Why does everything suck so much right now?

@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

I would trade all of those for a thousand 2500+ players in a heartbeat, and if you wouldn't, I think you've lost the plot a little. The ultimate goal of making these features (TMM, maps, simspeed improvements) is to get new players and retain old ones in the first place.

If we have a thousand 2500+ players, then, assuming we maintain the same monthly ratio of 2500+ players to total players as we currently have (likely a very conservative assumption), we would have more than a million active players within a given month. Can you imagine what FAF would be like? Just for reference, OSRS has less than half a million unique monthly gamers and their biggest content creator earned $1,354,805.74 between Aug 2019 to Oct 2021. FAF would be absolutely booming. Tournaments, content creators, streamers, new maps, new features, everything. It would mean that FAF is one of the largest competitive games in the world. So if any of you happen upon a genie that offers this trade, please take it.

@phong FTX's last sentence already covered that:

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.

You now have tens (hundreds?) of thousands of new and active players to play with at lower levels that necessarily now have to exist to support the 1000 new top level pros.

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

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

Would be a good thread potentially, I only have at best bad ideas on how to address this unfortunately but I did make a post here covering some of how I feel about it.

@Ganima @BlackYps I remember an old post from Tagada talking about UI mods which directly addresses that mods like ATP actually increase strategic diversity. I think FTX somewhere talks about that in relation to area reclaim as well but can't seem to find it now.

Competitive players do not draw in casual players, competitive players are born from casual players. And casual players exist because of a good game with good infrastructure. I think it's good to give this video a view:

• Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros

I'd recommend that to @Blackheart too, since being good at a game does not make you a good game designer, and being bad at the game does not make you a bad game designer.

And in general, I can highly recommend people to watch this too:

• The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why.

For the average player the value of matchmaker, the neroxis map generator, the vaults (seriously - these are so important it is unreal), coop and AI development create much, much, MUCH more value than the small group of top faf players. And I'd pick those - or another Brutus, Sheikah or P4block or two - over the additional 1000 top faf players at any moment in a heart beat.

Don't get me wrong - players that contribute (constructively) in discussions or via teams create value to the community. But just because you're a top faf player does not mean you make value. It just means you're good at the game, and nothing more.

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

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. (...)

I think your post is spot on, all of it - including the part about developers. Imagine not having Brutus, Sheikah, P4block and the like during the DDOS attacks. We wouldn't even be able to have this discussion on the forums right now .

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

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

https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15548
I don't even have to write anything

The difference now I guess is that ladder isn't dying but dead and tournaments are almost dead, but I can't comment much on this since i now have been inactive for years.

Reading through all this I can't help but wonder if it would make sense to have a pro level version of FAF. Kind of like we have FAF develop, Nomads and xtreme wars could we not have a pro level game type that used the preferred settings of all the 2K plus ranked players? FAF Pro? This game mode would still be ranked and would allow a suitable place for people who hit a certain level where they actually notice the difference between an early engineer dying or not or the difference between manually reclaiming and attack moving or patrolling. It would also allow lower ranked players to play that game mode if they so chose or to join in on a Semi-Pro level game such as 1400+ plus lobbies or something like that considering top level players tend to host such lobbies regularly. I personally would love to try a version of FAF that is more indicative of the way the game was played 5 to 10 years ago or whatever the Holy Grail of FAF is that the pro level group tends to reminisce about and would not have a problem if my rank was affected if I lost such a match similar to how I will play nomads or Extreme wars from time to time knowing my rank will be affected.

I personally can't imagine the game without advanced Target priorities, auto overcharge and even some of the implemented eco tools such as auto ringing/upgrading mexes and radars because my APM just won't allow for me to play the way it used to be and still enjoy myself but I do think that perhaps it's not ideal to have one standard set of rules that apply to pro-level and to the regular folk.

I'm sure all of these high-ranked players who keep speaking up about how everything is going to crap around here would have no problem being part of a committee to come up with the optimal set of rules for pro-level players and then it would just take some development time to create that game type.

How hard would it be to make another game type such as nomads or FAF develop?

@exselsior I don't really understand your meaning about players at lower levels. I guess I can understand that it takes a bunch of players to find a few good ones, but my point was rather that if push comes to shove, I'd rather lose a pro than a dev. No offense intended, and not talking about anyone in particular: it's just that the latter seem more irreplaceable and their contributions have impacted me more and seem more lasting overall.

They are also more likely to consider the needs and wants of average and new players than the former, in my experience, which affects both how many new players we get and retention to a larger degree than catering to the veterans, at least while the player base is growing. I think player base growth and nr of games played are the actually meaningful indicators of dev performance, and by those metrics, things do not, in fact, suck so much.

Ideally dialogue would not be painful enough to drive either away, but it seems things are not ideal.

I like that this has slowly morphed into “hey so who would you hypothetically shoot in the head, the dev that is here for the casual gamer or the high rated pro also there is no overlap between these groups at all ever”

How about we just don’t do bad changes for the game/community? People are frustrated because things are happening that don’t have a justification beyond “it’s cool and new” or because some players said “they want it” ergo 17,000 players actively want it whether developer or moderator or community related.

I can stomach people doing changes that I dislike to a point, but I also am not here to deal with slop at all times and I have hit my slop point. That’s the point of the thread.

@ftxcommando sure. As long as agreement about what "bad" means is reached without driving people away, should be a good strategy. Failing that, I'd rather let the devs have first say, trusting they'll come around once the evidence is in either way and revert bad changes.

Getting back to the thread topic, things do not suck, in my opinion. The fact that the title assumes they do makes me worried BlackYps might be bending the ear a bit too much towards the moaners. I urge him to start ignoring them if it ever becomes too much to bear, instead of stopping his contributions, if that thought ever crosses his mind.

@ftxcommando nobody is shooting anyone in the head here so don't be so dramatic. Phong is making a pretty good point.... I get paid a good salary to do my job and sometimes the complaining and whining of of the masses makes me wonder why the hell I do it.... I can't imagine being a Dev for FAF doing it all for free...

I don't think anyone wants anyone to leave... But if we lose the devs we have nothing.

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

Competitive players do not draw in casual players

Sorry but I entirely disagree with this. In pretty much every competitive game or sport that I can think of, people are drawn in by the best of the best.

People get into basketball because they see someone like Steph Curry do some absolute black magic on TV and are just inspired by that and want to do it themselves. You can go to any public court and probably find someone trying to emulate his shooting form jacking up terrible 3 point shots.

People get into chess because they watch Magnus Carlsen play with 10 seconds on the clock drunk and bantering with his friends vs other incredible top chess players who have 5 minutes on the clock and he still wipes the floor with them.

I saw ZLO do absolute wizardry on some Youtube casts; I saw Lu_Xun and csoller put up an incredible fight vs Brainwashed and Brainfart and imagined myself in their shoes; I saw Blackheart and Blodir demolish more average players in a 2v6 and just thought, damn, that was incredible, I want to be able to do that.

This is the sort of stuff that gets people hooked and gets a foot in the door, not stuff like area reclaim. New players do not care about those kinds of features; these kinds of features only affect the experienced players. When I was new, I did not give a shit about ACU snipe mode (in hindsight, objectively broken busted OP feature), I didn't use it because I didn't understand balance. When I was 1200 I genuinely thought Stingers were the best unit in the game because they were the cheapest ACU sniping t2 gunship. Whether that specific feature existed or not would not have mattered to me. I would've played regardless because I just wanted to one day be good enough to 2v6 some scrubs on Dual Gap, you know?

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/world/asia/chess-looks-to-young-norwegian.html?_r=0

I think this quote from this article summarizes my view well: "Chess enthusiasts say the game needs another big personality to energize it, and they are pinning their hopes on Mr. Carlsen. “I think that it is fairly clear that chess is not at the height of its popularity,” said David Shenk, the author of a book about the history of chess. “All it takes is one guy to come along and electrify the world.”"

If a dev leaves because they can’t get their toy in that serves no discernible function they’ll just keep adding toys and the problem will continue going on. Area reclaim is something that makes 0 sense in terms of how the game works in terms of low rated players. The problem has never been that they cannot keep up with reclaim. It is pretty much purely focused on the tradeoffs that begin to be perceptible at the higher levels of the game. The higher levels do not appreciate the dynamics between the 3-4 methods of reclaim being simplified down. The argumentation goes back to some casual level player, where again, attack move functions completely fine already. But they still want it. Because it looks sick in the ui and just as with BO now they don’t lose to “apm” and can be all “strategic” otherwise known as still being fully zoomed in on their base with half idle factories.

It does not help the causal player, it’s just cool and new. If we want to add cool and new, add a new slop unit every 2 weeks already. Move us fully out of FAF and into FAF BlackOps Nomads: Unleashed, Revenge of the ACU Prelease 3.4

There is a feedback process. Some ideas are bad. Area reclaim has been explained like every year as a bad idea in FAF. I don’t know why it’s suddenly up in consideration yet again with the same arguments that have always been shot down and the same counterarguments that are still not addressed. I do not consider being a developer some free card to implement any bad idea. People are acting like the whole issue with area reclaim was that nobody could imagine implementing it in the simulation rather than it being considered bad on principle from the start.

In fact, 2 of the features you cited as keystones for FAF recently were specifically brought to form because of input from high rated players to make it work as well as possible. Neroxis map gen existed forever generating terrible maps, Sheikah worked with mappers and high rated players to iron out what actually makes a map enjoyable so that the map gen would actually be competitively viable and now it functions as an alternative to premade maps for the community. Prior, it saw next to no usage.

Matchmaker from the beginning was a completely collaborative process on how to make things function fairly but also fun. For example, if we wanted to be totally tryhard, we would have no party system. I had people complain to me about that idea during the planning stages. Most people understood that it was a tradeoff worth having, though.

Thanks @archsimkat you saved me the trouble of writing that.

@phong, two related things in response. The first being that rating is a bell curve and it doesn't make sense to add a huge number of people to one extreme end of the bell curve without padding the rest to maintain some reasonable average. Hence both my comment and presumably FTX's comments about there needing to be a lot more "average" players for there to suddenly be 1k top pros.

For the second, let's ignore what I just said and pretend it really just is 1000 new top players. This ties in heavily with what Arch said and what I was starting to type up before I saw Arch's post, but top pros bring in a lot of new people and do a ton for community engagement. What do a lot of pros, including top FAF people do? They stream. Streaming drives engagement and awareness for the game. Streaming gets new people interested in the game. 1000 new top pros means, what, 100 new active streamers potentially? That would be huge for FAF. It also means far more tournaments, and far more competition in those tournaments. Which means more official streams that draw in more people. Which in turn makes the viewership goes up, which in turn means more people get exposed to said streams that might not have been otherwise exposed to it. There's a reason most big games have a vibrant competitive scene, and why many times they'll start to decline as the competitive scene declines.

It also means more casts get made, and additionally casts consisting of actual high level play. Again, refer back to Arch's post regarding this since that's identical to how I feel. For me, watching Yudi in particular was huge motivation for me to get better.

Edit: I'm actually not sure if I'd be getting back into playing some FAF right now if not for Farm's stream honestly. Watching it makes me want to play, and also shows where there are some high rated games going on. Having more active and skilled streamers is huge for any game community.

As a side comment, I play a bit of Apex, and while I'm over a decade past my prime on FPS games and am complete trash, I'll watch highlights of pros or top streamers and get motivated to play as a result. I'm reasonably sure that both myself and my irl friends I play Apex with wouldn't be playing it if not for the competitive scene and the streams + highlights from it.

@ftxcommando, thanks for eloquently expressing what input high rated players had to those features I mentioned. They're definitely the more fruitful collaborations. Please note, though, their help was not essential in the sense that if it hadn't been them, some other players rated 200 lower would have provided much the same support. And I think Sheikah was equally sensitive to what average players thought.

Not so much the case for the devs and mappers who actually made things happen. I've seen the code for the mapmaker, that thing alone took hundreds of man-hours of work to build, and had one of the devs decided it wasn't worth the hassle, it would probably have been years before someone else attempted it. Contrast that effort with a bunch of dudes just sharing their thoughts, and you can't really blame me for valuing this less than doing the actual thing, can you?

That's without even mentioning all the other moaners that aren't even good at the game. For some reason, nobody took issue as I suggested they should be ignored as well past a certain point, because it's only the higher rated players that should get a say in what the devs don't do, right?

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

I would've played regardless because I just wanted to one day be good enough to 2v6 some scrubs on Dual Gap, you know?

did you ever end up 2v6ing scrubs on dual gap?
actually didn't we do like 2v5 or 2v6 and lost?

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

https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15548
I don't even have to write anything

Damn. This was from 7 years ago, but change some of the names and examples and this could be written today. At least we have divisions now!

The difference now I guess is that ladder isn't dying but dead and tournaments are almost dead, but I can't comment much on this since i now have been inactive for years.

Yes, more or less.

The vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t even read the forums, so I think it’s silly for people to use negative sentiment on the forums as an accurate bellwether of the playerbase. Moreover, treating the majority of the playerbase as largely indifferent to any changes so just cater to what the highest level players say isn’t a necessary corollary to this. Why not actually have polls on the client news page for potential changes?

@archsimkat a bit of charm can go a long way, potentially making up for a less extreme drive to victory. Besides, nobody likes whiners. If we really cared about these top players drawing in the noobs, we'd all be doing more to censor their public tantrums even as we pandered to their whims in private.

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

If we really cared about these top players drawing in the noobs, we'd all be doing more to censor their public tantrums

Actually, I agree and have said as much before, for instance my first paragraph here.

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

The vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t even read the forums, so I think it’s silly for people to use negative sentiment on the forums as an accurate bellwether of the playerbase.

The majority of high rated players do visit the forums and most of this thread has been centered around the high level scene for better or worse.

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

Moreover, treating the majority of the playerbase as largely indifferent to any changes so just cater to what the highest level players say isn’t a necessary corollary to this. Why not actually have polls on the client news page for potential changes?

Most of the discussed changes do exactly nothing for mid level and lower players. Apparently this is controversial, but area reclaim falls into that category as well. We could make sweeping stat changes to a whole bunch of units and if it wasn't announced I doubt random <1ks would even notice in game. I wouldn't have when I was sub 1200 or whatever. Unless balance is absurdly bad it's just not that noticeable until you hit a certain level of game knowledge.

@exselsior I can't square what you're saying here "most of the proposed changes don't affect mid/low players" with what I thought the criticism for auto-reclaim was in the first place, that it would level the playing field between low and high tier players. Those can't both be true at the same time, can they? Maybe you don't agree with the latter, or it makes a disproportionate difference only past 1800 or what? I haven't kept up with this particular conversation, honestly.