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    The current pre-release of the client ("pioneer" in the version) is only compatible to itself. So you can only play with other testers. Please be aware!
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    archsimkat

    @archsimkat

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    Best posts made by archsimkat

    • Calling for nine2 to resign as Promotions Councillor

      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.


      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.

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • Introducing Mapgen Week on Ladder

      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!

      Mapgen Week (2).png

      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.


      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.

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods

      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?

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • Suggestion: Show mass reclaimed by engineers

      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?

      posted in Balance Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • Do not add new colors - discussion

      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.

      Screen Shot 2022-03-23 at 11.24.29 PM.png

      or a 2v2 with these

      Screen Shot 2022-03-23 at 11.24.39 PM.png

      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.

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • New feature announcement: Matchmaker Map Vetoes

      Map vetoes have been a long requested feature for the matchmaker and now, thanks to the hard work of ETFreeman, they are finally here. Simply select the maps you wish to veto and you will not get that map in your pool. This works independently for the 1v1, 2v2, and 4v4 matchmaker queues. The number of vetoes may be subject to adjustment but you can expect to ban multiple maps for each queue, allowing you to adjust the map pool to your liking.

      ade69cb7-4ad7-441f-bcd5-fc2210cf840a-image.png

      6221a171-f8b4-4bad-a5d1-001258dc38d9-image.png

      72e0beb1-b68c-48d3-b351-1c985eeaf7c3-image.png

      Now is the time to queue up for the matchmaker! Good luck commanders.

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • Caster UI Mod Functionality Brainstorming

      unknown.png

      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.


      Caster UI Mod Functionality Specifications


      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.

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: Why does everything suck so much right now?

      @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.”"

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • The FAForever Game Show

      Mapgen Week.png

      🔊 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?
        ?

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: Developers patch 3745 - 3748

      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
      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat

    Latest posts made by archsimkat

    • New feature announcement: Matchmaker Map Vetoes

      Map vetoes have been a long requested feature for the matchmaker and now, thanks to the hard work of ETFreeman, they are finally here. Simply select the maps you wish to veto and you will not get that map in your pool. This works independently for the 1v1, 2v2, and 4v4 matchmaker queues. The number of vetoes may be subject to adjustment but you can expect to ban multiple maps for each queue, allowing you to adjust the map pool to your liking.

      ade69cb7-4ad7-441f-bcd5-fc2210cf840a-image.png

      6221a171-f8b4-4bad-a5d1-001258dc38d9-image.png

      72e0beb1-b68c-48d3-b351-1c985eeaf7c3-image.png

      Now is the time to queue up for the matchmaker! Good luck commanders.

      posted in General Discussion
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: Matchmaker Map Pools

      image.png

      posted in Announcements
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: Matchmaker Map Pools

      Hello ladder enjoyers,

      The matchmaker team is updating how we draft the map pools for 1v1 ladder each month and wanted to share some changes we’re making to hopefully improve the experience for all players. Starting Oct 2025, we will be:

      • Increasing the overlap between lower and higher ranked map pools; that way newer players can watch replays of more experienced players on the same maps and learn more effectively.
      • Including a minimum number of classic 1v1 maps in every pool; this helps keep the map pool quality high and ensure matches remain competitive and familiar.
      • Keeping a certain number of maps fixed in the pool across consecutive months while others will rotate out; this means the map specific prep you have done for a specific map won’t become fully obsolete next month.

      5c734f94-7a9c-467c-b5b6-e9d8cee71fb2-image.png

      This is the pool for October and what the format for upcoming pools will be. We hope these changes will make it easier to learn, compete, and ultimately have fun playing 1v1 ladder at every level.

      We want to hear your feedback on the change, if you have any to give please post on this thread.

      posted in Announcements
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: Matchmaker Map Pools

      Matchmaker Pools March 2025

      image.png

      image.png

      afd5cae0-1675-4023-a5a0-c14065b04f53-image.png

      posted in Announcements
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: Matchmaker Map Pools

      Matchmaker Pools February 2025

      c696ef40-2ce2-4566-83d6-440b75140d0e-image.png

      176db925-434f-4a69-b918-b738f83ed4cb-image.png

      b00bf060-d662-472c-81ef-20bad642eba1-image.png

      posted in Announcements
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: RCVIII - Mars Attacks ~ 4v4 ~ $2,100

      Signing up

      posted in Tournaments
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: Matchmaker Map Pools

      image.png

      f853fbfc-60e7-4d43-9b7a-addc30f902ef-image.png

      2fba8b30-d0e2-4e5d-87e8-79b82ad2c8ba-image.png

      posted in Announcements
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: 3v3 Seasonal Mapgen Tourney

      archsimkat
      2079

      posted in Tournaments
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: Double Allied Tournament 3

      Sign up 2100 free agent

      posted in Tournaments
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat
    • RE: MapGen 3v3 SHOWDOWN

      Sign up 2100 free agent

      posted in Tournaments
      archsimkatA
      archsimkat