@morax said in "What will you do if you lose the election" and 5 Questions for FTX:

5. Have you ever donated your own money to a FAF event? Why or why not?

No comment on the rest but why do we care if a college student is donating money to FAF? Hell why would we care if anyone, college student or not, is donating money to FAF when they clearly put time into it? For all we know he’s broke as hell, and if you know he’s not it’s still kind of a strange question if he’s putting a lot of time in anyway imo.

Hi yeah it’s fucking stupid to hide global rating. I’ve stayed mostly quiet on this thread because it’s pure idiotic cancer, but if Mizer is here calling out bullshit I guess I will too. Getting rid of global rating is completely and utterly asinine, full stop. I don’t know what breed of ignorant elitism leads to people thinking it’s a good idea, but for the sake of FAF I’d like none of that in our community leadership.

What do you even think getting rid of that will accomplish? Congratulations you made any sort of manual balance in global games impossible unless you know every single player in the lobby! Wow! Amazing! Congrats, you took away a nice psychological trick to get people to play more games because seeing rating go up is fun. That’ll really help player retention! I’m sorry that you’re compensating for the fact some (in your mind) gaptard is higher rated than you globally, cry me a river.

Okay thanks I’ll get off my soapbox now. Have a nice day.

@thewheelie said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

@exselsior said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

It’s even worse than what @CorvathraNoob said because a single sat breaks t2 shields covering mexes.

No it doesnt. And even if it does it will be so time inefficient its not worth doing it at all

Just for fun I quickly tested this to make sure, it takes ~5 firing cycles and a little over a min of game time for a sat to break a uef t2 shield and kill a t3 mex. Now, the thing here is that the only maps where sats are cancer are high eco maps with spread out mexes. Meaning often the mexes will be surrounded by mass fabs. Killing the mass fab rings kills the t3 mex even faster if I am not mistaken, was too short on time to thoroughly test that part though.

Is this time inefficient? Probably. I can test this later but I'd bet on the novax killing distant mexes faster than a t3 arty would though, assuming mexes are spread out.

@arma473 said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

I can think back to a match where I made something like 6 novax and they wouldn't break the enemy's shields. They made a significant number of shields but they spent a lot less on the shields than I spent on the novaxes.

You're doing it wrong. You don't build 6 sats unless you're doing that purely for laughs. You build one or two and then a Mavor. Good luck defending vs a mavor and 2 sats without having a ton of hives + sera t3 shields. And at that point unless you have a para all you can do with your eco is assist shields.

Edit: Also you should have synchronized the sats firing if you had that many. It would take a very large amount of assistance to defend against 6 sats on the exact same firing cycle.

@rezy-noob said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

so far,i haven't seen a single game where novax spam beats arty grid spam and the single usage of a novax efficiently can probably be the t2 mex hunt if they are split across the map,aka setons but that's it?
i was also thinking about killing t1 assist,but making novax in order to do that isn't the best idea

Same thing I said to Arma, if you're just spamming sats with no arty then you're not using them effectively imo. It's sats + arty, not just spam sats. That combo brings down shields better than just sats do, and then the sats kill the shield generators the instant they go down to arty. Just arty and there's a decent chance it misses or lands after other shields come back up. With a well managed sat if there's any blip in the shields you start picking off shield gens.

That being said, on smaller and more compact maps sats make less sense than purely spamming arty, unless you don't have Aeon on your team then they're very nice for vision and situationally worth it.

Honestly the only situations where sats are arguably op are almost exclusively high eco 20x20 team games with spread out mexes, but they are obnoxious as hell when they are useful in a way that nukes, bombers, and arty aren't. Their perfect intel + perfect accuracy with decent damage is a pretty strong combo. That's just my opinion though.

I've played SupCom on and off since its release back in 2007. A big appeal for me is that it has had something for a wide variety a play styles or level of investment. What I mean by this is that back in the GPGNet days I was playing some other games more competitively with some friends and didn't really take this game that seriously, I just liked having massive survival battles or going through the campaign with different and usually troll strategies or self imposed limits like air only or defensive structures only. On the opposite side of that, much more recently I've been on a kick to start getting better at this game instead of playing chill games with zero effort or improvement and it's amazing the amount of depth there is. There's something for every level or type of player in this game.

Some more specific stuff:

• The scale
• Strategic zoom. This is one of the biggest reasons I never got into Starcraft despite giving it a few tries. Feels so limiting to not be able to zoom all the way out.
• The amount of outplay and comeback potential in the game at all stages
• Huge skill cap - even the best players have room for improvement
• The community - for keeping the game alive and all the new content that is added to it
• The community - for the nice good players willing to help not as good people get better
• Still plenty of new strategies or builds to try if you're feeling creative

Not sure if I'd actually end up using this myself much since I personally like the faster paced game, but I love the concept and the work and thought you have put into this! Sounds like something a lot of people would like to use and I'll be sure to give it a try once it's finished.

@blackyps said in Client v1.6.0:

This whole think makes him look not like a potential developer or an interested player, but like a script kiddie that needs to drop his "cool advice" that he read on the internet. The other option is that it is intentional trolling.

Of course in reality it could be different, but that is my impression from his behaviour.

This was my impression too when I read his post. It's just bad form in general to come into here and immediately accuse all the devs hard work as being "for nothing."

If he's legitimately an experienced dev he certainly doesn't have the how to communicate aspect of being an engineer down, and him commenting on JVM thread allocations really does seem like a script kiddie trying to be smart.

I like that this thread is here and that we can post on it, and I am pretty sure that if I came in here and said something like "hey, I know making the app fully non-blocking can add a lot of complexity in some scenarios, did you guys see a lot of improvements from making this change?" I probably wouldn't have been met with the same reception this guy did.

Though I also took a look at the pr and didn't get the feeling that it really made things more complex anyway. Not that me skimming through a 12k line pr in a language I don't use professionally for 5 minutes means much.

@archsimkat Makes sense and I didn't think about it in terms of radar being slow to actually show new signatures. Thanks for the clarification on that.

Honestly this is a perfect example of why the "why" is so important - players can learn from it. Tbh I thought that radar was just buggy sometimes and slow to actually show up, but it makes a lot more sense that it's just waiting on a certain game tick for it to refresh. While this isn't particularly useful information in the vast majority of in-game scenarios it is nice to know and there are a lot small details non pros who are interested in learning can pick up from balance changes.

@thomashiatt As I said, TMM is already nearly dead, and is effectively dead at most of the times I can play which is really unfortunate because I do like TMM. Adding more matchmaker queues is not a viable option. People are going to want their custom games.

This is my issue with removing global rating, the people wanting to do it are clearly out of touch and/or only get to play at peak times and are coming up with compromises that only work for a % of the player base.

The issue is that there are competitive as well as casual global games. There’s a competitive Seton’s scene, and please don’t give me some bullshit about Seton’s bad because you don’t like it or whatever. There’s a more general competitive high level team game scene on various maps, and trying to replace that with a 4v4 TMM just sounds rough for tons of reasons. People aren’t as willing to sit in a queue for as long as they’ll sit in a lobby where they can talk to a specific subset of players for their game they’re waiting on for instance. They’ll want specific maps and we’ll have more map list drama like we have with Ladder. Manual balance to help incorporate larger rating differences in off hours isn’t possible.

We already have an unranked global scene. Any modded game. Any survival game. Maps like Thermo. We have plenty of players that only do that. We need something for those that don’t fall into those categories, the unranked global and the ladder warriors.

If people had actual ideas on how to replace it that fill the role of global rating without being global rating then I’d be less against it, but all the ideas I hear are, well, shit.

Let’s get the achievement page working and working consistently. Let’s get more stats about players available, like w/l and number of time played per map and similar stats for factions. Let’s get more avatars available for lower rated people to show off things they’ve done. Actually do some of these and then come talk about removing global rating. Stop with the “well make a queue for everything and it’ll be okay” bs, because it’s bs for many people.

@ftxcommando said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

Things can’t operate off of magic; if you consider 2v2 dead you logically also consider 1v1 dead.

1v1 Is close to dead for me unless I play weekends. At which point I have to decide if on that short period of time do I want to join the generally higher quality custom games or play ladder. This is my own issue, not FAFs problem and not super related to the discussion at hand, but yes to a large degree ladder is also dead for me.

Don't get me wrong, regardless of how much I personally get to enjoy TMM I love the idea and I love it's a thing. I am grateful to all the people who put their free time into making it happen. I'm glad it's starting to see more popularity, and hell maybe it'll be better for me now if its popularity has increased significantly in the past couple weeks - I've been traveling and not playing for a bit.

The problem is that all of this is tangential and you're ignoring every other argument against removing global rating. Yes, Gap and Seton's are behemoths when it comes to popularity, but they're far from the only maps played where removing global rating is a negative.

To be blunt, and this I think is the crux of my issue: I've yet to hear a single argument that wasn't either entirely bs or true but not really an actual reason for removing visible global rating

If you think Global rating is useless, then ignore it and enjoy your life. If you think it's inaccurate in certain situations, like I do, then take literally 30s to look at their ladder rating and a quick overview of their replays. There you go. All you have to do. If I'm hosting a Seton's and see a 1900 rated global player that I don't really recognize and I look at their replays and see Dual Gap the entire time, it doesn't take a genius to realize that that 1900 will get crushed by a 1500 rated Setoner on Seton's. Seriously, what actual harm is global rating being visible doing outside of certain people being mad that someone they perceive as being worse than them having a higher rating than them? I've already given several reasons why having it visible makes sense.

And no, I don't want a Seton's queue or a map specific queue, that's a downgrade in every possible way. I would much, much rather the lobby sim than deal with sitting in a queue for the same amount of time. Not to mention having a queue for every scenario is just silly.

I am ready to get wrecked by Paralon at 7 in the morning in my timezone!

Would love to see this changed away from being an assist order, there are many times where I manually use my mex ring template to avoid having a random assisted engineer that I now have to think about. So many times have I selected an idle engineer to do something only to realize later that it was assisted by several other engineers due to this, or accidentally canceled Mex storage orders by selecting a couple of the engineers and accidentally selecting the one that they’re all assisting. Kind of annoying.

@kdrafa91 said in How do you survive Mavor fire right now?:

Also instead of making T3 adjacency bonus making it only T1 helps cause the shields are closer to the arty, you lose DPS but increase the survivability by a lot

If you do anything other than ring a Mavor with t3 pgens you’re using it wrong

@harzernoob iirc this does work with shields other than Cybran, though usually people put t1 pd near the para or whatever they're protecting for better tele def and run into issues with build space on maps like Seton's where the ground isn't always flat enough for shields but is flat enough for hives or whatever. So there's a chance you can't reach the right shield density for this. Then if you combine Mavor + a sat you really need the assistance to beat that.

Could be wrong on that though

@scout_more_often Were you stalling? There are two, well perhaps three ways. A non Cybran t3 shield with 30+ hives. I don't know the exact number, but there is a number of hives that will permanently keep up the shield vs a single mavor. It's in the 30-40 range I think, but you cannot stall mass at all.

The other way is highly apm intensive, but with shield micro. You have to constantly upgrade or rebuild shields, and do so with a lot of build power. Basically you want to have enough build power that in the time it takes for 2 shots to hit you can build a shield from scratch with enough time the new shield comes online before every other shot hits if that makes sense. Being able to do it between each shot is even better. This is what you have to do if you only have cybran t3, a mix of constantly upgrading them and rebuilding them.

The third and kinda troll way is to do the above as well as patrol continentals above the Mavor's target.

Also, you didn't ask this, but never make a Salvation before making a Paragon.

Edit: I have kept shields up over a paragon vs a mavor and a scathis at the same time by having some ridiculous number of hives, ~60 or so, assisting a sera t3 shield. It can be done, but you need an insane eco/paragon and a ton of hives.

Edit edit: Really you want a combo of the two strategies if you can afford it, that's the best way. Heavily assist shields that are still alive while building new ones and upgrading constantly.

@cheeseberry I got my invite from an email

@jip Here's one that just happened #15382566 game_15382566.log

@Jip There are XACT3DApply errors in both the provided logs. Could this just be an audio issue?

Yeah removing fuel usage is a straight buff to air units which seems like an odd thing to want given I feel like a lot of people think air is already op or broken or whatever.

I also agree with Arch on this. It's a cool idea that some people like, but a others find it annoying and it does add even more clutter to the already large list of sometimes unclear options in the game settings, especially for new players. It's a nice feature that I don't have an issue with it's just a bit out of the blue. This feels like a UI mod rather than a core game feature imo, and if we're adding this why not add advanced target priorities to core FAF? I don't want to open a can of worms here, but in terms of feature creep why does this make it in but not something like the target priorities mod which, again imo, is a pretty important mod that has significant in game benefits for players of all levels?

@fruitien00b said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

Also, a single t2 shield hard counters a strat rush.
You can hover under the shield with strat lol

Yes and I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen that actually be pulled off after a ridiculous number of games played/watched, and if there's any aa present this kills the strat.

@fruitien00b said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

@exselsior said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

Creating an air based counter to asf means sams reign supreme in the late game. Asf blobs are useful as meat shields for strats and t4 air units, now that just makes it so that those units are virtually useless if enemy has sams and are taking away options to end the game. Not to mention a unit that kills asf blobs would also wreck a group of strats coming in.

You do realise that if your opponent is fully coverd in sams than it means he spend a lot on it and the game just progress into even later stage at the game. Its like asking for still having an option to kill acu with mantis on t2 or t3 stage.

Not really. It doesn't take that many sams (if well placed) to effectively deny strat attacks with a single strat on most team game maps, and building a lot of sams before starting game enders on high eco team game maps is fairly standard practice anyway in the late game. Perhaps ladder is different, but in ladder there are other issues if you're losing to a strat that don't have much to do with t3 air being badly designed. I see t3 gunships end high level ladder games that make it to t3 air more than strats anyway I think.