Here, I made you a mod that let's you see your storages and also your net drain so you can extrapolate when you will stall:

Oh wait, it is already in the game. You are so lucky! I recommend watching those bars regularly.

The DoT idea and the name of the unit gave me an idea. I present to you the real firebeetle: https://imgur.com/a/rdL7f9q

You assume that people are making a conscious effort to pick a vault from the map and then play that. But they don't.
Nobody is digging through the whole vault to find the perfect map he desires.
Many people don't even know how to host games/don't want to host, so their options are instantly reduced to currently hosted maps. Then they choose maps that they already know and voila you have arrived at the feedback loop that has been described many times.

The idea is that people aren't playing the types of maps produced because those maps are missing something that people just love above horses.

And that is being familiar with the map, plus confidence that the map will fill quickly. People are afraid of pvp environments, so they want mitigate their fear by playing in a familiar environment. Also many players just want to have a game quickly and don't care so much about the particular map.

People are unconsciously choosing the maps that create the best overall experiences for their time invested in the game.

They don't even know all the maps from the vault. They can't choose the best one.

A lot of the community here is unfortunately in denial about that

No, they just refuse your claim that all the gap and astro players chose these map specifically because they would have the best experience out of all maps on these.

Nobody claimed that retention is not relevant. It is just not relevant to the question "Is faf growing?" This is in the FAQ section and aims to provide a short answer to a short question.
Discussion about how we can measure retention and how it changes over time is probably best discussed in a different thread. (Because it is indeed a relevant topic, but should not clutter this only semi-related topic in the FAQ section imho.)

But the patchnotes that Thomas mentioned are already doing this. So this is solved?
I don't even understand why this thread is still continuing.

Hello everyone,

As you may have heard, there is a league system in the making to bring back divisions like you know them from many other competitive multiplayer games. The backend logic is almost finished now, and we are actively working on client integration.

There is only one thing missing now: The actual names for the divisions plus icons to represent them.
We will have a tiered system: There are five tiers with five subdivisions (I-V) each and then one top tier that has no subdivisions.
For the graphic side of things, we plan to show small icons in the matchmaking tab, so they should be 20 pixels high and no more than 40 pixels wide.
We also want to show a big version in a new leaderboard tab. The design there is not finished yet, but I estimate that there will be around 150-200 pixels of height available. You can see a first idea for the new leaderboard below. The big division graphic goes where the empty rectangle is. Of course the rating plot will later show the division distribution instead of rating.

If you have ideas for division names, or are capable of making nice graphics for them, just reply here.

I like that you conveniently ignore that, as multiple people have stated, you can just make a ranked balance mod for maps that need a different balance than the main balance.

I don't know why you insist that your proposed changes are easy to do when multiple people have told you they are not.
You even disregarded the attempt to get the source code as half-witted, just because it didn't work. maybe it didn't work because square enix in fact does not have the source code? No amount of money will change that.
I advise you to do some research about compilation and decompilation of code and especially about the problems of the latter to get a better understanding why your proposed changes are not realistically possible. Everybody wants better pathfinding, it is not developers "playing hard to get".

make clients an input output engine focused on graphics

this is essentially a rewrite of the engine anyway, and that requires manhours worth millions of dollars.

Your samples are too small to make any meaningful conclusion. Can you keep tracking your ladder maps and see if this persists?

Or maybe query the api a bit for ladder games

I can't believe I'm hearing that we're ready to classify it as trash

You are the only one here making the connection of casual=trash

Maybe a mapgen queue is the solution? With the ability to multiqueue everyone can basically adjust if he wants all, none, or some of the maps to be mapgen maps.

You remember obnoxious people for a decade? I would be glad if I forgot them quick. Anyway this discussion is leading nowhere.

You: The communitiy was less toxic earlier.
Someone else: No
You: Yes

...

What indication do you have that RandomWheelchair is wrong and your memory is right? There is strong scientific evidence that our memory of things is more positive than it actually was.

And yes, there are reasons. People can shield themselves from the realisation that they made a mistake and the following feeling of inadeqacy by focusing all their attention on their teammates' mistakes and raging at them to vent their emotions.

Well do you want it? Being toxic is already forbidden behaviour, but you need to actually report the people or nothing will happen.

Hard to really give a good answer without more info.
At what time of day (UTC) were you searching?
How long were you searching?
Were there enough other people in queue to theoretically match?

Isn't recommended based on download number? It could definietly have a better name, though.

There is a separate category for most popular mods by the way

I had the same issue once. Was super frustrating that I couldn't even explain to my enemy why I can't keep on playing.
It seems that windows thinks you're constantly holding the windows key. Apparently pressing the physical windows key again fixes it, bit I don't know for sure, because it happened only once to me.

We could actually look at the data instead of just guessing what the winrate of new players is. I found two files on my hard drive that I used a while ago to plot the rating evolution of new players. Should probably alter it to give you wins and losses instead of rating, but it's a good starting point.
Don't really know why I have two files here, but you can have a look. I don't have time at the moment to do it myself.

They are python scripts, but I had to rename them to be able to upload them.
get_rating_evolution.py.txt
get_rating_data.py.txt