What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?
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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.
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more regional coturn servers for the ICE adapter could be good.
one in each active region would be good. Australia, North America, South America, Africa, India and South East Asia could each have connectivity significantly improved.
otherwise anything improving the new player experience and continuing to grow FAF's playerbase is probably the optimal direction
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I agree that having a bounty system would not work well and would only create division and hiring a dev for only a short time to work on something the community is already working on would also not work well as by the time they are up to speed of the code base their time would be up. The only thing here that could work is every X amount of months(say 6) a major improvement or feature is identified and under normal conditions this work could not be achieved by the current dev team. This work would have a set budget and terms and conditions.
If no major bit of work is identified that cannot be done with the current dev team then the money can be saved until then.
So in short if you are exploring the idea of hiring a dev the work that they would do would be significant, out of the skill level of the current dev team and the outcome would either lead to better tools for the devs or a big improvement to the game.
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Spending money on developpers, casters etc. seems to be problematic and "marketing" the game is not a very efficient use of the money.
I would suggest the money should be spent to just optimize the game. better tools for map developers, a few ladder options more and some nice servers to reduce the lag and disconnection issues. Just anything that makes the CURRENT playerbase happy.
let's face it, the period we have in our life where we enjoy playing a game like this is limited. And FAF did already an amazing job as a community to keep this game alive. But I dont think the goal should be to re-promote the game to try to catch up to games with larger player bases. I dont see any way that could be successful nor is it necessary.
Just use the money to optimize the game itself further (technically and if possible with new features) but let's not try to go down a "game publisher" kind of way.
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So you want money to optimize the game but you don’t want to pay developers? I see zero coherency between thinking giving a mapper $50 as a prize or a $50 world machine subscription are different. Buying servers does basically nothing for reducing lag, the game is p2p. How are you supposed to buy ladder options without paying a dev?
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The way I understood it so far from the comments paying core developers for additional features is very expensive and brings future problems or dependencys. I said giving better tools to map developers and paying the license of these tools for instance.
adding additional ladder options aren't that difficult or costly to implement I imagine. maybe something like an arranged team ladder or some noobs friendly ladder with build timer and with the option to be unranked. just ideas...
if there is no option to improve the connection or lag issues through further investments that's of course a pitty because that is THE major issue with the multiplayer in this game I think. everyone is bothered by the restarts you have to do sometimes because someone drops early in the game no? would be great to find some solution or work around to this problem
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@thomy100 said in What would be an efficient use of FAF's funds to improve FAF?:
adding additional ladder options aren't that difficult or costly to implement I imagine. maybe something like an arranged team ladder or some noobs friendly ladder with build timer and with the option to be unranked. just ideas...
Why would we need or want this when we have custom lobbies? I don’t mean that to be accusatory, just wondering if there’s a different view point you have there that newer players might have.
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@exselsior
Well, one of the problems seems to be that we lose new players too quickly. by creating a less competitive 'safe zone' for newer players in form of a ladder it would help keeping these players longer and give them a chance get more familiar with the game and learn to love it.Right now the learning curve for new players seems too steep and it's frustrating to get blown away by a 10min spam rush or 20min nuke while being called noob. no wonder newer players leave and don't come back.
since this game is old and most players already play it for years even the skill gap to a mid range rated player is huge. So I think creating an artificial more noob friendly area by automated ladders for specific maps or limited rating range would go a long way.
