I didn't know it was cheaper. Considering an early gun at min 6-7 when ppl energy production is around 300-400/s, 3k energy is not negligible: you might make let's say 3-5 pgen more to cover the extra 3k or stall your way through it (losing mass), but i'd imagine that's a solid 200-300 mass advantage for no good reason on an early gun. This would apply if the gun was the same, but then you also have the versatility to split it. Paying less to have more?

My opinion is: being unable to play FAF would be very annoying.

With that said, i'm not sure i understood this correctly (i think i missread this the first time). Will people be able to choose wether to opt into the new patch (the one for testing) or everyone will be forced in? If only testers are "sacrificed" then i think this will be mostly fine (and you should ignore my next paragraph), else, here i go with the considerations.

I would be willing to act as a guinea pig for the testing, but i would suggest to minimize, if possible, the potential negative impact of the tests:

• is there a way to drop the update on some separate instance like some "closed circuit" FAF beta? (this is me being optimistic, i'm guessing there isn't since you didn't say anything about it)
• if the only way is big mandatory update on the main client and shutting down normal games and people happiness in favor of essential testing, i suggest we make some schedules to have test windows that won't make people hate life more than they already do. Something like a week every 3 or so, or maybe we might test on the first half of the week and patch back on thursday or something (don't know if patching back and forth so much is a problem). The majority of games is in the weekend anyway so maybe the second option might lessen the discontent while giving frequent testing (or lower the testing personnel ).

What did you have in mind @Brutus5000 ? How many hours were you hoping to be dedicated to this, and how (low or high frequency, short or long duration for each instance)? Would a list of volunteers and their weekly availability help?

(Also, stuff like this makes me wish we could involve more of the community to get their feedback, because i know it will be at best the usual 200 or so guys who will see this post, BUT HOW TO DO IT? T_T)

Oh and btw, amazing job, didn't expect to see a prototype this quickly

Edit: i think i heavily misinterpreted some stuff from brutus initial post and reworked a bit for clarity

Oh wow it's coming

@IndexLibrorum i must have been mistaken then, was sure i got blocked from unpausing a few times. That's one problem less ig.

Before making a somewhat lenghty explanation as to what i think the problem is, i'd like to make sure i'm not starting from a wrong assumption: in ladder (and even custom unless people decide to change the setting) everyone has 3 pauses, right? If not, what's the current system like?

@Jip with limited timeouts (3 for each player iirc) if someone wants to be an ass he can unpause enough times within 30-70s to make your team run out of timeouts. It really depends on the situation, short pauses are a lot better, long pauses might have the same issues as before, missclicks are worse :S

@Jip Imo 2 things:

• missclicking on it (i was expecting this)
• if a guy needs to afk for 30s+ a player may still unpause after 10s, being annoying, and wasting a minimum of 2-3 timeouts or more

@Brutus5000 said in Should I stay or should I Go?:

Although your statement is pretty clear:

What we do know is that we can rewrite the ice adapter all we want. As long as we choose Java or Kotlin we are bound to ice4j as it is the only notable library for ICE.

you are very likely the one who knows best how much time will it take to learn Go, and what we can expect until we're "Go ready" (asking you to fix the next DDoS wave while you're also learning Go feels evil). The call should be yours, as it is the time.

I will cheer for you behind the screen whatever the choice

An idea i had a few minutes ago (you can find the full discussion in the discord channel if you're interested). Basically a suggestion to potentially make engineering stations a stable part of gameplay, while also using them to overcome current engine limits (specifically pathing). I'll copy what i said in the DS:

"The purpose would be to have a lot of buildforce that can't get pathblocked for maximum building efficiency in later stages of the game

The changes:

1. Engie stations costs shouldn't differ too much from engies (cost is about 10 points of mass per point of BP), so around 200+ mass, they are currently around double the cost (350 hive, 525 kennel, for 20 BP) . (Will they completely substitute engies if we do this? Look at point 3)

2. Engie stations should be available to every faction as a "pathfinding on big numbers" solution (new units, understandable resistance from FAF as per tradition)

3. Engie stations should be more hive-like than kennel like. This means that their area of assistance should be limited to a ring, dimensions to be defined, i'm thinking something like 2-3x current lv3 hive size. This should prevent them to superseed engineers, after all you don't want all the BP in one place and unable to move (should we keep kennel mobile as UEF faction diversity/advantage?). Also remember that they can't start a project, although this issue is solved by a single engie, still worth noting.

4. Engie stations should be unable to actively reclaim alive enemy units (still able to suck allies tho, in case someone forgets a unit on your main base and you need to build fast), meaning they shouldn't be able to act like point defenses melting the oncoming t2 units raid (i've seen ilshies drained in seconds by a few hives, unhealthy af especially if stations are to become more common). We might add a function of passive reclaim, or maybe a button to tell them to reclaim everything in range. This is where hives outshine kennels imo, the instant range instead of having a drone with a small build range move and then reclaim.

5. Engie stations could get a "filter" to not get stuck on building like SMD and nuke unless you want them to (engine?)."

I didn't watch the replay cause i'm lazy, but in case the dropping point is small there's a known issue of sera transports not behaving as they should, they're broken on small patches of terrain (in 100% of the cases i believe, they're just coded that way). It's just the sera ones that do that to my knowledge, and we can't probably fix due to "should touch the engine".

Same problem as you, but sadly, no solution.

I think i got this too today, 2 players from enemy team just went quiet at the same time, we won by dc. Tho it happened only once, all the other games were fine.

I really like the decapitation format, a while ago i tried to gather enough players to have regular games and some feedback to balance the mod (some say there are unbalanced things like com ctrl+k, although that's debatable imo, but verifying it in a game could give an answer). Sadly the recruiting process didn't have much success, and except for deribus bringing it in the community game night, the thing died there.

I think the mod has a few strong points like nerfing cheese all-in strategies to snipe coms (which are harmful to both killer and victim imo, we're talking low elo, game enjoyment, eco shape and stuff like that). I don't know if it could work in a similar balance state to normal assassination or if it would require separate balance changes, nonetheless i see some potential in the mod, which could imo become more fun than the standard one we have now. Unlike ftx i would like to see a matchmaker for decapitation, but i believe we don't have enough players for that, nor people to take care of its balance separately in case it's needed. Mind that when i say decapitation i mean to take the fundamental concept of "when your com dies you don't lose your stuff", but along with that my "ideal" decap mod has some more changes that go along (e.g. imo overflow is harmful in early and low elo cause it messes with your sense of balance, and i'd remove it. Maybe more than just decapitation i'd like to realize my own version of tmm, idk).

Anyway, if decapitation could be implemented in the victory conditions to make its lobbies immune to mod filter i think they would see more success, and i would for sure like to join to play some.

I'm embarrassed to inform you that i quite often missclick on the pause button while microing units in intense fights :3 (and i've seen other people do the same), but if no other solution is better due to engine i guess that's still an improvement

@snoog
People behaving on their own is the best case possible, but rules exists as this doesn't always happen, and i believe this pause stuff to be one of those situations.
I think index has a good point here and a rule or a system to prevent this issue might be needed, because there is a problem and this

but literally just re-pause anyway

is not a solution at all.
What do you think it's gonna happen? You repause, the other guy keeps unpausing cause he doesn't care. In case the pausing player has an urgency and can't pay attention to the game for 1-2 minutes the game is ruined because a team will be put in a significant (and unfair) disadvantage. Re-pausing is gonna solve nothing.

I will add my personal experience to this: there was a time where i paused and someone instantly unpaused (from my own team). I had to do something right that instant that i could not ignore, after my third attempt at pausing, and his next unpausing, i just ctrl+k my com and went to attend to the important IRL stuff i had to take care of.

My idea on this: introducing a punishment for "unpausers" is gonna flood the moderation team with reports, and they already have a lot to deal with. Furthermore, i think that if some kind of rule has to be made, it is one that protects a player quitting in a situation similar to mine (justified ctrl+k imo).

I suggest a possible solution to unpausing: make a system where every player (or team) has a set maximum pause time (like 2 mins per player or around 5-6 per team, idk), and make the unpause work on a majority vote or when time runs out. That way, i can pause and have a few minutes to deal with IRL and come back, if a single annoying guy tries to unpause due to bad manners, he can be blocked by the more civil users in the game.

Ideally, a pause without timer would be better (imagine a custom games with friends where a guy has to be absent for more than 5 minutes but everyone agrees to wait for him, if there is no more time left on pause they would not be able to do that), but that would require people to self-regulate and again, i wouldn't count too much on them, sorry for the low expectations. Alternatively, this pause timer could be implemented only in ladder to leave custom games more "free" to manage pauses.

@IndexLibrorum what do you think?

@Vindex

The first thing i ask myself is, what are these additional stats going to do? I believe that more stats might contribute towards tracking each player's own progress (making them feel more satisfied when they see improvements) rather than serving purposes like gauging a player's skill (at least with a non-ill intent in mind). With that said, i see these additions as something that could bring some QoL, but also come with risks. just look at how winrate is treated on LoL, people flaming others with <50% wr, or acting like they're superior with their high 58% winrate or so, even when that 58% is out of 60 or so games, and hence, irrelevant statistically.

The point is, it's up to the community to make good use of these new stats, if we trust the people to not go toxic about it, then sure, why not? Maybe some information about games that have these systems already in place and the effects they have on the community might be evalued first.

Onto the suggestions

1. About winrate: as previously said, some people might look at the single number without the game count in mind, getting the "wrong" information out of this stat. Also, and i talk from personal experience, in an environment where your WR becomes almost what defines your skill/value as a player, seeing it go down might lead to frustration and poison the environment itself (or lead people to treat you like garbage. This is a risky stat imo, the player base might either make good or bad use of it.

2. This is nice to track your personal progress, but i would add it to the player's profile rather than the leaderbords page

3. The position change is graphically easy to implement, some arrows and maybe a number saying how many positions a player shifted, with a set timer for each refresh. I don't see as many drawbacks for this as i do with winrate, although i have to say maybe this might only be meaningful above a certain level (like master+, where positions don't shift as easily as in gold).

4. This is imo unnecessary and doesn't fit well in the leaderboard You know what? I changed my mind, the graphic showing "last game played X days ago" is actually pretty neat. Additionally, how about improving information about the player's previous games regardless of leaderboard? An idea i just had:

• Match history feature, showing a record of the players last X games (X totally arbitrary), with the essential info and directly accessible from their profile (this could be an additional feature, or maybe a starting point for a complete rework of the replay section, maybe just a "compact mode" option for replay section itself).
  The info would be just some of the ones in the replay section, like players involved, map preview, outcome, game lenght (played not real time), gamemode (custom, ladder, mods). The goal would be to have more and smaller windows so you can skim through them quickly, seeing how the past games went in terms of win/loss, or finding easily the game you wanted to rewatch (i'm not too comfortable with the replay sections, windows are too big and you really need to scroll a lot, plus not having mapgen in the preview sucks but i know we can't do anything about that for now so rip).

Additional suggestion: rework score.
I don't like the score system, first, because in the leaderboard itself i can't find an explanation for it, and second, because even after i think i figured out what it does (i think it tracks your progress in each division, promoting you after it reaches 10+ or demoting on 0-) i can't bring myself to pay too much attention to it. I find myself barely checking the division (paying more attention to my rating), but even when i do score is just the extra of an extra, the only times i recall thinking about score were the times i was trying to figure out why this number was randomly going up or down.

I will try to answer to your first 2 questions, take with a pinch of salt what i'll say (i wasn't there at the time).

1. As far as i know GPG net was to play multiplayer, i never saw it, so i don't know too much about it, it was a matchmaker and supported a lobby chat function, i believe replays, and possibly other features. About vanilla or FA idk, but i expect such a platform to be there from the start rather than come out with a "dlc". It closed because the company stopped mantaining it years later, i think this was before the company failed.

2. https://forum.faforever.com/topic/8422/what-s-the-history-of-faf/13?_=1733931289441
   introduction by Ze_pilot, he says that gpg was not "alive" but simply "still up". Turns out he was right about imminent end of gpgnet which happened around a year later.

For more info, https://forum.faforever.com/topic/8422/what-s-the-history-of-faf/3?_=1733931289441
2 links given to me by sheikah, you can find a lot more there, the Lun Xun's one has year by year recaps (on different pages)

ZE_Pilot yt channel is still active after all these years lol, that was unexpected. Old client seems pretty cool for 2011, i thought it would be uglier. At the time i remember using Xfire (for games like cod4), faf seems way more ahead of the time compared to that, wp to the initial faf team.

While i dislike the option, before saying "FAF is not in financial need" i'd make a list of what should get fixed and the costs
Just by memory i recall a few operations possibly requiring more than the current total budget. More money can never hurt the project imo, still, not like this.

Sorry @GrabADrink but i'd never wanna see FAF in the micro transactions state many modern games adopted, even if just for lobbies. If the goal is to keep the project alive you won't do it by having people get mad and leave.

@Nuggets What's that capslock nuggets? I thought you were relaxed...

@Brutus5000 You're the software god, and as such, an exception. Active people in most teams have a more than decent rating (and usually everyone whose opiniong is taken into consideration).

Also, answer me on disc

(The morpheus quote killed me )

Also, gap surely dumbs the game down (i also rather play 3v3 instead of 1v1 so my attention can be less distributed and i find it more enjoyable), but it dumbs it down to a degree that you don't get to see most of the actual game. I'm bad at apm and multitasking, but having virtually 0 time between techs, entirely skipping from t1 to experimental, removes all sorts of interactions. And that's not even the problem, you can only play (maybe) a single map out of the huge pool.

Again, gap in itself is not the problem, if that's what people enjoy, the best to them, but it could be the only option they have at the start, and they just stick to it because they can't properly get introduced to the game (as i tell in my "diary" XD). My issue is with that being a possibility