With the latest client release (2023.3.0) we added the ability to watch a replay while you are waiting in queue. You can also watch a replay while you are in the lobby of a custom game. Replay watching while in lobby was possible before but you had to explicitly enable that. This is no longer needed. We moved the game data for replays to a different directory, so you shouldn't have any issues with differing game versions.

This release features visual improvements. We added support for terrain types, which means units driving on the ground will now create smoke and treadmarks that are appropriate to the terrain. Before these effects were completely missing.
Additionally the biomes were improved. It's most notable on the water that had very default settings before, but the general lighting and usage of decals got tuned on some maps as well.
A final important change is that the environment maps that the biomes use have been changed. This doesn't affect unit too much with the current shaders, but with the upcoming PBR shaders it will ensure that the units feel like the belong into the environment, because the reflections on units will have a fitting color, especially the metal parts.
Here are some comparison screenshots of the changed biomes, before and after.

Hello everyone,

we almost completed all required steps to finally have queues that are bigger than 2v2. The main roadblock was having an algorithm that can handle the premade teams of various sizes, that queue up, while still producing good matches. I wrote that algorithm over the last months and we tested it successfully in June. Recently we finally merged the code into the develop branch after making sure the code quality and test coverage was up to standards.
We are now testing new code that will handle the rating initalization for the new tmm rating. Once that has been merged we can make a server release to deploy the new code. Once that is in effect, the new matchmaking code will also be used for 2v2 matching. It is possible that there will be a short delay until we have added the new queues in the database. Once that is done, the new matchmaker queues will appear in the client. A client update is not required.

I will write a separate post about how the new matchmaker code works in the near future.

Of course we will also inform you when the update is in effect, but I guess you will notice that pretty soon if you regularly play matchmaker games.

What will be coming?

We will be releasing the following:

1. 4v4 No Share - also know as Share Until Death
2. 4v4 Fullshare

A combination of the ladder and development teams reviewed the content available for release of the two matchmakers, along with the player councilor discussing feedback from the players. In the end we determined that the two matchmakers for 4v4 would be best to accommodate the desires of the playerbase.

Differences between the two new queues

Per feedback from conversation with players, it was determined that there is a large desire for a matchmaker similar to typical custom games where players can find a more relaxed game experience. So the queues will work like this:

• Share Until Death is enabled - keeping ACU snipes as a viable option to end the game.
• more 10x10 and less 20x20 maps - keep the ratio of 20x20 lower for more relaxed play
• Unique Rating

For the Fullshare Matchmaker:

• Fullshare is enabled - keeps games playable after losing a player
• more 20x20 and less 10x10 maps - more spread out games, similar to a Seton's experience
• Unique Rating

Both queues will use your global rating and add some more deviation on top to initialize the new matchmaker ratings. After that your wins or losses in global won't affect them, just like the other queues. With this we want to avoid that pro players will get matched randomly with lower players like it happened with the initial 2v2 release. The deviation increase will still allow you to reach a new rating quickly if you are under- or overrated in global. It will also make your displayed rating approximately 400 points lower until your deviation has settled again.

Why is there no 3v3 matchmaker being released?

Quite simply, we wanted to bring a matchmaker that would be most appealing to a wider audience. In addition, the following issues exist:

• There are very, very little 3v3 maps in the map vault
• 3v3 is the rarest form of gameplay
• We want to test the 4v4 matchmaker to make adjustments, if necessary, before adding another queue

What needs to happen before release?

We need all people to use a client version that can handle different per-queue game options, most importantly different share conditions. The newest client version (v2021.10.0) has that capability. With an old client you would still see the queues, but the game would refuse to start. Because of this we will need to set the minimum required client version to that version, so everybody will be forced to update. This means it is especially important that this new version doesn't have any big issues and we will only increase the required client version when we are positive that this is the case. So check it out here: https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/releases

The other thing that needs to happen is deploying the new server update. We can't really give an estimate when that will happen, because Brutus is very busy at the moment.

Note that the deployment of the new queues is more like a configuration change and separate from the server update and client release. As explained above we can't give an exact date yet, but I estimate some time in the next few weeks is realistic. We will keep you updated when we have a release date.

Kindness will save this world, dont you think so?
PS: Rezy, die of cancer

Amazing

You might have read it already in the game patch notes, but in case you haven’t I’m putting it out here. Jip stepped down as the leader of the game team and the game team elected me to take his place. I’d like to use the opportunity to thank Jip for all the contributions that he did in this position. They are literally too many to name them all. So thank you Jip!

This change in positions will certainly change how the game team operates because Jip was very knowledgeable of the game and could do a lot of changes himself. While I have made contributions to the game myself, they have mainly been to the shaders, which is not entangled at all with the lua code of the game. I will (must) therefore focus on other aspects of the team lead role.
I will stick more to the administrative aspects and one of the first things I plan to do is to review how the game team operates and how that can go on as smoothly as possible despite this change in leadership. The game team is very active at the moment and that means it’s challenging to keep track of everything. On top of that it needs to work in close contact with the balance team, which is a lot less active. This has lead to frictions in the past and I will try to find a way of working together that suits both teams.

I’ll present more detailed plans or status updates at a later date, when I got more comfortable with my new role. You can still expect that development will continue in the meantime as we have a lot of regular members that can continue to work and are not affected by this administrative change.

Hello everyone,

after over one and a half years of developement the first season of the new league system is now live. Every matchmaking queue has it's separate division ranking. By playing the matchmaker you will get placed in a suitable division after your placement games. You can then see your division in the appropriate leaderboard tab and the matchmaking tab next to your name. You will earn or lose points by winning or losing and will thus move up or down to the next division. To see the new leaderboards you need at least client version 2021.12.0.
We will gather your feedback after the first season. Of course you can already post your thoughts in this thread.

Altough I am the guy that kept this particular project moving, it would have not been possible to achieve without a lot of work of other contributors, namely:
UmbraSolis,
Sheikah,
Askaholic,
Brutus5000,
kubko,
and many others that helped me. Thank you so much for all your support that made it possible for me, starting with only little coding knowldege, to implement such a big project!

The server update today brought an adjustment to the matchmaking algorithm for the team queues.
The main goal was to enable people near the edges of the rating distribution to be matched with higher priority. This hopefully solves the problem that the very top and bottom players find it very hard or even impossible to find matches. At the same time we tried to further improve the quality of the resulting games with some other tweaks.
This means that the average difference between total ratings of the two teams in 4v4 should be about half of what we had previously. The rating differences between individual players should also be about half for most games. Very high level and low level games will probably not see much difference here. We should also be able to see more high level games.
This is all made possible with an average wait time increase of just 2-3 minutes.

We also lowered the matching timer to 90 seconds to make it less disheartening if you did not get matched in a round.

Speaking of matches, with the new algorithm it is expected that the number of waiting players will regularly exceed the number of theoretically required people for a game, sometimes by a lot. It is not a bug if nobody or just a few people get matched in such a situation! The algorithm requires a pool of people to be able to pick good matches. If the games possible with the current people are not good enough, the algorithm will wait for more people to show up, and if that doesn't happen it will reduce the quality threshold by a bit for those that are already waiting.
When there are many people in the queue that means that there will be low wait times, so don't be discouraged even if you don't get matched immediately.

Please leave feedback below. I am especially interested if the situation improved for high rated players.

The game team has voted to not release the area reclaim feature. There was a lot of effort to come up with a solution to make this feature viable, but in the end playtesting showed that what we hoped the feature would do, is just not achievable. It will not come with the patch next week and it is not planned to be included in future patches either. There are fundamental problems that would require serious changes of the reclaim mechanic as a whole that would need to be done first to make this feature viable.

One aspect why many people were looking forward to this feature was that they believed it would reduce the incentive to spend your time issuing reclaim orders. Unfortunately the feature is so strong that it actually increases the incentive to spend time issuing reclaim orders (just this time the area version). There is no feasible technical way to simply make area reclaim less strong.

More detailed explanation of the reasoning for this decision will follow. I thought it was important to make the announcement quickly instead of compiling all the arguments first.

Hello everyone,

Today I will present to you an icon mod I made. I recently got a WQHD monitor and on that resolution the default strategic icons are just too small for my eyes. So I wanted to upscale the icons a bit and at the same time try to improve the readability even further.

The most noticable change are the tech markers. For example I found it too difficult to spot if there are T2 tanks mixed into a T1 army. So as a first step I got rid of a marker for T1 alltogether as it is redundant. The next problem I had was to distinguish T2 and T3, as it is not so easy to see at a glance if there are two or three markers under a unit. Especially when icons overlap and look like a T3 marker. So I changed the T3 marker to a bar. The noticable amount of white color in a blob of units makes it easy to immediatly recognize that these are T3.
I kept the symbols pretty vanilla for the most part, but I tried to increase the "boldness" of the symbols where possible. Originally I did this because a one pixel thick line is not so easy to spot on 1440p, but then I noticed that a different visual boldness makes the icons easier to differentiate without having to process the exact shape. Our brain is better at recognizing colors than shapes. The colors are already taken by the teamcolors, so the amount of black in the icon is the next best thing we have. Note that there is no real hirarchy in what units are bolder. This is mainly because the small pixel size restricts how the symbols can be made without looking weird. I did try to make arty and missile units bolder as I saw it fitting that these are more visible.
And that is basically all I did. I'm personally not a fan of emphasizing individual buildings like SML or TML, so I tried to keep the general feel close to the vanilla icons. If you want more of a revamp of the icons, then there are other icon mods that focus more on that.

The mod will be available in the mod tab of the client as Reworked Strategic Icons once I managed to upload it.
EDIT: It is now uploaded.
I'm very interested in your feedback on this mod!

Here is a breakdown of all included icons

These are exiting times! Now that some long-standing missing pieces of the editor are implemented, we are finally able to release version 1.0 of the editor. The most significant additions are

• Fully configurable water and lighting settings.
• Support for the new terrain shaders that are now available in the game.

You can read more about how the new shaders work, along with some pictures, here: https://wiki.faforever.com/Development/Shaders/terrain-shaders

New Features

• Added support for new shaders recently added to the game (#47, #51, #60, #61, #65, #66, #68, #71)
  • Removed the TTerrainXp shader toggle in the Texture tab
  • Added a text box in the Map tab to input the shader name instead
  • Implemented the new shaders introduced in the latest game patch
  • Added buttons in Textures > Tools to generate the required textures for the new shaders. Under the hood this integrates the Neroxis Tool Suite, a CLI program written in Java. A Java environment is required, but if you have the FAF client installed, you can simply use that one.
  • Added an option to disable the map info texture in the upper slot (via the v button)
  • The specular color UI in the light settings now changes based on the selected shader
  • Many more UI improvements in the texture layer tab to better support different shaders
• Improved lighting settings (#52, #56, #71)
  • Changed sun angle terminology from RA and DA to Azimuth and Elevation Angle
  • Added environment texture path (This texture is only visible on reflections of units, not on the map)
  • Various other minor UI improvements
• Improved water settings (#52, #56, #71)
  • Removed water parameters that had no in-game effect
  • Added toggle to copy sun color and angle from light settings to get fitting sun reflections on the water
  • Added toggle for advanced water absorption (this will recalculate the light settings in the background)
    Advanced absorption behaves more like real-world light absorption, allowing deep water to visibly obscure units and terrain.
  • Added texture paths for water ramp and skycube
  • Added UI controls for ocean waves
  • Fixed water coloration bleeding onto shores
  • Various other minor UI improvements
• Improved default values when creating a new map (#59)
• Improved Resource Browser UI (#62)
  • Added alpha channel preview
  • Added mipmap previews at levels 2, 4, and 6
  • Display texture resolution
    These changes only affect the layer textures. The resource browser is still the same for decals and props.
• You can now import stratum masks in PNG format (#63)
• Made FAF directory configurable (#45)
  Previously, the editor assumed the FAF data directory was at a fixed location. It now supports custom paths, as configured in the FAF client.

Bugfixes

• Fixed the slope overlay (#54)
• Improved behaviour of input fields (#55)
  Basically all input fields were configured in a way that you had to press enter to assign the value. Confusingly, they did not actually assign the value when clicking away, but didn't discard the edits you made in the field either. So it was very hard to understand what was going on. Now all fields assign the value on pressing enter or when clicking elsewhere.
• Textures in the resource browser and the layer tab are not upside down anymore (#56, #62)
• Fixed multiline map description text breaking the scenario file (#67)
• Fixed issues with the linear brush option and rename it to Scale target to 0.5 to 1 range (#67)
• Fixed mipmap rendering (#71)
  When using textures of different resolutions in the Layers tab, they have to be all scaled to the same size internally because they are stored in an array texture. This scaling would lead to a recalculation of mipmaps, so the blurred mipmaps would not be visible anymore, leading to a different look than in the game. Mipmaps are now preserved properly.

Other

• Slider values are no longer clamped. You can now input any value in the text box above a slider. (#47)
• Default maximum of texture scale sliders is now 20 to make the sliders feasible to use (#51)
• Order textures alphabetically before creating the texture buttons for the resource browser (contributed by sting) (#49)
• Removed normal map check (#57)
  The "Can't assign albedo as normal map" check when assigning texture channelssometimes produced false positives and blocked adding special textures for advanced shaders.
• Remove the two buttons that you could use to generate a random heightmap. (#60)
  The used Neroxis version was way outdated and we don't allow uploading maps based on the map generator to the FAF map vault anyway.
• Improved version check behavior (#70)
• Terrain now retains more details when zoomed out, making it more consistent with the in-game view (#71)
• The editor should now pause rendering when it is in the background, reducing resource usage (#71)

You can download the editor here: https://github.com/FAForever/FAForeverMapEditor/releases/tag/v1.0
As there have been extensive changes, it is likely that some new bugs have surfaced. Please report them on the FAF forum or open an issue here in github.

With gratitude to all those who took the time to report issues with the release candidates, and a special thank you to kent-sole who showed me around in the Unity editor and answered my questions. Without him all this work would not have been possible.

Happy mapmaking!

BlackYps

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

The ctrl-k rule is just one part of a bigger problem. Its the enforcement of rules in games where no participant asked them to be enforced. I'm not trying to say you should just exploit or whatever in your average teamgame. But what I am trying to say is that anything that happens (lets take my example) in a 1v1 game should not be held accountable to some rule where BOTH / ALL players in that game know about it AND are fine with it.

I think it has been well established now that if someone uses exploits in a streamed game, even if everybody in the game is fine with it, the done harm is the spread of exploit knowledge, because the game was literally streamed to an audience. I think everything about this scenario has been said already. Is there any other case where external reports happened that led to a ban?

Hi Zebranog, I am the one that did the recent changes.

why did the old versions of the editor stop working?

They should still work. What is your issue?

the new versions of the editor at first glance are worse than the old ones, what has changed?

I had to rework basically all of the map rendering to fix some long-standing issues where the map looked different in the editor compared to the game. It appears that in this process some things broke.

for some reason they changed the color, it became more difficult to see some small holes on the map, the division into squares is also now not precise, for some reason they removed where the conditional mex is one square

I don't understand what this means.

the function where you check a box and get additional layers for texture has disappeared

Yes, that is part of the rework. There will be a release of the 1.0 version of the map editor in a few days. That will also feature a more extensive changelog and will fix the bug with the colors of the slope overlay.

(and a bunch of other little things that I'm too lazy to write )

Please don't be too lazy to report bugs. If nobody reports them, then they will stay forever.
I recommend that you wait some days for the release, try it out, and then report any bugs that have not been fixed already.

@IndexLibrorum said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

You describe the exact approach we currently use to cover non-participant reports. Because we cannot cover each hypothetical, we've consistently phrased it as "we do not generally accept reports from people not participating in the game". Even with this type of phrasing we already frequently get attempts at rule-lawyering (for this and similar rules), where people argue that "well, it's not exactly against the rules as written, so you can't ban me", which is why we have to resort to these more general phrasings. But the situation you describe is the exact protocol we now adhere to.

I feel that it would make sense to spell out the reasoning of rules more explicitly in the rule page. Currently we have the rules that explain what is allowed or forbidden and we have moderators stepping around specific questions by saying "we don't generally do X", but if we leave the discourse at that it keeps being frustrating for both sides. As a player you don't get a clearcut answer, only vague statements that don't help you to gauge when you risk a ban. As a moderator you don't want to be too broad with your statements because some smartass will abuse the statement and find behaviour that should be punished but that would be against the wording of the moderator.

If we instead spell out the reasonings and goals in the rule page, then it becomes clearer for everyone. We could add statements like "A report from a person not in the game will only be considered if it explains how the behaviour in the game is harmful for the community at large. Otherwise it will be discarded." This would also make it clearer what reasoning the mod team uses to interpret the rules.

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

The fact that something is bannable in games where "no one asked" (as in: a closed community (like my example earlier), a 1v1 between 2 players and so on) is just crazy to me.

I think it's important to distinguish games that were streamed and games that were really private. I can get behind the idea of not wanting to have the knowledge spread how exploits work in detail. And on top of that, people will inevitably imitate what they see streamers do, especially if it's unusual stuff. They might not know that it is an exploit, do it in a game, get banned and then be pissed, because they perceive it was ok when the streamer did it.
So when the game is streamed it's really not a "no one asked" situation, because it has ripples into the wider community. The easy way out is to just not stream games where you want to do dumb shit that is against the rules.

I do agree though that it doesn't feel like a good situation that the current rules are that every game is considered public because a replay file exists. The answer that practically there is a really, really low chance of getting reported by someone not involved in the game, is not really satisfying in my opinion. Personally, I would say that games that were not streamed or remarkable in some other way (like being a tournament game) should not be reportable by external people. Or, better worded: there must be an identifiable harm, that the behaviour in this game did to the community (for example rating manipulation or spreading exploit knowledge in a stream), to make a report by an external person valid.

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

Regarding @IndexLibrorum comment that a player is using FAF as a platform and must therefore follow there rules; yes I get that argument, and if that is actually the case, theres nothing to be done, but is that really what FAF wants do to? I think (as I said before) this is a bit of an overreach

Is this a misunderstanding? because I really can't follow.

if that is actually the case, theres nothing to be done

what do you mean? He stated that you can still change the rules, but as long as they are not changed yet, the rules are still in effect.
I also don't see how this is an overreach? This seems like the standard way of dealing with changing rules. So please, if this is not just a misunderstanding, please elaborate why you think this is the case.

I like the idea of having a "you have been banned, now what" page.
It's true that most of the information is already accessible, but the discussion shows that it's clearly not as well-known as it needs to be.
Currently, when you try to log in you see your ban duration and the reason for the ban. It's not immediately obvious how to proceed from there. If we link to a dedicated page we can compile all relevant information there. This should give people a clear path what their options for actions are now and should increase the trust that the system is well thought-out and working.
Information on that page should include:

• link to rule page
• link to explanation of the appeal process
• explain that appealing can still make sense even if the ban is very short, because your moderation history is taken into account in future reports
• explain that if people think there is an issue with the process, even after appealing, they can contact Giebmasse as the team lead or the board.
• explain why individual decisions should not be discussed in public and clarify that discussing rules in general and proposing changes is still possible in public, preferably the forum.

@Nuggets said in Proposal: Establishment of an Oversight and Review Committee to Support Fair Moderation and Governance:

To put it in clearer words: We, at least the people I know / interact with, feel like there is a huge lack of understanding as to how our "high" rated games go. I'm not trying to be elitist here, its just that (what we feel like) context is ignored or not understood.

It makes sense to me that the moderation team does not completely revert decisions if they correctly apply the existing rules. It seems that part of this problem is that maybe the rules are not suitable for some high rated games, or maybe these people would like to have different rules? In this case it makes the most sense to have a discussion about these rules.

It got removed because the shader that this biome uses got changed with the latest game release. It will be readded once the necessary changes in the map generator have been completed.

One of the points of matchmaker is that you can't fully customize your experience to create a competitive environment.
Regarding the "unwinnable situation": You already occupy a slot in your own team, so there are only two slots left that could be filled with people that contribute nothing to winning a game, compared to three slots on the enemy team. So statistically these players are on the enemy team 60% of the time and their existence is actually to your advantage. Provided that you yourself play decent of course.

@Dorset said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

As I stated before I have noticed that so many ideas seem to stall within FAF and so maybe its time we have a look at the overall structure of how things are governed?

From my experience, most things stall because people have ideas, but there is nobody to implement the idea. Then there is also the case that someone has an idea and implements it, but it gets rejected by others that think it is a bad idea. It's hard to tell if things went well or not in this case, because if it really is a bad idea the community should indeed reject it. Of course most of the time the original guy will still think his idea was good and be frustrated that other people keep him from making the game better. It could also be the other way around, but there is not really a way of objectively evaluating this. We can't automatically conclude that there is a bureaucracy problem from these cases.
The game is already very good right now, so every change has the real risk of making the game overall worse. As Jagged Appliance said, someone has to say no sometimes.

A general problem with listening to community balance ideas more is that, from experience, most balance ideas are pretty bad. And there is a lot of them. Answering them all in detail will take an enormous amount of time from people that are experienced enough to accurately explain how viable each idea is. When you want to create a system with more community engagement you have to find some way of filtering that allows the people that know what they are doing to engage with the good ideas without being bogged down by endless overhead. Recently there was talk in the balance team about wanting to engage with the community more. But how this can work out in the long term is still an open question. I am not trying to discourage you Dorset, I am just trying to inform you what the hurdles are that need to be overcome. If you have good ideas how this could be achieved, then I think there are good chances you can find some open ears for them.

@JaggedAppliance what do you mean with the reclaim pausing feature you mentioned?