@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?

I agree with the others. Making a mod achieves what you want. The fact that we don't see many suggestions implemented for testing is not because there is no possibility to test things, but because nobody actually wants to implement it.

I'm just trying to understand what exactly people like or dislike about the feature because we have:

• the actual tombstones
• the marker on the map
• the text that informs about who the killer was
• the text being funny

It's not an all or nothing situation where we have to take or leave the whole package

Do we even need a wreck? There is a large black crater already. Isn't the utility of the feature the map marker and the message?

Could the people that want it as an option (I read that as "yes, but not in my games") please state why? This helps for a productive discussion to better understand what the controversial parts of the feature are

Good to hear that it's working now!

The actual deployment happend only just now. Can you report back after having played an additional ladder game?

Good news! There was indeed a bug in determining the number of placement games for players. I managed to fix the bug, so the fix should be deployed soon. Thank you for taking the time to reach out.

There is a Improved Graphics 2024 mod in the vault that changes a bunch of render settings. You can have a look there and modify the mod to your liking.
I also found a text file on my hard drive where I collected some explanations of some of the graphics settings. No guarantees on correctness as it is based on my understanding of the time and also some years old.

ConExecute("ren_DecalNormalLodCutoff 560")
ConExecute("ren_DecalAlbedoLodCutoff 560")
ConExecute("fog_DistanceFog off") -- map fog
ConExecute("efx_WaveCutoff 560")
ConExecute("UI_StrategicProjectileLOD 185") --standard 128, there is no apparent reason for changes
ConExecute("ren_ShorelineCutoff 560")
ConExecute("ren_SyncTerrainLOD 560")
ConExecute("cam_HighLOD 0.2") --sets the LOD value for the detail level “high” that can be selected in the menu
ConExecute("cam_MediumLOD 0.3") --sets the LOD value for the detail level “medium” that can be selected in the menu
ConExecute("cam_LowLOD 0.4") --sets the LOD value for the detail level “low” that can be selected in the menu
ConExecute("cam_DefaultLOD 0.2")
ConExecute("cam_SetLOD 0.2")
ConExecute("cam_DefaultMiniLOD 1.65")
ConExecute("ren_shadowsize 4096") --Resolution of the shadow map
ConExecute("ren_shadowLOD 400") --At what FocusDistance do we stop rendering shadows
ConExecute("cam_ShakeMult 0.1")
ConExecute("ren_IgnoreDecalLOD") --force render decals
ConExecute("ren_Meshdissolve 40") --double default value, individual value to be compared with LODMetric is defined in the blueprint exact function and interaction with ren_MeshdissolveCutoff unclear

SC_CameraScaleLOD 0 or 1 or 2 most likely determines which of the three LOD scales is used

LODMetric is the FocusDistance multiplied by cam_HighLOD, cam_MediumLOD or cam_LowLOD, measured at the respective location

Depending on FocusDistance, the strategic symbols are displayed (Standart 130, set in the blueprint)

I also think that working in a high quality ecosystem is way less hassle than trying to work around a somewhat broken and abandoned library. Even if it means learning a new language. And Go is not nieche. If we ask around we might even find someone experienced with Go in our community that you can ask Go-specific questions

@TheVVheelboy said in adjustable LOD cutoffs:

Also, could ask more technically inclined people if it's possible to edit this parts of lua yourself to see if it's possible to push the experimental graphics option even more by yourself.

Yes, you can call these two conexecutes from a ui mod as well. There are more settings possible. There are also mods that change a lot of them, but I forgot the name. I can look it up later, but if you search for "graphics" in the mod vault you might find it already

I also think it is better to improve the situation by changing how the pause system works instead of changing the rules. The issue seems to be primarily one guy in a teamgame being a dick and unpausing immediately while the rest has no issue waiting. If we change pausing to requiring a vote we can strip this power from a singular player. I know that counterstrike has a vote for a timeout of a fixed length. (Or at least it did while I actively played it.)
If we think carefully how we design this system and how many votes we require, I believe we can come up with something that is pleasant for everyone involved. For example it could be a pause of a fixed length that could be resumed earlier with a vote.

I can't tell you why it feels like your matchups have changed, but I can assure you that it is not because of the season change. The part of the backend that does the matchmaking doesn't even know about the season change.

And you should not have to play 10 games again when you were ranked in the previous season. It should only be 3 in this case. It could either be that the client gives you wrong info (which would be a bug in the client) or you indeed have to play 10 games, which would be a bug in the backend. If you could try it out and report back that would be really helpful to fix the bug.
We don't simply carry over the rank from last time because we want the leaderboard to only consist of active people.

I wonder if this problem has existed since the start or if some change at some point introduced this. I am not aware of this happening in base FA, but it could well be my ignorance

Seems normal enough. Then I have no idea what causes it. Sorry to be of no help

Version 0.8 and onwards uses a newer unity version. It could be related to that. What operating system are you using?

I tried it with TTerrain and TTerrainXP, but yes, please share the map where it is not working. Or the map name if the map is in the vault.

I am referring to this and it works fine for me.

You can find release notes here: https://github.com/FAForever/FAForeverMapEditor/releases
Bloom not working for you is odd. It is working for me and Jip as well that helped me with testing. I don't know why it is not working for you.
The issue with the brush height has not been addressed in that release.

if I installed 0.91 does that include any fixes from 0.90 also?

Yes

I had some more thoughts while reading the thread, but I don't have the energy to write them all down at the moment. Maybe later.
But I just want to say that this conversation illustrates really well that the "don't leave unless the game is lost"-rule is far to hard to gauge in practice and leads to bad experiences for everyone.