is probably not worth considering since it'd require lots of time and such ideas have already been suggested in the past. The first two probably wouldn't require as much work, but would still need someone with experience of the client and a fair bit of time.
In terms of your suggestion for easy to very hard groupings for the AI, I think this could work as a good idea; giving a rating number to the AI would be an alternative (and is discussed in the AI matchmaker thread), but they both have the same aim, and for someone new to FAF easy/medium/hard is probably more understandable than 200 / 400 / 600. However, I think this should be coupled with a complete rework of the UI relating to AI in the lobby.
I'm not sure quite what the UI would look like/the best approach, but ideally it would be something that would allow you to easily select an AI of the appropriate challenge, while also making you aware of all the possible AI.
For example, one approach might be a single 'Add AI' option. You select it, and you then get a box/grid that lists all available AI (i.e. including AI for which you dont have the mod for). Selecting an AI that you dont have the mod for yet will download that mod automatically. This at a stroke would massively increase awareness of the different AI that FAF has for newer players.
A box/grid/some other solution would also give potential for AI to be grouped/sorted. E.g. you could have them grouped by difficulty; you could us a tag system; you could have them grouped by type of AI (rush; tech; adaptive).
Meanwhile with the AiX modifier, instead of needing to select the AiX version of the AI (which doubles the list of AI available), and then know to go into game settings to change it from the default (now of 1.5), if you select an AI then there could be a drop-down box where it shows the AI/player name in the lobby that is at 1.0, and allows you to select any AiX value (for that AI), including values less than 1.0 (to cater for players that want an even easier time).
If the achievement system was working, this could also be used to encourage people to explore some of the FAF content (e.g. an achievement for beating an AiX 1.5 Adaptive AI, or for completing a custom campaign).
Another potentially simpler approach (although it would have less benefit) would be adding a section in the mods part of the client just for AI mods (i.e. the same way things are grouped by highest rated, most popular, etc., if there's a grouping for AI mods)
-
@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:
There are plenty of games that don't have campaigns or survival and those games are liked just fine by the casual audience.
I'm not trying to be rude, I'm genuinely curious here. Can you name five RTS games where the player controls at least five units[fn1] AND don't have campaigns AND they don't have survival AND they have more than a tiny casual audience (let's say, at least 200 unique casual players every month)?
[fn1] I want to exclude games where you control only one character, e.g. MOBA games, LazerGrrl, Natural Selection, Orcs Must Die. I see those as very different from FAF, StarCraft, C&C, etc. I would allow you to include games like BannerLord where you mostly move one character around but you do give orders to squads. Of course, BannerLord has a campaign so it can't be one of the 5.
Almost every RTS has a campaign if for no other reason than most casual gamers won't buy the game if it doesn't have one. The implied promise is: the campaign is a way to learn the game without constantly getting dunked on by other people, so you will get at least a few hours of enjoyment if you buy the game. So I think you'd have to look pretty hard to find 5 popular campaign-less RTS games unless you're looking at unfinished games (e.g. a game through Steam Early Access).
-
We could use the Coop tab in the client to improve the PvE experience significantly. It was supposed to get reworked at some point anyway, because the current ui is pretty terrible. Then we could present the campaign missions in a better way, streamline the process of actually starting it and create a new area that you can use to easily set up a versus AI game. At the moment you have to create a multiplayer lobby in both cases and that is very unintuitive when you just want to play solo. Selecting the AI you want to play against in the client would have the benefit that the client can display all available AI mods and then download them on demand instead of having to download all of them first to have them selectable in the lobby.
Now you might say it's pointless to spend time on this without having a developer first to implement it, but I disagree. A well thought out mockup massively increases the chance to attract a dev in implementing it. And even if we do not immediatly find someone to do it, then we at least have a concept that can be picked up at any point. At the moment we have nothing and thus no development work is happening, obviously. -
@maudlin27
I pretty much agree with all of that. AI selection should really be its own , user-friendly dialog. Maybe some options should even be selected before the lobby, during creation of the game in the FAF client dialog or with a specific "Create Game" button made for PvE (or maybe even an entire PvE focused page).@arma473
I don't see a reason why you would exclude turn-based strategy, and Civ 6 alone is played more than whatever 5 smaller games i could come up with. Then we also have Grand strategy and 4X genres that generally tend to not have campaigns. But i don't think listing games will imrprove this discussion.What is your argument?
Its good for games to have a campaign? I absolutely agree. Players like to play campaigns? I agree. FAF should make playing the campaign a good experience? I agree.However, in a campaign the players play against a mostly static setup predefined by the campaign authors. Campaigns tend to be not very replayable. "Free play", "Skirmish" etc. is were players are finally given the options to customize their gaming experience, and were games start becoming replayable. It is also were one-time campaign players might be converted into long-time FAF enjoyers. Regardless of the topic of campaigns, which i too very much enjoy, i do think that skirmish vs-AI should not be an overlooked gamemode.
-
Yes, i have been thinking about how to make a polished PvE section sometimes, but i have not put the time in to have a really good idea yet for an overall design. I think the biggest question is if we want to separate the custom games list to have a PvE only list.
-
FAF does have coop missions though?
Starcraft 2 Coop is not like coop campaign (i think , its a while since i played that). It is much closer to Company or Heroes 2 "Theater of War" mode. Its basically skirmish but with a bit more spice and variety, but there is no story like you would expect in a campaign mission.
And btw we do have a sparate campaign mission Discord server, were people are making very cool Seraphim campaign.
-
I don't understand why you would want to separate the custom games list and neither why this would be the biggest question. Do you mean because of survival maps? To me this would really be a secondary question. The important part is to have a streamlined way to play PvE. This streamlined way would probably limit your options in some way, so there will always be a use case to create a custom game if you want to have a really uncommon setup, but handling the edge cases should be of secondary relevance.
-
Mostly because game lists take up a lot of space, so the client layout has to kind of be designed around them. Streamlined game creation dialog can in theory just be behind a button somewhere, so while its more important, it would be easier to layout i think.
-
I mean, I play multiplayer almost exclusively, but I won't argue that several people in my playgroup love the campaigns and similar 'vs AI' skirmish and survival setups. It's a big draw for some types of gamers, so for the longevity of FAF, Katharsas is probably correct that it would be beneficial if that experience were to improve.
I mean, these guys really do the multiplayer games with us for the social aspect because we use discord. Given the choice, they'd probably do UEF coop campaigns all day erry day otherwise.
-
@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:
I think that Trusekill is not really a helpfull mechanism to facilitate PvE play. What exactly does Trueskill matchmaking achieve for PvE over players selecting AI opponents themselves, if we assume that it is clear at which skill level each AI plays at?
My suggestion is a way to match players to AIs of different strengths without finding a "correct" global / tmm rating for each AI and without interfering the existing leaderboards.
If people want PvE, we can just keep it out of the competetive leaderboards.
