Today I've been able to take a look into the server log from our testing session. It confirmed that things went well. So the test was a success! Thanks again to everyone that helped me with testing!
There are some minor touch ups to do and we also have to set everything up for the production environment, so don't expect a release next week, but we are getting close to a finish line now. If nothing unexpected happens, we can probably see a release in a few weeks.

Good to know that only othe player councillor can host tournaments

I see a lot of "FtX ignores the lower rated players" but not a lot of specifics, so here are some thoughts and some questions I have so we can maybe see how much merit this statement has.

One aspect I saw mentioned, is that there are almost no tournaments for lower rated players. I think that is a fair observation and we could really use more of these. Morax also recently pointed this out in a separate thread. Luckily Suzuji seems to be very motivated to organize some. And because you don't need to be PC to be a tournament director, I'm looking forward to seeing some tournaments from him regardless how this election goes.

It seems like Emperor_Penguin and the players he knows are very unhappy with the maps in the ladder pool. Can you elaborate why the pool "doesn’t prioritize regular player preference, fun, playerbase growth, and new player retention anywhere near as much as it should"?
Also what exactly do low rated players desire, when talking about mapsize is apparently not it? What are these same things that they all dislike as Valki said? And how do you determine that what you and the people you talked to is representative to the playerbase as a whole? I am about 1k rated myself and I generally like the pool. I think the rating brackets for the pool are a good solution to give lower rated players maps that are easier to play.

Polling lower rated people is really difficult because their community interaction is really low. Many don't even read the news. Only a server message to all boosted the poll result numbers significantly and I don't want to have everyone bothered by popups every month.

I'd also like to hear some examples of the "toxic/derogatory attitude/rhetoric", because the dictator FtX meme gets hinted at a lot, but so far nobody bothered to explain what egregious things he has apparently done. To me it seems that some people are disgruntled because he denied their proposed changes/maps/ideas. In my experience, everytime this happened was because the ideas or maps were not well thought out (i.e. had negative implications that the proposer didn't think of, or didn't even adress the root problem but merely a symptom), were of low quality or simply not feasible (hello low dev resources).

It was just a day ago, but at the same time it is over 30 posts ago that Morax requested I say a little bit about the upcoming league system. It's true, I and many others have been working on it. It will probably be ready in the next months. Basically it will provide divisions and seasons for the players like almost all competitive games do.
This will not remove the trueskill system, but it will hide it from the players in favor of their division. This way we can hopefully provide a better sense of progression while also making the system easier to understand. No more "why do my teammates get a different amount of points than I" and the like.
There is no plan to have a global rating division system. So the divisions would basically only exist for the matchmaker queues. That does however not imply anything about what you will see when you join a custom game. It's basically an added feature for the matchmaking system. Changes to how the custom games rating system works could be introduced at the same time, but are not necessary.

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

Violations of rules will always exist regardless of how severe the punishment is. The existence of the violations does not imply that they are allowed.

I am not arguing for or against an increase of punishments, I just want to say that there is a point where an increase in punishment doesn't have any further effect. There is a reason why we don't punish every crime with a lifetime in prison.

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.

What even is the problem here? The split was agreed upon by the players. There were other showmatches that got a 100€ price pool. I guess the one without one was because the players didn't ask for one, because I can see no match in the showmatch thread being denied money. Also what will you do if FtX simply answers yes to your last two questions? 4head

About the shaming: It happens regularly that someone has an idea that is not well thought out. E.g. separate rating for Astro or Dual Gap. When FtX points out that it is not feasible or not desirable then he will say so. Proceeding to whine about "dictatorship" will accomplish nothing. The reality is that FtX listens to arguments, but they have to be good, if you actually want to convice him. I have not seen yet that he denied proposals without a good reason to do so. Or even blocking people from contributing for that matter.

Your and Suzuji's application feel like you just don't like the current player councillor and want to get rid of him. barely anything of what you wrote warrants to be PC to be able to do it or even falls in the area of responsibilty of the PC. So please answer biass's questions, because I feel they are very relevant to this thread.

RTS is stressful by design, because there are many things to keep track of at the same time and the better you do that the better you play. Only a fraction of players enjoys that. And that is imho the reason why RTS will always stay niche.

The astro experience is arguably not RTS anymore but more a city builder with big explosions in the end. There is nothing wrong with playing sim city, but that is not what faf aims to provide.

That is why you will never find maps like astro in a competitive matchmaker. It just doesn't align with the aim of faf regardless of how many people want it.

In the end it is also about the kind of players that faf wants to attract, not only about the players that are already here. That is why it is not always useful to argue with what a majority wants.

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.

Thank you for your offer! There have been two testing sessions already and everything seems to be working. There are no further tests planned.
You can still help by providing feedback on the new system once it is live. Don't worry to miss it, there will probably be a pretty big announcement about it on the news and forum.

It's hard to comment on why individual games took place exactly. I can tell you though that it is a known problem that the matchmaking is not ideal.
We have developed a new algorithm that should give better matchmaking results. We are currently in the process of deploying the new code. It will maybe still take some weeks, partly because I am quite busy with real live stuff at the moment, but hopefully we will see the new matchmaker in action in a few weeks.

Playing a teamgame is about winning as a team and not about "everybody win their lane and if you don't, I will blame you for losing". With these incentives you are incentivising that people try to maximize their indicators even at the expense of their team instead of promoting team play.

Why would you want to play teamgames anyway instead of 1v1 if you just want to win against your "lane" opponent?

You could tune down the mass cost of the commander to make that effect negligible

As people already mentioned your game list needs to be public. Also make sure that you actually own the game. If it is in your game list because it is family-shared by a different account it won't work.

There is a mod already, that does some of this stuff. I think it is simply called "Notifications".
Maybe you can try it out and see if it helps. You could even enhance it with more functionality/notifications if you ask the original mod author for permission

FtX applied to be an association member in the beginning of June. As far as I know there has been no communication why he was not approved yet. Saying that he is solely responsible for the drama, because it's toxic when he gets mad about the lack of communication seems a bit unreasonable to me.

You are forgetting that some map downloads fail consistently for some people. As long as this is happening, forcing people to download the whole pool beforehand is off the table.
Sadly we didn't find a way to reproduce that issue yet. So I don't think it will change anytime soon.

You heavily implied in your OP that it would be allowed.
Anyway there is no point in discussing this further if you don't want to.

because obviously everybody is happy with the way things are so that's why I give up....simple....

So you choose to ignore this?

For this to be as productive as possible:
https://www.faforever.com/rules

Explain what segment of the rules should be changed and what it should be changed to.