Best posts made by BlackYps

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

Looking at the general state of things, it seems that things are not the best.
There seems to be a lack of general vision. There is fighting about certain features/changes, but there seems to be a general lack of willingness of elaborating arguments. Instead people only post their conclusion ("we obviously need this", "this is obviously a terrible idea") and they seem to be too disillusioned or frustrated to put in any more effort.
And the worst thing is that I am guilty of this too.

I am tired of the fighting. I don't want to put time into developing features and having the feeling that the biggest hurdle are other people that are in my way. I want the biggest hurdles to be technical in nature. "Technical" doesn't really capture it, but what I mean is that we overcome problems that life gives us instead of an opposing party that consists of other sentient humans. That way nobody has to lose and we can all win.
Some absolute son of a bitch is trying to burn this place down by ddosing it relentlessly and actually paying people money to attack this community in various ways and I don't want to give him the satisfaction by letting him watch how people that all at heart have the best interest of FAF in mind are mauling each other on the forum or on discord over internal disputes.

I'm not saying that everything is actually getting worse, but to many they seem to feel like they are. I want to explore the reasons behind this in this thread.

I would like to hear what you think what the reasons are.
Now before you start typing I want you to reflect on if the first things that come to your mind are the actual reasons. My hypothesis is that things like the rename period or the league system are not the underlying cause that started our grieves, but that it is something else. And then when we are already agitated, we can't calmly discuss these surface problems anymore and everybody starts having a bad time.

If you don't want to state your opinion in public you can also write me in private.

A short thing about behaviour in this thread: I think to really get to the truth it is important that we speak the truth. That we let go of masks made out of sarcasm or "professional appearance" and talk about how we really feel. That doesn't mean to insult anyone. It's okay to be angry in this thread, but show us your anger in a way that we can empathetically relate to it instead of burning bridges.

I will probably add another post later that describes more in-depth how I feel and what I think the reasons could be, but it is getting late here and I want to get this out.

P.S. if writing a lengthy post, remember to save it externally before posting as this forum has the unfortunate issue to sometimes error out when you try to submit it.

As I've seen it brought up more often lately I would like to ask everyone to not immediatly bring up the "unpaid volunteer" argument when someone complains about things in a rude manner.
I know you mean well when bringing this up, but firstly, it is irrelevant as we would expect civility even if everybody was paid here, and secondly, it can lead to the impression that you can't criticise decisions because they were made by volunteers in their freetime, which is simply not true.
Thank you

Hello everyone,

it is time for an update on the progress that has been made on the league system. I believe the last post was this one: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/311/graphic-artist-wanted

We have decided to use petrics artwork. You can find his post here: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/311/graphic-artist-wanted/23
You may remember that we originally planned to release the league system alongside the team matchmaker. That was last christmas, or in other words over 9 months ago. So what happened? To answer this I will give you some insight into the developing process:

First some basics: The FAF client communicates with our lobby server and additionally gets some info from our API. Persistent information, like your rating, gets stored in the database, so it can be accessed by the server or the client by using the api whenever necessary.
We wanted the league system to be not part of the lobby server but to be a separate, independed service. This has the benefit that we can update, shut off, restart etc. the league system without having to touch the lobby server. This allows us to deploy updates without having to restart the server and in consequence have everybody kicked and the currently running games destroyed. The league service even has its own database to store the league data.

So far so good. But actually implementing this was way more difficult than I anticipated. I mentioned that the client queries the API for information. We want this separation of the server to be abstracted away from the client, so all data should be available from the same API. This is actually difficult, because the api has to get access to both databases. But the standard configuration assumes there is only one database. Elide, the library we use for our API can handle the case of several databases, but this requires a reconfiguration. This needs special knowledge, so kubko did the job (Thank you kubko!). However, nobody told kubko that other work couldn't continue until this was solved, so he treated it as low priority until several weeks later we talked about this and I was made aware that this information got lost.
This actually illustrates really well, why the development of the league project happens so slow. This project touches so many different aspects of FAF. It needs changes in at least six different repositories on github, each with their own relase cycles, and many depending on one another. This makes it extremely easy that one part is bottlenecking the rest.

Another example: The league service was actually already running for quite a while, the server sends info messages about games that the league service can read to trigger changes of the players' league scores. However UmbraSolis and me didn't really pay attention to the format of the messages. The league service read these messages, but failed to parse them. Worse, we realized that we actually need different info from the server. So now we needed to change the league service to accept the new message format This was relatively quick to be done, but it reuqired another server and league service relase.

Add to all of this the normal issues of a volunteer project where random people randomly don't have time for some weeks due to the job, university, holidays or whatever and you arrive at the pace that you see. This also illustrates well why we can't really give estimates when a feature will be ready. It is so uncertain how much time people will be able to spend on a project and new issues that need to be dealt with before a release pop up constantly.

Right now the league service is functional and already processing game results for a test season I started. The client UI is also mostly working now. This screenshot is using real data from the test season.

As you can see it is already in a good state, but there are still some things that need to be worked on, like the number of placement games not being relayed. I also need to alter the division distribution because right now, almost nobody gets placed in bronze and we get a bit too much grandmaster players.

The additional UI is quite a large change to the client code, so even when it is ready the new code needs to be reviewed properly and this will also take some time. Because of this it will not make it into the October release. Maybe it will be ready in November if everything is largely smooth sailing from now on.

The only definite release date estimate is - as always- soonTM.

A veto system for matchmaker is in active development at the moment.
I'm also looking into bringing back the indicator that someone you can match with is searching

The development on the PBR (physically based rendering) shaders has now reached a state where it is close to finished, so we can now enter a beta-testing phase. The shaders should look quite good on maps from the map generator. All other maps should work as well, but your mileage may vary. You can get a glimpse of how earlier iterations of the shader looked in the screenshot of the week thread, but they are a bit outdated already.
The aim of this is to gather new comparison screenshots for the promotion of the release, to get feedback and to hopefully inspire people to help with the remaining units that have issues with the new shaders due to their textures.

As this is a beta-test you will have to manually install the file. For this you first have to download the file and rename kyros.zip into kyros.nxt. Then, to use the new shaders in the game you have to place the file in C:\ProgramData\FAForever\gamedata, to also use them in replays you have to also place it in C:\ProgramData\FAForever\replaydata\gamedata.

The PBR shaders will only be enabled on high graphics fidelity. The previously used shader got moved to medium fidelity. To make quick comparisons you can switch the fidelity by using the console command graphics_Fidelity 2 and graphics_Fidelity 1 for high and medium fidelity, respectively. You can use up arrow to recall previous commands on the console to make switching even easier.

Please post your feedback and screenshots in this thread.

Download disabled while we fix the issue with the latest patch
You can now test them by playing on fafdevelop

I run some tests with the matchmaker and I agree that the matching is not ideal at the moment. There are two things we want to do.

1. Improve the game quality in general
2. Find a way to bias the matchmaker to high rated games somehow.

The first one is relatively easy to achieve, as we can tune config values of the matchmaker. The second one is a bit harder as this requires that the matchmaker doesn't match a semi-high rated player with lower players, so he still stays in queue until more high rated people show up. This is not trivial to do and requires to find some sort of metric that consistently does this first.

I have a script to run the matchmaker with test data and plot the results. If someone wants to try to modify the matchmaker code or to just try different config settings, then I can happily share my script.
In the meantime here is a comparison of the current config values and the new ones I came up with.
Current:

New one:

As you can see there is always a tradeoff between game quality and wait time in queue.
With these particular settings I believe we strike a nice balance between quality and wait time.
This will lead to more people "floating" in queue and not getting matched immediately. This is what allows the matchmaker to pick better matches. It may have the nice side effect that you can actually gauge the queue activity from the amount of people in queue, even shortly after a queue pop. (E.g. 20 people in queue -> high activity, 10 people in queue -> rather low activity.

Wow that was a lot of posts to read with very little actual discussion. Anyway here is my attempt to contribute to the parts of actual constructive discussion.

It’s even created issues for moderation, where reports for one person were meant for another player, or creating additional work because a user in a screenshot has changed their name four times since, or even it’s not the player they think but a username that looks identical.

FAF already uses a player ID, that's how you keep all the account info when you rename. When the mod team has issues, because there are ambiguous reports then we should talk about how we can base reports more on the account ID than the name. Whenever you make a report by rightclicking a username we could internally use the ID to prevent moderation problems with renames or similar names.

The rule regarding user-impersonation in particular has been criticized as vague and applied unequally, which has prompted us to review it with the moderation and administrative teams.

The attempt to remove ambiguity from the rules didn't really work, because we still have "Are difficult to distinguish from other usernames or otherwise too similar to other usernames" in the rules. That's still ambiguous. I seriously don't know where this rule draws the line. Is TheWheelie and Wheeler too similar or not? How can I as a user determine if I am breaching the rule?

Usernames that are difficult to distinguish from other usernames may no longer be used. This includes usernames that exploit visually similar characters, such as 'l', 'I', '1', 'O', and '0', or are otherwise intentionally designed to be difficult to read.

I think I understand the intention of this rule, but the way it is worded is not optimal. I am not sure what the "designed to be difficult to read" part is supposed to mean or which problem this is trying to solve. Maybe change the rule to something like

• Usernames that are visually identical to other usernames by exploiting visually similar characters are not allowed.

We will be limiting the ability to change your username to once per year. We will maintain the current policy of making previously used usernames unusable for six months, meaning that another player may not immediately pick up the name that has now been freed up. This grace period will give the community some time to get used to seeing players under a new name, and helps mitigate player-impersonation. Be aware that this means that changing your username might mean that you lose that name permanently: your old username will become available several months before you are able to rename again.

I understand the 6 month grace period and I agree with it. However the increase of the rename period to 12 months seems overly drastic and lacks good justification. Why do we need this change that you run the risk to permanently lose your original name? I don't see any reason why this would help anybody.
The rename period seems to be the main thing people have an issue with in this thread and increasing the period can only ever mitigate issues, but not eliminate them. There is some explanation, but it is quite vague. From the given explanation I don't really see why a change that affects the players so much is needed. Can't we limit rename confusion with the other rules for example the banning of identical names?

In general the rules should specify better when action will be taken. From what I read on discord it seems to be an unwritten rule that derivative names (like all the wheelies in this thread) can be punished, but only if the original name owner makes a report. This seems like a good rule, but I don't see this in the new rules. This is also relevant for other areas, for example that in-game misbehaviour can only be reported by people in the game and not outsiders.

One last thing: Discussion along the lines "do you need this feature to have fun" doesn't lead anywhere. There is hardly anything that is required to have fun. I couldn't justify why we need a faf-memes channel, but it would be sad to see it go with the justification that there were people not behaving in the channel so it is easier for moderation to remove it. It's a similar thing here. If the current situation creates issues for the moderation team then we need to talk about it, but I didn't see much of that in the justification of the change, or not detailed enough to be able to discuss possible alternatives to the current rule change.
The ability to have fun interactions with others is important for a community and the rules that we have should have clear justification why they are needed, so we can have the minimum of rules required to have an enjoyable community. "We think it is very important that usernames are unique and easy to read" is too vague for me to justify a rule that limits everyone in choosing their name.

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.

I think with the right tuning the suggestions in the OP could lead to more interesting bombing decisions. Right now engies are basically the only viable targets, because they die in one pass, while the power in the base needs multiple. A weaker but cheaper bomber could allow you to make two to one-pass either engies or power in the base. So you can now either commit to multiple early bombers and do a lot of damage, or make only one and have less harassment with fewer cost.
Having more vulnerable pgens could also be nice for later raids, right now engies die so much faster than pgens that it's hardly worth it to target pgens instead of buildpower when a raid gets into the base.

Here are some comparison screenshots of the new work-in-progress PBR shaders. The first picture is always the current shader, then comes the new shader. All screenshots are without any post-processing.