Here are two of the pledges that a councillor makes upon assuming their duties:

• I will communicate professionally and avoid bringing FAF into disrepute.
• I understand that if I am unable to perform these duties, I will resign or be replaced.

Due to the messages made by nine2 in this thread:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1695/council-of-setons-exposed-part-1/

and due to an overreach of power as promo councillor shown in this thread:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1712/curbing-toxicity-in-faf/

I believe that nine2 has demonstrated that he is no longer capable of upholding the councillor pledges. I am therefore asking for the resignation of @nine2 as Promotions Councillor.

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Edit: This thread is dedicated to nine2's actions and the call for his resignation. The moderation team will ensure that existing comments discussing other topics be removed or moved to a new thread, and that future comments are on-topic.

Hey, you!

• Are you interested in putting your FAF skills to the test on the most level playing field?

Whether you are someone who refuses to play any map that's not mapgen unless it's LoTS, or you are someone who has never played ladder at all, this is the event for you!

The first week of September will be the first ever Mapgen Week on ladder, where the 1v1 ladder map pool is only 5x5, 10x10, and 20x20 mapgen for those 7 days (Sep 1 through Sep 7). A regular pool resumes as normal afterwards.

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I plan to make Mapgen Week a semi-regular thing and the precise frequency will be determined based on feedback from you guys and what I see. As of right now I plan to run it every month or every other month. Also, depending on feedback and other factors, I may make it an event only for particular rating brackets only, e.g. 1300+ or 1800+. Feel free to post any feedback here or message me on discord/FAF.

I propose we ban mods that automatically throttle energy and mass spenders (mass fabs, engineers, factories, etc.) to prevent stalls such as, but not limited to, EcoManager and UI Mass Fab Manager - Auto Fab Manager.

The way EcoManager in particular works is that it will throttle energy users when your mass/energy in storage falls below a certain threshold. It provides a huge gameplay advantage, preventing shields from going down, without any input from the user since it just plays the game for you.

Here is a recent example of it being used. You can see the streamer lilSidlil add 14 hives to a t3 pgen, which crashes his power to -30k. The mod immediately reacts to pause all mass fabs and other engineers to save as much power as possible.

https://youtu.be/vbKlS3k-LRE?t=8032

EcoManager has some features that are acceptable, such as the Mex overlay and the Nuke overlay (displaying mex tech level/number of missiles loaded) that don't need to be banned, but those non-cheat should be bundled into a new mod or the cheat features removed from the current one.

In my opinion this mod far surpasses the threshold for a cheat mod, and honestly am a little confused at how it is still allowed to be used. It should be straightforward to just remove it from the vault and ban people that still use it, since it's pretty obvious when it is being used. What are your thoughts on the issue?

As the title says, my suggestion would be to show mass reclaimed by engineers in the same way you can see mass killed by combat units.

This feature alone would be a nice quality of life feature for both playing and viewing. It would:

• help especially lower level players see the impact of reclaim and the value from investing into reclaiming engineers.
• provide more information for coaches in their training sessions.
• help higher level players refine their build orders.
• create these exciting moments for casters where you can see the impact of a "hero engineer".

One potential downside is the impact on sim speed, due to having do these arithmetic calculations on the fly, but a different thread has concluded that the mass-killed calculation for determining veterancy has a negligible effect on sim speed.

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1986/about-the-veterancy-system

I would like someone more knowledgeable to weigh in on this issue, but it seems to me that this mass-reclaimed system would be implemented in a similar fashion to the mass-killed system and likely have the same order of magnitude impact on the sim speed—which would be negligible.

The other "downside" (that is, barrier to implementation) is the development work required to implement such a system. Once again, I am not knowledgeable on this topic and would like someone to weigh in, but considering the mass-killed veterancy system was implemented in 2017, I assume this suggestion is reasonable to implement as well.

It seems to be the benefits far outweigh the downsides. Let me know what you guys think! Would people like such a feature or are there other arguments against such a feature that I haven't covered?

The purpose of this thread is to discuss arguments for and against adding new colors as proposed in this pull request: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3706

My view is that the primary objective for player colors should be to make the game readable for players and casters. In my view the suggested change detracts from that goal, as the addition of more colors makes certain color combinations more similar. For example, imagine playing a 1v1 with this color combination.

or a 2v2 with these

Trying to cast games with these similar colors would be even more of a nightmare.

It just seems like a completely unnecessary change that is not fixing an existing problem and is instead only potentially creating a new one. I think the colors are just about fine the way they are, and the focus should be just on improving them slightly (e.g. the current dark blue/violet should have white as a secondary color, not black, to maximize contrast).

My view is that there is no reason to add more colors, as we have enough colors for even 8v8, and this change just makes the game potentially less readable, since some color combinations are more similar than before, so these changes should not happen.

If you are in favor of these changes please explain why, and if you are against these changes please also join in the conversation so the devs have a sense of what the community thinks.

This is a concept draft of a Caster UI mod made by a contributor after discussion with Swkoll and myself that is, EDIT: fortunately, now being worked on! The goal of the UI mod is to create a casting interface in the form of a UI mod that contains a complete suite of tools that can be plug-and-play for any potential caster for any 1v1 replay or live game. The goal of this post is to create a complete set of specifications for a Caster UI mod with the help of you, the community, so that we can determine the proper scope and the most relevant features of the project.

I will start off by posting my current set of specifications, but it's almost certainly incomplete and some features that I currently have may not be desirable, so please post and list your desired features/which current features aren't desirable. I will update this post to maintain a list of the most desired specifications.

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Caster UI Mod Functionality Specifications

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Main view

The majority of the features here is already encompassed in the concept draft.

• Current mass/e in storage for both players
• Current mass/e income for both players
• Current total mass for both players
• Current total mass reclaimed for both players
• Player factions
• Player names
• Player clan names
• Tourney title
• Tourney round of ?
• Tourney best of ?
• Current game score
• Highest land/air/naval tech level (shown by a progress bar % if it's upgrading)
• Total mass in land/air/navy
• Current ACU HP
• Current ACU upgrades

Additional information panels

In addition to the main view, there should be additional information panels you can pull up. I think there should be two main categories of additional information panels. One category should cover the screen and display information over the course of the game, and the other should be a small side panel which displays current information. These panels should be opened using hotkeys.

Real time match timeline (covers the majority of the screen). This should be a live scrolling graph with information over time.

• Match timeline (when players reach key objectives like first t2 land, t2 mex, t3 air, gun upgrade, etc.) [this can information be overlaid on any of the following graphs]
• Live income graph (similar to the graphs of mass/e at the end of the game in the score screen)
• Live mass income disparity graph
• Live energy income disparity graph
• Live net unit disparity mass

Side panels (brings up a small panel with additional information)

• Units lost (mass/e lost for each player)
• Current air breakdown* (intie/bomber/gunship/transport/asf/etc. numbers for both players, and total mass in air, kind of like UI party's ECOntrol interface)
• Current land breakdown (once again broken down by number of units for each unit type)
• Current navy breakdown
• Current structures breakdown (mex/factory count)
• Current economy (number of t3/t2/t1 mexes, pgens, etc. exactly like ECOntrol's interface but for both players)
• Total units lost (once again broken down by number of units for each unit type)
• Net spending (broken down by spending into Eco/Production/Units)
• Current production
• Current/average APM (I don't know if we can track this)
• Current/average CPM

*Do we want to list land/air/navy current units and units lost in one tab or break down each one into 3 categories? If it's just one tab it might become too information heavy in the late game when there are many unit types.

Additional camera control options

• Toggle semi-free cam (keep casting interface)
• Toggle free cam (remove all UI)
• Toggle slow acceleration based camera movement (smooth scrolling)
• More cinematic camera features

Misc features

• Hero units (most units or mass killed by individual units - if you click it you go to the unit)
• Show energy reclaim of map
• Show mass reclaimed per engineer
• Average mass reclaimed per engineer OR
• Engineer efficiency ratio (total reclaimed gathered / total engineer time) [total engineer time increases by 1 for every second each engineer is alive, eg. if 5 engineers are alive simultaneously then it will increase by 5 every second]
• Eco efficiency ratio (total mass spent on economy / total mass produced by economy) [does not include reclaim]
• Hide player chat (in case some players get a bit... salty)
• Swap player colors (dunno if this is possible, mainly for when players choose very similar colors)

Last edited on 11/09/21.

@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.”"

This is the Active Trainers Contact Page, a place for students to find trainers and a for trainers to advertise themselves.

If you are a student:
This is a page for you to find a trainer that best suits you. Regardless of your rating or any reason you may have to not look for a trainer, as long as you have a mindset of improvement, you can use this page to reach out to an active trainer. You may either message a trainer directly, or post a reply below. Please tell the trainer a little about yourself, the areas you would like to improve in, and your ultimate goals for the training.

If you are a trainer:
This is a page for you to advertise your availability. Trainers please give me a short blurb about the type of student you are looking for and your training style, your desired student rating range, your availability, and your discord contact. There is no rating requirement to be a trainer. If you would would like to be added to the list or taken off, please contact me on FAF, Discord, or the forum.

Active Trainers Contact Page

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Tex [Global: 1929 | Ladder: 2100]

Teaching Ladder 1v1 for players [rated 1.2K+]
I won't teach you 'standard faf' - that is, build orders or how to eco, but I will teach you when to push and when not to push, how to identify the game state find your win condition, even from a losing position. Please already have a basic understanding of FAF gameplay and macro. Teaching will primarily be in the form of replay analysis and questioning decision making. This can not be done unless there is a basic understanding of FA gameplay mechanics.

Teaching all game modes for any players (All rating)
I will go over your replays and help you figure out the most important aspects of your gameplay that needs improvement, and point you in the right direction to fix these.

Please contact me on FAF primarily.
Discord: Voiceoftex#9399

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F-Odin [Global: 1971 | Ladder: 1832]

"Experienced Trainer who has taught anyone from complete beginners to decent players, uses Discord religiously and will even whack out a twitch stream with recorded commentary now and then to help analysis. Happy to teach anyone who can speak English. Will be hosting/has newbie (under 100 games) group sessions on Fridays 2000 GMT"."

Desired student: [played >5 games and speaks English]
Discord: F-Odin#0791

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cocAurico [Global: 1612 | Ladder: 1636]

"In just about 15 days, with a 12 steps program, get rid of your firebase addiction, and even better, learn to break your opponent firebase with a 97% success ratio! 5 first day are free, why don't you try it!"

Availability: UK afternoon/evening time.
Discord: @Auriko5386

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CheeseBerry [Setons: 1700 | like 1200 anywhere else]

"If you are below 1.4k and interested in the map Seton's Clutch pm me!
This includes experienced Setoners trying to become better, Astro and Gap players wanting to try out a new map and ladder players switching it up with some team games."

"I'll also gladly show you the ropes on any map if you are completely new to FAF (< 50 games).
The basics translate between all game modes and there are quite a few unintuitive tips and tricks you just gotta be shown when starting out."

Desired Student: See above, speaking English/German
Availability: Typically German Evening
Discord: Cheeseberry#1965 (or pm me in FAF)

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arma473 [Global: 1265 | Ladder: 1173]

"I have no minimum rating requirement and you don’t have to be particularly motivated. If you are playing ladder matches, or you want to play ladder matches, that’s good enough. For active players: I would watch your replays and give feedback. For anyone who feels like they’re not ready for the ladder: I will teach you the tools that you need to get started. You won’t learn them by playing against the AI or by playing in team games.

I also wrote a guide to 1v1s. You might find it useful: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/766/ladder-1v1-beginner-intermediate-and-advanced-topics-by-arma473. "

Availability: I'm available most of the time, but my work schedule is irregular.
Discord: 4rma473#4558

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Wainan [Global: 1018 | Ladder: 750]

"Looking at helping to optimise basic build orders and help to get people into the mindset of playing aggressive 1v1."

Desired student: [Speaks English]
Availability: UK afternoon/evening time.

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Sladow-Noob [Global: 2000]

"Training players reaching from complete beginners up to 1.5k+ rank since years, specializing in teamgames on any map, any faction. I don't mind if someone only wants to learn the standard buildorders or the more advanced micro-techniques - I can teach you what you want to learn and especially for the ones who're usually by far the highest ones in the team: How to carry teamgames. Usually it's up to my trainees if they want to go through replays via a VC on Discord or just via chat. "

Discord: Sladow#9155

Desired student: [Speaks German and English]

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Last updated: Oct 30th, 2021.

Jeopardy music plays

Hello and welcome to the first FAForever Game Show! Thank you for tuning in, I am Archsimkat and I will be your host for today. On this episode, we'll have a range of questions from in-game knowledge to the community, from player history to mapping knowledge.

Now entering the studio are today's contestants... an avid FAF player... a masterful forum user... from all over the world... you!

Simply copy the text from below the line and try your best to answer the questions. If you don't know something, you can move on or try your best to guess. Good luck!

---

I hereby declare I have not looked up anything to help me answer any of the ensuing questions since opening this forum post.

1. How many mexes does rock spot have on Senton?
   ?

2. List the four different T2 transports in order of their carry capacity (highest -> lowest):
   ? ? ? ?

3. Which player has the most wins in LegendOfTheStars?
   ?

4. On Operation Overlord, Fletcher gives you a number of titans as reinforcements. How many?
   ?

5. Name any 5 non-experimental Seraphim units:
   ? ? ? ? ?

6. What produces more mass per mass invested? a) T1 mex or b) Paragon
   ?

7. How many mexes are there on the map Open Palms?
   ?

8. How many missiles does Cybran T2 TML load?
   ?

9. Gyle casted a 2v6 game of Dual Gap. Who were the players?
   ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

10. What is the mass of the Novax satellite wreck on land?
    ?

11. List the four different frigates in order of their HP (highest -> lowest):
    ? ? ? ?

12. In Rainbow Cup III, Nexus died to an AI. Which AI was it?
    ?

13. In the Forged Alliance campaign, Dostya is betrayed by a Cybran. Who?
    ?

14. What term refers to the strategy of going mass t1 spam? a) Graardor, b) Grond, or c) Grarl
    ?

15. List the four different t1 tanks in order of their rate of fire (fastest -> slowest):
    ? ? ? ?

16. Which player had the most highly rated player card in 2021 LegendOfTheStars?
    ?

Can I suggest a feature?

Contextual drag selection:

• Alt drag box to select only engineers
• Normal drag box to select only army
• Shift drag box to select everything

Sign up 2100 free agent

Sign up 2100 free agent

In my experience, outside of the tightest core friend groups, it's pretty much inevitable that in any given social group (whether it's in school, at work, in hobby clubs, etc.) there will be people you dislike and disagree with, and there will be people that dislike and disagree with you. It's just the nature of people being different and having different opinions. In real life, however, there is more of a filter as people at least feel the need to be polite to one another that stops conversations from going this toxic. In internet communities, there is no such filter. There is serious evidence that tech platforms fuel increasing political polarization and I think this is just a microcosm of what's going on more broadly.

This problem is compounded as on FAF you have people from literally every corner of the globe, from different countries with completely different cultures, with different social norms and different ways of communicating. Look at how easy it is for people from more similar cultural backgrounds to commit social faux pas: call a woman a cunt in the UK and it's not a big deal; call a woman a cunt in the US and they just might murder you. And this is just between two majority English speaking countries. I do think that some amount of the perceived aggression that people experience in discussions here may genuinely just be due to cultural communication differences, and as people take offence and strike back that's how conversations turn into arguments.

These are not problems endemic to FAF, as some people seem to think: Rowey mentioned moving to the BAR community and contributing there as there instead. If you take a gander at the BAR subreddit, literally half of all the posts are about how toxic the community is and, from what I've heard from players who have tried BAR, it seems even worse. This does feel like the rule, not the exception, among internet communities, especially competitive gaming ones, in general.

I think it's this communication problem, plus a big fundamental disconnect, that really made the entire area reclaim discourse so taxing on the devs and so aggravating for the players.

From what I read of the conversations, the game team simply wanted players to test this new feature they thought was cool and would make the game feel better to play (without perhaps understanding the full history of the discussion that had already existed about this feature in the past decade or the gameplay implications of said feature), and decide whether or not to add it later after feedback.

At the end of the day what ended up happening was that tons of people gave negative feedback about area reclaim, some tested it, found it was as bad as expected, and the game team decided not to add it.

Everything happened as it should.

It was just that the conversations that led to this outcome were so abusive and nasty. We could've had more civilized discussions without the personal attacks and ad hominems and arrived at this outcome all the same. Just discuss the feature. There's no need to attack the person.

‎

‎

My man AUTO said this to me earlier today. I'm sure that in real life he's a nice guy, that he doesn't interact with people like this, and that he wouldn't be like this had we chatted in person, but because it's a discord chat that will scroll by in minutes, he feels there's no holds barred on what he can say.

I don't have the solution to this problem. People just need to understand that at the end of the day it's just another human being behind a computer. And they don't, or at least they don't act like it. I completely understand if @Jip decide to take his talents elsewhere and I respect the decision after the vitriol he received for investing his time into trying to improve the game.

@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.”"

@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.

@noc said in Username rules updates:

In terms of tournament recognition I personally would love to see a stream where TheWheelie (Farms) in this case would have to figure out who the 8 players are as they all have the same names.

Think it would make rather good casting.

The wheekienoob is attacking the wheekie while the ThewhekieNoob is fighting TheWhekeNoob

A preview of the tourney:

https://clips.twitch.tv/TangibleBraveCrowMcaT-EIcbNo1RgClv4JX7

Sign up archsimkat 2100 + Babel 1500

I think a good middle ground solution that gives the best of both worlds would be to show two names in the lobby, one chosen freely changed name and another permanent handle. Here's a mockup of what I'm envisioning:

Sign up

Adding to this thread, I also think that it's really hard to see mex locations on snowy mapgens.

I have to strain my eyes a lot more than other map types to see the mex spots and over time have noticed on multiple occasions that I, or someone I'm in a call with, miss a mex or two on these types of maps.