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.

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.

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.)

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.

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 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.

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

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

Getting kicked because no games

No amount of training missions will fix that problem. It seems to me that many people are getting put of, because they feel they don't even have the chance to prove themselves in a real game.

A lot of the suggestions seem to revolve around the problem "it is hard to get good" but this is different to retention. We first have to make the player want to get good at this game, before he will even notice a lack of training material. (In fact it is probably better to have low rating, because then you get lots of players to play with.) Also you don't have to be very good to enjoy the game. Yes, you need to understand how you can control the game, but you don't have to be 1k to have fun.

I agree that we need to encourage building communities more and the clans are an obvious tool for this. I have been in this community for some years but I don't know what I would do to join a clan. Message random people with a clan tag I guess?
There is no accessible list of clans that states their purpose. What clans are open to noobs? are there clans with the goal to reach 2k together? are there clans for shitposting? I don't know. And we should change that.

The matchmaking tab will probably display your total number of games (all gamemodes added together) in the near future. I don' t know the plans for the in-game lobby, though.

Btw, the bug with the queues happens more the longer you wait to switch to the play tab after starting the client. So switching immediately or even setting the start tab to it should help until we release the next version that has the bug fixed.

We will give the responsible guy a stern warning to not slack off any more at work

My beetle mod is now in the vault, btw

Will do, kinda forgot about it to be honest. If you can't find it in the next days, remind me again.

I didn't have to do some complicated lua coding, but I changed some blueprints. Not sure what you mean with graphical effect.
You can have a look here: https://github.com/BlackYps/Napalm-Beetle

The answer to your question is in the original post.
There is no more accurate release scedule yet.

In what world is posting a replay of an underpowered unit proof of absence?

Ah yes, the spreadsheets are far more relevant than playtesting. There is no way that there could be some game mechanics not covered by the holy spreadsheet.

You realize that you can also post a replay of a sandbox where you test a specific scenario?

For argument sake i would like a replay where mml's did break firebase.

I hate to start this "burden of proof" debate, but the only sane way is to assume that things are balanced until proven otherwise. It is just too much effort to "prove" something is balanced in all scenarios. Much easier to focus on the specific scenario where they are not.
Also you are the one, that wants a change, soo...