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.

@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.

FWIW, the trailer contest seemed like it worked out pretty well. Different people have different tutorial styles, where a given tutorial might be more helpful for some players, while a different tutorial might be more helpful for some others. Alternatively, if we want to avoid multiple tutorials on the same topic, we could avoid repeats with a first-come first-served style, where the contestants sign up/reserve their tutorial topics before they make them.

A tutorial campaign (or mission) is not a video tutorial. There is vastly more work involved in the former and such a prize would end up being split between 4+ people because of the effort necessary.

Fix the lobby issues (login failures, loading failures when trying to start new games after having just finished one, extremely frequent connection failures when loading new tabs such as leaderboards or browsing the mod vault)

Maybe it’s just me having these problems (idk) but it seems like making a more stable lobby is something that should be prioritized if at all possible

@Rowey you werent shut down, I simply did not have time for anything except paying bills (which is why I did not candidate again)

In my opinion a series of challenges would be better than an actual tutorial, as they would be easier to make and dont baby sit players through timely scenarios, simply choose a map, create said task and record the time it takes for a leaderboard it would also create a seperate area for competative play.

the challanges could start with easy but essential basic skill tasks such as fastest time to create 100 tanks
then fastest time to claim all mexes on a certain map like miricle

to eco challanges like fastest time to break 1k mass income
or fastest time to create a strat bomber then kill something with it

then to more complex things like breaking through a very well defended base

and then these could be placed into another tab where you have matchmaking, custom and co-op
this would allow people to learn things at there own pace and practice particular skills and see how good they are against other times and also allow the top players some bragging rights to the fastest times and the first to use certain stratagies to accomplish those times.

very similar to campaign missions and recorded times but far more specific in nature and smaller in scale

@brutus5000 apologies then

i think casting wise we are more than blessed with gyle. this guy talks like he is and an broadcaster at the bbc for live.

imho the main problems why new players leave (wihout having any data to prove it) who maybe dont have any special connection to rts or remember the game from their youth is the pathfinding combined with the nealry non existant multicore support (and this in an engine that highly relies on cpu). seeing a 6v6 going down in speed after 40 min while everybody got i5's, i7's and ryzens in a game from 2007 is not very pleasant while used-to players still consider a it a fluent gaming experience.

i wouldnt state toxicity as a characteristic of faf, its even lower than in most other games i think, bcs due to the relativly small playerbase you have to play at some point with the same people. i always have a very family feeling playing it:) also i lost it myself here and then i never had any trouble with players over a longer period of time. also i want to emphasize the fact that those bad lobby names indeed stopped (e.g.)

besides buying the royalties and the game code to make a complete 2023 makeover of the engine i think the tutorial campaign would be very very nice. maybe push modded fun modes more with an own ranking (i know we already got so many different rankings). Its incredibly what the sup com engine is capable of, but me, as most i think, never play fun modes. I think there could be even some battle royal with the coms be possible. warcraft III footmen style if anyone remembers:P the coms get tons of upgrades and can vet like 50 times (level up), maybe you can even implement more ultimates trough the over charge function. also im a big friend of the challenge idea. crazy made up scenarios and some objectives. easy to make bronze but hard for 2k's to get platinum, like trackmania.

all just ideas which would be a shitton of work i cant myself do bcs i didnt learned something useful:P