In both my ladder and team games I've gotten the feeling that Chrono Dampener can be quite oppressive to play against, while also providing little feedback. I've written a mod (called "Chrono Expand" in the vault) to try to address these shortcomings.

Default Chrono Dampener:

There is a small effect around the ACU which causes units in a huge area to get immediately stunned for 2.5 seconds. The last titan is actually at the edge of the range, but there's no way to tell that.

Chrono Expand:

The effect now covers the entire area in a wave which stuns units. All units lose the stun effect at the same time, which means that the closer the unit is to the ACU, the longer it gets stunned for. At present, units right next to the ACU get stunned for 3.5 seconds, while units at the edge get stunned for only 1 second.

The values above aren't set in stone, and are actually mostly the result of my lackluster modding ability. I'd love to get a stun shorter than a second at the edge but for some reason that starts to shrink the radius of the effect instead.

What are your thoughts?

Make radar selection not make the exact same sound as a ping

There's little to no point making any judgment on Sanctuary until people not involved with the project can play it.

I did some testing and managed to determine that the formula used is
Speed Multiplier = 2^(Simspeed/3)

In other words, every +3 difference in simspeed is a doubling of the simulation tick rate. Here's a handy dandy table for those curious:

Can't say this is the most useful information, but I found it interesting.

Trying to make a more convenient list of suggestions, as this thread has grown enormous:

Being worked on/looked into:

• Easy to interpret lag information (Coming soon)
• Change radar selection sound (Being worked on)
• Give friendly/enemy nuke launches different sounds (Being worked on)
• Display total score of each team in lobby (Being worked on)
• Repeat hotkey improvements (Being worked on)
• See friendly radar bubbles (May not be possible, being investigated)
• Full share unit gift prompt/notification (Being worked on)
• Button to notify players to ready up (Being worked on)
• Enable many "proplayer features" by default (Being looked into)
• Global unit toggle (May not be possible, being investigated)
• Force rainbow cup colors (Not possible in custom games, but being worked on for matchmaking)
• Better CPU test (Being worked on)
• Audible low power warning (Being worked on)
• Display whether maps are rated (Being investigated)
• Matchmaking menu improvements (Being worked on)

Probably not possible

• Add unit to beginning of build queue (May not be possible)
• Fix stereo sound issues (May not be possible)

Feature already exists or was purposefully removed

• Ship FAF with PD + Walls template by default (Rejected/similar feature already exists)
• Prevent pause button spam (Feature already exists)
• Target prioritization improvements (Rejected/old feature that was reworked)
• Allow reduced disconnection timer (Feature already exists)
• View share condition in-game (Feature already exists)
• Ability to name templates (Feature already exists)
• Shift-g reclaim orders (Rejected, purposefully removed)

Suggestion outside the scope of the thread

• Clear client search field (Client issue)
• A variety of UI improvements (Client issue)
• Toggle option for UI mods when watching a replay (Client issue)
• Highlight alternative game modes (Client issue)
• Merge all ladder queue chats (Client issue)
• Option to hide games by specific mod (Client issue)
• Portal/teleportation building (Rejected, better as a mod)
• Chat history (Client issue)
• Wyvern mod fix (Rejected, mod issue)
• Encourage optimal balance games; discourage leaving the game early (First is a large feature but may be looked into later; second rejected)
• AI improvements (Rejected, large issue)

Rejected for other reasons

• Lobby voting system (Rejected)
• Gain rating for each player kill (Rejected)
• GC claw inconsistency (Rejected/no issue)

Miscellaneous

• Hotkey of build closest mex for engies
• Announce when players lose connection to one another
• Infinite build experimentals
• Chat beep lite integration
• Spread build
• A variety of changes from KonjikiNoYami
• Filter maps by size
• A variety of changes from WillowsDuality:
• Make air units bounce off map edges like wrecks do against shields
• Custom template images
• Allow premade teams in optimal balance
• Separate nuke load bar for nuke subs and battleships

Instead of focusing on what I would do if elected, I'll focus on how I've already been doing many of these duties.

• Being a communication relay between players and contributors
  • Compiled a loooooooot of data on the small suggestions topic: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3206/small-suggestions-topic/291?_=1649658115116
• Collecting data related to the player experience
  • Ran an experimental survey on people's opinions on the state of naval balance https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1597/naval-balance-survey?_=1649658115124 (as well as the above)
• Being present for the players and answering questions
  • Hard to provide a simple link to that, but I'm pretty active on both Discord and forums, as well as the many PMs I get being a moderator.
• Organization of regular games
  • A little old, but I organized this thread on a forum: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/supreme-commander-gaming-thread.323817/, which ran for 2,879 posts over several years before finally running out of steam. I've also organized many games among my Discord friends but again, can't just link that
• Other Community Management-esque items
  • Trying to lead the Balance Discussions subforum by example: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/759/balance-thread-guidelines
  • Supcom "fun fact" kind of posts: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3413/what-each-simspeed-value-means?_=1649658115138
  • Occasional meme-making:
    • https://discord.com/channels/197033481883222026/849681991111934002/952114017487446066,
    • https://discord.com/channels/197033481883222026/849681991111934002/930825385443196948
  • Wrote an April Fool's mod that sadly couldn't be implemented this year but perhaps could be next year
  • Activity on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/supremecommander/search/?q=author%3Au%2FDeribus&restrict_sr=1&sr_nsfw=&type=link (as well as dozens of comments answering questions)
  • Many private training sessions with players
  • Responsible for the single most important Discord channel, #cute-animals

Hopefully the above demonstrate both my experience with and willingness to do many of the tasks that might be asked of the community manager. Oh, and also I'm a Russian speaker so I can engage with astro players.

What are my actual plans if I were elected?

A lot more of the same, additional data compilation, updates on the state of development, I like the regular games idea. Might look into running a successor to "this week in slack" but Zulip is so active in so many channels I frankly don't know if I have the time to catch up on that many messages. I have a few other ideas but I'm not committing to anything at this point until I consult with the board post-election.

Will I remain a moderator?

I too had this question, as I was hesitant to retain the moderator role while also being the community manager. I felt this would make me less approachable as a community member. However after posing this question to the board they recommended I keep my role as a moderator, so that I will do.

One of the things requested in the Call for Community managers is setting up regular community game. I've spent some time figuring out how best to do this, but eventually decided the best way to find out is to attempt one and see what happens.

First weekly game will be on Diversity on Sunday, June 12th, at 4PM UTC -4

Here is a link to let you know when it will be in your local time zone

Why this date/time?
Sunday because I work Saturdays, and that time because that is when daily FAF peak player count is. It won't necessarily be at this time every week.

Why this map?
I thought it was a relatively straightforward 10x10 map that most players should be comfortable on.

This first game will be largely experimental, so don't take it as a definite sign of how these will play out in the future.

Also depending on how many people join I may need volunteers to host parallel lobbies so we may split up by rating.

Did you know?

Transports assisting a land factory will automatically carry units to the factory's rally point

Whenever you fire at something, you have a choice of two firing angles. A high arc (red) and a low arc (green)

The high arc is above 45° while the low arc is below 45°.

Unlike every other artillery piece in the game which uses high firing arcs, T2 artillery uses low firing arcs for some reason.

These two are firing at the same target, but look where the T2 arty is pointing and where the T3 mobile arty is pointing.

So I'm proposing we do a bit of a...

Benefits

• Longer time to impact
  • In my testing a high firing arc at max range gives an 8 second time to impact while a low firing arc gives one around 4.5 seconds.
  • This nerfs it against mobile units as it has to predict their movement further ahead and also gives them more time to dodge.
  • It can even be extended further by increasing the projectile speed, so that it fires even more vertically.
• Fixes inability to fire at certain elevations
  • Currently T2 arty can have issues aiming at higher ground. See this thread for an example
• Consistency with other artillery pieces

Ship FAF with PD + walls template by default

One of the most common pieces of advice I see for new players is to make a template of PD surrounded by walls. It's by far the most used template and even some more experienced players can be annoyed if they lose access to it for one reason or another.

Why not have FAF add the 4 (one for each faction) templates automatically? It'd be a QoL feature like mex assist for storage and should be fairly low impact to everyone who doesn't want it.

10k v 10k v Youtube compression

To clarify, it is something the moderation team has the technical capacity to do.
However, as Brutus alluded to people use their account name to sign in so forcibly renaming them would mean they could no longer do so. And returning players are unlikely to know about the alternative ways of signing in through Steam or email.

In the future we strongly prefer people make moderation tickets for requests made to the moderation team, but this is a fairly common question we get so I'll leave this here for visibility.

Are you in the Discord? The tech support section there typically answers faster, and it's easier to search for others with similar issues.

@DeivisJenkins said:

The key point of the suggestion is to make it an optional feature. A middle ground between forcing or removing it.
The backlash you mention was because there are users that like it, which is perfectly fine.
What I suggest would be more of an optional cosmetic toggle.

That's rather idealistic. If we make country flags optional then people who turn them off are going to be harassed because the impression is they're doing so because they have something to hide.

Reddit has a feature where you can hide your profile. If you do so, someone clicking on your profile cannot see your post and comment history. It's a common sentiment in the Reddit community that if you stumble across a hidden profile they're either a bot or a troll, because there's something on their profile they don't want seen and they went through the trouble to hide it.

Overwatch went through this some years ago with hiding profiles because people would get harassed for playing certain characters. They avoided this by making ALL profiles are hidden by default and you have to click a button to un-hide your profile. If you see someone with a hidden profile they at least have the plausible deniability that they never bothered to or didn't know about clicking the button.

Given these two approaches (which were both controversial) I don't expect an option to hide or reveal country flags to go over smoothly.

Combining a country flag with a username, playstyle, time zone, and language can easily narrow down an identity faster than intended.

I really don't think that's true.

• Username
  -- Usernames are already unique. There's no Deribus with a Brazilian flag so flags don't let you narrow anything down within FAF. I suppose if someone uses that same username in a different service which does allow non-unique names then you could get some information, but again you can only narrow down to an entire country.

• Playstyle
  -- I fail to see how playstyle gives you any information you could use to identify someone in real life

• Time zone
  -- First, that's not something FAF reveals, so this would only affect people who both are uncomfortable sharing their country but also are comfortable sharing their time zone in chat. Second apparently the smallest population country with multiple time zones is Micronesia which has 114,000 people, so even in that edge case it doesn't narrow down a ton.

• Language
  -- Not sure how this would work. If I see someone with an Italian flag speaking Russian they could be living there, on holiday, or just using a VPN.

I think there are more objective ways to measure connection, like regular pinging.

Ping is already displayed in lobby if over 500ms. It's just not enough to establish connection stability in anything other than a 1v1. You would need to somehow check their network stability over time, with higher unit counts, across every single other player in the game. That is possible to do but it's a much more complicated request than just turning flags on and off.

I don't remember it being discussed as a privacy concern, but there was an update a few years ago that removed them from everyone and people were... unhappy.

@DeivisJenkins said:

Prevent tracking for privacy/personal reasons
i.e: Personal targetting

Streamer/content creator safety
i.e: Targeted harassment, tracking, or doxxing

I don't see how country flags allow tracking or doxxing. Outside of the Vatican (which doesn't fit the typical FAF demographic) even the smallest country narrows you down to tens of thousands of people. That's not doxxing territory.

@DeivisJenkins said:

I really think is a no-brainer to let it be optional and let users agree to share their information

Mandatory flags do have some benefits. People who host custom lobbies may not want to play with countries which tend to have poor connections or which are actively at war with their own. It can also help team organization and communication by giving a decent idea who speaks what language(s).

@CpaHb said:

This does not apply to mapgens or other options, only for dual gap type maps.

No, there are no plans to implement special rules for specific map types.

T1 land scouts are built with just about every army for portable radar and don't have a higher tier equivalent

Here's the full list of bonuses

does that mean that I need to spend less mass, and with the same build power, will I finish producing of an expensive unit faster?

You will spend less mass but the build time is unaffected. A factory which usually would draw 4 mass/s with a 25% mass discount will instead draw 3 mass/s building the same unit.

Also note that these discounts are for the factory build power only. Any engineers assisting the factory will not receive any benefits.

I am not aware of any recent effects changes

Please attach logs