Why does everything suck so much right now?

@phong My general take is less that it levels the playing field between low and high rated players and more that it somewhat lowers the amount of skill expression available at high level play. And when I say high level, I mean higher level than me. There's zero chance that this magically makes me beat, say, Bully, let alone lets me beat Farms with any meaningful level of consistency. Also goes the other way, there's zero chance it would mean a random 1500 is going to start outplaying me. Consistently at least, flukes happen and I'm rather inconsistent.

Anyway, what this does mean is that in high level tournaments for example there's simply one less avenue for someone like Yudi to flex his apm vs Nexus or whoever you want. It lowers volatility in a way that I don't think I like, for example early aggression is made weaker because if it fails then perhaps you at least canceled a bunch of reclaim orders or something like that. You can argue that early aggression is too strong, and you might be right. I disagree with this as a fix though.

Right now you have to make a tradeoff with your attention, and it's a tradeoff that only truly exists at a very high level. There are decisions they have to make - Can I spare the apm/attention to manual reclaim? Is it going to result in me getting the mass too quickly so I actually can't spend it? Do I need the mass asap or can I just attack move vaguely in the right direction and move on?

I'm making too many mistakes in my play for those choices to really matter 99% of the time. I have never in my thousands of games played lost a game because I didn't manual reclaim enough and my opponent did it more than I did. It simply hasn't happened. I've probably lost because I didn't attack move reclaim enough, but that's different. In those cases I'd probably still attack move reclaim and not area reclaim anyway.

Really I think I will largely ignore area reclaim if it goes live. The scenarios I'll choose to use it are relatively niche and mostly involve getting a bit more mass from a hotly contested reclaim field with my acu when I'm lacking apm. I think anyway, I haven't yet played with it much. Otherwise I find clicking rocks kinda fun, sue me. The other issue is the huge nerf to rock reclaim that's apparently associated with the area reclaim and seems depressing to say the least. I can't ignore that one like I can area reclaim.

So if it were somehow a bit worse than manual reclaim the same way factory reclaim, attack move and patrol technically are, this whole argument would stop? Why not do that?

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.

Oh how merciful of you to relent and grant us this basic feature that every game has of playing with your friends. Truly we are blessed for such a collaboration. Did you write any code or no? "if we wanted we could have made it utter shit" I guess that's your way of saying you listen to feedback ?

So if it were somehow a bit worse than manual reclaim the same way factory reclaim, attack move and patrol technically are, this whole argument would stop? Why not do that?

Well at that point why even have area reclaim? It's confusing to have 5(?) different methods of reclaim with little to differentiate them. Attack move and patrol are the same except patrol doesn't stop when there's no reclaim left, but then what's the difference between area reclaim and attack move? Slightly more focused I guess? Then you also have to understand why factory attack move is different, and I'm pretty sure that difference only exists as a game engine bug funnily enough. It would be confusing for new people and ignored by more experienced players which is kind of the worst of both worlds.

@exselsior at that point why oppose it? if it made someone happy and nobody unhappy? Why refuse to try it? Why quit the game over it? It makes no sense except as a power play.

How would you make area reclaim worse than manual reclaim?

@thewheelienoob I already told you: as worse as other options are, to shut people up about it.

Yeah but how would you functionally achieve that?

I am certainly not quitting over area reclaim? But in this scenario where it's somehow worse than manual reclaim my point for opposing it is simply that it makes things more complicated for no reason. Why have it if it's attack move with extra steps? It's just confusing. I'm also not sure how you could somehow make it worse than manual reclaim like @TheWheelieNoob is saying.

@thewheelienoob by reordering the reclaim commands such that the engineer has to travel some amount between them, as when it does so it gets closer than it strictly needs to be, thus wasting time. The width of the reclaim strip can be widened as well to achieve this. By making sure it stops to pick up every little speck of dust if need be. Some combination of those factors.

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

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.

Oh how merciful of you to relent and grant us this basic feature that every game has of playing with your friends. Truly we are blessed for such a collaboration. Did you write any code or no? "if we wanted we could have made it utter shit" I guess that's your way of saying you listen to feedback ?

I bet I’ve written more code than you for FAF. Aren’t all you good for is hosting games for random new dudes? Why are you even here typing as though you even matter with your stupid contributive mentality lol, go away.

If that’s not enough, I’ve probably put more hours into this project than like 5 total devs in FAF history, if that. I don’t gotta wait for my FAF pity thread for my effort, just people like you to tell me I don’t do anything. Garbage.

@ftxcommando I made no grand claims regarding my contributions, nor do I feel entitled to have a say in how this or that change is implemented.

I'd rather stay and offer reassurance that things are not as gloomy as the OP and complainers makes it sound.

If you did write code for faf, I guess you're a dev and what I said applies to you as well: just do your thing and ignore the haters. If instead you mean writing forum guidelines you then ignore, well, anybody can do that. Just because it happened to be you doesn't mean it couldn't have got done without you.

@blackyps Im just very much against area reclaim and reclaim rate changes (in their currently proposed states) and am nervous to see how, if at all, they are implemented. Otherwise I'm generally happy with my faf experience training players and grinding to reach the higher echelons of 1v1 when I have time/energy. One man's opinion.

if you are good at a game that means you probably understand it
lower rated dudes should ask for advice

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

I bet I’ve written more code than you for FAF. Aren’t all you good for is hosting games for random new dudes? Why are you even here typing as though you even matter with your stupid contributive mentality lol, go away.

No - lol - you go away. What the f*ck is your problem?

@phong has been a monumental pillar of inspiration and actually did contribute, whether that is through discussions or by designing various banners for tournaments and YouTube thumbnails - including the one for LOTS. He also never made any claims of his contributions and was just trying to have a constructive discussion. Until you came around and decided to attack and ridicule him for absolutely no reason.

Similarly how @Blackheart comes around and decides to do a personal attack and call me deranged. And instead of calling him out for it we have, wait for it:

Fifteen upvotes. Fucking brilliant. Almost all top faf players too, just pointing it out for those that are unaware . The majority of this topic is full of attacks on character and intentions. All unnecessary, but all of it is a good example of the attitude problem that I mentioned at the very start.

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

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.

It is not the FAF community that is conservative. It's not 'parts of' the community that are rude, ignorant or lacking empathy. It's a small group of players - less than 0.1% of the 17K unique players we have playing each month - that create a toxic, unfriendly and motivation draining environment towards contributors the moment they feel their status quo is threatened. Let that sink in for a bit - less than 0.1% of the total number of unique players playing each month.

The majority of this topic is the perfect example of that. There's only a few decent contributions to the discussion, some that are even left ignored such as the post of @Lowki even though I think he manages to capture some of the essence of it at that moment. He actually took the time to read through some of it!

With regards to area orders - or as Ftx would call it 'the toys I want to add' - I've mentioned all over that I have no interest in dying over this hill. I think it can be a healthy change, together with area commands for all the other orders. Area reclaim blows up the economy a little, but that can be fixed as anything else.

Unlike the imagination that is running wild in this topic, at no point have we been 'close to having these features in the game'. They're available on FAF Develop for you to experiment with. To gather arguments based on actual games to have a constructive discussion about it. To see how we could make it work if we would want it to work. To discover the pros and cons based on replays. And then once everything is on the table we can weigh the pros and cons and make an actual, informed decision. We can document that informed decision. And then we can all understand why something did (not) happen. Forever! Something about exploring the idea, appreciating the novelty of it and then decide on whether we want it or not.

But instead what I receive is immediate rejection on all grounds based on the imagination. And I know that for a fact, because looking at the vault a lot of the players that shit on area (reclaim) orders did not even participate in a single game using the FAF Develop game type since the feature is available on it. Some of you, and @FtXCommando in particular, are just attacking character and intentions and the post I am referencing when you attack @phong is exactly what I am referring to. Again, what the f*ck is wrong with you @FtXCommando ?

To come back to what the topic started with:

This is why everything sucks as a contributor. It's not because of connectivity issues, even though I spent three full afternoons fixing the most obnoxious bug related to it recently together with a group of people including @IndexLibrorum, @Ravandel, @Tagada, @Strydxr, @Rowey and Brutus with effectively no thanks to almost everyone else in this topic. It's not because of bugs that players perceive. It's because of the relentless harassment on contributors from all angles from a small, group of players that can't even be fckng bothered to give something an honest try or help fix something if it does not suit them. And then the same group continues to create the biggest nonsense, lies, personal attacks and whatever they can think that drains the motivation out of contributors that put in hours, days, weeks or even months of their free time with the sole intention to create a better environment for everyone.

And I'm done - I'll probably be leaving soon because of all this nonsense. I'm a reasonable person. You can convince me with good arguments. Everyone I actually talk to about things know this of me. I don't want to fight people that attack my character and intentions. I've spent too much time writing (forum) posts such as these against the wildest claims that people make based on their imagination. The majority of them never even spoke to me once. They don't know who I am. The majority of them not even bothering to ask me questions about it. No, instead they just bash and bash away at it until the 'problem' - read, the contributor - loses the motivation to continue.

And you've succeeded. And apparently after a small discussion with some (previous) large contributors the same group of people succeeded again and again over the past decade. The same thing happens every few years - great contributors come up with ideas that may or may not work and the contributor is simply attacked until the motivation drops below a critical threshold and not just the idea but the contributor as a whole just decides to move on.

Imagine if all that effort into attacking contributors was put towards actually contributing to the project. Towards having healthy discussions. Towards accepting the fact that sometimes decisions are made that you do not agree with, but in the bigger picture it does not actually matter that much (the backlash towards the username changes, hello! What the f*ck was that?) We could've had so many nice things years ago that would've been such a positive impact on the community. That would actually attract new players and maybe even new competitors for tournaments.

But no, instead we have the comfort of knowing that once great player such as @Blackheart may eventually come back. We don't know when. We don't know how. There's no ETA. But when he does, everything will be exactly as it was when he left so that he can pick up where he left things.

Oh, except for the sim rate problems. Because that is something that we can all agree with. You're welcome by the way . If it were up to me, which it is not because we have an amazing moderator team, I'd perma ban the f*ck out of some people in this topic. No questions asked. And as @phong stated before - the average player wouldn't even notice the difference.

This got sour quick

There's nothing sour about it. BlackYps asked to remove the mask. This is what it's been like, with the exclusions of course when people actually do come in and have a constructive discussion. Even when they disagree with my point of view.

The point is that it matters what you write. Mean one-liners, people that talk shit about you behind your back, people that attack the character and intentions of contributors. It all happens, everywhere. It all matters. And all of it is damaging to the project much, much more than it feels like that the people responsible for it realize.

Here is the pull request to disable area commands before we do a release somewhere next week.

@jip After seeing what you said about the pain of developers, I feel very sorry and sad. Imagine how much FAF would have changed if these developers had stayed. In any case, there is no RTS on the market that can achieve the same quality, good visual design, and large-scale combat as FAF. I would rather the FAF changes and even becomes a completely different game to the FA than to see it remain stagnant.
Imagine if all these developers had stayed and contributed, we might now have multiple versions of FAF with different focuses to play! (For example, some focus on AI combat, PVE, or cooperative missions, some focus on 1V1, and some focus on 4V4)
Unfortunately, the unhealthy atmosphere of community discussion continues to discourage developers. While I hope you continue to contribute more to FAF, I also hope you find joy in what you do. Whether or not you choose to continue writing code for FAF in the future, I thank you for bringing us these exciting optimizations, thank you.

Jip I'm just a lurker who plays occasionally but from what I'm reading I would say take a break, do something else you really enjoy, and please come back. You've done so much for this game. And remember that RTSs are largely played by young men who aren't exactly known for being reasonable, well mannered or socially adjusted, I.e. there's a lot of d***s about (and we've probably all been guilty of it ourselves).

To be honest, I think the FAF community should have some protections for developers, such as banning personal insults. Developers have been contributing to this game for love and a sense of accomplishment. We can't keep losing developers because of community engagement issues. The problem is that there aren't many active developers in the first place, and allowing the community to crack down on developers will only lead to FAF being abandoned.
The premise of the discussion is that everyone can express themselves politely, rather than letting off steam. One person's emotions do not represent the whole community; But a person's great emotions can really cause harm to others. Banning people who make personal attacks doesn't make community discussion worse, it just makes community communication more effective.