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.

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?

@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.

@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,

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.

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.

Just my two cents as a relatively new (joined 9 months ago) now 1.6k global player:

A large part of what makes our favorite game so fun and rewarding is its complexity. Sadly, this complexity is also one of the biggest hurdles for new players. I mean, even playing sim city is hard!

This complexity is I think what many people misattribute, imo, to "APM". It's not that you need a lot of clicks per second, like in starcraft, it's that you need like two correct clicks per second.

One thing that immensely helped me when starting out was to just copy the build orders and general game plan of better players so that I at least knew what to for the first 10-20 minutes, even if I didn't yet know why.

Not only was I playing semi-competent and fun games fast, it also allowed me to learn the ropes much faster compared to me just "winging it".

This was only possible though because I could choose the same map, and preferably slot, in a custom game.

In general I agree with the slow move from custom games to the matchmaker queue.
It's almost certainly the right direction for the game and its players, even low rated ones, if the "lowest common denominator" game mode becomes a chill 4v4 matchmaking queue.

The thing I'm worried about is the people who, like me, want to reduce the game's complexity via map choice.

If the only way to play ranked multiplayer were to become a 4v4 queue with 6+ maps and randomly assigned slots tomorrow, I would stick around, because by now I have actually learned the fundamentals of the game well enough to adapt.

If that would have been the only way to play 9 months ago, I am skeptical that I wouldn't have just been completely overwhelmed for 5 games and then left, never to come back.

Also, please add me as a trainer then:

CheeseBerry [Setons: 1700 | like 1200 anywhere else]

If you are below 1.4k and interested in the map Seton's Clutch pm me!
This includes experienced Setoners trying to become better, Astro and Gap players wanting to try out a new map and ladder players switching it up with some team games.

I'll also gladly show you the ropes on any map if you are completely new to FAF (< 50 games).
The basics translate between all game modes and there are quite a few unintuitive tips and tricks you just gotta be shown when starting out.

Desired Student: See above, speaking English/German
Availability: Typically German Evening
Discord: Cheeseberry#1965 (or pm me in FAF)

@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.

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.

One option to implement something like this would be via a map-veto system.

Essentially, you get to veto ~3 maps out of the entire pool you are eligible to play and your opponent does the same. Once a match is found, it compares votes and then randomly chooses a map out of the non-vetoed ones.

A big advantage to doing that is that you don't split up the already small player base, while being able to accommodate peoples preferences.

Discussions are of course to be had about how many maps one can veto and if it's a soft or hard veto (making maps less likely, or outright impossible to be chosen). Regardless of the details, Starcraft II implemented something like that years ago and it is working well.

@tatsu
Well the distribution of players is not the same as the distribution of games played, right? Do we have some statistics on the latter?

@zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:

@cheeseberry said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:

Very intriguing read, love it!

I don't quite agree with some of your analysis but you already knew that it's not perfect, so who cares.

As long as you keep going at it with a mindset like this, you are bound to improve. So keep up the good work!

Well, I care!! I'd love to hear your thoughts on specific things you disagreed with, even if I still don't agree with you

Biass already talked about quite a few points that were on my list as well, the most important one being that Sup Com is indeed a game focused on macro, and not micro.

Or phrased differently: Supreme Commander is a game about getting more stuff.

First and foremost, this means that you need to spend your mass on stuff, because mass in the bank does literally nothing for you.

Just spending your mass is imo by far the most important thing to focus on.

Once your massbar is empty, how do you get more stuff? Well you need to get more mass. As a consequence: Supreme Commander is a game about getting more mass.

Why are mexes and reclaim good?
More mass and hence more stuff.

Why is map control good?
Map control leads to more mexes and more reclaim, which leads to more mass. (Also it gives scouting information, but nobody below 1k scouts, so who cares.)

Why are armies good?
Not only do they keep you alive, so that you can spend your mass on stuff, armies are also used to take stuff from your opponent and if your opponent has less stuff, you comparatively have more stuff.

Why are t2 mexes good?
If you don't sacrifice too much to get them, they will lead to more mass and hence more stuff in the future.

The only strategies that fall outside of the "get more stuff" plan are snipes, cheeses and memes. To be clear, all of them are valid strategies sometimes - many tournament games have been won by a well executed snipe after all - they are just not worth focusing on w/o having your fundamentals in order.

Note that I didn't even say what "stuff" you should actually build, because fundamentally it doesn't matter (yet).
If you have twice the total mass of your opponent and you just spend it on something that can attack, it becomes very easy to win the game.

In your analysis you are talking about unit movements, army compositions, attacks that did or didn't work, intie micro, tech levels, pgen adjacency, and so on, none of which matters (yet).

Your final bullet points almost hit the nail on the head as they are all different versions of "I failed to get mass when I had the opportunity."

Crucially though, you do have a full mass bar from minute 6 to minute 14 which you mention only once, even though it's the most important of all of them.

In short: This is a game about more stuff and by extension a game about getting and then spending more mass. Everything else is just details.

Very intriguing read, love it!

I don't quite agree with some of your analysis but you already knew that it's not perfect, so who cares.

As long as you keep going at it with a mindset like this, you are bound to improve. So keep up the good work!

WiseOldDog's guide
is not about gameplay itself, but about the time and mindset between games. A very valuable and short read.

Heaven's Guide about generic build orders.
He made a lot of tutorials (see above) but this one specifically is great for new players as the first couple minutes of every game just matter so much.

BRNKoINSANITY's "Weirdly Specific Tutorials for Supcom".
As the name implies, tutorials about niche topics. Sadly there are not a lot of them.

Jagged Appliance's impromptu com drop tutorial on stream.
How to com drop a T2, T3, TML com. Relevant for 1v1 and team games.

nine2's guide to writing your own custom hotkeys,
if the build in ones are just not enough for you. Very technical and nothing a new player should concern themselves with. I just put it here for completeness sake.

@arma473
I wouldn't say that there is literally "no bar" for practicing a build order. First and foremost, you gotta find a good one, which is harder than it could be.

BO tutorials on Youtube are great for that but they only cover generic BOs afaik. For the most popular team maps (Gap, Setons, Astro) you have to find many of the most interesting build orders/example games yourself.

While full out tutorials for all of them would be great, a more realistic goal is a library of example games.

Like:

• Here are 5 replays of 2k+ players doing a T3 com drop on Setons
• Here are 7 replays of 2k+ players rushing a nuke on gap.
• etc.

Just as a proof of concept, here are a couple tutorials that we could link:

------- For the new player -------

WiseOldDog's guide
is not about gameplay itself, but about the time and mindset between games. A very valuable and short read.

arma473's 1v1 guide.
While it focusses on 1v1, a large majority generalizes to team games as well. A great first guide to read!

FtXCommando's guide to the economy,
and what that means for your gameplay. Very competently breaks down some of FAF's more obtuse systems to be much more transparent. (Not sure if all the numbers are still correct, but the general sentiment certainly is. Should check that, probably)

Heaven's Guide about generic build orders.
He made a lot of tutorials (see below) but this one specifically is great for new players as the first couple minutes of every game just matter so much.

------- For the intermediate player -------

Blackheart’s guide to improving forever.
It's mostly about mindset and meta-analysis but also has some great points about how your game, e.g. hotkeys, should be set up.

Heaven's full list of Tutorials.
60 tutorials in total covering a wide range of topics: Macro and micro advice. generic and specific build orders, faction overviews, etc. A great place to look after you have gathered some experience.

BRNKoINSANITY's "Weirdly Specific Tutorials for Supcom".
As the name implies, tutorials about niche topics. Sadly there are only four of them.

------- UI Mods and Game Setup -------

Blackheart’s guide to UI mods.
Some of this is debatable, but it's nonetheless valuable advice by one of the best players in the game.

nine2's guide to writing your own custom hotkeys,
if the build in ones are just not enough for you. Very technical and nothing a new player should concern themselves with. I just put it here for completeness sake.

------- Other stuff I'm not sure how to classify -------
Jagged Appliance's impromptu com drop tutorial on stream.
It's great stuff, but linking to individual tutorials like this in the client seems tedious. We could maybe make our own Youtube playlist with all the scattered pieces of information out there?

Yes, I'm part of that post as well, I just took your idea and made a new thread for it

This is AWESOME!

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?

Also, please add me as a trainer then:

CheeseBerry [Setons: 1700 | like 1200 anywhere else]

If you are below 1.4k and interested in the map Seton's Clutch pm me!
This includes experienced Setoners trying to become better, Astro and Gap players wanting to try out a new map and ladder players switching it up with some team games.

I'll also gladly show you the ropes on any map if you are completely new to FAF (< 50 games).
The basics translate between all game modes and there are quite a few unintuitive tips and tricks you just gotta be shown when starting out.

Desired Student: See above, speaking English/German
Availability: Typically German Evening
Discord: Cheeseberry#1965 (or pm me in FAF)