What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?
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Maybe bring back Galactic War Multiplayer?
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We're already paying our good friend gyle 1800 bucks a month for casting
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@thewheelie said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:
We're already paying our good friend gyle 1800 bucks a month for casting
No FAF funds are going to any caster at the moment. I suspect you are just referencing his patreon which is from non FAF individuals
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Its called a joke my man. I think its pretty obvious faf isnt spending 1800 a month on 1 caster
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@thewheelie said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:
We're already paying our good friend gyle 1800 bucks a month for casting
H-hey, c-could I get s-some of t-that for fa-faflive?
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@thewheelie
Some people read jokes like that and take them literally. I'd suggest not making those sorts of jokes on the forums...
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@thewheelie said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:
Its called a joke my man. I think its pretty obvious faf isnt spending 1800 a month on 1 caster
Yes as Penguin said not everyone reading this would know it is meant as a joke so I had to clarify to make it obvious.
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I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if faf was spending 1800 a month on gyle since he has such professional casts.
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Because farms is always serious @Penguin_ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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the only thing worth using money for would be to get the IP back and hire developers to rewrite the engine without touching anything else (impossible task in itself), but that would need FAF budget to be in dozens of millions
I don't think there is anything else worth using money for other than keeping the servers and services (like this forum) running
about promoting FAF, everyone on steam forums seems to get triggered whenever FAF is mentioned unless they specifically asked about it, as do some people on supcom reddits, so idk if it would not backfire to go on an advertisement campaign instead of attracting new players
things that matter, improving performance, increasing modding capabilities, reducing friction for joining (recently someone complained they don't use FAF because it is a hassle to set up), derp's new player tutorial system meme, etc all don't seem to cost money to do, but only voluntary effort, adding money to "official" people to do stuff would be toxic to people who already do it for free, and afaik doing things for free is where 99% of FAF development comes from in first place
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@edtjuh this has been ongoing for years as it a technical issue that just required people who know what the are doing both the GW back and front end are on the fa repo
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I know very little about how open source projects work and how devs choose the features they work on, but would a bounty system be worth the headache? Maybe someone knows of a tool or website that allows communities to suggest and pledge money towards desired features? I think that would avoid a lot of pitfalls. If what you're asking is how to use funds managed by the association, maybe the various elected councilors could receive a budget to manage take on the task of assigning bounties for things they'd like devs to focus on. 50 bucks will obviously not mean much to seasoned devs doing this on the side, but it might attract hobbyists or beginners, that, under the guidance of our senior devs, could help with the less glamorous aspects.
And since the thread has somehow also become about marketing vs player retention, I'd like to mention 2 great features, one still in need of some polish, the other only a suggestion for now, that could help with the latter:
The league system was a move in the right direction to emphasize ladder more over custom games, and the system is in place, the icons are very nice, but we don't use them enough in the client and ingame right now. The client UI needs to be checked meticulously and modified such that every instance where a player is mentioned and their global rating displayed is modified to emphasize league first and foremost. Those league icons should be like the country flag, always attached to the nickname, only then will the true potential of the league system be within reach, that is, shifting the culture away from custom games and global rating.
Another proposal I thought was very very promising (apologies, I forget who suggested it) was a chat wheel ingame. Managing toxicity in competitive team games is partly about removing sources of frustration, and a good, formalized, useful and fast communication tool does just that. Something to bridge the gap between the fast but vague ping and the tedious, unreliable (because of language barriers) and potentially insulting team chat. Even the basic pings could be improved upon if they showed an arrow towards the location when you're too zoomed in to see them. As they are now, a new player might not even realize what the sounds are about and miss them completely.
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@ftxcommando said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:
This is currently private money only. There would have to be some kind of mechanism for the community to assign FAF money to issue bounties. If the devs do it, they would kind of assign themselves FAF money.
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We discuss this once a year. Putting money on issues causes more problems than it solves.
There are 2 facts:
- We lack and overall amount of manpower.
- We have decided not to pay (core) developers.
People always want more features. So you put money on these features. Core devs don't have time for these features (otherwise we wouldn't need putting money on it), so potentially new people appear solve it and get money.
This leads to the situation that core developers who do not get money need to guide and review people who get money for their work. Also while they work on cool new features while core developers can still mop the floor. This is not a healthy situation.
Alternatively if you put money on groundwork issues it will most probably redeemed by core developers. Which we didn't want to pay in the first place. Also this wouldn't improve their work hours, just shift their direction.I see no win scenario here.
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Thanks for clarifying Brutus. I understand it's not trivial to turn association money into manpower in this situation, especially given the 2nd fact you stated. What are your thoughts on encouraging donations directly through Issuehunt instead of redistributing donations made to FaF? Would that avoid enough headaches to justify the attempt? If so, maybe we can promote that instead for a while.
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Maybe a less controversial way to add monetary incentives and make use of the money would be to create a few threads once a few months or so where people could vote for their favorite contribution to faf during that time, with prize money going to the top picks. We could split these by categories to ensure client devs don't compete with mapmakers for instance, since some contributions are inherently more visible and popular than others. I don't know why the decision to not pay devs was made but maybe this way of doing it might be acceptable to those that made it. It could also attract other kinds of contributors the same way steam workshop has.
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How do you pay devs in a fair manner? The time spent differs each month and everybody has a different productivity level. We can't even quantify the outcome.
100$ have a different value for a student compared to a senior dev, same applies for a German dev vs a Spanish or Hungarian dev.Let's say I earn 60k€ per year=5000€ per month (before taxes, social insurance etc., that's a medium German salary for an experienced dev and a simple number to calculate) for a 40h week. To take a whole working dev off every week for faf this would mean 1000€ per month.
Many students in Germany live from 400€ per month!A realistic budget we could spend per month is 300€ max... you don't get an experienced dev not even 50% part time for this. Maybe you get an outsourced call center agent for that...
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@derpfaf it is actually very close to what I do now. A coop framework.
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@Brutus5000 you are of course right, my initial proposal was crude. Let's instead imagine using the money to order some custom plushies on https://www.budsies.com/ or engraved badges or 3d printed ornaments. 1000 euros would hopefully cover production and delivery of maybe 10 such rewards, just a ballpark figure at this point. Every quarter we could run a contest to decide who to send them to.
There would be no quantification of work, just the popularity of the feature as decided by the voters after the fact. Community members themselves could put forward candidates and make the case for them. Here's an example of a community deciding who their best contributors were, in a very wholesome and organic matter: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10kjyy5/the_people_have_spoken_announcing_the_best_of/
The voting process in itself is a great opportunity to name and thank and celebrate contributors that might otherwise not get the deserved attention, the prizes are the cherry on top and a way of answering OP, but there is some value in the fact that they are physical objects, tangible demonstrations of gratitude.
