Hello everyone,

I first joined FAF like many people at the beginning of the first lockdown in March, but really started playing just a couple of months ago so my new player experience is still relatively fresh.
That being said, I am at a 1.3k global ranking now and do intend to stick around for a while, so I guess this is the opinion of someone who got over the "new player hump".

First and foremost, I agree with many of the posts here: The game is indeed very hard, unintuitive and complex. More casual game modes that can bridge the gap between the (coop) campaign and multiplayer would also be greatly appreciated to onboard new players.

But really, what got me closest to quitting was the toxic community at ranks below ~800. At those ranks, every game is a complete clusterfuck, and sometimes (often) one side just straight up gets destroyed by the other, even if both sides were of the same skill level. Imo there is nothing much that can be done about that. The game's economy of unrestricted exponential growth means that even a 20% difference in skill, can result in you having 10 times the number of units than your opponent just a couple minutes later. So new players will regularly get destroyed at lower ranks and there is nothing we can do about it.

But what we can change is how they FEEL about getting destroyed! Every such game that ended with people starting to flame and then ctrl+k-ing their entire base left a sour taste in my mouth while games where I got equally murdered that ended with friendly advice on what I could have done better, made me want to play again right away!

It's not even about people like me I am concerned about. I have thousands of hours of competitive multiplayer games under my belt by now, so I am (sadly) very used to online toxicity by now. But, the toxicity at lower ranks does prevent me personally from introducing some of my more casual, less abuse proof friends to the multiplayer side of FAF. Because who wants to introduce their friend to the multiplayer experience of a game they adore, just for them to be called slurs for minutes on end?

Playing 2v2 with them is only a partial solution as the scale that many casual players love is found much easier in 4v4 or larger multiplayer matches. There are many other good things to be said about larger team games too:
On many noob-friendly maps, the initial minutes are conflict free, which just feels much more relaxed than the "action from second 1" that smaller maps have.
Larger team games usually have dedicated roles for each spot. While suboptimal for learning FAF the most "efficient" way, one single role like "you are the air player, just have more planes than your opponent" is conceptually much easier to understand than the myriad of stuff you have to do in 1v1 and 2v2 games.
Larger team sizes also make it easier to write off losses as not entirely your fault. It's not that I'm preaching unaccountability here, but loosing 5 times in a row, and knowing for certain it's your fault, can be a much harsher experience than just knowing you could have done a bit more.

None of this is new information of course. I mean, there is a reason that lower ranked players get drawn to 6v6 dualgap and not 2v2 Fields of Isis.

So the most natural place to onboard new players is in large team games - at least half of which end in flaming at lower ranks...

My suggestions therefore would be a Karma system of sorts, fully built into the client.
Make flaming, griefing, ctrl+k-ing your base reportable and start restricting people's functionality once peoples karma score drops too low.
Maybe start by restricting all-chat during games, so they at least can't flame the other side for "being smurfs" or whatever, maybe even disable team-chat too if they drop too low. Put a skull picture next to their name in the lobby so people know right away not to take them seriously, ban them for a day or a week, stuff like that.

You could reward positive behavior too, although I don't know what those rewards could be yet.

tl;dr: Have been playing FAF for about 5 months, the toxic community at lower ranks is imo the biggest hindrance to introducing new players to the multiplayer. My solution would be a Karma system to punish bad behavior.

In the vault there is a mod called "chat beep lite" which plays you a small "beep" whenever your allies write something in chat. At least for me, it hugely helps to actually read chat and coordinate with allies in hectic games.
As I'm seemingly not the only one that sometimes has trouble reading chat, integrating that into the main game options would be great

A lobby option allowing premade teams to play together in an opti lobby would be great!

Example: Two people want to play together in a custom 4v4 with opti enabled. The host enables this new "opti with premades" option, and then puts those two players on the same "opti team". The opti algorithm then takes this into account and tries to find the most balanced teams, with the condition of those two players always ending up on the same one.

UI wise you could even use the already existing "Team" selection interface, as it's literally useless in opti lobbies.

I'm not sure how small of a suggestion this actually is (I guess a similar algorithm already exists for tmm?) but if implemented it would certainly find some use.

@arma473 said in Why would you have left FAF?:

If more people hosted "nice players only" lobbies that would suggest there is more demand for good behavior. I think there is a lot of willingness to tolerate toxicity and trying to force everyone to be nice would also have serious downsides.

For example, "Gentleman Seton's" has specific rules about being polite, not ctrl-k your base, that sort of thing. The vast majority of Seton's games are not "Gentleman" games.

If someone hosts a "Be Polite 500+" lobby, I'm guessing there would be 90% less toxicity in that game.

I always advocate people to host the games that they want to play. It doesn't matter if you have 2 games or 2000.

Your suggestion is indeed a workaround if you are already invested in the game and just fed up with the toxicity. I see a couple problems with relying on this approach though:

New players don't know the game, the maps or the implicit rules about hosting (initially, most of them don't even know what "being grey" means), so new players don't host games. I'm fairly certain this is true in basically all server lobby based games, so the experience new players will have is the one we give them, for better or worse.

Even if new players were to host games though, it would put the responsibility and work of curating a good game experience on them, which is not what we want. If we want to retain as many new people as possible, they should be able to just play the game and have fun, without worrying about all that stuff.
Therefore, I would strongly argue that curating an enjoyable new player experience is on us, the invested people, and not the new players themselves.

Hello everyone,

I think the new player experience would be greatly improved by linking to external Youtube/written tutorials in its Tutorial section.

I know that's not what it was meant to be, but I think it would be a pretty big improvement over what's currently there, i.e. not much.

Finding good educational content for FAF is hard enough as it is, even searching the Forums for it is not super straightforward, so having an "official", easily found place to get started would be great for new players.

Opinions?

@MT_Switch

The "all welcome" lobbies all being a lie is definitely a problem and racism should of course never be excused.

Sadly, there is actually a non-racism related issue why many Germans can't play with many players in South Afrika:
Some of the most popular German ISPs throttle their connection speed to South Afrika to such an extent, that the game becomes straight up unplayable. Nobody knows why they do it, but afaik there is nothing the customer can do directly to lift that restriction.

I, as a customer of such an ISP myself, couldn't join any lobbies with South Africans in them due to that for the longest time.

Giving the Russians the benefit of the doubt (maybe a mistake, but whatever), I'd assume that they have a similar problem.

My working solution is to just use a free VPN. It's not perfect and does increase your ping by like 50 ms. But it turns the game from "literally unplayable lag fest" to "pretty good". I'd recommend Proton VPN, but many others are available.

If you want to do a connection test with a German having such a shitty ISP, just pm me and we can hop into a test game.

How about an option to make the default chat recipients to always be chat to allies instead of chat to all?

Having to always press shift+enter is annoying and also error prone as many a accidentally spilled plan can attest to

@exselsior

Like I said, its not that you must learn a BO for every map on ladder to be successful.

What I said is that it feels like you should learn a BO because it will have a positive impact on your gameplay and is simple to do.

Again, I myself enjoy the BO aspect of the game, but it does represent a certain time commitment I just don't want to invest to play my 5 ladder games a month.

Could I just play on static maps w/o looking at BOs at all? Of course! But I will always have the feeling in the back of my mind that I should have.

Is that dumb? Yes, but so is all of human psychology.

Hello everyone,

I have a very positive opinion of the Advanced Strategic Icon mod.
Yet, whenever it gets mentioned anywhere a very vocal group of players immediately accuses the mod of being made by Satan himself, ostensibly completely ruining the gameplay of everyone who uses it.

Normally I'd just ignore them and chalk it up to nostalgia or whatever, but in this case many of the game's best players are some of the mods most vocal critics.

For example, here is what Blackheart, currently ranked number 5 on the 1v1 ladder, has to say about the mod in his UI mod guide:
"Advanced Strategic Icons: Extremely strong NOT recommended. I would go as far as saying that this mod will completely destroy your ability to improve past a certain level."]

I don't get it.

I have played the last year with some version of it installed, and while I'm still far away from the level of e.g. blackheart, as a 1.8k global I imagine myself to have a decent understanding of the games fundamentals.

And I still don't see the major downsides people insist the mod has.

This is what this post is about: I want people to show me proof of how and where I'm just to blind to miss the very obvious detriments of the Advanced Strategic Icons mod.

One of the most common arguments I hear is that the mod clutters the screen and makes it impossible to accurately judge army sizes and unit types. In my experience, the exact opposite is the case.

For example, lets look at the below scene captured at 1080p resolution and at the same level of zoom each time. If you want to follow along, just open the pictures in full screen but do not zoom further in. Not needing to zoom in further is exactly what distinguishes a good icon set from a bad one.

Here is the scene, ye old lategame setons with the default icons:

So what do I see? Well there is a t3 navy battle going on. The two tempests are pretty eye catching and there are obviously lots of frigates everywhere. Purple also has some battleships but without staring at it for a couple seconds I don't know if purple has 4 or 10. The red navy is even worse. I think I see a battleship in there but its really hard to distinguish it from the other ships because the damn pips are so small.

Lets see how this looks with the small icon set from the mod:

If you are unfamiliar with the modded icon set, open both pictures in separate tabs and switch back and forth a bit to see what changed. Again, no zooming in though.

So what did change? Destroyers, cruisers and battleships are a lot more distinctive, especially compared to the literally unchanged frig icon. It's now much easier to see what ships are important and counting the 8 battleships from purple is a lot faster than before.

This is not even mentioning the actual strengths of the mod, like how finding and sniping purples sonar with a couple torps is now a trivial exercise or how you can easily see that teal has a smd due to the purple border added by the mod.
But, as mentioned above, I don't want to look at the upsides of the Advanced Strategic Icons mod, but at its downsides.

So at least for naval combat, the modded icons are, at worst, a neutral change and up to personal preference.

"But the ground armies!", I hear the naysayers typing. "The mod makes it impossible to accurately read the size and composition of dense ground armies.", they say.

Well, lets look at the same picture again, this time at default army icons on the land bridge:

Even at fullscreen resolution, without looking at it for an embarrassing amount of time, the only thing I can really make out is that there are "like 30-40 T1 units".

How does the icon mod fare?

Well look at that: It's now blindingly obvious that the first two rows of units are of a different type then the back rows. So now my observation is "like 30-40 T1 units, half T1 tanks and half T1 arties". As the heretic that I am, I'd say the modded icons are straight up better than the default ones in this case.

So what about the air? Lets look at the canonical "estimate army sizes quickly"-test and see if we can estimate ASF amounts any faster or slower:

So can you estimate ASF counts easier with the default icon set? I would say there is effectively no difference. In both cases all I see is that the ASF numbers are about equal, no clue who actually has more but the difference can't be huge either way.

It seems to me there are no real downsides to the Advanced Strategic Icons mod when looking at armies and lots of upsides regarding the readability of bases, especially in large team games, the latter of which I didn't even get into here.

So what's going on? Why are so many, often very good, players so strongly against using this mod?

Hello everyone,

recently I tried testing which PD + wall template is the "best" one and, to my complete surprise, I found that their effectiveness varies hugely between the factions.

In short: Aeon PDs become immortal to t1 tanks when surrounded by walls, Cybran and UEF PDs get a slight HP boost, and Sera PDs don't seem to benefit at all from walls.

Links to a couple clips I made during testing:
Aeon
UEF
Cybran
Sera
For testing, I surrounded the PDs with an assortment of t1 tanks of all factions on the Seton Landbridge. The tanks are shielded so that the tank, PD and wall positions are exactly the same for each test. (Testing replay ID: 14204602 (very long))

Additionally, it seems that it's not just the PD or the wall hitboxes that result in those highly variable results:
Surrounding a Sera PD with Aeon walls still doesn't help the Sera PD survive at all.
An Aeon PD with Sera walls does benefit from the walls, but doesn't survive nearly as long as with Aeon walls.

What's going on here? Is this well known? Intended? Should one just never build walls around Sera PDs??

Solution idea to conform to the guidelines: I think we should change this behavior and make the effectiveness of PDs behind walls at least similar for all factions by adjusting the hitboxes of walls, PDs or both.

Note that ecomanager has of course a lot more features than the two I mentioned (automatic mex upgrades, auto share of resources, etc.), but all of them are easily, and usually much better, done yourself.
E.g. sending mass to allies or upgrading a mex is just a single click and both should always be a conscious decision if you want to win.

Can those features still give you an advantage if you are inexperienced (or lazy) enough? Of course, but for me they rank similarly to overly intricate templates: It's far from optimal, so why not let people have fun with them if they want.

My main gripe with ecomanager is not that it's op, but that it gives you a type of advantage that new players are not even aware of being possible.

While I can't speak for the 2.5k gods among us, at my semi competitive level of ~2k setons there are only two actually useful, hard to replace, automation features of ecomanager:

1. Making sure shields and omni never turn off in the lategame by throttling fabs, (air-)factories and construction.
2. Allowing your mass fabs to run on your allies' power overflow without fear.

Integrating the second feature into the main repo would be a nice QOL change imo, but for the first one I don't really have a good idea.

In a perfect world all parts of ecomanager would be unnecessary, e.g. adding the fab throttling into the base game, banned by an easy to enforce rule, like reclaim auto-clickers, or just explicitly allowed.

Sadly, all three solutions have problems.

For one, I'm pretty certain there is no way to integrate throttling of non-fabs to always keep your shields up in a sensible way.
Having your construction pause automatically will loose you lots of games unless you know exactly how the automated logic works, and/or you being able to edit said logic directly. But automatic throttling like this is a must if you want to ensure your base doesn't die to your shields flickering from a random influx of mass while you micro your army on the other side of the map.

Banning it is also a bad idea imo. Not only would enforcement be costly and avoidance trivial (just make sure the pausing looks human enough and you have plausible deniability), I can already imagine the endless arguments about some 1k dude on dual gap having used, or not having used, ecomanager to pause their hives..

As a result, even if you want ecomanager gone (and I kinda do), I think it's not big enough of a problem for the ban route to be worth pursuing. None of the actually good players use ecomanager in tournaments after all.

As such, I think just explicitly allowing the type of automation ecomanager uses (selection, pausing and unpausing), while keeping mods that give unit movement/reclaim/attack orders banned is the least bad solution.

It's the "least bad" solution because for maps where ecomanager is useful, keeping it allowed also keeps the weird meta-skill of having to learn ecomanager, if you want to get the most out of your t3/t4 arty wars which is useful nowhere else in faf.

But having selection, pausing and unpausing explicitly allowed avoids the problems that ban or integration have, while, as a side effect, also clears up the grey zone that mods like selection prioritizer, split/disperse move and the auto-repeat feature of UI party are in.

If we combine this with having mass fab throttling as an option in the main game, now every new player also knows that something like ecomanager is possible which should significantly reduce the information gap between them and long term players.

Most of you seemingly go directly to the "remove the target lock once a unit left intel range" option, but as Jip already alluded to, there are other possible changes too.

For example, you could make it such that a locked unit always shows it's accompanied radar signature. That'd remove the unintuitive part, where only some units magically know where their target is, while keeping the balance of being able to kill bombers/drops reliably, intact.

Tbf, this change would bring other (balance) problems with it, so implementing it exactly like I just suggested it is not a good idea.

The discussion of "intel consistency" in the game is an interesting one though, with at least some possibility for making the game better

Not sure if 'realistic' is a good argument as you could explain that phenomenon with all types of weird scifi tech. Like, quantum entanglement or something.

And its not like the rest of the game, when taken literally, makes a lot of sense either..

I would argue though that it's certainly unintuitive from a player perspective, so its probably worth taking a look at.

That being said, is it even (reasonably) possible to change that target locking behavior without screwing up everything else?

Sidenote: Should we get enough players for two tournaments, both tournaments could be played on the same day. They won't interfere with each other, afterall.

Jup, the rule as it exists now ("No player can play 2 games in a row on the same slot.") will result in the captain and their first pick just trading air and rock back and forth, while the other two play beach and mid.

So if nerfing captains is the goal, this rule won't do much.

If you wanna nerf the captains specifically, enforcing the opposite, i.e. having them only play their choice of beach or mid, would be a lot more effective.

Alternatively just having everybody play whatever spot they like achieves the same balance wise, while also allowing some of the TMM players to compete much easier
(and probably resulting in more interesting gameplay, as you can go all in on the BO practice for a single slot, instead of getting a "good enough" BO for two)

@Pryanichek : I've heard from a couple TMM players that they are not signing up due to the "no two games in a row on the same slot" rule.

The reason being simply that it doubles the hours you need to invest into getting a setons worthy BO without adding all that much to the gameplay/tourney.

Have you considered relaxing that rule to get more TMM players interested in signing up?

If it works out, earlydoor's suggestion of 2 tourneys, split by rank, would also become a lot more likely

Sign up - CheeseBerry 1954

The real question is: Do we want to show the flags at all?

@sladow-noob @Xayo:
As an avid setoner I have been arguing for the removal of setons from the 4v4 pool since before tmm even went live, for those exact reasons!

If I want to play setons I can just do so, and if I want to play something fresh and queue up for the tmm, I don't want to randomly get thrown into an unbalanced setons that must devolve into cancer to be playable.

Making Setons the "map of the day" once every couple months or something, similar to mapgen week on ladder, may be a better solution.

Regardless, Setons shouldn't be in the default 4v4 map pool.