Cherry picking examples on repeat and presenting them as evidence of the icons being cluttered or not is the epitome of bad faith. It's very easy for someone like me to ignore your example and point out that in your first images, the cyan coloured player is building something using a swarm of engineering drones. On the defalut icon setup the building is visible whereas in the ASI image, the building is completely obscured. It's pretty typical of FAF users to engage in such boring talk that goes nowhere, but you didn't help it by framing your OP this way. Did you come here to learn something or only to argue about your point for 55 cringe ass posts?
Of course you're going to be able to see certain things easier if you abuse the 5 elements of design to blow something out of proportion. When two things are contrasted together, one is easier to see -> and the other is thus harder.
Luckily on this game, you are provided additional information while you play the game in order to help you parse what you need to know.
Let me draw attention to this quote.
Purple also has some battleships but without staring at it for a couple seconds I don't know if purple has 4 or 10.
This took less than a second for me (and others, apparently) to see. Why? Because a decent player can make reasonable assumptions about where or what a battleship would be doing. They're a similar distance away from the enemy fleet in a fragmented line due to their long range. They're definetly going to be behind the frigates but closer to the enemy than the cruisers. You might (read: 100%) have range rings on while you play that help you determine units even better. New (bad) players are fans of this mod because of these two things:
- Good positioning won't happen in badkid lobbies and as such these assumptions cannot be made
- They do not understand the basics well enough to make said assumption.
And instead need to use this overblown out contrast mod in order to see units "better". God forbid they're not using that dark blue and it's just universally harder to see.
Akin to ecomanager E throttle, It's a crutch that raises your rating a little - because you can see units better in badkid lobbies, but you won't ever learn the basics in order to see things like positioning -> making you a good player overall.
I'll also bring up mexes as an example, albeit one among many:
Theoretically you don't need to scout and see the hideous, blatantly overcontrasted ASI mass icon to know a mex is now t2 while you're playing. This is because the t1 mex "dies" when the upgrade is finished and appears as such until the location is rescouted and the t2 mex is seen. This isn't the case for mass storages, which are also counted as an eco step and should be watched closely in a ladder game or other tight competition.
It's very lucky that you can even see that there are structures next to the mex icon when they're that upscaled. But what about if the mexes are actually pgens? Plenty of players ring their mexes with pgens to gain a boost while upgrading. You probably do it in the build order you've abused for 500 games. The important information is obscured to you unless you zoom in now and look, because the irrelevant MEX icon is so important that it needs to grab your eye despite other factors making it visible,
Let me restate the point im trying to make here with this new information.
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While the default icons provide a mostly blank slate for you to exercise your fundamental game knowledge, ASI intentionally obfuscates important information to make important what a random modder has deemed important for you to know.
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You use this overblown and overly emphasised information to compensate for your lack of game knowledge and plateau yourself by using a crutch. This is why I believe that BH claims it is a detriment. Because you would have to then lose rating in order to learn the game properly and you're all too weak of mind to do that.
And before you ignore everything to claim that you can make the assumptions about battleship placement despite your eyes being dragged around by insane contrasting: Even as someone qualified in design, impact from stuff such as colours (You could make everything important ingame red, because your eye catches on faster on average) still affects me. You're not any better. These are innate issues that most people cannot articulate, and is why you didn't know why all the good players don't like the mod.
While i'm here:
katharsas said in Downsides of the Advanced Strategic Icons mod:
common logical fallacies
It's very cute to call out a fallacy and then totally ignore the appeal to expertise in the OP. Luckily this is FAF and i'm already used to seeing rat-like tactics used for personal gain.
cheeseberry said in Downsides of the Advanced Strategic Icons mod:
as a 1.8k global I imagine myself to have a decent understanding of the games fundamentals.
It's also very cute to claim you understand the game and thus ASI is made more valid by your claim, luckily someone pointed this out to me that in fact:
Grinding out a single map for a high rating leaves you with a warped understanding of the game. A understanding that in fact, might make ASI appear more valid to you.
When you plateau as a 1200 in ladder, please come back to this discussion and consider again why this might be a detriment to your understanding.
