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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.
@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.
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.
@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.
Hello Everyone,
has there ever been a discussion about an online interface showing the currently open custom games? Basically, it would just be a mirror of the current custom games tab but viewable on a webpage w/o opening the local client.
The use case would be checking for games on your phone while sitting on the couch, doing laundry, while the PC is off, or for people like me who do their daily work on a different OS/PC then the one they use to play FAF.
During non-peak times I quite regularly think "I wonder if there is an interesting game open right now" but checking would take a couple minutes, so I don't.
Not sure if anybody else would use such a web interface, but at least I certainly would.
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.
@FemtoZetta said in Why would you have left FAF?:
@CheeseBerry said in Why would you have left FAF?: A couple of days ago I report someone for "being a dick" during multiple games and as expected nothing happened. You mean the report already got closed? I was under the impression that at the moment they can't work on reports that fast. Also what does "being a dick" entail for you? Did he insult people or did he just say "you're bad"? Would be interesting to know whether mods are too lenient. If you think they should have taken action there are channels for that. It won't change if nobody even tries.
@CheeseBerry said in Why would you have left FAF?:
A couple of days ago I report someone for "being a dick" during multiple games and as expected nothing happened.
You mean the report already got closed? I was under the impression that at the moment they can't work on reports that fast.
Also what does "being a dick" entail for you? Did he insult people or did he just say "you're bad"? Would be interesting to know whether mods are too lenient. If you think they should have taken action there are channels for that. It won't change if nobody even tries.
Yes, the report already got closed, w/o any notification to me, which I assumed to mean it was read and discarded for not being severe enough.
I don't think the mods were too lenient though. I filed the report specifically to test the "just report them" argument made in this thread and as such the bad behavior was relatively minor.
I don't want to publicly shame somebody here for maybe just having a bad day, so I won't post the replay ID, but a short summary is the following:
As it became apparent that we were loosing 40 minutes into a Setons, said player started to blame our air player, conveniently the lowest ranked player, for our loss. First passive aggressively by excessively praising the opponent's air player and then more directly by saying that our air played like shit, didn't do anything, etc.
It tipped all the usual boxes: Purely negative and non-constructive, avoidance of all personal responsibility for the outcome, excusing his bad attitude by being "competitive" when confronted, and so on.
Also, and this is my favorite, blaming our air player for that loss was, imo, just straight up wrong. He had air control for the first 30 minutes of the game, and bailed out both ponds with torps. He played about as well or better than would have been expected for his rank. (Even if he didn't, that wouldn't excuse being a dick of course.)
So, what was the experience like for our air player? He played a good game, winning his lane for half an hour straight and got to help his teammates, including said player. Then, once the tide turned, instead of fighting hard and loosing a still rewarding game, he had to sit there getting told he was shit and to blame for the loss for a full 10 minutes until the game finally ended.
No racial slurs were used and nothing really offensive was said, so I don't think the above is bannable behavior. But it is definitely mean, unhelpful and ruins the fun for everyone involved.
Compare that to some of the better games I have been a part of: Just recently I was matched against HappyNoob (2k) on Setons navy, who then proceeded to absolutely murder me, even though I had 28 to his 12 mexes due to mid dying. Undoubtedly, had a better player been on my slot, we would have easily won that game, so in that sense I was certainly to blame for our loss.
Crucially though, the atmosphere was friendly all around, and he even started coaching me, his opponent, during the ongoing game. He even took the time to answer all my questions after the game on how I could have played better and how exactly he came to overcome such a huge eco disadvantage.
Even though I was responsible for our teams loss and I got absolutely obliterated by my opponent, this is easily among the best experiences I had in FAF so far!
Maybe the karma system idea is just an expression of my desire to give an "official" thumbs up for behavior like HappyNoob showed during that game, and an official thumbs down for stuff like the aforementioned flamer did.
The land bridge of Setons is decidedly not flat terrain. You can see that by either zooming and changing the camera angle or by just observing that both Sera and Cybran T2 PDs have the unfortunate habit of shooting the ground depending on their placement.
I agree of course that you should kill PDs with arties and not tanks. Regardless, it does happen that you have to kill a PD with only few or maybe no arties, e.g. when raiding. In that case it is super weird that you can't kill the Aeon PD, and only the Aeon PD, with tanks.
And what benefit does this strange behavior have? I'd hardly call it faction diversification if almost no one even knows it exists.
Faction diversity is probably a good thing, the way it is right now feels really weird to me though:
Why is Aeon the faction with the, by far, most survivable PD? Just flavorwise, shouldn't it be the UEF with the sturdiest defenses?
Why (in my limited testing scenario) do Seraphim walls literally not block bullets? I can understand them being weaker or more permeable than other walls, but 100% bullet penetration is too high imo. It's supposed to still be a wall after all. For protecting a PD of direct fire units, Seraphim have the equivalent of a 0 health shield here: A completely useless unit that you would never use for this purpose.
@Sheikah Thanks again!
@Sheikah
Thanks for answer and the tipp regarding game time!
Is there a thread / github link regarding the stuff thats being done on the database?
there are many useful data points in the replay vault that are obviously saved for each replay that I can't figure out how to search for.
For example: The game length. I know you can search for the "start time" and "end time" but those seem to refer to the real life date the game was played. While that is useful, a criteria to search for games that lasted e.g. 10 minutes or longer, seems to be missing.
Similarly, I am unable to search for other features the replay server has definitely saved. Stuff like: The number of players that took part in a match, the average/minimum/maximum ranking of players, etc.
Am I just overlooking some feature in the replay vault? Is the solution just to write the "search query" directly and if so is there a tutorial for that?
@biass
Yeah the system can be circumvented, but what's the incentive for doing so?
The "number of games played on this map or variants"-number would have only one use case: Giving the host an easier time to manually balance games. I guess the host can use a map variant not tagged correctly but that would only result in them now not being able to see how often somebody has played the map.
Why would that be beneficial at all?
All fair points.
That being said, you can circumvent most of then with the "number of times someone has played the map"-approach:
As Bennis mentioned, this would still be a nice bit of information though when manually balancing the most popular maps.
As a Seton's player I'm of course mostly thinking of Seton's and, while the map is great, it has the big problem of the highly balance sensitive air spot at lower ranks. As you all know, if you put someone with a practiced BO vs. someone who didn't practice a BO on Seton's Air, the game is essentially over before it began, regardless of their rating.
Imho, you really can't/shouldn't play opti on Seton's due to this at lower or even medium ranks (<1.2k or so). That means you must balance manually, for which such a "games played on Seton's" number would be AMAZING.