What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?

People don’t play ladder because there is a fundamental dissonance between what the game is marketed as and what the game is.

The reality of FAF is that it is an economy centered tactics game. The tactics don’t matter unless you can do the economy because the game is built on soft counters rather than hard counters for the most part. A guy with better macro will beat you if he just dumps mass into garbage as long as he has 2.5x the mass in it.

So that reality makes teamgames that drastically simplify the eco situation much more popular. It isn’t really fun to go into the big robot epic nuke wars and explosions RTS and be irrelevant min 8 during end of t1 phase because you don’t know the efficiency of map control in scaling compared to any other method.

As long as the big marketing aspect of FAF is big boom robots and epic explosions, the game will inevitably be attracting people to the game modes that let you attain either.

@thomy100 said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:

How about making new "Skins" as reward for playing x amount of games or reaching a rating? Can be just a new ACU skin for the start and later maybe from other units as well. I know, this is probably the most difficult one to implement but also something that could motivate a lot of players to play more or come back to the game to earn new skins or whatever.

i want ACU emotes. we already had the fortnite dance and orange justice dance animations, would be hilarious if u could do that shit ingame

@ftxcommando Sup Com 2 was exactly trying this no? Easier economy and more big robots. It didn't work out so well.

Marketing doesn't have the aspiration of being "realistic" so people dont get disappointed. The goal of Marketing ist to get people interested and try it out. Watching the sup com trailer (the best RTS Trailer of all times imo) again it does a decent job showing that the game is about base building and (very) large battles with some cool units and even nukes. If you ask me it already attracts the people who are less into Starcraft 2 and more into big scale Macro heavy RTS games.

I think considering that there are not many new RTS games around this game just needs a bit more visibility, easier accessibility for new players and a "modern" reward system and it would do well gaining more players.

@waffelznoob said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:

@azraeel said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:

I don't know of any gaming communities that fundraise money for the developers to do stuff. Very unrealistic to expect this

Arma 3, Squad, Sanctuary, Operation Harsh Doorstop, War of the Worlds,
Not even getting to modders which is what FAF is.

Arma 3's RHS Team, CUP Team, OPTRE Team, Warhammer Team, Webknight
Squad's Star Wars Mod, Middle Eastern Escalation
Operation Harsh Doorstop is an entire game funded by the community for the devs and is free.
War of the Worlds is completely funded through Patreon and is made by 1 dev
DCS World aircraft mods funded by the community
Mount & Blade Bannerlord Mods - Old World, Eagle Rising
Total Warhammer 3 - SFO Grimhammer, Radious, Mixu's Unlocker, etc
Ready or Not's release was funded by the community via early access
Arma Reforger - RHS Team
Stellaris - Gigastructures, Real Space, NSC
Insurgency Sandstorm - ISMC
HOI4 - (Literally every big mod)
Barotrauma

I can go on and on about mods and even games being funded so i think its you with the unrealistic expectation lol

@waffelznoob said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:

@azraeel said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:

Game has fundamentals issues

Elaborate

Sure, now please understand this is my personal opinion, but I don't think I'm the only one that feels this way. You can look at purposed Balance Changes for one.
But I also think that the way we handle stuff as a community is toxic. It's not that the game should be without toxicity. It's unrealistic. It's just the way we introduce players into the game that really has to improve if we want better retention. I did go on a bit of a rave in that last sentence which I did delete.
We need to put more effort in actually teaching players the game via tutorials & more community engagement. The biggest thing is how must players don't know anything about how the actual community leadership works. I think there's certainly an amount that just don't care but theres also an amount that just don't know how to get involved. Specifically tournament sponsoring.
I think Jip showed the best method of getting people involved with development. I think we can learn and apply that to methods of getting more TDs to do tournament and maybe even getting Promotions into the ability to just fundraise money for Tournaments so it's actually worth it to get into the scene of FAF. We can even double this down with paying Casters if we want so that we cast highly competitive games in highly paid tournament (highly paid for faf that is).

I do see potential if we get more balance issues fixed and THESE ARE ALL MY OPINION!

• T3 Air Nerf,
• Navy being more interactive and fun to play (ask a lot of players and they will say they hate it. I will even make a forums post about it.)
• Economy Scaling should be nerfed.
• Allow the late game to be more volatile and the early game to be less volatile.
• Make all units viable in some sort of way even if its not directly combat related
• diversify factions (this probably needs a thread too)
• Nerf Reclaim Gains (so late reclaim gains isnt an autowin)
• Rebalance SACUs to be more diverse and interesting
• Buff T1 Air Slightly (Mostly ints and bombers)
• Nerf/Reduce Intel Ranges on Static Intel Buildings
• Nerf Commander Gun Upgrades
• etc (ill make a thread about this too in the future my overrall balance changes i would make)

Just a flyby early in the morning but making a survey thingy system when someone goes to uninstall the client would already be a leg up to understand for what reason they maybe be leaving, assuming they are leaving or that retention rate is not as great.

This whole "we must first work on retention before we work on promotion" idea is a fallacy in my opinion. Yes, if you double retention then you double the player base, but if you double player influx you double the player base as well. For this we don't even need to know if our retention is good or bad. Why do you think we have so many russian players? Because of russian casters. Russian players face the very same retention issues, but there are noticeably more than you would expect, because there is more russian promotion.
If you want to work on retention you should focus on everything that keeps people from playing the game at all, less on things like making them better players. That is less relevant to be able to enjoy the game.
Things that come to mind are:
Account creation and steam linking
Setting up AI games
Setting up campaign games without getting crushed by the hard settings
Setting up sandbox games

It feels to me that there's a lot we can do with those funds that we should definitely not do. One of them is paying casters or channels to promote our community. It never ticked for me. If a channel wants to promote FAF then they can already do so out of the kindness of their hearts. Paying may costs thousands.

I think it is better to use the funds to empower content creators to help in various tasks. As two examples:

• (1) A premium account on www.textures.com to make it easier for veteran mappers to retrieve high quality textures and to experiment with them
• (2) A premium account on https://beta.elevenlabs.io/ to make it easier for campaign / co-op / mod authors to create high quality voice overs
• (3) Access to premium tooling such as World Machine or Gaea to help create maps

The difficult part is that neither of these services have proper support for sharing an account across multiple users. Therefore there's some sense of trust involved with sharing credentials.

One idea I'm tinkering with is to have a mapping tournament where the reward for the winner is a one-year license to World Machine or Gaea. That would be an interesting prize to win for sure, and it would be given to someone that would be able to appreciate the prize. It is also a lot easier to give someone a key code then to give someone money.

@jip said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:

It feels to me that there's a lot we can do with those funds that we should definitely not do. One of them is paying casters or channels to promote our community. It never ticked for me. If a channel wants to promote FAF then they can already do so out of the kindness of their hearts. Paying may costs thousands.

I think it is better to use the funds to empower content creators to help in various tasks. As two examples:

• (1) A premium account on www.textures.com to make it easier for veteran mappers to retrieve high quality textures and to experiment with them
• (2) A premium account on https://beta.elevenlabs.io/ to make it easier for campaign / co-op / mod authors to create high quality voice overs
• (3) Access to premium tooling such as World Machine or Gaea to help create maps

The difficult part is that neither of these services have proper support for sharing an account across multiple users. Therefore there's some sense of trust involved with sharing credentials.

One idea I'm tinkering with is to have a mapping tournament where the reward for the winner is a one-year license to World Machine or Gaea. That would be an interesting prize to win for sure, and it would be given to someone that would be able to appreciate the prize. It is also a lot easier to give someone a key code then to give someone money.

Didn't know these were options, I would definitely support these ideas.

I agree, premium dev tools seem like a far better use of funds than trying to get more players. Lets just improve the game as much as we can with it. Maybe getting the certification from microsoft so that the client is not marked as a virus would be worth the investment.

Also if you pay someone to cast or to promote the games its kinda a be “fuck u” to everyone else who casts\promotes for free.

If someone got paid $50 to develop the model for a new unit would you resign from all balancing work forever in protest for your unpaid burdens?

Has FAF an official Treasurer?

The donation page is very basic - Yes, it has a nice (meaningless) graph:

https://www.faforever.com/donation

Also, on Patreon you can decide where the money will go https://www.patreon.com/faf ,but ultimately, those are just words on a screen. You have no tools to verify it, everything is based on blind trust.

Over the years, there must an amount of money accumulated. I doubt the persons who have access to the funding account will make some infamous "exit" strategy like some crypto wallets, but money is money.

There are much better systems to use for stuff like this, where we would have full transparency:

https://opencollective.com/

I would highly recommend using this or a similar system, when you want to be open about the funds and giving players a tool to check for themselves what is going on with their donation.

Only if we have access to the whole information, then it makes sense to talk about different budgets and how to get the best value out of it that benefits the FAF project.

On top of my list, would be monthly cups, with a small amount of price money. Those events would give fuel to casters, and people always like to see competitive games (100+ viewers on last tournament, with great games and funny casters).

Pay geo to set up high speed global proxy network so lag is a thing of the past

@magge said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:

Has FAF an official Treasurer?

It's Brutus atm until Board elects a successor which should happen the 26th

@magge I tried to get us migrated to open collective but it was shut down. I'm all for spear heading the transfer to one.

Ive already contacted the new Board about revising this and moving forward with it as it will be more beneficial for us in the long term.

Where can I buy one?

@blackyps said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:

Where can I buy one?

FAF could fund a FAF tutorial creation contest. Would that be a good idea?

No, it's extremely inefficient to let multiple people compete to do multiple variations of the same thing when they could instead work together on one.