Why does everything suck so much right now?

@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

A lot of headache would have been resolved if you could have convinced people on how area reclaim creates some new strategic opening on FAF but instead all the people that have always not liked it now heard of an implementation and how it’s in faf develop and how there is now a game dev team vote to implement it.

I don't know what to tell you either.

The entire process was natural. A feature that is both wanted and unwanted was proposed and discussed together with both the game and the balance team. A prototype was created. Almost nobody has a development environment, that you can learn about here, therefore it was pushed to FAF Develop. That is exactly why we have FAF Develop - to try and see how things work. Some people did try it. An iteration was made. Some people discussed it again. Another iteration was made. This time there was not just a public Discord discussion about it, but also a forum post. It was discussed again. The game team voted on it based on the current state and we decided not to ship it in its current state.

This all seems very natural to me. And from the outside it is. But what a lot of people do not see, and what is clearly visible in this forum topic, is what Katharses describes:

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

• "Lol devs ruining the game once again"
• "Lol devs not knowing how the game works once again"
• "Im not gonna explain what i dont like because its useless anyway, <insert untrue sarcastic argument that their opinion is being oppressed/ignored anyway>"
• "Why are you even here typing as though you even matter with your stupid contributive mentality lol, go away."
• "you are deliberatley mutilating the game"
• "this is absolutely terrible, no wonder FAF is dying"
• "i haven't tried it but i already know without a doubt its gonna be absolutely aweful"
• <insert dismissive "funny" comment here>

That is bitching, bickering und bashing, not arguing. People talking like this have no desire to actually discuss anything, this tone is just used to shoot down something or somebody, usually in the hope that some buddies will come along and also bitch and bash it strongly enough for it to go away. Of course there are people that don't do this. And of course there are also players that are not high level that do this.

But if you are a high level player and long time FAF community member and you do this, than i have to assume that the reason you talk like this is because you just bash against changes out of reflex which is where my skill-investment argument comes from (or alternatively that you just like to not behave like a decent human being, which is actually worse).

Changes to the game are reasonably well communicated, and the reasonably presented arguments get heard. Sometimes you get the feeling that some people think they are "victim" to all the oppresive changes "imposed" on them.

And i don't doubt that some people have managed to warp their own sense of reality so much that they actually think they are being mistreated somehow. Sadly, self-victimization is en-vouge everywhere today, but it still an incredibly shitty attitude and it deserves to get called out whenever it is seen.

This happened all over. It was a change that I wanted people to give an honest try. Some did, but some people who joined the discussions were there with the only intention to bash, bicker and bitch about it. They did not try the feature. They only attacked the person, his character and his intentions.

Again, I don't know what to tell you. I think the entire process was fine. And all the bickering that some people did was totally unproductive, unnecessary and uncalled for.

You highly exaggerated how many people were in favor of this for one. Secondly those that are in favor of it do not understand the game. Thirdly you have constantly misused what we are arguing. If it was just a bad idea we wouldn't have gotten mad. Also more curse words maudlin pls remove them!

Oh no someone dared to ask about moderation action.

Delete the post.

The sky is falling.

The end has come.

If stating my personal experience with the mod team is considered "insider information" then we got a bigger problem.

Now considering the stuff said in other peoples messages, I find it personally offensive that my post was targeted.

As such please restore it.

Oh no guys another mean rude unproductive argument!

The links you posted are exactly the problem I’m talking about. The entire early implementation process happened on github. Github is not a place that is going to work out well for a discussion on principles, because it’s completely opaque to a general user. Nobody can navigate it or figure out where to find what they need. It’s constantly after the fact. This is why there is like 6(?) people involved in all your links and the majority are game or balance team contributors.

Which brings me to the balance team point. I have no clue when the balance team specifically got involved in the conversation here but I do know this feature was definitely not getting some flying color consensus. I think I was told like one guy openly supported it? Surely this should have been a red flag to check out community onboarding with whether this feature is a good idea for the game.

Both the Discord and especially the Forum thread are will into the dynamic I was talking about where principles are attempted to be shoehorned into the mechanics. It’s about making something people view as bad for the game less bad instead of first figuring out if it is good enough to warrant a mechanical discussion on something like github.

@FtXCommando

The initial discussion was on Discord in the balance team channels. Those channels are private. It is not my choice that those are private, so how can it be my problem?

I'd be nice if you'd ask what happened instead of endlessly describing what you think happened based on your imagination, as a reference to one of my earlier posts.

How that not rude sarcastic and unproductive

You just told me the process and I took it at face value. I then proceed to say where I have no idea when someone was involved and what was information I was operating from with hearsay.

This is the part where I match the passive aggression I have been talking about by saying maybe you should just do a better job explaining the whole story. Very tedious. Can only assume the exclusion of this balance team segment showcases how much care was put into their input!

@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

You just told me the process and I took it at face value. I then proceed to say where I have no idea when someone was involved and what was information I was operating from with hearsay.

This is the part where I match the passive aggression I have been talking about by saying maybe you should just do a better job explaining the whole story. Very tedious.

No, you proceeded to spill your imagination on what you think happened and molted that into a forum post that you presented as the truth but is in fact just miss information, gossip and what not. It is not the first time you did this either.

You could have just asked for more details. It's one line of text. And I would have given it to you.

The entire process was and is as transparent as it could have been at the time. That you feel like 'the community' was not included is because during the development of a feature it is in fact difficult to do so. Even though the feature was on FAF Develop and there were sufficient games with sufficient exposure to a wider audience.

Luckily for you, the game team channels are all public to view and nobody else but @IndexLibrorum and @Fichom are discussing whether this process should be different in the future. You can read up about that on Discord.

I've kind of said all this before, and it is essentially an anti-FAF post. But I am curious about what motivates talented people like @Jip to add features to mainline FAF rather than creating a fork, mod, or their own game.

In my opinion, if you are a good programmer and smart game designer (or think that you are) you should work on your own game instead of contributing features to this community of people who don't want your features. It sounds like a very mean thing to say, but I really don't know why people want to contribute to FAF. I have decent programming skills, have watched/read a massive quantity of game design things on the internet, know a lot about FAF, and am even one of the highest-rated players on FAF. Outside of some very brief moments of delusion, I never considered contributing to FAF to be a reasonable thing to do.

Even if all your ideas are truly amazing and make the game way better, it will still be a dead 20-year-old game. You will get no merit or money or anything for your effort. Everyone will be mean to you on the forum no matter what, and you end up in miserable forum threads like this one. The only benefit I see with contributing to FAF is that you have a pre-existing captive audience, so it is to some degree impossible to fail and you can feel like a smart and successful person and get fans and whatever. The downside is that this preexisting audience is old people playing an old game, so you can't treat it like your own early-access indie title. If you do the bare minimum to keep the project alive it will probably go fine, but even if executed perfectly, getting feedback and implementing new things will have large amounts of friction.

There are finally some reasonable competitors coming along to fill FAF's niche place in the market. Either work on one of them or start your own. Or make something totally different. You will probably still be subjected to the same toxicity as here, but at least you will have your own thing, make money from it, and leave your mark on the world. When I'm not too lazy and depressed to work on stuff, I work on my own little game project. If I ever release a game, I fully expect to encounter toxic assholes like myself, but since it's my own game I can just do whatever I want and tell them to fuck off.

In my twisted view of the world, the toxicity of FAF is somewhat beneficial because driving talented people away to make new things is better than having them contribute to this dead-end project. I thought the people working on [redacted] were pretty cringe and annoying, but since they went off to try their own thing I have a lot of respect for them and look forward to seeing what they accomplish.

There is one thing that should be made crystal clear:

FAF, as a game, does not suck.

The numbers for monthly games and users don't lie- people love playing the game, the network issues are trending back to stability. The maintainers and contributors to the game have done an excellent job in ensuring this game lives on.

Where FAF sucks, then, is elsewhere. Community, expectations, and the experiences of the people who have given the most to the game. It sucks for the dedicated players, the ones who have given the most of their time to the game over the years. It sucks for contributors on every level, from news crew, to game team, to map makers, to modders. Why?

In my opinion, it's because there's a gross disconnect between the expectations of where FAF is and should be going. I believe there was a period of stagnancy after massive changes, such as the engy mod integration, where the meta ideas of FAF stabilised. Jip is not incorrect when he says the first year of work he did mostly aligned with what people expected of FAF and where it should go. But other, bigger changes see much more resistance because the massive majority of pro and casual players got used to the meta developed by the relatively stagnant periods of development.

In my mind, it's a good opportunity for everyone invested to step back and thoroughly evaluate not only their expectations for FAF but what others expect too. FAF cannot stay completely static but it may also be too late for drastic changes. Contributors want space to try new things that may result in great experiences, but they take time and require patience from the people most sensitive to changes like this.

For myself, the answer I found was that making maps is not terribly rewarding as people have developed favourites from the past years, and so I have decided to only contribute when I feel the desire to express myself creatively, rather than chase being on the matchmaker pool every month.

I think a reassessment on where things should go on a personal and game design level is a healthy thing that everyone should be doing right now.

No, it was not as transparent as can be.

We had a giant community choice poll advertised where people could upvote and downvote ideas they submit and we had TMM as one of the three most desired additions to FAF.

Once long term developers could devote time to the project, a plan was formulated on how the whole mechanic would work which was then publicly posted and a news letter was made.

Said policy got feedback where concerns were addressed and critiques were accommodated.

People would ask for updates, people would post about what the roadblocks are or if work has paused because of real life concerns.

TMM launched and the biggest overall concern I recall with said new feature was the map pool made for the beta month.

This does not include the variety of github and zulip conversations but these were about mechanical implementation.

That to me is as transparent as possible.

@thomashiatt said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

I've kind of said all this before, and it is essentially an anti-FAF post. But I am curious about what motivates talented people like @Jip to add features to mainline FAF rather than creating a fork, mod, or their own game.

I think it's a great question, but I do not have the spare energy to answer it right now. Perhaps I'll write a blog post about it if more people are interested in what motivates me.

@thomashiatt do you even play this game anymore or do you just come here to try and tear it down? Your post is completely pointless and serves no purpose.

Not really related to FAF, but there's countless pieces of software you could probably ask "Why would you bother contributing to this?" about. But if we didn't have those contributions from those devoted developers, the open source world would be quite a bit worse off for it. So many projects rely on developers that just pour their heart into projects for reasons that would confuse most people.

That said, this thread as totally devolved. I don't think it's fair to accuse Jip or other contributors of trying to force changes when they've simply followed the established process. If you have a problem with the process, that's a different story that I think could be more civilly addressed, but attacking contributors who have kept this game running makes no sense to me.

In my experience, outside of the tightest core friend groups, it's pretty much inevitable that in any given social group (whether it's in school, at work, in hobby clubs, etc.) there will be people you dislike and disagree with, and there will be people that dislike and disagree with you. It's just the nature of people being different and having different opinions. In real life, however, there is more of a filter as people at least feel the need to be polite to one another that stops conversations from going this toxic. In internet communities, there is no such filter. There is serious evidence that tech platforms fuel increasing political polarization and I think this is just a microcosm of what's going on more broadly.

This problem is compounded as on FAF you have people from literally every corner of the globe, from different countries with completely different cultures, with different social norms and different ways of communicating. Look at how easy it is for people from more similar cultural backgrounds to commit social faux pas: call a woman a cunt in the UK and it's not a big deal; call a woman a cunt in the US and they just might murder you. And this is just between two majority English speaking countries. I do think that some amount of the perceived aggression that people experience in discussions here may genuinely just be due to cultural communication differences, and as people take offence and strike back that's how conversations turn into arguments.

These are not problems endemic to FAF, as some people seem to think: Rowey mentioned moving to the BAR community and contributing there as there instead. If you take a gander at the BAR subreddit, literally half of all the posts are about how toxic the community is and, from what I've heard from players who have tried BAR, it seems even worse. This does feel like the rule, not the exception, among internet communities, especially competitive gaming ones, in general.

I think it's this communication problem, plus a big fundamental disconnect, that really made the entire area reclaim discourse so taxing on the devs and so aggravating for the players.

From what I read of the conversations, the game team simply wanted players to test this new feature they thought was cool and would make the game feel better to play (without perhaps understanding the full history of the discussion that had already existed about this feature in the past decade or the gameplay implications of said feature), and decide whether or not to add it later after feedback.

At the end of the day what ended up happening was that tons of people gave negative feedback about area reclaim, some tested it, found it was as bad as expected, and the game team decided not to add it.

Everything happened as it should.

It was just that the conversations that led to this outcome were so abusive and nasty. We could've had more civilized discussions without the personal attacks and ad hominems and arrived at this outcome all the same. Just discuss the feature. There's no need to attack the person.

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My man AUTO said this to me earlier today. I'm sure that in real life he's a nice guy, that he doesn't interact with people like this, and that he wouldn't be like this had we chatted in person, but because it's a discord chat that will scroll by in minutes, he feels there's no holds barred on what he can say.

I don't have the solution to this problem. People just need to understand that at the end of the day it's just another human being behind a computer. And they don't, or at least they don't act like it. I completely understand if @Jip decide to take his talents elsewhere and I respect the decision after the vitriol he received for investing his time into trying to improve the game.

One thing is very clear after several weeks of watching various posts spiral the way this one has.

There is clearly a cliquey and very immature group of players who seem to only care about tearing down FAF because they don't get their way.... I'm not going to leave FAF cuz I love the game... But I am going to leave coming to the forum. I think everyone involved needs to take a big step back and look in the mirror and grow the hell up!

If you really have such a problem about how things are run sign off and don't sign back in again ever. It's that simple.

FTX ... I've been reading the forums for a long time and you consistently bring a negative immature and unproductive tone to everything you say and do. You should seriously quit this game and never log back in again. When you do casts you seem like a legit dude but when you start to type in the forum you turn into an immature child and you should be ashamed of yourself. You don't take any accountability for things you say or do and you act like it's okay to be such a pathetic child. You're a smart person that's for sure but you're not smart enough to be able to portray your thoughts and ideas without being a complete negative piece of crap. Grow the hell up kid.

Yeah I know I just committed a bannable offense. I'll accept my punishment.

This is the one of the worst threads I have ever seen. Lock it or even better delete the whole thing. And in the future probably no threads with the very productive title of "why does everything suck so much?".

On top of that let me just say one more thing...

Jip is clearly a mature person who understands what it takes to lead. The immature people that have no concept of leadership and project management and workflows that come here and try and tear him down. Everyone else knows who you are but you don't know who you are because you are so delusional that you think you're right.

Jip can't be expected to be perfect but in my time in faf and reading the forums pretty much everyday without responding it is clear that we need him and people like him involved. Do not need people like FTX or Thomas and that little clinky group of immature people who just come here to tear down and destroy because they haven't mentally passed puberty yet.

I think the moderators need to start banning people and cleaning out some of the trash. Put it all under the blanket of incivility.... You'll be doing the community a favor, doing development team a favor.... And 99% of FAF won't even know about it. The people who come to the forums or discord channels that do know about it will suddenly realize their lives are more peaceful cuz they don't have these whiny children around anymore.

Ftx has been the most reasonable out of everyone for the past several months.