I too would like to see mapgen as one of the maps that could be put in the ladder rotation...

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Last updated: Jan 21st, 2021.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up. Even a top player could learn some things from this. Personally, even though I had internalized a lot of these concepts, hearing it summarized in this fashion is very useful and helped me identify some areas where my decision making is not as strong.

There is a curious phenomenon that exists when you take a look at the ladder league data: the 1800+ league basically has zero activity. As of the 27th, only 2 players with ratings above 1800 have played more than 30 ladder games over this month. Why is that?

I believe that it is because the incentives to play ladder are broken. A high ladder rating is valuable because it guarantees favorable seeding in tournies, which usually have money on the line. Inactivity guarantees this ladder rating will be maintained, while activity will run the risk of potentially lowering this rating.

As the title of this post suggests, I believe the solution to this issue is the implementation of some form of rating decay. Whether it is necessarily decay in the actual rating, or just the uncertainty, there needs to be some incentive to have people continue to play ladder. Back when I had played Heroes of the Storm, my rating would undergo a soft reset every 3 months - people who had achieved the top rating would need to play consistently to maintain that rating. This is the case for many other online games, and should be the case for FAF.

--
My proposal: add in a rating decay system based on a visible rating and an invisible rating.

v = Visible rating
i = Invisible rating
t = Inactivity tracker

v = i*0.96^t

Where t=t+1 for every month that passes without 10 games played and t=t-1 for every 10 games played.

--

It's a pretty simple and straightforward system that adds decay based on how long a person hasn't played for. This can go hand in hand with the new "divisions" system, which displays a visible division rank (visible rating) on top of the actual player rating (invisible rating), but also works directly with the current rating system.

A returning player should find that their rating rises quickly with activity.

This also fixes the issue FtX is facing with tourney seeding - instead of having to give completely inactive players a rating of 0, the rating system already accounts for the decay that should happen.

“beetles bad, pls fix”. These words from the first balance suggestion on the new forum so eloquently describe our collective experience with the Cybran T2 mobile bomb, the fire beetle. Think back, when was the last time you’ve seen a fire beetle? For me, it would be in a Heaven video from years ago, where Tokyto dropped some fire beetles to snipe an ACU. Since then, I don’t think I’ve seen it at all. It’s clear that this unit is being relegated to the ash heaps of history. Here’s my suggestion for what to do to fix it.

New toggleable ability: ambush. Once toggled, the fire beetle may not move; its vision radius increases from 24 -> 45 (radar range of the mole); and it gains stealth.

If this ability is toggled on, it will not get selected by click/drag boxes or select all army hotkeys in the same fashion as a selen with cloak toggled on.

The effect is to create a new role for the fire beetle. An enterprising commander can set up fire beetles ambushes in strategic locations and use beetles as landmines. Perhaps the enemy ACU will head in that direction. Perhaps a tightly clumped army must pass through that location. Other use cases are just as exciting. The enemy army could pass by the fire beetles, which can then continue to advance into undefended enemy territory. The enemy commander could spot the beetles, but then you’d react by putting them on ambush mode, and the enemy commander would have to camp the beetles with some units with radar coverage (to catch them once they start moving). Anyone who has watched StarCraft II knows the exciting moments a well placed baneling landmine can create.

If you actually look at it closely, this is not a big change. Cybran could already pair deceivers with fire beetles for cloak+stealth on the fire beetles for similar effect. The big impact this change should have is to provide a simple and clear use case – move the unit to a spot, press a button, and wait. The ability provides immediate visual feedback – a larger vision radius and sound effect. Not being selected with other units once the fire beetle is in position should also be a nice QOL addition. A new fresh and exciting ability might just get people to build the fire beetle.

Also, btw, beetles don’t target enemy beetles. Beetles also cannot do damage to enemy beetles. Pls fix.

Since the main matchmaker pools thread has not yet been updated, here is a temporary post detailing the matchmaker map pools (1v1 and 2v2) by rating bracket for the month of March.

@moses_the_red

Your solution, disabling manual reclaim for small props (trees and small rocks), but allowing them to be reclaimed by attack move, is possibly the most inelegant and unintuitive solution I can even think of. It reads as if I just described the issues with reclaim to my 8 year old cousin, who has absolutely no understanding of the game, and had him try to create a solution to the problem.

It belies a complete lack of understanding of the fundamental tenets of game design. Are we going to have to create a must-read forum post now describing what is manually reclaimable and what is not? That seems necessary to make it clear what is manually reclaimable and what isn't. Your solution makes it difficult for a new player to even learn what is reclaimable, and even for the experienced player your solution adds unneeded complication. It will be extremely frustrating to manually click reclaim only for some of the commands to not go through. This adds a whole new set of complications – with your solution, players likely now have to learn what reclaim is manually reclaimable on a map-by-map basis.

I took the time to respond to your post and point out the issues with it, not because I think your opinion deserves it, but because the community needs to realize just how useless the drivel you spew is. I agree with Tagada that there should be some kind moderation for misleading or harmful posts.

Thanks to the ever amazing @arma473, I have been able to make a spreadsheet with the frequency that ladder matches on particular maps are aborted. I consider a game aborted if it ends within 90 seconds (initially I was doing 3 minutes, but it seems there are some openers such as first bomber, intie rush killing transports, etc. that will potentially end the game within 3 minutes). The data are composed of ladder matches going back to March 1st 2020 and are broken down by ladder rating.

@Valki while I’m not saying you’re wrong, I will say that your anecdotal experience about people quitting frequently on Badlands simply does not agree with the empirical data. 8 - Badlands_v4 has a 1.92% abort rate at <300 and a 2.12% abort rate at 300-800. For reference, the median abort rate for the <300 bracket is ambush the enemy with a 2.91% abort rate and is Vulcan's Reach with 4.44% for at 300-800. In fact, out of the 88 maps that have been played by ladder players at 300-800, only 8 maps have a lower abort rate than Badlands.

@Brutus5000 it seems your experience does match the data. For the 300-800 bracket, outside of Moonlight Mesas with a 20.95% abort rate, the next 4 aborted maps are all 20x20 maps (Seton's Clutch: 10.11%, Roanoke Abyss: 10.24%, Seraphim Glaciers: 11.13%, Crossfire Canal - FAF version: 15.00%). These are very high abort rates and should be taken into account.

Other interesting stats:

• 62/105 maps in the 1800+ bracket have a 0.00% abort rate.
• The highest abort rate maps are in the 1800+ bracket with Adaptive Kusoge at 22.72% and Broken_Vows at 22.22% (small sample size).
• The average* abort rate in the <300 bracket is 3.40%.
• The average* abort rate in the 300-800 bracket is 5.04%.
• The average* abort rate in the 800-1300 bracket is 4.19%.
• The average* abort rate in the 1300-1800 bracket is 3.03%.
• The average* abort rate in the 1800+ bracket is 2.47%.

*average calculated by weighting every map equally.

Overall, the higher the rating, the lower the abort rate. Perhaps the better you get, the less picky you are with maps because you are more comfortable playing a variety of maps (with a few notable exceptions). Or, perhaps the willingness to play on a greater variety of maps makes you a better player. Not sure which direction the causation arrow points. Also not really sure why 300-800 is the pickiest bracket by a decent margin.

Going forward for future ladder pools, I will also take abort data into consideration as an additional criterion when making the map pools.

@MarcSpector if you’d like to go through the trouble of going through the entire ladder map pool and marking each map by color I could take color of map into consideration.

Motion to rename the tourney to rAInbow Cup

Fully support every idea brought up by biass. I've been on the subreddit every now and then, and there seems to be quite a bit of misinformation and confusion regarding faf.

One more suggestion: I've also seen a lot of gaming subreddits clip highlights from streams or cool moments from games. Those posts tend to get a lot of engagement because it's both easy to consume and entertaining, especially on mobile (which I think is how the majority of people on reddit consumes content). I have a clip in mind from the recent faflive stream I'd like to clip and post to the subreddit, and hopefully there can be a consistent stream of content to highlight on the subreddit in the future.

In a lot of situations, you actually need to ctrl+K to actually get the draw (e.g. your opponent is <2500hp, but has shift g'd units around your acu and is about to walk out of range), so until the issue is fixed, the best temporary solution is to just pause and ask for/accept a draw in every draw situation.

I like the idea but removing the structure blueprints would be a massive nerf to the ACU.

I had originally placed Cheeky Isle in the 1500-2000 category, but Jip put Autumn as a map proposal decided to add it last minute so I just shuffled Cheeky Isle up a division and slot Autumn in - I can put Cheeky Isle in the 1500-2000 next bracket so it gets more exposure and playtime for sure.

As ftx said, what counts as a build order to a 1k player is probably very different to what counts as a build order to a 2k player. As you get better at the game, what was previously a "build order" is now just the natural output of playing the game and balancing your eco, so unless you are at a level where you cannot improve your general gameplay (which I don't think is the case for anybody in the game - even Tagada/Nexus), focusing on improving your general gameplay is preferable to worrying about preparing build orders for specific maps.

This is literally the plot to Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut...

It would be like a 1v1 sure, but between 2.8k rated players.

If thirteen out of the top 20 don't sign up I will play!

Very well said. I love the vision you are laying out and I think this has the potential to truly make forged alliance forever, as this seems like an actual formula for sustainability in the competitive scene. Getting on casts (mostly Jagged) was also a massive motivation for me to start becoming a better player, so this seems like the perfect way to encourage more competition on the scene. I would be down to fill in the quota by playing showmatches/co-casting, and perhaps also try casting.

I agree that the way FA is cast is usually wrong - as you become a better player, you don't have time to zoom in and enjoy the cinematic parts of the game, but that does not carry over well for casting. Casting should be done with low scroll and pan speed, with a focus on actually watching the game and not icons moving around the entire game. I think with some thought put into casting, and perhaps some small changes (maybe in a casting camera control UI mod) to camera controls would go a long way in making the game a better viewing experience.

I've also thought for a long time that FA looks "slow" from a viewers perspective - what's funny is that most RTS games except supcom are actually played at a faster speed than they were initially designed for (aoe2 is played on 1.7x speed, starcraft 2 is played on 1.4x). In the MOBA I used to play a lot, they gave every single hero a baseline 11% movespeed increase at some point to increase the pace of the game. I think it's natural that the pace of the game gets faster as players get better. I like the direction taken with the mech marine and other balance changes, but, here's a half baked idea, perhaps if the game were just entirely played on 1.1x or 1.2x speed or if every unit got a 1.1x or 1.2x speed increase, that would help alleviate the "slowness" inherent in the game especially for viewers. In any case, I think the slowness is a problem and should be addressed.

"I have long-term plans to make a unit interaction redesign mod after some of the balance stuff is out of the way." This sounds interesting and I would like to hear more about this...

Tex pointed out one of the biggest issues with high level activity on faf - there just isn't a critical mass of 2.1k+ high level players where players can "hop in" and play ladder.

What that means is the barrier to playing ladder effectively becomes much higher, as you basically have to hope that one of the few people you can match with is online and playing ladder. Sometimes the windows when people are playing ladder just line up, and you get a ton of decent ladder games (Tagada/Blodir a year go, Mozy/Thomas a while ago, Swkoll/Tex now). However, that isn't always going to be the case, and it's very demotivating when your ladder buddy isn't playing when you want to play (for me personally, there's quite a vicious cycle as playing less makes me want to play less). The issue is the way ladder works right now is that most people in the 2.1k+ range have very, very few people that they can realistically match up with: their opponent must be 2k+ rated, in a similar timezone, and actually active on ladder. You can probably count on one hand the number of people that fit those criteria for a given top player.

What is the solution to getting more high level ladder activity? Get more top players. This may sound facetious, but I am listing this as a solution because it is the best solution to the issue. If there is a critical mass of top level players, to the point where your top player could just drop in and play a ladder game, at least during the active timezones, it would really fix this issue. Of course, this is perhaps just a pipe dream, since even just getting more players ≠ getting more top players, really, we need a lot more players + the next bracket of players needs to get a lot better.

What is a more realistic solution to getting more high level ladder activity? Give an option for players to increase their search range, so that they can at least find a game if both parties are willing. I think being able to find a game at all, rather than literally being unable to find a game through matchmaking, is the most crucial part of the solution, and this is a fix that does exactly that.

Implement a checkmark that asks "Would you like to increase your search range? It will increase your chance of getting a game but also increase the chance of getting an unbalanced game." that the user can tick or untick. If you tick it, you get reduced search range (e.g. +/- 300, or whatever is reasonable), and if you untick it, the search range can increase so you can match with people 400 or 500 points away.

The rating system should be able to handle the "imbalanced" matchups that result (e.g. if I face a 1400 as a 1900 on ladder, I would have a 95% chance to win, but get like 2 points or something from winning, -14 from drawing, and -30 from losing), and players who don't want to use this option can just not tick the box, so I don't see any reason this shouldn't be implemented.

The question really is would you prefer having a potentially unbalanced game or no game at all. For people in the less active timezones, the former would likely be preferable to most people. Being from a less active timezone, I am very much against reducing the search range without any recourse. A reasonable middle-ground solution would be to implement a checkmark that asks "Would you like to increase your search range? It will increase your chance of getting a game but also increase the chance of getting an unbalanced game." that the user can tick or untick. If you tick it, you get reduced search range (e.g. +/- 300, or whatever is reasonable), and if you untick it, the search range can increase as it currently does in TMM.

This option should also apply to ladder 1v1, allowing your search range to increase until you find a game. The rating system should be able to handle the "imbalanced" matchups that result (e.g. if I face a 1400 as a 1900 on ladder, I would have a 95% chance to win, but get like 2 points or something from winning, -14 from drawing, and -30 from losing).

Also, from my anecdotal experience, I've personally been in quite a few games with a weaker teammate against 2 ~1500 opponents and come out victorious. I think it's very reasonable for a 1700+1000 to beat a 1400+1300, with the outcome probably being 50/50, if everyone is actually at their rating (separate issue). This is a little beside the point, but Swkoll showed me a replay the other day where his 800 global/700 ladder/700TMM teammate just crushed Inspektor_Kot and Wesh, who are both rated around 1.8k. It was very entertaining to watch.