All this talk about "skill preservation" that I don't really get. There have been tons of balance changes over the years that all the current good players adapted to, often with little resistance (most resistance towards the balance team is generally even coming from lower rated players who don't understand why the changes were made).
Now there's one change (area reclaim) that a select group of high rated players don't agree with, and you attribute it to unwillingness to change...
Why does everything suck so much right now?
@reckless_charger I'm thinking more along the lines of the context of a multi-billion dollar company and how they view things. As a senior manager I will often have to implement policies that corporate comes up with. I may believe they are the absolute worst decisions possible and at times it completely destroys my joy of working there because I put my heart and soul into that position and now I've got to go the 100 plus people that work under me and tell them that this ridiculous way forward is how we're doing things now. It's my job not to seed any incivility no different than it is the workers job not to seed incivility as we carry forward.
In the context of video game management.... Especially one as small as FAF I agree with you that talking about disagreeing with something to the core of your being seems excessive but it really seems like certain people feel that way about certain things and they're not able to express it in a civil manner. I find it sad that certain players decide to leave over such things but at least they leave rather than hang around and seed incivility and discontent.
@ftxcommando I apologize for implying you were an endless-essay pretend-pro busy-body. That was very Passive Aggressive of me.
I love that whenever someone shows frustration at the way these discussions have gone they aren't being "productive". Meanwhile I see plenty of times they are just outright insulted and no one calls them out on it.
If this is partly related to my post:
At the end of the day, respectful communication is the prerequisite for resolving different opinions into a shared compromise. I expect you to be one of those to knows this even better than most. And you certainly can be respectfull when you want to. It was not my goal to single your comment out becaue it come from you. Id just happened to be an obvious example. We can add other disrespectful phrases from other parties too to my post if you want!
And I don't really give a shit about the progressiveness of FAF. Im playing Coop. I could not care less about any small changes that happen in FAF, other than new campaigns being developed.
But if you want to pitch it as "“traditionalists” vs “progressives”: One of those groups consistently behaves MUCH less decent than the other.
Jips behaviour for example is NOT AT ALL comparable (in terms of aggressiveness) with some of the behaviour he is facing.
@phong said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
@jip It's fine, I rattled his cage, I'm no better. What's actually funny is I was asking @FtXCommando how exactly loud, dissatisfied pros might have improved my faf experience without me realizing and he hits me with "we could have been real tryhards and prevented you from playing TMM alongside your friends, but relented". Insert tyrant extolling his benevolence to his subjects meme.
My dude, you're not even an actual pro, you're a 1900. "We"? Pffff
No wonder the lobby server dev quit after TMM was up and running. Imagine working to help players more conveniently find games and having to deal with some endless-essay pretend-pro busy-body actively trying to sabotage your main goal, because, you see, the trueskill data (a mere means to an end) would otherwise be a bit noisier than it already is. Then, to top it off, they go and take partial credit for the work, calling themselves Collaborator, since starting, then losing futile arguments about dumb shit technically counts as labor, right? Also, they get indignant should their effort not be valued over yours, the actual dev.
Regardless other contributions I have you to thak for, this one's not helping change my mind about whose activity benefits me more. The boastful claim this was actually within your power and we were spared such an outcome only by your willingness to compromise would be worrying if I actually took it seriously. I'd I'd rather hope someone reasonable will always be here, willing and able to step in whenever your lot fails to be brought to your senses, which is why I'm speaking up before you drive them away.
Nothing here was something I said. This is you doing exactly what Jip is in the current process of moaning about for sympathy points but nobody cares because:
- “he’s on our side”
- Gosh we don’t wanna lose Jip so we gotta allow this incoherency with our supposed “good discourse” principle
It’s pathetic. If you want a list of my contributions you can go read my election post in the last PC reelection thread, I ain’t retyping allat.
Yea it's a lie that the devs and mods have not deliberately antagonized players while this debate has gone on these past few weeks. We have a right to be frustrated by it.
@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
Nothing here was something I said.
This you?
@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
If this is partly related to my post:
At the end of the day, respectful communication is the prerequisite for resolving different opinions into a shared compromise. I expect you to be one of those to knows this even better than most. And you certainly can be respectfull when you want to. It was not my goal to single your comment out becaue it come from you. Id just happened to be an obvious example. We can add other disrespectful phrases from other parties too to my post if you want!
And I don't really give a shit about the progressiveness of FAF. Im playing Coop. I could not care less about any small changes that happen in FAF, other than new campaigns being developed.
But if you want to pitch it as "“traditionalists” vs “progressives”: One of those groups consistently behaves MUCH less decent than the other.
Jips behaviour for example is NOT AT ALL comparable (in terms of aggressiveness) with some of the behaviour he is facing.
Nah not you. You haven’t been either of the two and I’ve worked fine with you in the past. I do disagree with some of your arguments, going back to the ancient area reclaim threads where you argued that if people have a problem with area reclaim then you might as well as have things like a unit cap on how many things you can select because it also makes the game more difficult to play. I disagreed with this then because FAF already had an ease of use reclaim method in the form of attack move. Alongside the other reclaim methods which created a strategic choice at high levels without being essential at low levels even with low level gameplay revolving around learning how to macro.
Communication is a two way street and Jip is kind. Kinder than me, that’s for sure. But, Jip has a real problem when it comes to other stuff. One example is the disparity of evidence between supporters and opponents. He does not really care when people support something without trying it out. They can be shown it and like it and they are now people he is fighting for. This is likewise seen with the whole “silent majority” shtick, they’re silent because they don’t support anything so why are they on anyone’s “table” here? Meanwhile we might watch Farm toy around with reclaim, watch a replay, talk to the people that used it, and we’re essentially irrelevant datapoints. I don’t mind if the condition for support is as strenuous as it is, but it needs to be applied fairly. These sort of incoherencies are what make me bristle.
@Katharsas I agree with 95% of what you're writing. Thank you for taking the time and effort to write it. It helps a lot with my sanity 
.
@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
I do find it funny that I just had to read like half a dozen point (...)
Another perfect example of a rude, unnecessary harmful and empty message with nothing but your opinion to work with. At the same time you indirectly attack the current contributors by stating we do not engage honestly. You derail the conversation by introducing vague statements with no references that I'm not going to put in the effort to debunk.
@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
I’ll just utilize the same line Jip used when referring to his attack on Tagada’s ability to be a contributor and tell people to read and get a conclusion for themselves. Inevitability, as always, people will see the harm of their opponent and not the harm of their supporters.
I'll help you with that, here's a link to the cherry-picked conversation discord conversation. Have a read for those that are interested, again make sure to read everything that was posted the 9th of June.
A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned
Dunno what to tell you Jip. Area reclaim is like one of the most historical arguments on FAF. People have been against it on the aspect of principle, beyond even mechanics, since all the way back in 2014. The step of collecting some consensus on the principles was totally skipped over and development went into mechanics and now there is an attempt to work backwards and somehow fit the mechanics into principles that state it as fundamentally anathema. 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.
Working backwards to accommodate principles was just not going to work on this specific problem.
Why on earth is that rude and unproductive when he has been insulted all these times for being critical.
We are hesitant to police these threads:
So that fact I raise a query about moderation and say a swear word means its deleteable?
If this post is removed please let it be known that likely Maudlin is censoring topics that could reflect negatively.
If your worried about swearing Maudlin go police a 500 rated dual gap game.
Ras Boi's save lives.
Those points combined meant your post was deleted, (although I checked with another mod first to check they agreed it clearly crossed the line). While some points (swearing) should be self-explanatory, I didn’t think it worth going into detail here on other points such as the falsehoods you were spreading about moderation actions since it would both derail the thread and because as a general rule specific reports that have been moderated aren’t intended to be discussed publicly.
If you find yourself playing games containing toxic language then please feel free to raise a report in the client.
M27AI and M28AI developer; Devlogs and more general AI development guide:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/2373/ai-development-guide-and-m27ai-v71-devlog
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5331/m28ai-devlog-v100
Why have a thread that says don't have a pr answer and then you silence someone for swearing. Also the author of this thread wrote a curse word are you going to take down his post?
@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.
A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned