The End of FAF

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

@Evildrew I will not disclose who helped me with creating the grievances in my post unless they want to.

I totally get that you are not making that decision for them, you clearly respect their rights to anonymity and to make that decision of outing themselves. Would be nice if you respected other people's rights in the same manner and not speak for the community, which you and these 6 people clearly do not represent when making your claims.
Good luck though with getting your grievances resolved.

@ftxcommando your base would be the last i'd blow myself up in ️

@thewheeler said in The End of FAF:

@blackyps said in The End of FAF:

I frequently see "there are no other high level players to play against, so it dries up" but when the game was new, nobody was good at all. How did these people manage to push the level of play to heights that nobody had played on before? Why is it not working now?

Honestly, it feels like your skill at games is decided by your genetics.
Some people get to 2k+ level or its equivalent in other games in less than a few years, some players get hardstuck in elo hell at <1500 for literally tens of thousands of games, like they just perform a script, without ever changing it or improving.
we should introduce gaming skill-based eugenics

That's not necessarily true. I understand the game far better than I can play it and a lot of that comes down to me not being able to use a mouse and keyboard so well because of the state my hands are physically in.

I never got the feeling that Wreck was trying to speak for me or for the community at large here. By that logic, no one could post any topics of concern anywhere on the forums ever which is obviously something that would be horrible for the community.

Anyway, there are some spectacularly bad takes in this thread now, but there are one or two related points that are interesting to me. Those being: why are there fewer active high rated players, and the related why are the newer high rated players worse than the OGs.

I'll try to tackle both at the same time since they're, imo, closely related. I feel like I've been high rated adjacent for a while now, hovering 1900-2k in both mapgen and setons, and I'm sure I'd get to about the same in 3v3 and 4v4 tmm if I actually played them. My personal top two blockers for improving are: it takes far more effort for me at this point than I'm willing to put in and even when I was more active I could barely play with top players due to my timezone. The latter is getting worse as fewer and fewer top players are active, and due to rating inflation there are arguably worse players at 2k now than in the past. Some might even argue I'm one of them

It's hard for me to say, but imo the last point is slightly overblown outside of a few niche areas. Not going to name names, but I can think of more than one person who has massive rating inflation because they have one or two troll strategies that consistently win vs the 1300s they play vs but get wrecked vs competent 1800+ rated players. This is more of a thing in burger Setons or presumably gap as well rather than mapgen though, where there are few if any high rated players keeping this in check. For example, when Yudi was active in these games this rating inflation was much less severe. Due to that last bit, I don't think I see this quite as much in more generic team games. Granted, I also haven't played in 6 months, but I'd be surprised if the average 2k in those games are very noticeably worse than 2ks from 5 years ago. It might just be rose tinted glasses for the past making it feel that way.

Back to the first point about fewer top players, I just think most 2ks are like myself - don't have the interest or drive to keep improving at this point because there's so little competition and then there are a tiny amount of people like Farms who are far above the random 2ks. Imo it's hard to improve when you're already the best in most of the lobbies that you play in unless you put in a lot of work outside of it, so those who aren't playing with the handful of top players right now are going to be pretty stuck.

How to fix this? Honestly I don't have great ideas there, only two things come to mind and both are related to 1v1 ladder, since I think the death of higher rated ladder play is a very large part of this.

1. Bring back the feature from the python client that tells you when someone your rank is queuing ladder. People have been asking for this forever, and it feels like such an uncontroversial and low hanging fruit to achieve.
2. Throw even more money at it. Top active ladder players get a cash prize each season if eligible. More tournaments. Even bigger LoTS prizes, though iirc last years was quite large so probably not much can be done there. Let former top players know that these prizes exist and that there's more competition. I think the ship has sailed with most of them, but who knows? This also might incentives some current ~1800+ players to improve.

Again, particularly the 2nd idea, isn't the best idea. It's just what I have off the cuff.

Hopefully my stream of consciousness rambling makes at least some amount of sense and people don't think I'm way off

Yes I was not expecting everyone to agree with what I wrote but I know for a fact that a lot of people are not happy right now and they are leaving this game. I emphasized the community in my post because the people who are quitting are essential members of the community in my opinion so I tried to voice their grievances and mine to the best of my ability and what they and myself believe needs to change to stop more elite players and community members from quitting.

@maudlin27 said in The End of FAF:

Also while we have you saying FAF is dying because (amongst other reasons) the mods have cracked down on insults, we have the most active thread on the Supcom steam discussion pages prompted by someone saying people should stay away from FAF because (amongst other reasons) the mods do nothing about insults.

Sone excerpts from the OP of said post.

"Stay away from FAF
It used to be a great thing. As it is now, developers are completely incompetent: the real developers left long ago and what's left only add more bugs with every patch they release, not knowing the first thing about programming, and the moderation and community is, for the most part, just a bunch of mindless fascists.

It's still one of the best RTS games ever made. Just don't fall for FAF. The people involved are toxic, rightist simpletons. Moderation is openly leading the persecution of people who are different in some way. It's just one big circle jerk of rednecks you wouldn't want to get involved with, if you're remotely right in the head.

I'm not one of those LGBTQ+ radicals, but I did witness how sexual orientation was brought into the "discussion" on discord for no other reason than a profile pic and a person got ganged up on by these pitiful creatures, attacked for what they are and then banned for trying to defend themselves.

Stay away from this filth. They are not worth the air they are breathing."

"Just from the top of my head:

• They broke the connection loss recovery (the most important part of the game). It used to be that you could still reconnect after a minute of silence or more. That hasn't been working in years now. A few seconds of silence and you're gone.

• Connection losses between 2 people in a match have become significantly more frequent at some point, not that long ago.

• Moderation doesn't give a about griefers and abusers or flamers/harassers. The report system is still in place from the time when people who were actually competent were still working on the FAF client, but there are only clowns dealing with reports now. I had times when a player lost connection to 3 or more others, but instead of leaving, so the rest can go on, they just went silent and sat it all out until, half an hour later, all the others had finally given up and left. And they don't ban these or other griefers. They don't give a .

• Factory queues often don't respond anymore. They just broke it and never fixed it again.

• Artillery stopped firing uphill at some point for no apparent reason. Never got fixed either.

• The player score/rating system is an absolute joke. It's made for 1v1 matches, win or lose, nothing else matters - except nobody plays 1v1. Most people play 6v6 or other team vs team setups. As a result, ratings are just completely random and lobby hosts stack their games, instead of using opti (auto-balance), to ensure they don't drop to a 400 where they can't join any serious games anymore. Most games are decided by who has fewer disconnects anyway.

• The game still constantly freezes and crashes, usually on starting. Maybe 1 in 4 games started can actually continue at all, and that's a generous estimate. Rarely any of those also finish without several disconnects, though. When it's not the crashes, then it's lag from bad p2p connections beyond playability. I'm sure it would be possible to do a stress test while still in the lobby before starting and figuring out first-hand that the match is an unplayable lag-fest...

And on top of that, you can't even properly report an issue with bugs or balance without getting swarmed by the local redneck trolls on discord. It's mostly a place where idiots hang out, circle jerk, post funny gif memes or gang up on "woke" people."

"Everything I posted is factually right. Some fanboys jumping in trying to undermine someone's credibility without actually having a point - that can actually be considered trolling and adds to internet toxicity. You fit in nicely on their discord. You can howl and circle jerk with the other trolls there in mutual confirmation, if you aren't already.
"You can play something else", lol. I am... You can bring up that kindergarten-level argument whenever someone critcises anything. Only shows where you are coming from."

That's some parts of the post in question. Makes you really wonder how genuine it is. Considering the man behind it seems pretty butthurt due to his own lack of understanding.

Honestly, just go read it: https://steamcommunity.com/app/9420/discussions/0/4336474207081809919/

It makes it pretty clear dude is a bad actor.

I keep saying the fact I hit 2k says more about the state of the community than my ability. There's a definite drop in quality of players at the higher end, it's contributing to the rating inflation. And as Excelsior said, why try to get better when you're already near the top, even if the current top is far worse than it used to be. FAF desperately needs start making %1 improvements rather than -1% setbacks that are slowly but surely driving people away.

The only improvements I can really think about are on the actual development side:

• Jip improving sim speed so much over the last few years (You're a god for this tbh, easily FAF Hall of Fame)
• (Sorry I can't remember your name right now) trying to rebuild the ICE adapter in the face of all the recent issues

The list of -1% setbacks have already been listed elsewhere here & in the other thread. But it continues to grow, and we continue to lose valuable talent in the community. I mean shit, talk about a -0.5% setback, the maplist in the client no longer autoselected the latest mapgen but defaulting to the top of the list, something I made a thread about and got no attention for. Losing a player such as Sladow who is actually a high rated (not inflated) player AND someone willing to contribute back and train new players should frankly be a massive wake up call that shit is wrong.

Honestly, there were waves of 2ks leaving in the past, just think of it as the survival of the fittest and faf evolution, prob 10 years into the future we get full gual gap faf and ladder would be treated as we treat dual gap now, who knows, if you dont want to be a part of it then dont, quite simple

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

Banning players for base control k, banning and censoring players who use words that individual moderators do not like, and lastly the username rule change updates. All of these policies are widely disliked by the community but they are enforced anyway.

THIS IS NOT THE PROBLEM.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

Final Thoughts
An honorary mention that I did not include in this post is that a number of community members have also expressed frustration regarding the development and balance team in relation to things such as tele Billy and area reclaim but I will leave that for another post.

THIS IS THE MAIN PROBLEM. BALANCE DESPOTS!!!!

Yea there were several players that shared that sentiment.

This thread is very confusing for me. It's very hard for me to tell who is telling the truth.

@ganima said in The End of FAF:

This thread is very confusing for me. It's very hard for me to tell who is telling the truth.

Its not really about truth or lies its about differences of opinions in which case everybody is telling the truth.

It is clear that there are so many passionate people who are a part of this community and I trust that such debates will make the community stronger and that people who may have chosen to leave will return and help build it further.

I totally agree on the point of selfishness of moderation, I have not really seen people, even the ones who NEVER got banned, that say that the moderation team is just. I will not name high-rated never(or very rare) banned players, who agree on the point that moderation team is not to be understand in most of the cases. One friend of mine who used to play a lot was banned for the nickname containing a word "Sex" (full nickname: Honey_Sex), which moderation thought is offensive. This is strange, cause I have never seen a person who was offended by his nickname (except for moderator who gave the perma ban). This is just one example of moderation team acting subjective, rather than acting objective.
Another reason for me is perma bans, I totally agree that the perma ban should exist, however I do not agree on some cases, which ppl receive perma ban for. Cheating should be banned forever in my opinion, however toxicity should not. I was the reason of perma ban once (my report), but when I found out that the person got perma, I textem him and mod team to retrieve my report, I know that it is not reversable, but I do not think that the person should be banned for toxicity, cause there are good mechanics in game that give you the possibility not to see the messages from the person, like foe or chat mute.
Another reason of perma ban being not relevant to FAF is that the community is not as big as I wish it would be, so in my opinion we have to consider that these actions are mostly held against very active players, which is also not as good for the bigger community.

@jip

Honestly, I'm not sure what is the correct answer, as FAF operates on a decentralised communication aspect. I'm not sure how the other teams have handled it, but here's how we handled it when I joined the Personal Trainer Team:

1. We drafted worthwhile topics.
2. We had a meeting (with nearly 100% Trainer Attendance + Babel & OGW_PR_Outreach)
3. We discussed these topics, verifying that the problem is commonplace and began to provide solutions and feedback (everyone contributed to each problem in some way, making sure we had every insight we possibly could have acquired)
4. We narrowed it down to two insights that would work best for the problem, and then had a vote
5. We documented this meeting, including all important notes and changes to start the shift for a slightly more centralised approach to keep each other up to date.

Now this won't work in larger scales, as this was meant to address several issues within the Trainer Team, although I think this is where Team Leads could possibly have a bit more impact within their respective teams.
I'd propose for most major changes to have a representative of most if not all teams to keep everyone up to date, as this should then allow everyone to keep up to date due to the flow of information from the teams to the community, or for the Team Leads to just be informed and then they forward it to us, and then we follow the same step in keeping everyone up to date.
This may have some flaws I cannot foresee due to conditional bias, and I think teams could have some pretty qualitive and quantitively varying insights to changes before it's published, hopefully lessening the impact of issues like this in the future.

Another solution I'd like to put forward is newsletters or pings for discussions in this matter, as I think they already exist (correct me if I am wrong) in FAF development, but for changes regarding moderation changes and stuff like that, I think the outward communication before publishes may have a similar effect, and it may solve the communication on the moderation game dev or whoever's end, leaving it to the players to then keep their end of the deal of promising better two way communication.

Perhaps you'll disagree, and that's fine. But this is my opinion of someone who's seen this before and realistically the more insights that are provided the better.

Thanks @Strydxr , I think the steps (1 through 5) you mention is exactly what the moderators team did. But they can't be as open about what was discussed exactly of course given that they are moderators.

Fun fact: It's also what the game team did yesterday , but about different topics of course.

@strydxr said in The End of FAF:

Another solution I'd like to put forward is newsletters or pings for discussions in this matter, as I think they already exist (correct me if I am wrong) in FAF development

We can create a news post about it. I'll ask Deribus when is the best time to do that.

@plunder I agree and briefly touched on it in one of my posts that there are likely alot of players who are currently banned that deserve the opportunity to return. Take some of my early 1000 games and if people reported me I would probably have been banned because I was toxic.... More so I returned toxicity 10-fold to those who showed it to me which is not the way to go. My last 3,000 games I've been pretty chill and I feel I definitely deserve to be here. It would have been a shame if I got banned during that first stretch and would have never been allowed to experience this game the way I have over the past 3,000 games. I try hard now to contribute to the community as best I can when I can and I'm sure there are a lot of others who would as well if they had the opportunity to return.

Not sure how we communicate with people who have been banned to let them know they are unbanned and they can return but I think it's something that should be considered.

@dorset said in The End of FAF:

I agree and briefly touched on it in one of my posts that there are likely alot of players who are currently banned that deserve the opportunity to return.

General info: perm bans are very rarely handed out. Players that have received temporary bans for particular offenses in the past will notice that new bans will be increasingly longer. At some point this leads to the player being discussed with the moderator team, the whole file being reviewed, and in some cases a perm-ban being issues. However, it almost never happens that a player accumulates enough tempbans that we decide a permban is in order; from the top of my head I can think of maybe 5 instances in the past year.

Bans can be appealed at any time, and we have previously revoked perm-bans in the past. They are seriously considered after some time has passed, but they have to be requested by the player themselves.

Naughty Words:
Nobody should be banned for exercising their free speech rights. If you don't like it then you can block them. It is that simple. JT is one of the most toxic Setoners and several Setoners have responded by refusing to play with him. It is that simple. There is no reason to ban people. It is hard enough as it is to fill a lobby.

Ctrl K base:
There is no reason to ctrl K your base. The proper procedure is to recall first. If the recall falls then you can ctrl k your com. And preferably you ctrl k your com outside of your base or near the enemy units although I have not always done this.

No game is 100% lost. If you understood just how likely FAF is to desync then you would play on as long as possible. The losing team has every right in the world to play on in hope of desync. You may not consider this to be an "honorable" way of fighting but this is the way that FAF awards points. Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

Not to mention jt actively reports people and the moderation team takes him seriously despite being blacklisted among most of the setons community.This is why I troll about the moderation team being consistent because if they were so many more players would be banned and there simply won't be any more games. However games are absolutely lost past a certain point in higher level games and 1 player can refuse to recall and waste everyone's time however the moderation team always comes up with something to ignore this scenario.