I've made various topics on the forums to give you all the opportunity to discuss the factory designs. They are bundled in the overview topic. You can continue your feedback in the dedicated topics, it would be a lot more streamlined than what we have here.
@Blodir and @Katharsas thank you for your constructive feedback, I've used them as examples on how to give proper feedback.
Now to debunk some stuff.
A lot of people mentioned that they feel surprised by these changes, and asked us to be more open about them. I'd like to turn this around: if you're that interested in what changes are coming then why didn't you:
- (1) Play on FAF Develop
- (2) Join the discussion on Discord
- (3) Join the discussion on Github
(1) is by far the easiest approach to know what is coming, while also providing us with valuable data to find bugs and performance issues. To mimic the terminology in the topic: it is a net-win for everyone involved
(2) (3) Everything we do is in the open, as promised when I took on the position of Game Lead (councilor) at the time. All the game development related channels on Discord can be read, only some have write restrictions to limit access to testers and game developers. The same applies to the work done on Github, where all it takes for you to join the discussion is to have a Github account of your own. A surprisingly large amount of people look on Github:
Those are exciting numbers. Some people that visit also joined in on conversations, and some even started contributing.
Changes that we make are usually promoted through the news, and at times even by Gyle with an average audience of 20.000 to 40.000 views per video. But those numbers turn pale when you know that the developers iteration topic has been viewed for 130.000 times!
To drive home the point: some people in this topic have a strong opinion with a on average negative attitude. Yet, those people did not or barely played on FAF Develop. Yet those people did not participate in discussions on Discord or on Github. And now these same people are here shitting on me that I did not manage to reach you
To hand-pick a few quotes and respond to them
@penguin_ said in Factory models:
but I think this should be reverted
We won't be reverting the changes because of a set back. FAF wouldn't have existed if we would revert every set back. I think 4 out of the 6 factory line ups that we've done so far are quite good. We're open to feedback and suggestions to improve all of them further
@biue said in Factory models:
the power to upset thousands of players
I'm very much aware that we last year we had 75.000 unique players according to our database. That is all I'll respond to of your (shit) post (ing)
@ninrai said in Factory models:
These changes just make it an overall worse game experience imo. Identifying the HQ by quickly looking at them is much harder now - forcing the player to zoom out more often in order to see the icons.
We're open to constructive feedback on how to improve them. See also this topic that acts as an overview to gather feedback.
@penguin_ said in Factory models:
Part of the issue has to do with the expectations based on what was communicated not matching the reality of the changes.
It didn't match our own expectations either, to quote myself:
@jip said in Factory models:
We ran into this issue, so we had to make a decision. Which we did: we're going to need to re-think how we tackle the HQs / support factories. The models have been on FAF Develop for months and we received no feedback on the factories during that time.
This is how development works - it takes a lot of experience to be able to properly see through a solution and all of its consequences. Our communication was still based on our initial assessment which applies to all units but the HQ factories. We only found out about that later though
@ninrai said in Factory models:
Not a fan of the "they'll get used to it" attitude in this case. Overall, the changes feel like a net-loss to me.
Objectively one part of change is to 'get used' to the changes. I do think the alternative needs to be equally good or better, which for some line ups is of course not quite the case yet