Why does everything suck so much right now?
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Thank you all for your input, it sounds like an empty phrase, but I did read it with great interest and Thomas, I really respect you for being so honest in your post!
I can't comment on everything in detail, but I did read everything. Below you can find a part of my notes that I took that are half-finished reflections on some things that were mentioned here.
Top players that basically only play in tournaments still manage to stay at the top. Does this mean we need to change the meta?
It's a bit absurd that people manage to stay at the top with hardly any practice. People complain about rust all the time and doing anything on a high level requires you to regularly do it or you will get worse over time.
One problem is that medium-good players don't have anyone to practice against, because the top players are so afk.
In this way the problems in the top-rated scene are indeed self-inflicted, because they could partially fix it by being more open to playing with new people. But raising your own competition is irrational if you want to stay at the top with little effort.We could maybe solve some of the problems with low activity by experimenting with tournament formats that require playing the game more, but we have almost zero tournament directors.
I suspect directing tournaments is unfun and takes a lot of time.Do we need to shake up the meta to encourage more high level activity?
It's true that many games use regular changes as a way to drive engagement.
Chess is a popular game and doesn't have any balance patches. Chess is even a solved game in the sense that we can have computers play it better than humans ever could. Still, many people start playing chess.
My personal take is that many games that changing regularly is not necessary. It can be used to cover up mediocre games, because then you can paint over the fact that the core gameplay loop is not very engaging or that there are serious disbalances in the game with the rush of discovering something new and that many op things are not found out yet.
Still, we do have the problem that many people say there is no reason to play the game.@thevvheelie said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
one of the biggest problems is that players should be but aren't getting rewarded as much for making better plays whether thats micro or macro
Can you elaborate what you mean by that? Doesn't the person with the better plays win? I don't really see a way to reward good play inside of the game other than winning the game.
Changes/new features get introduced and it doesn't seem like it matters what kind of feedback people give -> people feel powerless.
We're stuck in a vicious circle where the powers that be say that they are open to feedback, but the feedback is of too low quality. The people at the bottom don't think it's worth it to put in a lot of effort, because they have seen no change even from feedback that they see as good enough to should have passed.
The powers that be spend less effort explaining changes, because they feel how much they get shit on is not a sensible metric to inform their policy, so they go on doing whatever they personally think is in the best interest of the community.When people argue against something and then the original plan gets executed anyway it feels to them like it was all for nothing. How can we encourage them to still voice their opinion next time? Sometimes the feedback changes the long term plans or leads to changes in subtle ways that don't get communicated explicitly. For example I originally was in favor of scrapping global rating entirely. Having read various arguments against that, my opinion is now much more nouanced about this topic. These arguments didn't actively reverse any changes that have been made, but they prevented me from working on things that would have been a bad idea. So it definitely had a positive impact, it was just completely invisible (So thank you people, whose names I unfortunately forgot in the meantime because some of these discussions are years old). I'm not sure how we could improve this.
A general problem with explaining reasoning is that it takes an ungodly amount of time. This is true for both the developer and player side. I wonder if it is actually more time-efficient to take the time to compile relevant arguments once instead of repeatedly arguing with arguments that are only half-formulated each time. Still, doing this takes a lot of time and can't always be done in advance. Nobody expected that changing the HQs would be such a hot topic, so it just got mentioned in a changelog as a minor feature. Somebody was actually complaining that the feature was "hidden" in the wall of text of the rest of the changelog. It's obviously a bit ridiculous to demand that each feature has to be prominently displayed at the top for the people that stop reading after the first paragraph because that is literally impossible to do for each feature. So for every change you have to guess how important it is, to decide how much effort you put into promotion and explanation. You inevitably get it wrong sometimes and then people say with the power of hindsight that feature X should have oBVioSlY been promoted better and sometimes it's really hard to discern if you indeed made a mistake there or if it's just an entitled ass speaking to you.
In general we can't know what the average player wants, we can only do educated guesses. It seems the most sensible way to decide changes is to collect arguments for and against it and then weight the arguments.
Having multiple people complain about something does have utility because it makes it less likely that the person complaining is some sort of outlier and is just claiming that everyone else feels the same. But it doesn't make sense to define some sort of threshold as in "if 10 people complain it gets scrapped". -
So I'm just a retired old man who is as much removed from FAF as the average FAF player is from normalcy. Though, being this absurdely old (and obviously exceedingly wise as well) I want to give my extremely valuable input:
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It is impressive as hell that the same discussion that was held in 2013 and 2015 and 2019 and basically every year still is ongoing. A very motivated dev (what specific name this dev has has always changed throughout the years) comes up with amazing new ideas for the game/balance/whatever, and gets pushback on some of those ideas, from whoever the remaining top players are at the time.
Usually, as a result, some ideas get stopped in their tracks, some get implemented. Then at least one or so of the top players get depressed, or more depressed than they already are, and eventually the little drops of accrued depression lead to them leaving the game (usually permanently, or in steps of decreasing activity, inversely correlated to their depression).
Hence we have the same development year after year: The top playerbase gets thinner and weaker (not just physically). Yet the argument keeps getting made "the game has to change with my amazing ideas, it will finally get new top players, more activity, etc). How the actual banana is that STILL the argument, after more than an entire decade of this cycle repeating over and over? This is so insane it made me write a forum post. -
Now you might ask, oh, smart and sarcastic BC_Balkheart, what to do?? Well, the game does NOT have to change much at all, as none of those old tasty legendary games have to. (Supcom, Aoe2, Chess as my personal fetish games)
Tons of changes make comebacks for old players more difficult than they need to be (e.g. me), and are irrelevant for the grand total playerbase, which is weak enough to not even realize what was changed. Changes that are greatly appreciated are things like better sim speed (FAF has done quite a bit with this, its really good), balance fixes that pertain to the egregious issues (absurdely OP unit XY). Things that are also greatly appreciated are tasty tourneys with cool casting and fun settings. It would feed the nostalgia, which is one of the absolute main "selling" points of FAF, cause face it, this game is old as fuck and has very obvious weaknesses that won't disappear. What it has is amazing mechanics that are appealing to a small group of nerds + a great nostalgia factor for old people like myself (and there are more old people, not just me, although that might just be the dementia speaking).
On a final note, how deranged does a person have to be to think they know whats good for the game, if they dont remotely understand it (sub 2500 rating or whatever is equivalent to 2013 rating of 2000), and dont have appreciable experience in high lvl play in other RTS or games. Although I think this attitude of thinking they understand the game is mostly why those people suck too. Rant over.
Good luck boyas
(postivity quota; fulfilled)Ban Anime
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nice one blackheart, the only sensible post in this whole thread. the area reclaim idea has been played with at least once in the dim past already and rejected
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FaF has continued the development trajectory of NOT prioritizing mechanical execution as the primary differentiator in player skill. This is a mistake and has resulted in reduced skill expression and reduced strategic depth. This kind of design in not appealing to competitive players.
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Could you elaborate what you mean with that? It sounds interesting, but I can't follow. Do you have examples for me?
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@blackyps If you are interested in this idea, then here is a detailed write-up.
What is considered a “UI mod” here would get you instantly banned or produce a large player outcry if implemented by the developers of other RTSs. Implementing a mod such as adv. target priority into StarCraft2 would instantly make the game less interesting and cause large balance issues. This is not even mentioning the competitive integrity aspect.
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ATP literally increases the depth of unit interaction. It enables choices that are not mechanically feasible without it due to how the game works. It was a problem when it was applied to all units universally because the game is not built for a 4 second ACU misposition resulting in game over because a shift+g of 40 tanks ends up taking 10k hp from your ACU and forcing the minimum of a draw.
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SC2 and FAF are different enough mechanically that I don't think the targeting priorities are even comparable. Not to mention, actions in SC2 are near instant, whereas in FAF they have a 500ms delay. Microing targeting is far more feasible in SC2 whereas in FAF it's just an infuriating experience where by the time your attack order processed and the units stopped moving they're probably already out of range of what you targeted. Or you're telling your GC to manually target power so it stops moving and then doesn't even fire (A frequent experience lately) vs using ATP and it killing power while continuing to move.
There are many things I'd argue are pushing the limits of what should be considered a UI mod, but ATP should honestly just be made part of the game.
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I'm an average player. I can't say recent or not so recent departures of top faf players have affected me negatively in any meaningful way. The fact of the matter is they do best what all other members of this community do: play the game. When they leave, another good player replaces them, tournaments don't stop happening entirely, there's just a drop in quality that's imperceptible to someone like me. Maybe if these players also happen to be amazing streamers or TDs, the impact of their departure is more palpable.
But devs are not like that. There isn't always someone to immediately replace them. I don't even know who it was that handled lobby server development before they left, but apparently nobody has filled their shoes a year or more after the fact and development on features that require such a person has stopped entirely. Such departures affect me a lot more, since basically all of the best features to have come about in the last few years have relied on very few key individuals being motivated enough to implement them. And they don't just affect me, they affect every player, no matter their rating.
I wouldn't trade TMM or mapgen or 20% sim speed for 1000 2500+ rated players because I wouldn't be playing faf today without people like Ze_PiLoT, in spite of all the pros that had already stopped playing before he stopped developing. The ideal would be to have good communication and understanding between both groups, but sometimes it seems like each are focused on different goals and no amount of communication can fix that - what's needed instead is compromise. And when such compromise is not offered, I would urge you, devs, to consider ignoring feedback that's not constructive to your goals, before you consider halting your contributions or leaving.
As for features where gameplay and balance overlap, I would urge both the dev and balance teams to consider that yes, this is an RTS game and micro is important, but what's very specifically different about this particular RTS should be emphasized. I think the flow economy is one example, but a more relevant one to recent conversations is the focus on the big decisions and away from accurate micro evident by the unprecedented level of automation (at the time) the original devs went to great lengths to implement.
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@Ganima that's an interesting article, albeit a bit confusing at first because the author includes "reliably remembering to do things" and map awareness in mechanics. So it includes physical mechanics (clicking buttons) as well as mental mechanics (not forgetting about the units you sent to raid, not forgetting to scout, actually noticing the HQ upgrade that your scout reveals etc.). That is a broader definition than I think most people have in mind when talking about mechanics because I think most people primarily think about the physical part.
In this game most people struggle with the mental mechanics.
I'm not a very good player, but I can't think of anybody that I would consider to have mastered the game mechanically.
I also don't agree with everything the article states. Poker doesn't have any mechanics that you need to practice but still allows for different strategies, something that the author seems to rule out.Anyway I don't think we have to discuss the article in depth for the further discussion, can you give me some examples where in your opinion "FAF has continued the development trajectory of NOT prioritizing mechanical execution as the primary differentiator in player skill"? I would still like to know.
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FAF is the direct result of the inputs that went into modifying SC:FA. If you concluded that FAF sucks then you know based on who made the decisions to change it to what it is has the culpability. You point out a lack of vision, well it does not seem that the people making decisions about the game were selected based on the vision they presented or got overwhelming support to do what they set out to do and are actually doing.
I can only say the process of selecting the Balance Team is the culprit and all other reasons are an extension thereof. There is this famous saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Showing the community that power when forcing through bad changes irrespective of the opposition is just asking to ctrl-k your player base.
Contributors come up with good ideas sometimes that just don't fit the game but if there is no stated vision then how would a developer know that his idea while functional would be a waste of time? I personally do not see any reason to get involved as a contributor with the people who have the final say at the moment, others probably took longer than me to see the light but eventually we all see the light
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- Now you might ask, oh, smart and sarcastic BC_Balkheart, what to do?? Well, the game does NOT have to change much at all, as none of those old tasty legendary games have to.
Is vanilla supcom just as good as FaF? The need for all the accumulated changes that turned the former into the latter speaks to the goals of those that made them, over which different people might disagree. You can't define NEED universally, but the discrepancy between these 2 player bases is evidence that the improved version is preferred by many, evidence that those goals were aligned with what the players wanted, and thus that the changes were, in this narrow sense, needed.
This is easy to see with the benefit of hindsight, and glossing over details. Of course it's harder to see before each change is put to the test. Many such changes were rolled back after their drawbacks were realized - something that is always an option. But if nobody made the changes in the first place, we'd still be stuck with vanilla supcom.
It's better to have devs motivated to try things out even if they turn out not to work, than to have no devs.
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I must admit I’m not that interested in defending my opinion. I have been a part of some other open-source games, and I don’t look back fondly on such discussions, since they usually lead nowhere.
I will answer only @blackyps since you read the article. Some examples: auto overcharge, target priority, selection deprioritizer and now possibly area reclaim. I think I saw a "UI mod" that automatically launches tac. missiles.
PS: poker has a lot of RNG
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The FAF community has always been conservative regarding changes that touch gameplay in any form. And parts of the community have always been rude, ignorant or lacking empathy with other people's opinions when discussing anything.
The "Grubby attitude" will never be the majority here. And FAF will never have a balance team that has enough authority and consensus-making ability to push through meta-changes in quick succession.
If think there is no choice than to accept this as fact. It might change in the future, but i doubt any single person can really impact this, and i also don't think it is necessary to be happy as a contributor / developer.
If a FAF contributor wants to make changes to FAF gameplay (even if they have a perfect technical solution), what they DO NOT necessarily have is community consensus.
Pushing things through without "enough" consensus is the path to burnout and unhappiness. If a contributor wants to keep having fun doing things around FAF, this is the one thing that they should not do. The technical solution that the contributor has built here does not really matter, other than that it works! It is the consensus that matters and the consensus alone that has the power to bring that change into standard gameplay in a way that everybody is happy with.
And here is in my opinion the common pitfall for contributors:
Contributors burn out trying to create consensus for their proposed change.The reason for that is that trying to create consensus in a short amount of time is often practically impossible. No amount of playtesting, putting things into news, letting Gyle talk about them or making a forum posts will be able to convert a change from "controversial" to "generally looked forward to".
In my opinion, the only way to really do things happily is to do them primarily for yourself. Make a gameplay change that YOU want to play and play it together with people that also like it.
And i believe that good changes will eventually mature into having consensus to be put into the game (might take years but still). However, let other people argue for that. The contributor's job should then be to market whatever they made, so that other people can find it, but thats pretty much it.
This is for example how map generator got into ladder without a lot of problems. It took a lot of time, and in the eyes of many that is a good thing.
If a contributor absolutely wants to (and is motivated by) bringing changes to FAF quickly and in short succession, they must indeed only make absolutely uncontroversial changes (like the performance improvements).
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A UI mod that automatically launches tac missiles would not be allowed, can't comment if such a mod exists in reality.
Thank you for providing examples -
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@phong said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
I wouldn't trade TMM or mapgen or 20% sim speed for 1000 2500+ rated players
That might be the easiest decision I’d ever have to make regarding FAF. Even including trading all 3, really. One is something that will never happen, the other is things that obviously can happen. The one that can’t happen also includes 1000 people that are evidently highly invested in the game and have a much higher rate of contributive participation than other pools of players so they have decent odds of implementing the evidently implementable so you have your cake and eat it too.
This is without factoring in that to have gained 1000 2500+ players you had to apply said growth to the rest of the FAF population pyramid and have also proceeded to increase the playerbase by two orders of magnitude.
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Considering a large goal of things like mapgen and TMM is to keep FAF alive and the community engaged, I can't think of a better trade than getting 1k new Tagada/Farms/BH level players. That magically happening would do more for FAF than basically anything I could think of, beside the number being even larger than 1000.
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For me, the big negative is seeing people leave that we have played with for years and look like they will never return. (Recent people being Sladow and Terarii). I'm still fairly new to the high-rated scene maybe around 2/3 years which isn't that much in regards to others. As there are only a few 'decent' players we all play with each other 90%+ of the time, which has resulted in making some good relationships. So seeing these people just pack their bags and leave is sad and negatively impacts the high-rated community.
Not that long ago you could easily get high-rated games on the weekends and sometimes during the week. The above results in the only time there is a decent game is when Farms is streaming. Even at the moment when Farms is streaming, it feels like few people are playing.
I have no intention of quitting FAF, as I have very fond memories of this game (this is the first game I ever remember playing as a child). The only reason I'd quit would purely be because of a lack of games, or if the game is just too unstable for whatever reason.
I think the community is still great there are always new people trying the game but what can we change/revert to entice old players to come back, without losing new/existing players?
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The question why the high rated scene is dwindling while the rest of the community is growing is indeed very interesting and warrants its own thread. I wanted to start that soon, but if someone wants to go ahead and open it, feel free to do so. I will then comment my thoughts there
