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

We discuss this once a year. Putting money on issues causes more problems than it solves.

There are 2 facts:

1. We lack and overall amount of manpower.
2. 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.

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.

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.

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...

@derpfaf it is actually very close to what I do now. A coop framework.

@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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

@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.

@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.

I'm late to the party here, but I have read the the whole thread (mostly). On the subject of player retention and advertising what FAF really is at ground level (as opposed to the surface, i.e. shiny robots & explosions), my suggestions are as follows;

First, pick a few RTS Streamers and invite (pay) them to host a mini-series in which they learn the game's mechanics alongside veteran players. This would allow said players to briefly explain how FAF has significantly more important economy considerations than other titles, on top of the normal unit microing and tech factors of actual battle, and why that makes it a more satisfying experience for the armchair general.

Second, the current streaming community, while dedicated, is both small and geared towards existing players/fans. I suggest that on both Twitch and Youtube, we create an official FAF Streaming channel in which groups of players can casually talk about how the game works while playing at the same time, effectively explaining as you go. We could also have Clan involvement here in order to expand community interaction among our own playerbase.

That's all I've got for now.

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

First, pick a few RTS Streamers and invite (pay) them to host a mini-series in which they learn the game's mechanics alongside veteran players. This would allow said players to briefly explain how FAF has significantly more important economy considerations than other titles, on top of the normal unit microing and tech factors of actual battle, and why that makes it a more satisfying experience for the armchair general.

This sound like a good idea on paper but trying to be the middle man and get this all organises will take a heap of work to do and need one person to be dedicated to dealing with time constraints & time zones

Second, the current streaming community, while dedicated, is both small and geared towards existing players/fans. I suggest that on both Twitch and Youtube, we create an official FAF Streaming channel in which groups of players can casually talk about how the game works while playing at the same time, effectively explaining as you go. We could also have Clan involvement here in order to expand community interaction among our own playerbase.

This is Basically what we have for FAF Live but only really used for Tournaments but i don't see why it can be branched out for something like this or their is the option for the FAF YouTube which i maintain and could give a stream key out too select people.

A couple years back there was a community run tournament for Overwatch called "The Scrub Cup" - basically it was for low level players, and it introduced a whole host of people to the competitive tournament scene. That game is heavily team focused, and having a randomly assigned dedicated team to work with for a couple months before the tournament was incredible in showing people an entirely new side to the game.

I think FAF could benefit from something similar. A tournament designed specifically for noobs, who could work together on a team to learn and grow and improve. I don't know if it'd help with player retention or anything like that, but I think it would certainly help people see why competition can be fun without all the pressure of being the best of the best.

Here's a link that explains what Scrub Cup is (was, RIP)

https://www.reddit.com/r/OverwatchUniversity/comments/frttsu/announcing_scrub_cup_7_2500sr_and_below/

this issuse is low rated player thier never enough that show up to tournamnets it ben tryd time and time again ans allwasy lkinda flops. might be somthing the next Community manager could look in to

@rowey On the first point, provided we are slightly organized, I have time to be the FAF rep. for a few one-off sessions with a popular RTS streamer learning the game. I can wrangle some players from my clan to help as well, if only to serve as punching bags.

On the second point, having multiple players using the same channel to maximize up time would be nice, and could be done across both Youtube and Twitch.

You need to pay me to do video tutorials on everything, think people would play more if there were clear tutorials on how to improve.

Also I need to improve the website and create a much better infrastructure for tournaments and newshub…

@femboy best to focused on one thing than spread yourself over too many things