Posts made by archsimkat

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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.

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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

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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:

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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.

The matchmaker team will be trialing a slightly altered approach to selecting maps for the 1v1 ladder map pool starting in September. The pool will be focused on high quality competitive maps and eliminating the more extreme ends of the previous map pools, such as very small or large maps and extremely high reclaim maps.

We hope that the approach results in more consistent game lengths, maps that allow diverse strategies and an overall more consistent ladder experience. This approach should also make it easier for newcomers and returning players to learn the maps and jump in.

As an exception, we will maintain the inclusion of the smaller maps for the lower rating brackets, as feel that they offer a great gateway for newer players. We'll be monitoring the effect of the experimental approach in the coming months and make adjustments if needed. Furthermore, we would appreciate any feedback and encourage you to post it in this thread.

It makes a lot of sense that the guy who has an issue with the balance team and feels the need to make his own balance mod is also the guy who has an issue with the English language and feels the need to invent his own English word.

In AOE2 you can select a <<force random>> option on/off and if more than half the players in a game select it then everyone in the game is forced to play random.

Also, in addition to the civs and the regular Random options, there are other options like Mirror, which gives you the same civ as your opponent (mirrored slot in teamgames).

I think adding the force random option and the Mirror option would both be reasonable.

ok,

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Thanks for the report, I've replaced Desert Planet II with Open Palms.

The matchmaker team is against this idea because playerbase is already small enough and this will only serve to increase queue times.

@thewheelie He could be your opponent!

I don't play ladder because I can't just randomly queue or I will never get a game. I literally need to pm people to schedule ladder matches like they are dates just so I can get a game and it's just too much effort.

Eonnacia, formerly only in the 1500+ pool, has replaced Adaptive Maridia while the latter is being fixed.

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