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You need to look at your own replays before making such wild accusations.
I'm watching a game of yours, you're 5k mass down (one and a over-half T3 mexes) at minute 10.
You make a Galactic Colossus instead of planes like you're supposed to be doing. So you're of course going to be down planes.
You engage enemy air while down on planes by roughly 20. You move your planes right past his, allowing him to shoot down your bombers for free. And after idling for a couple of seconds, try to run away while he is in the process of shooting your planes down.
You'll find that fighter jets are not capable of shooting backwards.
After this loss, you decide to make AA gunships. AA gunships are not as good as ASF for damage vs other planes and thus you shouldn't be making them unless you actually won the fight.
Also, despite being on two bases, your inability to follow basic eco steps is letting your single base mirror get close to out-ecoing you again. I don't know what happened to that GC but i'm assuming you fed it.
Your second airfight, after idling over five cruisers and two flak guns for a couple seconds, puts you at 50 asf to 216. That's not "out number my opponents air on units". That's a complete and total air loss.
You get smoked, as only someone with a quarter of their units can.
I'm going to be straight with you. You're not an ok air player. At best, you're attempting to mimic better players without any of the desicion making or understanding of why the better players play the way they do. You have a long way to go before anyone would consider you "ok" at the game. If you want to get better, focus on reviewing your play and handling losses with more tact. Attempt to incorporate better ideas into your play each lobby instead of mindlessly sitting on autopilot for another 6000 games.
And don't accuse people of cheating unless you watch the replay yourself and prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Good luck!
I’m of course happy for anyone to air out their issues either now, or when it actually appeared. My pms are open or you can forward it anonymously through a middleman.
However, for the interests of making an informed opinion about the topic, you need to be aware of the following:
Exotic_Retard speed2 Tatsu nine2
Have both:
A financial incentive to reply here - all part of a team developing a game that tatsu/nine2 co manage A career incentive to post here (nine2 pays or organised the payment of their salary for the financial incentive) They were directly asked to post here through private message.
Your opinions are your own about the topic, however I don’t think choosing to omit this information is particularly acceptable.
Hello everyone.
It is with regret that I announce after much discussion, FAF Leadership has unanimously decided to remove both Francias and Suzuji's applications to apply for Player Councilor.
FAF Councilor elections - like the grand majority of democratic processes - Do have eligibility requirements. It is expected that applicants do have a mostly clean moderation history. Users who are permanently banned, or have been banned repeatedly for serious offences, do not meet these requirements.
It is indeed our mistake to have not posted any requirements in the original thread, and I will apologise on behalf of the council for that. I will push for both the Council and the FAF Association to outline these requirements so that this situation does not happen again in the future.
I also apologise about the desicion to review the canidates AFTER the discussion period. The review should be done beforehand as to not needlessly waste anyone's time or sow confusion.
For the sake of transparency, and to avoid any Conflicts of Interest, I need to make it known that:
I would also ask that discussion around the removal not be included in this thread. If you need further information. I would suggest going over to zulip - or asking Giebmasse or myself.
Following this decision, we've decided to prolong the discussion period for an extra week to accommodate further debate.
The new timeline is as follows:
30th of May: Signups close. 6th of June: Voting Period begins.
If you're wanting to apply, you can still do so until the 30th. Make sure to post your application here. Any applications posted outside of this thread are not to be considered as legitimate.
You also need to commit yourself to a councilors pledge. If you're not able to think of one; one has been created for you. Make sure it's in-line with the councilor responsibilities from the FAF wiki. They're also posted here: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1589/player-councilor-election-2021
You can find an outline of the current duties of the position here: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1571/an-election-will-soon-take-place-for-the-player-councilor-role-apply-here/2
You can find the current applications with these links:
FtXCommando: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1589/player-councilor-election-2021/2
Morax: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1589/player-councilor-election-2021/4
Emperor_Penguin https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1633/new-player-councilor-discussion-removal-announcements/27
They may also choose to repost their application, or modify it to place here if they wish.
Use this thread to discuss the applications. Feel free to repost questions from the old thread if they have not been answered.
And of course; good luck. biass.
As mentioned in the roadmap here: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/305/creative-councilor-intro-roadmap-discussion/4
As it stands right now, the limiting factor in user created maps is without a doubt props, this means reclaim like trees or rocks.
While map authors are very much able to easily implement new custom textures and decals into their work, you'll notice that authors are more or less forced to resort to the same 2 or three props, or completely cripple their creativity because we just don't have the assets to match the idea.
Some examples:
After the older attempts to get custom props going in Gateway and Rose, we eventually pushed through a patch for the code that allows you to load props from your map folder. Or so I have been told.
(The map folder is of course - the same place we're putting stuff like custom textures now.)
This also comes with it's own set of problems and thus isn't an optimal solution:
The FAF Creative Palette project is a simple project aimed on small edits to map assets in order to bring a larger variety of enviroments to the game. It's not a radical new concept, but can easily provide a lot of reward for little to no risk or effort.
Here is a simple example I did, I opened a crystal prop and then made one edit.
All of a sudden, these recoloured red crystals open up a number of possible use cases.
I want to do a number of these and then add them to FAF so that map authors can use them in their own creations. And of course, you're allowed to help on this.
That currently includes editing the following items, and i'll add onto this later:
What happens now? Well first, we'll probably announce a prop making tournament after the mapping tournament i'll announce later tonight, Due to the interesting theme for this one, making props for the tournament is also encouraged.
You can discuss it, add your suggestions or offer to assist this below. Suggestions for other things to add such as decals or textures are also fine. I'll make some more concepts to push this project forward shortly. Talk soon.
You can view this as a google document HERE
This is a start of a series about creating basic modifications in Supreme Commander. This guide was made by both biass and Dragun101, with the hopes that the community could use this knowledge to create balance mods to test their theories. Special thanks to Balthazar for his assistance.
Every unit in Supreme Commander has it’s stats and features controlled by a text file called a blueprint file. The file syntax for blueprints are “.bp” files.
What we’re doing here is creating a second blueprint file for the game to compare to the first one. The game will then add your code into the original blueprint file for the unit(s) you’ve selected to change.
For example: If you make a merge blueprint that says that the Pillar tank has 9999hp; that will overwrite the original HP of the unit and thus, the Pillar tank will have 9999hp in the game.
This is the basic foundation for all of our changes in FAF. This includes the core game balance, The Equilibrium mod, and BHEDIT. There are a number of different nuances to that, but we will only go into the surface level today.
All mods (and maps!) sit inside a folder so to start a new mod, a new folder needs to be made. I’ll call my mod folder “oneNiceMod” for the purposes of the guide. But you should of course give your folder a relevant name. If you don’t know what you’re going to do yet, you can come back to this at any time.
Inside this folder, you need to place a file called mod_info.lua You might need to make a “new text document” and then save it as this name for it to become what you want.
This file is critical because it contains a lot of important information about your mod. Lua files can be opened with your text editor of choice - including basics like notepad - so don’t worry if it asks you for a program.
Inside this file, you need to have a couple lines of very basic code. Balthazar has kindly provided a template for us to use here, lets go over all of these in order.
name = "My first balance mod" uid = "4378-3q43-bia55-m0d9" version = 1 description = "Finally gives UEF the respect they deserve." author = "biass" icon = "/mods/oneNiceMod/mod_icon.png" selectable = true enabled = true exclusive = false ui_only = false conflicts = { }
The name of your mod appears in the lobby and the mod vault. You should dictate the exact name of your mod here, and not with the folder you just made earlier.
UID stands for “Unique Identifier” and will be used by the game to know what mod is what. It’s almost like a barcode for a supermarket. This can in theory be anything, but no two UID’s should be the same. Make sure you add in some stuff so it couldn’t be mistaken for another mod.
You can use https://www.uuidgenerator.net/ if you want a random one.
When you want to upload a new version to the mod vault, you should increase this number by 1. This will allow the mod vault to properly hide your old version and keep everything clean.
This text will display in the mod vault when you click on the mod, as well as show in the lobby. It’s best to properly tell other people what your mod does. As well as credit other people for their work if you need to do so.
This can be anything. You should really just add your username here.
This is a link to the image that shows in the mod vault, if you have one to place there. I recommend you make your icon file a .png file, and place it neatly into the folder you made earlier. You don’t need to name your image file “mod_icon.png” but make sure the text path here matches the name of your folder, and the name of the image file.
In order for your mod to appear in the lobby for you to use, both of these need to be set as “true”
If this is your first mod, you won’t need these.
If you set this to true, you can only use this mod by itself. No other mods can be used if you select this one. It’s best if you just leave this as “false” unless for some reason, you 100% need this to be true. The default is “false” so you don’t need this for your first mod.
Setting this to “true” forces the game to ignore code that impacts the simulation of the game, making it only load code that touches upon the UI. Balance mods impact the sim, so setting this to “true” would make your mod useless. The default value is false, so you don’t actually need this.
If a mod cannot be used with another mod for any reason, that is referred to as a conflict. Put the UID (See above) of the mods that you cannot use here (For example: “234-345-2345-badmod”) and separate them with a comma. When you select the mod in the lobby, it will ask you if you want to turn off the mods you put here if you have them selected. Remove the examples and leave it empty if you don’t have any conflicts. You won’t have any for your first mod, so you can remove it completely if you wish.
You can go over a more advanced explanation of the mod_info commands here: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/blob/deploy/fafdevelop/lua/MODS.LUA You should probably do this some other time, lets move on.
Blueprint files can be loaded from anywhere inside the mod, but I highly recommend you create some subfolders for organization.
Create a new folder inside your first, and call it “merge”. You can name this whatever in reality, but “merge” is clean and descriptive of it’s content. You can make more folders inside here that go as deep as you please, but we will make our first blueprint in this folder.
You can also name the blueprint file whatever you want, and you can edit multiple units from one file.
I’m going to make edits to one unit in this guide. That unit is the Pillar tank, and thus I will make my file “pillar.bp” Again, you might need to make a new text document, open it, and then save it as “pillar.bp” for it to be correct.
I will now write my first few lines of code.
UnitBlueprint { Merge = true, BlueprintId = 'uel0202', }
Make sure to remember the comma marks.
All units in supcom are identified by a code. You need this code in order to select the unit you want to edit. There are a number of ways for you to get the code, remember how I said you needed the unitdb? You can see the code underneath the name of the unit in the unitdb. Alternatively, you can see the code in the spawn menu ingame. It’s default binding is Alt + F2.
Reading the code is simple. Lets use the pillar code as an example. U is for Vanilla (DLC content like the mongoose is D. FA content, including seraphim, is X) E is for UEF (R is for Cybran, who were originally named the “Recyclers” in early development. A for Aeon, and S for Seraphim) L for land. (A for Air, B for Building, and S for Navy) “0” is the category. 0 means factories and factory built units, etc. “2” is for the tech level, and The second “02” is for the Pillar specifically.
Now that we have everything set up, we now must figure out what we’re going to change. Each statistic can be changed by writing it’s correct syntax. Furthermore; a number of those are in certain categories, which are called “tables”. It’s best to look up the correct names instead of trying to guess.
For example, I'm going to change the HP of our pillar to 9999.
Each individual command for changing something is referred to as a “key”. Here are the two best ways to get that key.
You need to be in windowed mode for the latter to appear. The Shift F6 menu can also show you the unit code, and you can even just change the stats on the fly mid game too. If you change a stat, any new unit will have the changes applied. These changes of course do not save.
The key for health of a unit is in the “Defense” table. https://supcom.fandom.com/wiki/Blueprint#Defense We need to start off by referencing that table in the code we typed earlier.
UnitBlueprint { Merge = true, BlueprintId = 'uel0202', Defense = { }, }
Make sure you’re using the correct, squiggly line brackets. You also don’t need to move everything “across”, but I personally find It’s much easier to understand if you do.
The key for the health of the unit is MaxHealth. We also want to use Health, so the pillar does not spawn with less HP than the new maximum. (That we're setting with MaxHealth)
We will add these two keys inside the Defense table we just wrote, along with the required value.
UnitBlueprint { Merge = true, BlueprintId = 'uel0202', Defense = { Health = 9999, MaxHealth = 9999, }, }
That's one change down. I’m going to make another. Let's change the rate of fire of the pillar’s gun to fire at 600 shots a minute. Weapons can fire once per “tick” and the game runs at 10 ticks a second. That’s 10 shots a second.
Weapons in FAF are complex, and thus use more complicated code. We can see that the “RateOfFire” key we need to write is in the “Weapon” table. Let's add them both in now.
UnitBlueprint { Merge = true, BlueprintId = 'uel0202', Defense = { Health = 9999, MaxHealth = 9999, }, Weapon = { [1] = { RateOfFire = 10, }, }, }
We want to change the statistics for the pillar’s first weapon. It’s also the only weapon, but we still need to mention that. That's why the weapon section requires more brackets and etc, than the health. If the vehicle has 2 weapons you would just make another item. Like the following:
Weapon = { [1] = { RateOfFire = 5, }, [2] = { RateOfFire = 2, }, },
Make sure that the closing bracket for your tables is followed by a comma.
Doing something like this is referred to as an Array, which typically starts at 0 in most other programming languages. We need to list our weapons inside an array, and have done so for our examples. Let's move on for now.
With our simple block of code, the pillar now has 9999 health, and fires it’s gun at 600 shots per minute. Finally, let's add a new description to the unit. This key does not need a table.
UnitBlueprint { Merge = true, BlueprintId = 'uel0202', Description = 'Finally faf is balanced', Defense = { Health = 9999, MaxHealth = 9999, }, Weapon = { [1] = { RateOfFire = 10, }, }, }
I've put this in before the tables because it looks neat. Typically, and outside of the first couple of lines; tables and keys are organised in alphabetical order. It helps a lot when your blueprint files are 100 lines long.
The description should probably be something along the lines of “Modified Heavy Tank” so it makes more sense in game. This is just an example of what a key looks like without needing to be inside of a table.
You don’t need to upload a mod to the faf vault in order to test to see if your mod works, and to be honest. Most people would rather the vault not be spammed with single stat changes.
Please see: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/671/how-to-test-a-mod-offline-locally
With any luck, your mod should now be able to work ingame. If not, you might need to go back and check to see if everything is written properly. Check your upper/lower case, and your commas/apostrophes. Feel free to look at other mods for comparison if you need, but don’t steal their work!
Eat your heart out, balance team.
This is my stance, it's prewritten at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SDsnfOu1prAMZx0XbUlyZZprsqLdkV_BMu5ZAs9P0FM/edit?usp=sharing If this post has issues. Huge shoutout to everybody that put in their time to make this post - the longest on the forum as of now - possible.
The purpose of this proposal regarding the FAF Map & Mod Vaults (hereby referred to as “vaults”) is to create a system that serves to better suit the regular FAF user, to reward the effort they put into their contribution, and to avoid removing features and options from the user experience.
Furthermore, this proposal seeks to extend the range of valid contributions to the community, and strike out internal inefficiencies that are causing a large negative impact to you, and the client as a whole.
If you want to see more content in FAF, and that of a higher quality - without losing anything in the process; I would hope that you would support this following proposal.
This proposal eventually expanded out to 7 pages worth of text. I do deeply thank everyone I've bothered over the course of writing it for your input and suggestions. If you’re short on time, I decided to create a TL;DR for you. I would highly encourage you to read over it all before you cast your vote, however. So, to summarise:
1. Do NOT remove the “Most Recent” vault tabs like what is currently planned.
2. Remove rules and inefficiencies that make admin work overly difficult, and take away from your gameplay experience.
3. Organize and catalog all of our creative resources.
3b. Organize and promote what tasks FAF needs people to do.
4. Remove the map bias from the Councilor role.
Let us begin:
1. THE WHITELIST VAULT
This is the main point: Keep the “most recent” tab of the vaults, while allowing the planned “FAF Author” exclusive tabs to be integrated. The difference is this: Morax plans to remove the “most recent” tab, and I do not wish for that to happen.
The FAF Author vault will be discussed in Item 3.
Removing the “most recent” tab of the vaults removes the need to moderate them. FAF doesn’t need to go and spend their time doing admin work if they just cut that feature out of the client entirely. It’s a cop-out strategy. More below:
The first problem with stopping you from seeing rule-breaking content, is that the rule-breaking content still exists on the vault. Examples of this being a problem are cheat maps.
Consider the following: I make a clone of “Fields of Isis” and add some player slots, making it a 6v6 map. I also clone the mass near my spawn a thousand times over to give me a significant reclaim advantage, and because I’m hosting my games; I put myself in the same spot every time.
Even if you’re lucky enough that the cheat is not well hidden and you manage to spot it: The burden is now on the player to go and gather the evidence and make a report. There is no reason for there to be a vault moderation team if we don’t moderate the vaults, so it’s a gamble on if your report is handled. Whoever does handle it must now sift through all of the other new isis variants to find and hide the map. Even if this is handled in a reasonable time frame, the damage to the regular user is done. If you think it isn’t possible for a map to get away with having extra resources on one side, we only found out Loki (a map with over 50k plays!) was imbalanced a couple of weeks ago. It can happen to you.
In our current system, cloning maps and uploading them again are both A: against the rules of the vault and B: are the easiest to spot and remove. This example could not happen and If it did, the problem does not lie with the vault tab.
My further points about this topic follow:
Uploading and seeing your map on the vault is gratification. I can state this even after uploading 30+ maps to the vault; seeing your maps in the list and watching them climb in play count is one of the only rewards that map-makers - and by extension modders - get on the client.
Removing motivations and rewards for contributors to make life easier for the administration goes against what keeps FAF alive. The statistics for map play count are being used to justify the removal of the tab, but I personally don’t think we have a real right to decide how many plays are good enough for an author. If an author sees their content get even 1 extra play, and decides that’s enough to create another work? FAF only serves to profit from that.
We also - as an aside - remove options for the player when distributing maps to other players. Relying on auto-download would have been devastating to FAF during the period when said auto-download was broken, and many users have expressed their discontent over the interface for the vault search systems. Allowing maps to be located with no extra UX “steps” covers an inconceivably vast array of use cases for how players use the vaults to distribute their content to one-another. It’s not something worth throwing away to escape administration responsibility.
Speaking of:
2. VAULT ADMINISTRATION, AND THE 3 STRATUM RULE/MEME MAPS RULE
The current system is damaging the community to fix issues that the vault admin team have created for themselves.
I will first outline the current administration process so you can understand how desperately it needs reformation. And then I will discuss the removal of rules that are inherently elitist in nature and remove your gameplay variety.
First: When you upload a map to the vault that is rule breaking. It’s eventually hidden. So you just upload it again, and it’s back. You can repeat this process ad eternum.
The only way you get banned is to intentionally step into vision of the M&M staff and annoy them enough so they ban you from uploading. This ban will be permanent. If you avoid this step, the vault is free game for you.
Appealing your permanent ban is tough, because the staff or the admins do not know why you’re banned. Outside of one particular case, your ban reason is not properly recorded or maintained in any location that staff can find.
Map Authors already know this strategy. When the vault team found someone dedicated enough to start hiding maps on masse (hello Farmsletje), FAF started to see an increase of maps uploaded to the vault in return. Authors are just re-uploading their hidden maps to evade FAF’s administration process.
Here’s a graph to back this statement up, it shows maps uploaded per day, big thanks to Exotic_Retard for sharing this with me.
In the FAF admin log, Farms went and removed a lot of old maps first, before moving onto the current uploads. This is shown by the authors of such content being an “unknown” because they’re so old. Names of authors start appearing around the 18th of the 3rd. I marked that date with a black arrow for you.
You can verify that in the admin log here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15Q3FJ9QN8nc51ytTDJK61brrUtqd3L3efq58GFJaclU/edit#gid=0
Why are people circumventing the rules? For starters, it’s easier to do and nets you no consequence, but another important point is that our rule documentation has some major accessibility issues. If said rules were on the forum proper or another website, users from other languages can automatically translate them from a web browser. It’s far harder if the rules are on a google document, and impossible to do if you’re using images with text in them. The current rules are using both of those. And so I ask you: Вы вообще можете прочитать наши правила? If you don’t know what the rules are and thus don’t know why your map was hidden, it’s easy to perceive the hiding as a bug, or as an unjust removal.
As an aside: If we had happened to go down the route of using more text in imagery and other methods that are less accessible, FAF could run the risk of legal actions as covered under some national disabilities acts. This is something I feel FAF needs to be conscious of moving forward.
On to the second part; Here is what we’re removing that nets such an increase in people circumventing the rules:
Here is a graph I made in the admin log some time ago. It shows all the reasons for removal in a bar graph.
It does illustrate my key point, that being we’ve hid over 1100 maps for the “3 Stratum Rule.” This is the vault team’s way of gatekeeping content that FAF deems low effort.
What’s “low effort?” We don’t know. Just adding the required textures is very easy, so they added a clause to make sure you paint those textures onto the map “in detail.” except that it's highly dependent on what staff member sees your content first, and a lot of the staff are people that the userbase would not deem qualified to judge. It’s far too ambiguous for FAF to regulate, and should not be a rule.
I’m of the opinion that content that you inherently don’t care about will not pass the gate no matter how many textures you have, and this is showing in the map vault now. Maps are still low effort, and are just at varying levels of how close they tried to skip around the rules to allow it on the vault. Either it isn’t enough and it’s hidden (just re-upload it again!) or it is good enough and you stay on. Except it isn’t any better than having no textures on your map at all.
Painting textures onto the map is done in such a rough and artistic method, and so it is almost impossible to create artificial texture styles in the editor unless you “really” know what you’re doing. If you want to create for example a city map, or a machine world map that requires a lot of harsh angles and square geometry? You’re forced to create a high level masterpiece to avoid the gatekeeping rule, or you’re just no longer able to make them with the current administration.
If you want to create something to play with your friends on a saturday afternoon, and don’t want to to spend a month making a map pretty because that doesnt net you any return, you cannot pass the gatekeeping rule.
And lastly, moving onto the second rule: If you don’t want to create a map that is not made for the standard FAF ladder/teamgame gameplay, you’re not able to do so because we also do not allow “meme maps'' in the vault. The addition of this rule means that “fun” custom game content that defined other multiplayer games such as Halo and Counter Strike, is not allowed on FAF.
Obviously, removing maps that are not made for ranked gameplay only damages the variety that the FAF experience offers, and authors will not change to make maps for game modes they don’t care about. They just leave, and that is the worst scenario to have if you’re in charge of creative content, as the councilor role is.
Now I've explained the process and the flaws in our system. If you vote for this proposal, what changes is this:
“Meme” maps, or maps that offer differing gameplay experiences, will be allowed in the vault once again.
Maps that don’t have textures, or are impossible to have textures on, will be allowed on the vault again. If you were banned for either of those rules, your ban will be lifted.
Add a proper consequence to users that intentionally circumvent the rules. Create alert systems that properly alert you to infractions without requiring insane admin overhead. Properly document the rules to help allow for your appeal, and add a fair, time based system in line with FAF that prevents all bans from being permanent.
Move the rules to a more accessible location. remove inherent accessibility issues that prevent users from seeing them. present them in a more professional manner. and organise for them to be translated into FAF’s main languages.
Properly extend these improvements to the mod vault, which is just being moderated ad-hoc at the moment.
3. ENCOURAGE AND REWARD CREATIVE CONTRIBUTION
With my proposal, you have removed the admin inefficiency and are now properly managing content that breaks FAF rules. You did this without crippling features that benefit the FAF user, and have allowed them to play games on modes that are not just our standard ranked systems. So how do you use this role to get MORE quality content than was previously appearing?
This area of the proposal outlines implementing systems that allow the councilor role to demonstrate the potential that is being wasted in an almost criminal fashion.
First of all, and most importantly; this role is supposed to be more than just a “Vault Councilor,” and furthermore, the role is not only supposed to be a “Map Vault Councilor.” because doing so leaves the vast majority of FAF creative contributions out in the cold with no proper project management.
FAF needs someone to do two things: Create a central, easily accessible bank of contribution related information, and: Organize what yet needs to be created, and promote it to potentially willing contributors.
The M&M Role as it has stood since creation, has been the one role most up to the task of completing these critical objectives. Perhaps due to the name, or pool of willing applicants; the role has been instead relegated to some kind of vault janitor. While I don’t understand why it had become this way, (due to vault admin tools not existing when the role was made) NOT doing the two tasks above has crippled FAF in a truly indescribable fashion.
To better explain this section of the proposal, it will be split into two relative sections: Why this bank of information is required, and How I will be able to manage the contributor base to more efficiently produce what is required for FAF.
1. Our knowledge bank:
Hundreds of FAF contributors spend their time creating tutorials, guides on how to contribute, and other such educational resources for every aspect of FAF. However: this information isn’t placed in any feasible location so that other users may access it. This means that when another willing contributor decides it’s time to write a guide, they do not know what has already been covered. I try not to imagine how many times FAF has made the same guide over and over again.
With the wiki, blogging tools, the forums, and the various FAF discord servers as an interconnected suite, the councilor role should prevent this issue from occurring time and time again by properly cataloging and presenting what has already been created.
This benefits everyone in the community.
I would like for the wiki to be the start. Discord servers have always been terrible for accessibility, and a wiki is easy to edit, can help display what is still to-do, and doesn't require “inside knowledge” to locate.
But what is still “to-do? 2. Contributor project management. Here are some random items that FAF requires help to complete, to help illustrate the point:
Depending on how far “into the community” you are, you might barely know about two of those items. Just like how you don’t already know what has been done, the community needs someone capable of organizing what actually needs doing. Feeding more information outward to potential contributors will give them the information they need to jump right into the project, without joining a server at random and flailing about until someone decides to direct them. It gives said contributors an end goal to work towards, and FAF is more easily able to locate contributors to fill niche roles that never get done.
Adding to point 2 is a system about presenting what needs to be created to contributors and providing incentives towards their completion. Names for this system could be: FAF Contracting, FAF Bounty Hunters, FAF Bounty Boarding, etc.
Viewing what needs to be created on FAF is essentially looking at a bounty board. This system helps to elaborate on the requirements for each request by laying the information out in something not unlike a design brief.
Have you seen the mapping tournaments I (And FtXCommando) have created? They ask for something, offer a reward, and explain to you the nuances and technical requirements involved. They've been nothing but an absolute success for FAF, and this system aims to bring this method out from purely map creation, to the entirety of FAF proper.
When you see something that piques your interest as a contributor on this client; You’re immediately shown what is needed and if applicable: the reward for doing so. The higher the priority, the bigger the reward, the faster it gets done.
You’re told who to go for more information, who to hand off your work to so it gets integrated, and what to send them. If you’re one of the people who are using your work here to bolster your employment applications, completing these pseudo “design briefs” is a far better case for your professional ability than trying to compile an explanation in the dark.
Will this work for maps and mods as well? Of course. The ladder team is beyond able to articulate what niche maps are needed to fill out the pool, and if you’re starved for motivation, completing one of these basic tasks is an easy way to keep refining your skills.
I mentioned the FAF author vaults would be discussed in this section and it’s because completing tasks like these could net you access to the FAF author vault as a reward. Other rewards for completing this could be avatars, forum decorations if they’re added to the new forum, and other forms of compensation as well. This gives you actual reasons to make maps/mods/other content and to make it of an acceptable standard. We can’t possibly expect you to work for nothing here, and while other councilors might protest that “noone is motivated to do anything,” it is this councilors job to motivate you. I personally don’t believe that your creative contributions to this client should be left out in the cold and have advocated for this stance across multiple other councilor cycles. Maybe it’s time you actually got compensated for the work you put in?
Finally, I want to extend these suggestions to grunt work. Grunt work can be defined as for example: testing new FAF systems, maps, new mod content, doing janitorial roles like being a vault moderator, etc. No matter how many times we advertise in chat, no one appears to help because they don’t benefit. When we gave users even a small avatar incentive to help test ICE in one instance, participation spiked. I want to continue this trend by including them in this system.
So to sum up these three main points, You’re not going to lose the vault tab if you vote for this proposal, you’re instead getting systems that enhance your experience on the platform as a contributor, and you’ll be rewarded for helping FAF grow. You’re also getting a more professional admin system to properly handle the vaults we would be keeping in.
However as a bonus: I wanted to add an extra section at the end to “catch” things I had missed out of the flow of text here.
4. MAP/MOD VAULT PARITY: RE-ALIGNING FOCUS
The past couple of M&M Councilors have been almost entirely map focused. While I'm not the champion of modding some of you might dream for, I believe that mods are just as important to the game as maps, and wanted to use this role to rightfully extend FAF’s improvements to the mostly underdeveloped mod vault.
Such as the following:
Of course, mod related materials are also part of those due to improve in the systems i’ve outlined in point 3.
That’s all I have for you today.
Personally I think it’s time that FAF got someone to give their contributors the actual project management they need to really drive the project forward, and I think that the “Maps and Mods Councilor” was a role far too limited in scope. Perhaps as the close of my proposal here, rename this role to the “Creative Councilor” instead?
Please leave any questions for me to answer if you have them, pms are always acceptable. biass.
You might have seen a couple of comments on the forums about it, but we're looking to start a casual matchmaking queue that runs party game modes.
The devs that work on TMM are very eager to put the code time into it, and the far-more-skilled-than-i-am Creative team aready have a couple party game modes "fixed" for their inclusion into the queue.
This post is to ask for suggestions to this list, which has everything I can think of which could be included. Of course, this queue would be unrated. I rather it didn't show your rating at all too.
Final Rush Pro Phantom X Wave of Death Claustrophobia King of the Hill Murder Party Zone Control HardFFA Gap of 64 ACUS Labwars Scout Wars Chess Crazyrush Shared army Generic survival? New faction mods? Special win conditions?
This is everything I can remember.
It's important to note that it was quite common for maps, which contained their own scripts, and mods to be combined. So it's possible for us to do something like Gap of 64 ACUS, with the claustrophobia mod that makes the map shrink. If you do have any combinations you would like to see, make sure you also suggest those here too.
I've been granted the authority of the M&M Councilor position as of now. This post serves as:
The initial announcment, What I plan to do as Councilor, A checklist of if i've done it or not. A list of things I hope to complete as an aside, A place for you to pass your feedback to me, And a place to provide status updates and the like.
First, some things are effective immediately, or as soon as I am able to do so.
1. Renaming to the Creative Councilor. If you object to this, let me know.
2. Strip the 3 Stratum, and Meme map rules out of the map vault rules document. I'm just going to move the existing document for now, and put that in a new post on this forum, because I don't think one exists on the new forum yet.
If your map was hidden for these reasons and you want it unhidden, the onus is on you to contact me. Maps will not be unhidden if they also break other rules. (Don't ask for your 8 astro clones to be unhidden, please!)
3. People who are banned from the vault will be unbanned. This is pending until I touch base with the people responsible.
Futhermore, I need to speak with a number of people. We may or may not have spoken already but if you have not yet got anything from me, please message me at your most convenient time.
And anyone else i've forgotten.
The following things will be worked on in no particular order:
1. I want to fix up the discord server a little bit, thanks again to Morax for this smooth transition. This includes a rebrand, trimming channels, fixing the roles and adding extra features such as bots. Feel free to leave suggestions.
This includes a space for the "Preflighting" concept, which was left out of the vault proposal due to space.
I also want to open a basic space for projects, this list currently includes:
All it is, is a basic introduction as well as an invite link to the server and stuff. If you're one of the three leads responsible, expect me in your DM's eventually. If you have a FAF project you would like to put in this space, let me know.
2. Implement the new vault admin systems spoken about in the vault proposal. I need a new document for keeping track of hides and the like. I want to set it up in a way that allows for good data collection. Need to further fix the new map rules to remove the accessiblity issues and translate them onto the forum. Need a new rulelist for mods.
If you're interested in helping hide maps, let me know as always.
3. Work on the knowledge bank concept outlined in the proposal. Currently working on consolidating my information and contacting people who might want to have a stake in this. this includes Laticlave's old unit - github concept, and the old tutorial curriculum I still have to work on.
3b. Implement the bountyboarding systems in tandem with the above, again as outlined. Need to create a terms of use, and create some documents that need to go with it.
Here are some things that i'll probably be doing as an aside.
It's almost certain that i've forgotten something, so this post will serve as my bookkeeping and is prone to change at any time.
Finally, each councilor has a pledge that they follow along. It's really only for sentimental value more than anything, but I've made one anyway.
Very poetic.
If you've been mentioned in the post, expect a message soon.
I want my time as a councilor to be one that people do not look back upon with resentment. Thanks to everyone who has been involved thus far, hope to continue working with you.
Rowey has kindly offered $35 to sponsor this tournament.
You have until the 20th of April. Create a 10km map, Make it 2v2, and in a summer/spring/early fall theme. And post the name here. The best authors will recieve prizes.
Prizes:
1. $35 and the Grand Sculptor Avatar 2. Face of Faction Avatar 3. Logo of Faction Avatar
This is pretty standard for mapping tournaments. However rules dictate that you should create a map that is in a summer/spring/early fall theme. This implies a vibrant, sunny evergreen map. Creating maps that revolve around the summer/spring culture of a certain nationality are also fine, but:
A: If i can't tell it's a sunny theme from first glance, it still bombs out on the score. B: make sure to let me know.
I'm adding a simple 4th score to ensure the theme is met. If you submit a map that isnt of this summer vibe, you score a zero and will probably not win this tournament.
This is on top of the basic Asthetics / Gameplay / Variance score we've used in the past.
Please note that adding custom props will help to boost your asthetic score as well as your "theme" score *if relevant), this is to help assist the new prop initiative mentioned here. and to reword you for your effort if you do decide to contribute.
Also, the map must be 2v2 and 10km. Nothing else will be accepted.
Usual stuff below:
Rules: You may only submit one map per author. Maps already in the vault at the time of posting may not be submitted. Maps that are currently in progress may be submitted.
Content is judged by an opinion panel, and like last time I expect that panel to consist of high level players, FAF councilors, and Ladder Team members. To avoid conflicts of interest, opinions of users who have also entered into the competition will not be considered.
There are still mutiple objective requirements. Make sure your content abides by them. Any map found to not meet these requirements will be instantly disqualified and I will not be showing any leniency.
I want to have more than just myself judge tournaments. PM if you're interested and NOT competing. See you in roughly two months.
ensure your map is just a folder upon upload, and not a compressed folder
Aurora not needing scouts would end up in aeon having the most brutal raids ever concieved
People choosing aeon because they're not overpowered isn't a fault of the balance itself, but people spreading word that aeon now gives you free rating for playing it
@keene said in Why would you have left FAF?:
To many gap/astro maps seems to be a recurring answer in this thread. I wonder if de-ranking all gap/astro maps would ultimately be a positive and long term gain for FAF.
It’s not a feasible solution with our current map distribution method. (Vault rules like that are stupid easy to evade)
That aside, if we took away something you enjoyed, and asked you to instead do something you fundamentally didn’t want to do; would you do it or would you go and play something else?
I’m not accusing anyone in this thread, but there have been countless people who claim “they would play X other thing if only…” and for a lot of them, they’re never going to have the confidence to do so. There are probably a lot more gap/astro slaves than you think exist, it’s just that a lot of them are in the closet.
zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
What's different about playing this game and playing a musical instrument is that playing this game for the first time is a little like picking up a guitar for the very first time and trying to learn "Flight of the Bumblebee". You really should just try and learn "Louie Louie" first or some other dumb schlockey song that you'll never want to be caught dead playing in front of humans (I would) because you're not ready to attempt "Flight of the Bumblebee", just like I'm not really ready to learn how to micro Inties at this point.
It's fine to think this way, but let me use another guitar analogy for you here. When you're learning to play a new song, you learn to play it at a very slow speed, but correctly. You don't play the song incorrectly in order to try and match the tempo right away. Once you commit the correct chord/fret/etc changes to your muscle memory, you can work through them faster and faster until you're doing it at speed. If you commit the incorrect notes/etc to memory. You'll definetly know that it's tough to work them back out of your playing when you are doing them subconciously.
If you do the right things now at a poor speed. It will be much more beneficial for you overall. I'm not expecting you to go into a game and spam out 100 move orders to do perfect circle micro in your game. I only expect basic moves to shoot down threats and fighting enemy planes when you know you're ahead.
I can honestly say that reclaim is at the very top of the list of things I would like to improve on.
Reclaim is something you'll be working on thoughout your entire time playing this game. Right now you don't need to make it overly complicated. Ensure you get as much reclaim as possible by any means possible. Lots of people just end up taking engineers and doing attack moves to the other side of the map, for example..
"You shouldn't focus on your army movements or stuff like that so early on" Mmm, that's a little bit of a contradiction there. If I don't need to focus on army movements at this point, why do I have to focus on micro'ing air?
You should practice it in your games, but you do not need to focus on it in your post game analysis.
A tank that didn't die because another type of unit gave me a slight advantage in one aspect over an opposing force of pure tanks is a tank that I don't have to build again.
Thinking this way is fine for other units, but a lot of the game and your choices within it often revolve around comparing your "X" to the "X" of the enemy. For example, you might count the number of land factories you have to see if you'll eventually have enough tanks to take map control.
While arty and aa are both:
Engineers are something else entirely. When your factories are essentially not making land units one 5th of the time, your ability to scout and make choices in the game become obfuscated.
I would suggest making factories exclusively for engineers if you need them. If you end up not needing the engineers later (it's hard to make "too many" engineers), you can always make more tanks instead. Or just reclaim them.
Anyway, like I said, I hope you don't take these comments to mean anything other than I just want to keep having these discussions and learning. Thanks again for taking the time to watch my replay, read my post, and offer your own insights.
No problem mate. I'm always around to answer questions
made the "noob team i played epic" joke one too many times and now I don't have enough FAF social credit score to ride the bus, what should I do?
Putting in the effort to analyse your games is already a show of promise that the majority of newer (or, bad) players lack, so i'll try to give you some good advice here. I've watched your game and read your analysis, and there are two major points of interest that I felt needed commenting on.
First:
because it's another good price to pay for attention/APM. It's not something a 2k player is ever going to do, and I realize that air combat is something I will have to get better at going forward.
at some point, we all will need to figure out how to upgrade to higher tech levels to compete
At this point in my "career", I don't have the attention/APM to be that exacting with such things
I'm not sure if it's a good idea to justify bad play to yourself in a developmental stage. I don't think it's a good idea to justify anything to yourself at all, you're trying to learn and thus you must accept your mistakes so you can correct them.
Higher rated players are not doing anything particularly different that is out of your reach, they've just committed the correct things into muscle memory. If you allow yourself to continue to do something badly by justifying it with talk about your APM level and your current skill, you'll form a bad habit that will take a long time to revert; If reverting it is even possible to begin with.
After all, you'll default to your training under any form of pressure, and you'll be stuck doing something terrible like the air patrol when a higher rated player appears, or you get a new map you don't know. I've trained new players for many years here now, and I would be confident in claiming that most of that training was beating bad habits out of people. It doesnt matter if you spend some time now doing the right thing poorly, it's much faster than trying to un-learn something later after you create a habit.
The very basic of air micro is that planes cannot shoot backwards, so it's all based around getting behind your enemy and shooting him down for free. Don't you think that would be a bit easy to do if your enemy is flying his planes around in a preset path and not reacting to you? Air patrol has negative consequences from something as small as no fuel to something as large as a complete wipe. You were not punished here because your enemy didn't even bother to make any planes to try and fight you, but be careful to not draw conclusions. You WILL be punished for doing this before you get as high as a paltry 600 rating. Learn the correct basics now.
There's a lot here, but if I can give any advice from one noob to another... you don't need Tech2, and you certainly don't need Tech3
You've drawn this conculsion without looking at any of the factors that might have caused him to lose here. This is a game focused around macromanagement, and it seems you've only looked at micromanagement related issues.
There is more behind why he died while he made tech, and why you've made an incorrect conclusion.
When you look at your games, there are a couple things for you to pay attention to in order to get the most out of it. First would be your factory counts, because if you make the same number every game, you'll win/lose depending on how much your enemy makes.
Second is your total mass collected, which you might need the Supreme Scoreboard mod to see. It's not the end all mark of why you win/lose games, but it's a stat that will help you diagnose your games in 99 percent of cases.
Third would be your reclaim count. You'll progress faster if you can quickly learn to suck up all the reclaim you possibly can and then spend it. Compare your total reclaim to the reclaim of your enemy and you can figure out why you beat/get beat by people.
You shouldn't focus on your army movements or stuff like that so early on, and its also why strange stuff like adding engineers to your army or whatever also don't matter. The bigger picture stuff is more important.
I'll stop there, one last thing though, our learning content is all made by individuals and thus I can't assure you the quality of information in each post. I could go over Arma's post you linked and point out about 100 different things I think are wrong, but someone could come to anything I make and easily do the same. Don't treat any one material as gospel; not only will you be a blasphemer, but you'll hinder your learning.
I have more I could rip you on but it's best if you don't try to internalise everything at once. Incorporate new things into your play and then come back after you do, and make sure not to force yourself into bad habits. Good luck,
@zukko said in Why would you have left FAF?:
the question was why would you leave FAF, the answer for me would be that it is not an easy game to just pick up and play,
Hey, I did a rough poll of the responses in this thread and you are indeed correct. Most of the responses in this thread mention the learning curve of the game as one of the biggest reasons why people leave FAF.
While i'm not going to suggest any massive changes to the game that defy the mission of FAF (to maintain the mutiplayer service of the orIginal game) I would recommend making a second thread to discuss learning-curve ideas seperate from here. I think this thread has served it's purpose.
It is possible to make a balance mod with an "easier" balance. It would be on you to make one though.
I made a guide for doing just that: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/739/guide-creating-a-basic-balance-mod-with-a-merge-blueprint
same dudes who sit in discord training channel saying they have no apm
thinking randomly getting double your current unit count is not a big deal
stay classy faf
post replays