Lets be real here, the reason people are distracted with renaming limits and other trivial nonsense is they have nothing else to do. They are frustrated that they cant get enough games especially at the higher level (so it is claimed).Therefore they are looking for somewhere to vent that dissatisfaction.
I think the moderation team made a fair argument as to why name changes should be less frequent. If you need something to attack to vent your anger at you should look elsewhere.
The root cause though is that FAForever is unable to attract and retain the more capable players that are out there looking for something to play and excel in and the reason they are choosing other games over SC:FA on FAF is that the FAF mod is such crap in terms of gameplay that they rather play checkers. No one is going to devote their time and effort to become good in a game if they think it is very monotone and boring.
FAF has maintained this stupid policy of letting the balance team leadership decide the direction of the game but not letting the community that FAF is supposedly serving have any input on electing who gets to decide where the game goes from here.
The current Balance Team Leader barely plays (to me it looks like he only plays tournaments) and has not stepped down. His adequacy for the position in my eyes has always been very doubtful and yet the worst part is that in his stead it appears this Wheelie guy seems to be calling the shots and the garbage just keeps coming. Those of us who have eyes to see can tell that these people have nothing of any value to offer in designing the game, they only make it worse. I have conceded that they are very good players due to their fast click speed and willingness to grind but that is not relevant to the task at hand. We just need to look at 2 illustrative examples I remember very clearly.
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The disruptor: Tagada claimed it is amazing and super strong. Never seen one being built and used, especially not in the 100+ replays of his I checked back then. In his arrogance he struck down my proposal because he knows best and did not need to prove his point, because he decried it to be so.
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The mercy: Wheelie claimed you can deny your opponent advancing, he was told by many people how stupid it was to keep insisting on this when thousands of games later no one can point to any game where it was being used in that way.
Both of these points make it crystal that they do belittle you when they are wrong and more importantly it highlights the low quality of their thought process and capacity to reason are.
Another point to be made here is that no one is calling for the return of previous balance councilors, they were just as bad as the current one.
In conclusion, the best thing for FAF at this stage would be that it collapses since I do not see the people who are responsible for running the quality of the game into the ground ever conceding that they were wrong to think they knew how the game should be played. FAF would be much better off without these people and could start rebuilding from the mess they have made once it is restructured.
@Jip Those stats do not tell the full picture, please provide answers/data for the following to show a clearer picture.
*Are lobbies actually games that are launched or just lobbies that were opened regardless of launching or not?
*How do you account for games that were short and needed rehosting because someone crashed as games of their own.
*How many minutes was the average lobby/game? This may be a better gage for actual activity when multiplied by the number of games.
*Are all the 1 player "testing" games developers like yourself create in the replay vault counted as games in this statistic?
*What is the ratio of how many accounts were created since the Steam link requirement relative to the current daily unique users?