What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?

Here is a list of pain points that are frequently mentioned:
playerbase too small
competitive scene dying
map pool not to personal preference
too many changes to the game
connection issues
PvE experience bad
no reason to play
game ui too clunky
balance too slow
players too toxic

Lack of communication between different dev/balance/content teams and community, instability of connections, client being buggy and slow.

The fact that the game is still being actively maintained needs to be praised, though. It's not common to see this kind of activity in a decade old game.

@indexlibrorum said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

Lack of communication between different dev/balance/content teams and community

I don't think that's a fair comment teams share as much as they can, the game dev teams channels are readable by anyone, balance team are posting updates more regularly, by content teams I assume you mean creative team our chat is private but only coz we discuss vault moderation actions

ded gaem cant fill lobby

Biggest issue you’ve already noted (Connection issues)

Outside of that I think for want of a better term I see the ‘New player experience’ the next issue, which covers lots of different subpoints - ie how to retain new players so the playerbase hopefully grows (although noted the growth in previous years is unusual anyway given the playerbase for games is expected to decline over time). I think Penguin did a thread a while ago on this point that got lots of responses.

@blackyps said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

Here is a list of pain points that are frequently mentioned:
playerbase too small
competitive scene dying
map pool not to personal preference
too many changes to the game
connection issues
PvE experience bad
no reason to play
game ui too clunky
balance too slow
players too toxic

does anyone have any further discussions on any of these topics.
Specifically No Reason to Play, Too Many Changes to the game, Competitive Scene Dying, etc.

I will say Connection issues and client stuff is always being worked on but its the most difficult part of faf even Triple A Studios struggle with connection issues nowadays.

Connection issues, client stability is trash and when it works its a laggy mess, communication from dev team to players is inexistent. Theres also a culture of denial when it comes to technical issues.

Balance team seem to be on a diet of shrooms or something of late.

As you and most already said, the connection and stability issues. I'm borderline about to just give up and uninstall. The first game I played in a few days last night, every few minutes someone dropped until literally it was a 2v2 (originally 6v6) and then I dropped so my teammate was left 1v2. It was honestly just a waste of time, and for a game that requires a fairly large time investment, that's just infuriating. What's the point of lobby simming if the game is just gonna drop players constantly or desync.

Competitive scene dying since 2011...

Sounding like an echo chamber in here, but I'll also chime in and say that I've tried to play I think 2 or 3 times over the past couple weeks, and I each time I'd join a lobby and not be able to connect to people that I've never had a connection issue with before. I didn't have a huge amount of time so I just kinda gave up after one or two retries and did something other than FAF.

That & the relatively sad state of affairs for the quality of Setons games at the times I usually can play. Not sure if there are decent general 1800+ team games being hosted these days, if so they're not (usually) at times I can play.

Edit: A random comment/thought, I am a bit surprised at the number of people having client issues. I know this is a classic "works on my machine" comment, but I've never really had issues of note with the FAF client over the years. I think there was a time where the window was buggy and could only be full screened or something like that but that was quite a while back and not something I heard other people complain about.

I've long wanted a built in system to allow players to share their ratings of other players, to enable them to see in the lobby players with a genuine history of lag/dc/bad cpu/toxicity. All it takes is one bad player to ruin the game for 11 or 15 others. Rooting out these negative players is very important to the health of faf imho.

You have said system and you might have just unintentionally poisoned a couple hundred people over the last 3 weeks of faf connection issues.

@ftxcommando said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

You have said system and you might have just unintentionally poisoned a couple hundred people over the last 3 weeks of faf connection issues.

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

Theres also a culture of denial when it comes to technical issues.

Anything but. I see a lot of talk on Zulip and work being done to improve connectivity, FAF has a lot more infrastructure than it looks like and just maintaining it is a big task.

Lack of cope in my ranked and tmm games.

@mazornoob Timely post seeing as we have the first post today from azrael.

If people want to pretend there are no issues when there are dozens of client crashes, hangs and bugs experienced every day in VC, games not launching about 30% of the time thats fine.

Maybe its all being worked on really hard on zulip, I wouldnt know because aside from you and one person mentioning a zulip in passing, it is written nowhere where people are supposed to be informed.

@mazornoob Jip has brought this up before as well, and the response at the time was "What's a Zulip?".

This points back to my comment about lack of communication between playerbase and devteams, but given that Azrael has commited to improving this, this issue might be solved in the future.

I don't feel like playing.

I think the game is great and it’s not a given that we still have the opportunity to play this game today. Sure, there are phases when the game runs better or worse, but what’s important is that there are people who have made an effort and keep FAF running again and again. I think we should be a little more modest and grateful that we still have the opportunity to play this great game. I think we’re just too spoiled today. It may be that there is currently a lull at FAF, but there have always been hype phases so don’t worry and check back every now and then and don’t take everything so seriously!

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

@mazornoob Timely post seeing as we have the first post today from azrael.

If people want to pretend there are no issues when there are dozens of client crashes, hangs and bugs experienced every day in VC, games not launching about 30% of the time thats fine.

Maybe its all being worked on really hard on zulip, I wouldnt know because aside from you and one person mentioning a zulip in passing, it is written nowhere where people are supposed to be informed.

while I understand your frustrations, I want to assure you that Developers are working extremely hard on improving the client constantly.
I'd like to point towards Github & Developer Discussions on the Main FAF Discord.
I'd also like to point out that I do plan on doing dev logs this month as well.