Hello dear FAF player,

today i want to ask two questions:

Question 1:
Do you want to see FAF putting work into making FAF awesome for the average casual RTS player?

According to the video "The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why." (highly recommended), around 77-80% (!!!) of Starcraft players are "casual" players (players that only played the campaign and never touched multiplayer). Starcraft is one of the most competitive RTS out there, so we might assume that the ratio is even more imbalanced for Supcom FA.

So my personal answer is YES!

More people means more ideas and creativity, more work put into FAF, more fun, more donations, more everything! And some of those casuals will naturally become salty, competitive tryhards by the nature of this community, providing more spice to the flow!

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Question 2:
If yes, how could that be done?

Well, to know that, we have to forget ourselves and put ourselves into the shoes of a casual player. Luckily i am somewhat casual. You want proof? I only play bot matches in Dota 2 and I tried playing that game with a controller. I still like to play the FAF campaign from time to time even though it is way too easy for me at 1100 global rating. Hopefully that qualifies me as casual enough!

However, if you are even more casual than me, i want to hear your opinion!

Now lets talk about what causal players want. The key difference is quite easy to understand:

Casual players do not want to compete, casual players want to progress!

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Chapter 1: Difficulty
The idea of creating an auto-balanced queue for casual players, where players win/loose 50% of the time thanks to Trueskill like in TMM would be stupid. Why?

Because casual players to not really want to be challenged by a competitve opponent. Casual players want to instead have a fun and satisfying gaming experience, which for them means having a feeling of PROGRESS, and while this can include personally improving at the game, it does not need to.

However, how easy exactly should it be? And the answer is different for every player. Some players can stand loosing against opponents more often than others. This is why in gaming there is the very popular concept of "game difficulty". Difficulty allows players to decide what the "skill gap" between them and their AI opponent should be.

This skill gap preference is different for every casual player! There are games that do not have difficulty settings, which are usually explicitely marketed at "hardcore" players like Dark Souls. However even Dark Souls has built in "difficulty" by allowing players to farm stats and play in Coop. I know it because it had to farm against the O&S boss, because I would have been too bad to beat it otherwise.

(difficulties in AoE2 DE)

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Chapter 2: Progression

So our casual player selects a difficulty, the game should not stay that difficult the entire time. There should be a diffiulty progression that the player can keep up with. This is straighforward to handcraft in a RTS campaign, but how does difficulty work in RTS skirmish matches against AI?

Well, the progression in a skirmish against AI is to select a harder difficulty at some point. Lets say i played against Dota 2 bots at mid difficulty, at some point i might feel like im skilled enough to turn it up a notch and try playing against hard difficulty. The turning of that nob, if i win, is what is satisfying as a casual! This is why RPGs with auto-scaling difficulty are hated by quite a bunch of players, but thats a different story.

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Chaper 3: FAF custom games vs. AI

Now that we know that the casual player desires to set the difficulty in a vs-AI game, why is this a problem in FAF? Don't we already have Sorian with various difficulty levels and a bunch of alternative AIs?

Well, the problem is that selecting a difficulty in FAF sucks. In fact, it is hardly possible for a casual player:

• The actual new good AIs are hidden in the mod vault and lengthy forums post, where a certified casul does not ever dare to look
• There is no readily accessible information about how good any of the AIs really are
• Even the AI authors do not always know how good their AI is
• AI performance changes as balance patches and AI patches hit, causing the performance of AIs to swing
• Some AIs are somewhat broken on some maps, the whole AI marker situation is a thing that casual players should not have to deal with - if possible, it should "just work".
• There seem to be no balanced steps in difficulty. How much better is Sorian Adapter compared to AI Easy? The casual player has no good way to find out if he should try Adaptive after Easy or if there is something in between
• The AI developers themselves have no incentive to create modifications of their AI for different skill brackets (nerfing the AI to create an easier AI variant, adding a cheating variant, finetuning the cheat multipliers etc.)

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Creating a consistent concept of difficulty for FAF AIs

As a solution to these problems i propose the creation of "AI skill brackets". These are rating brackets that AIs are sorted into and that effectively define what "hard AI" etc. means on FAF. The numbers here can of course be changed, but something like this might work:

How AIs in each bracket should perform expressed in global rating:

• under 200: Very Easy
• 200-400: Easy
• 400-600: Normal
• 600-800: Hard
• over 800: Very Hard

This would allow us to simplify AI selection a lot. A casual user can just select one of these brackets and automatically get an AI implementation that plays acoording to that skill bracket. If AIs get better, they might change their bracket, allowing casuals to have consistent difficulty without thinking about how AI authors change their AIs.

If the casual user wants more control, they should still be able to select a specific AI in a specific bracket. If he doesn't, then just select a good default or a random AI from that bracket.

It should be noted that if an AI is exploitable with a very specific hard to find exploit, this should not be factored into the skill level of the AI. We can assume that a casual player never finds those exploits, or that they can quickly be fixed if found. The goal here is not to give an exact represenation of AI skill, but a consistent system that is usefull to the casual player who doesn't play very often.

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The hard part

All of this until this point is just mostly client/lobby implementation work, nothing that i think would be too hard. Were it gets hard, is this:

How do we know which AI belongs to which skill level? How do we measure the skill of AIs? There already are multiple ideas, as expressed in the "AI in matchmaker queues". And there are other ideas like regular AI tournaments that could be used to manually asses AIs capabiliy. However first i want to know:

Should this be the next big project for FAF? Making playing against AIs easy, consistent, and a generrally pleasurable experience? Do you think creating well-defined skill brackets for AIs is a good idea? I think this would substantially improve FAF, but that is just my casual opinion.

@Jip

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).

Given the stupid amount of energy and words wasted by all kinds of people in the PC election thread, i wanted to present a different idea out there. This not just about PC. It could probably replace several councillor positions, maybe even the entire Council of Setons.

The goal of the system is mostly:

• Transparency about who does what in FAF.

Ill call it the "Badge System" or maybe "Roles system" because i have no better word.

• A person can hold more than one badge
• Each badge is linked to exactly ONE kind of responsibility
• We hopefully only ever discuss exactly one badge at a time, if there is an election. No more "discuss these 30 responsibilities that councillor position XYZ comes with" for fucks sake.
• There is a "Main" Badge for every responsibility that only one person can hold, and that person hands out sub-badges of the same type (but not "Main") to anybody they want. Only Main badge is voted onto a person by election.

Example:

• "Main Tournament director" can hand out and remove "tournament director" badges to anybody.
• "Main TMM director" can hand out "TMM director" badges to anybody
• and so on...

Pros:

• Non-insiders can finally see who the fuck is actually doing what.
• We see more people with badges which makes it look like its easier to participate in FAF. right now "PC councillor" is a scary word.
• FTX can still do everything because he can hold literally every "Main" badge in the world.
• The conversion from the old system to the new one doesnt require any kind of power being handed over so we could get it done without too much drama.
• Maybe we can convert the other councillor positions as well because i see no reason to have a mix of old and new system.
• Badge holders can give their badge to somebody else (maybe a bad idea?).

Negs:

• The forum needs to be able to display all badges a person holds.
• We need to implement a system that tracks who has what badge i guess? Otherwise there will be chaos.
• Handing over badges needs to be done though the mentioned system (like a tab in the client)
• We still need to decide which badges are voted/eleted, so i expect that would be a shitshow of a discussion. But for now we could just make all PC related badges votable and assign them to the winner of the PC election.

Its basically Discord roles on steroids but for FAF.

Opinions?

Edit:
There might the some badges for which sub-badges dont make sense, so maybe restrict those.

People always tend to prefer things they know, when they have a choice. This is why the mapgen can do what handmade maps cannot.

If a person goes into the map vault, they see a bunch of maps they have never seen alongside ones that they already now, and their brain is automatically going to dismiss the maps they dont't know because anything thats new is frightening on a primitive human level.

The mapgen solves this problem by frontloading that choice:

• Do you want to play an unknown map or not?

And then forcing you to stay with that choice by preventing your brain from categorizing it as just another map and therefore reverting your decision to try something new. So the way in which the mapgen creates an advantage is not necessarily by just creating unknown maps, but psychologycally.

Of course the mapgen should eventually still reach higher level of quality. But its important to realize how important the UI is here.

Lets assume that there is a way for the client to automatically select a handmade map that

• Follows some easy to use filters (size, amount of water, etc.) similar to map generator
• Guarantuess to select a map that is generally not very actively played by the community and of certain minimum quality
• Introduces some sort of UI-barrier to backpedalling from the decision to play something new

Then maybe handmade maps could in some way fullfill the same function that the mapgen does. However, we dont have that kind of UI for handmade maps, and as long as it is that way, people will resort to the mapgen to play unknown maps instead of simply selecting a not much played handmade map.

The mapgen also crates some sort of unspoken contract: The map is guarantueed to be new to everybody (in reality thats not true because you can regenerate a seed, but this is still the expectation that people have). This is of course very hard to replicate with handmade maps.

PS:
Could participants in this thread please stop assuming that everybody else argues in bad faith or against their interests? Turning this thread into a mapgen vs handmade war will not create many usefull insights on this topic. Too late probably.

Who event wants 3, god forbid 4 blues? Why?

Does choosing the bright but saturated red color make you a connoisseur of the exquisite art of expressing yourself by choosing the color that represents your inner spirit animal or what? Does sending your professional 4th shade of green into the enemies slightly desaturated (but not quite brown) orange base make you a collaborative map-painter, such that your are creating an interactive piece of modern art by mixing units such that the resulting composition makes you think deeply about the world of shapes and abstractions? Does anybody suffer torment from the idea of having to paint themselves and their units with the brush of a color that has been excluded from the cool color space club that is currently en-vogue in the most accomplished circles of the Illuminati?

Colors are in this game to easily distinguish and call players out. And as long as the available colors do no induce eye cancer, that is what they should be selected for.

I think that there are technical, social as well as UI/UX aspects to this problem that go way beyond just "what moderation would like to have".

1. Technical

As @BlackYps said, when names are referenced in a tool in any way, the ID for that name should be lookup up and used internally as soon as possible (so if there is a UI form with a name input in the client, the client should resolve the ID right after the user inputs it).

2. Social (recognition)

Members of a social community (which FAF is) want to be able to recognize other members (even after coming back after leaving the community for some months). This is really a basic social need in any community for mainly two reasons:

2.1. Social self-policing

Every well-working social community has some form of fluid social contract between each other. Moderators/bans can and should never police all behaviour that is taking place inside a community.
Instead, the community itself enforces certain standards of behaviour. This happens automatically and is important. It is a major part of the "culture" of any community, and it requires people to be able to remember social misbehaviour of its members, which requires recognizing other player on FAF.

2.2 Social hierarchy

In every community, there is some sort of social hierarchy. In FAF there are two major hierarchies, skill and contribution. Generally, community members want to be able to respect other people inside this hierarchy. This is how legends are born inside a community and also requires recognizing other players.

For example, if a random player joins my 1200 rated games and absolutely destroys me, i will probably not react positively (i got smurfed?!). However if that random player is instead Blackheart, my reaction will be totally different because a legend player just joined my game.

3. Social (self-expression)

However, it is also true that self-expression is a good thing! Popular communities often provide a whole range of customization to how you appear to other people (not just name but usually also additional bits and pieces). Im not going to go into detail here because plenty of people have expressed how important this is to them.

4. UI/UX

The goal should then be to make both possible through UI/UX. And it is important to realize that a player ID is not sufficient to address the recognizability problem. Humans are not good at memorizing a random number per player.

One solution was already mentioned: Fixed player handle and changable player name. In addition

• the player handle must be shown in conjunction to the player name
• OR it must be trivially easy to look up the player handle for a given playername (for example by showing the handle when hovering with the mouse over a player name)

Another solution is to move the self-expression from the name to some other self-editable part of self-presentation (many games have "titles" or "status text" that is shown under the names of players).

Stop claiming that "icon confusion" was intended by the devs.

• You have no idea if that is true.
• The whole point of the stratetgic icons was that it was supposed to allow players to play at the strategic level instead of zooming in. So the icon confusion actually goes against stated goals of this game's design.

@javi said in Introducing Mapgen Week on Ladder:

(thanks Neroxis)

don't forget Sheikah who has improved it a tremenduous amount for more than a year now : )

+1 like to mapgen week.

Here is another approach to solving this problem used for example by Star Citizen:

Red: Character/User name (can be changed)
Green: Player Handle (cannot be changed, chosen during account creation, not related to login credentials)

I pretty much agree with you @Jip, ive just mostly given up arguing for this kind of attitude, because it seems to indeed be pointless on FAF. But i will add some points now in a harsher tone than previously because you are right and you deserve the support, and it fits in.

Oh boy here we come.

The primary interest of the average high level player is to protect their skill-investement against any real or perceived threat.

Grubby on the other hand is a pro player (that is an entirly different player category). He earns money by keeping up with changes, which is pretty much the opposite attitude to the majortiy of top rated players on FAF.

Blackheart and most other top FAF players are not pro players. In fact there have never been any respectable number of "pro players" in FAF. A pro player gets payed to keep up with changes to the game and to re-invest time to re-learn every change that happens.

If you do not have the mental energy for that, or your ego is not able to survive temprary drops in rating (which can of course even happen entirely without balance changes when new metas are discovered), you won't stay at the top for long anyway, in a real e-sport at least. Real e-sport players require (and some receive) high mental and physical well-being (psychologists etc.).

For an example of extreme changes look at Dota and the insane changes in the last year or two (complete character base stat mechanic changes, complete map changes, insane hero skill changes). Didn't hurt their competitive scene like at all.

Blackheart is probably a good example of the quintessentiel non-pro player, and his balance mod is probably on of the most conservative (conservative here meaning "if we just turn back time enough everything will be awesome") mod in the FAF vault. Or maybe its more nostalgia than conservatism, or maybe both, not sure. From a pro-player perspective (which i do not share), this would probably be seen as mostly a self-serving "i want to stay in my comfort zone" attitude.

On the other hand this is mostly just human nature. The average human is not mentally healthy enough to be a pro player.

What is also seemingly human nature sadly is the accompanying tone. And yes it seems that often the better the player in question is, the more "deranged" their elitism gets. Like imagine thinking that only >2300 rating players (probably the top 0.1%) should be allowed to propose game design changes. Like literally no game in the world is being desgined or balanced by the 0.1% top players of that game because that is a deranged idea.

The problem is also not just about games. The "status quo bias" exists, which is normal human bias against any changes.

Whenever any big software anywhere on the world changes almost anything, like it might be the position of a single button, people flip the fuck out. They create discussions so unrespectful and unconstructive that you would think somebody was murdered.

This is sadly, what anybody that actually is trying to improve anything is constantly fighting against, and it is of course tiring. Take a rest @Jip if you need it.

I can only say that i would (and have) stopped engaging entirely with people that I know are not interested in actually at least sometimes changing their own opinion or at the very least trying out changes before complaining about them. I consistently just ignore their posts in this forum, and i have no advice other than that strategy.

Such people just suck your energy it into a black hole. @zhanghm18 banning that behaviour is imo both pointless and ethically questionable, poeple have enough ways to suck up your energy that does not require bannable offenses anyway.

So for anybody that does not want to constantly fight resistance, the "do things for yourself" is in some ways "giving up", but in other ways it might just be the wiser thing to do in terms of personal happiness.

Last but not least, let me say that this video "Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros" is not a good video. It does not seem to produce any actual argument as to WHY this should be the correct thing to do for devs. Which is sad because its not that hard to formulate actual potential reasons/arguments (like preservation of skill investment).

The game itself does not require a server, so having a server is pointless. Unless you rewrite the game engine to use a client-server-architecture.

So the only useful thing that a server can do is forward connections, which is exactly what Coturn does.

Replace "Game Server" with "Coturn Server" in your picture and you have almost exactly what FAF is using for people that have direct connection problems.

Glad it worked : )
You might want to get some tools to monitor your CPU and GPU temperatur and make sure neither goes over like 87 while gaming.

Weird. Do other DirectX 9 Games work without a problem?
Other than reinstalling or resetting you operating system, which would very likely fix the issue:

You can try to run Supcom with dgVoodoo2. dgVoodoo is a compatibility layer for Directx9 games. It essentially turns Supcom into a DirectX11/12 game. I have never used it but it is a well respected piece of software online and if your error is Dx9-specific, that should fix it (if dgVoodoo happens to work with Supcom).

Try this:

1. Use DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller ) to uninstall the MX550 driver and to disable automatic windows driver update
2. Install the GPU driver from the support site (Acer) for your specific laptop model, not from NVidia!

Regarding the question at the end about development on a mac:

There is still the old mac-support branch that contained some changes to enable running the client on Mac:
https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/compare/develop...feature/mac-support

However the client commit it is based on is massively out of date so you would have to check if these changes still apply/ are still needed and re-apply them to the current state of the client.

For future reference:

As i have contributed to the client in the past, i might also help others with getting to know the code, if you didn't get the chance to look at it with Sheikah. However it has been quite some time so my knowledge might not be fully up-to-date.

@FtXCommando

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.

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

It is quite rare to see someone have so much arguments and opinions that are wrong. Fascinating.

You start your post by sarcasticly lashing out against me, which is exactly the problem we are talking about. Not a single agument found in your first sentence.

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

The primary interest of the average high level player is to protect their skill-investement against any real or perceived threat.

The primary interest of any non-pro (the game is NOT their dayjob) player is to get enjoyment/satisfaction out of the game they play. The three main ways of getting the enjoyment are:

1. Having fun and engaging social interactions (competition/coop)
2. Enjoying the game (graphics, story, gameplay)
3. Getting a sense of progress and accomplishment (better gear, higher rating)
4. Gambling

There is no such thing as protecting a "skill investment", or even a "skill investment" itself, since your skill isnt really an investable resource, unlike time or money. You cant magically lose your skill to a few in-game changes either.

Your argument about protecting X thing only applies to in-game items like skins/weapons/armor, since having them lose their value means that you ruin player's sense of progress/accomplishment, effectively burning the hours they spent on achieving the said in-game item.

Im glad you didn't continue like that.

Why does it only apply to ingame items? There are plenty of things that a FAF player might want to protect:

• The respect they earn among their buddies / the community for being a good player
• The rating
• The authority related to any game changes that they believe their rating gives them
• The self-worth that they extract from being good at the game

And of course, protecting your skill-investment is also about the time you put in not becoming a waste of time. And its not just a thing in games, it applies to pretty much any skill that anybody invested into in life.

Anyway, if you think that it is not the skill investment bias, then why do people not argue constructively / in good faith so often?

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

Grubby on the other hand is a pro player (that is an entirly different player category). He earns money by keeping up with changes, which is pretty much the opposite attitude to the majortiy of top rated players on FAF.
Blackheart and most other top FAF players are not pro players. In fact there have never been any respectable number of "pro players" in FAF. A pro player gets payed to keep up with changes to the game and to re-invest time to re-learn every change that happens.

And thats the crucial difference between pro players and normal players.
Pros essentially have to treat the game as a normal office job that allows them to put food on the table. This means that they are forced to side with the game devs (their employer) on pretty much everything, including stuff unrelated to the game, or else they risk losing their job.

You can find quite a bit of news articles describing yet another pro football/basketball/rocket league player losing his contract or getting fined over something like this:
b8135198-8f5c-44f3-a5fe-771a71b30252-image.png

On the other hand, we got normal players that play the game for the sake of enjoying it, and they can and will (and should) complain about anything that lessens their enjoyment.

No they should not. If they have an issue with something, they should respectfully and empathically discuss it with the contributors, which are other human beings that just want the best future for FAF. The tone is extremely important here.

I can forgive a new player somewhat for not displaying human decency and basic manners, because they might think that FAF is a company or something, but the longer a player is here, the more they should know that this community is created and kept for them by volunteers that invest way more time, care and heart into FAF than they can imagine.

Like i don't need you or anybody else to worship any contributor. Just treat them with basic human decency when you talk. That is all that is needed.

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

Blackheart is probably a good example of the quintessentiel non-pro player, and his balance mod is probably on of the most conservative (conservative here meaning "if we just turn back time enough everything will be awesome") mod in the FAF vault. Or maybe its more nostalgia than conservatism, or maybe both, not sure. From a pro-player perspective (which i do not share), this would probably be seen as mostly a self-serving "i want to stay in my comfort zone" attitude.

You may call the "lets not mess with the core gameplay mechanics changing which will affect a trillion different sides of the game" argument a "comfort zone cope", but i prefer calling it a Valid Argument. You do you.

I'm not saying it is wrong to be conservative about game changes. If you are, just be honest about it and respect the opinion of others that are not your own.

This is really important because game design is an exploration process. Game design is always more like "two steps forward, one step back". Support the steps you like and critize the steps you don't but stay friendly while doing it.

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

On the other hand this is mostly just human nature. The average human is not mentally healthy enough to be a pro player.

Average human is, in fact, not mentally or physically healthy enough to be anything that is above average, hence the name average. Dont know why you even put this in here.

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

What is also seemingly human nature sadly is the accompanying tone. And yes it seems that often the better the player in question is, the more "deranged" their elitism gets. Like imagine thinking that only >2300 rating players (probably the top 0.1%) should be allowed to propose game design changes. Like literally no game in the world is being desgined or balanced by the 0.1% top players of that game because that is a deranged idea.

And yet thats the norm for every single other area of human life.
We would rather have the top 0,1% surgeon to operate on our heart than an average surgeon.
We would rather have the top 0,1% pilot fly our plane than an average one.
We would rather have the top 0,1% designer make our new phone than an average one.
We would rather have the top 0,1% coder write our apps than an average one.

The question is, why is it videogames where you draw the line? The best players are always the ones who see the game situation the clearest, know what units are the strongest and what are the weakest, and what change would improve the game or make it genuinly worse.

No, they are absolutely not the ones who always see what change would improve the game or make it genuinly worse.

Game design skill is not gaming skill! Those are separate skill sets! Sometimes, a person is good a both, but that is rather unlikely.

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

The problem is also not just about games. The "status quo bias" exists, which is normal human bias against any changes.
Whenever any big software anywhere on the world changes almost anything, like it might be the position of a single button, people flip the fuck out. They create discussions so unrespectful and unconstructive that you would think somebody was murdered.
This is sadly, what anybody that actually is trying to improve anything is constantly fighting against, and it is of course tiring.

The change in a design of a big tech software and the change of something in faf arent exactly equal.
One is made by a whole team of experienced designers and managers after lots and lots of meetings and tests.
The other is made by a few amateurs saying "Wouldnt it be cool if we had this feature"? And trying to shoehorn their idea upon a bunch of people that dont want it.

Nobody is "shoehorning their idea upon a bunch of people that dont want it". This has not happened regarding FAF gameplay changes for at least the past 3 years, and probably not before.

What has happened, is that changes were proposed (which is a totally normal and expected thing to happen), and some people responded rudely to it (like they often do).

The people critiquing the changes arent the same either.
The haters of the design change on a random big software are usually a vocal minority, only a few people of which are actually educated on the subject of software design and can give a valid critique.
In faf, however, the said vocal minority has thousands of hours in the game, and if they are not eligible to express their opinion on the subject, i dont know who is.

No, the majority of haters on any software project change don't critique, they hate. And hating is not critiquing. Big difference.

If long time FAF players are consistently unable to express their opinion on a topic in a respectful way, then in my opinion they do more damage to this community than they bring benefits. Im not gonna ban or report them but im also not gonna shed a tear if they get lost for good.

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

I can only say that i would (and have) stopped engaging entirely with people that I know are not interested in actually at least sometimes changing their own opinion or at the very least trying out changes before complaining about them. I consistently just ignore their posts in this forum, and i have no advice other than that strategy.

A bunch worthless yapping. There has been more than enough posts with actual arguments against the changes.

And if the actual respectful arguments where the only thing that was said by people, this thread would not exist and Jip would not be on the brink of stopping his contributions.

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

Last but not least, let me say that this video "Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros" is not a good video. It does not seem to produce any actual argument as to WHY this should be the correct thing to do for devs.

i Wholehearedly agree with you on the fact that this video is Not Good. It looks like that the man that made it has only a vague understanding of the industry and why games are how they are.

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

That would be the level of respect towards all the work going into these changes i would expect from high level players especially. This is often not what is happing on FAF though. What is happening on FAF often is this:

"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.

Once again, a whole nothingburger of worthless yapping and strawmanning. There has been more than enough posts with actual arguments against the changes.

Same answer as before. Im not claiming that there were no proper arguments.

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

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.

Yes, we ARE being mistreated, especially when an unnecessary naming change is being forced onto everyone even after all the backlash it got. There is no self-victimization here, only an objective observation of reality.

No you are not. The naming change is in consideration and will probably not go through as it was proposed (and it would not have taken any bitching, bickering or bashing to stop it, just friendly arguments).

FAF players that actually think they are being mistreated somehow are like kids that didn't get their second ice cream this day. Entitlement beyond my comprehension.

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

I think this completely misses the mark. While I often don't agree, there's been solid arguments for or against recent changes by these players. To basically invalidate all the arguments from this group by claiming all their concerns are self-servicing and/or are rooted in insecurity is ridiculous.

Well if somebody puts fortward an actually decently made argument in a respectful way, this does not apply to them. Im talking about the baseline behaviour. Here is what i would like baseline feedback or arguments to look like:

"I dont't like that a new type of control is introduced into a game with already complex controls, because it might be too much."

That is an example for an argument. Now, unless you also try the change to validate that this is actually the case, its not a very convincing argument. So if im feeling even more constructive i might add

"But im willing to at least try it, how can i play with this change?"

That would be the level of respect towards all the work going into these changes i would expect from high level players especially. This is often not what is happing on FAF though. What is happening on FAF often is this:

• "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.

I pretty much agree with you @Jip, ive just mostly given up arguing for this kind of attitude, because it seems to indeed be pointless on FAF. But i will add some points now in a harsher tone than previously because you are right and you deserve the support, and it fits in.

Oh boy here we come.

The primary interest of the average high level player is to protect their skill-investement against any real or perceived threat.

Grubby on the other hand is a pro player (that is an entirly different player category). He earns money by keeping up with changes, which is pretty much the opposite attitude to the majortiy of top rated players on FAF.

Blackheart and most other top FAF players are not pro players. In fact there have never been any respectable number of "pro players" in FAF. A pro player gets payed to keep up with changes to the game and to re-invest time to re-learn every change that happens.

If you do not have the mental energy for that, or your ego is not able to survive temprary drops in rating (which can of course even happen entirely without balance changes when new metas are discovered), you won't stay at the top for long anyway, in a real e-sport at least. Real e-sport players require (and some receive) high mental and physical well-being (psychologists etc.).

For an example of extreme changes look at Dota and the insane changes in the last year or two (complete character base stat mechanic changes, complete map changes, insane hero skill changes). Didn't hurt their competitive scene like at all.

Blackheart is probably a good example of the quintessentiel non-pro player, and his balance mod is probably on of the most conservative (conservative here meaning "if we just turn back time enough everything will be awesome") mod in the FAF vault. Or maybe its more nostalgia than conservatism, or maybe both, not sure. From a pro-player perspective (which i do not share), this would probably be seen as mostly a self-serving "i want to stay in my comfort zone" attitude.

On the other hand this is mostly just human nature. The average human is not mentally healthy enough to be a pro player.

What is also seemingly human nature sadly is the accompanying tone. And yes it seems that often the better the player in question is, the more "deranged" their elitism gets. Like imagine thinking that only >2300 rating players (probably the top 0.1%) should be allowed to propose game design changes. Like literally no game in the world is being desgined or balanced by the 0.1% top players of that game because that is a deranged idea.

The problem is also not just about games. The "status quo bias" exists, which is normal human bias against any changes.

Whenever any big software anywhere on the world changes almost anything, like it might be the position of a single button, people flip the fuck out. They create discussions so unrespectful and unconstructive that you would think somebody was murdered.

This is sadly, what anybody that actually is trying to improve anything is constantly fighting against, and it is of course tiring. Take a rest @Jip if you need it.

I can only say that i would (and have) stopped engaging entirely with people that I know are not interested in actually at least sometimes changing their own opinion or at the very least trying out changes before complaining about them. I consistently just ignore their posts in this forum, and i have no advice other than that strategy.

Such people just suck your energy it into a black hole. @zhanghm18 banning that behaviour is imo both pointless and ethically questionable, poeple have enough ways to suck up your energy that does not require bannable offenses anyway.

So for anybody that does not want to constantly fight resistance, the "do things for yourself" is in some ways "giving up", but in other ways it might just be the wiser thing to do in terms of personal happiness.

Last but not least, let me say that this video "Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros" is not a good video. It does not seem to produce any actual argument as to WHY this should be the correct thing to do for devs. Which is sad because its not that hard to formulate actual potential reasons/arguments (like preservation of skill investment).