Tournament Director: F-Odin

Date: 31/10/20
Time: 15:00 GMT
Channel: #4v4MapGen

Rating Limit: 6400
CPU limit: 300

Challonge: https://challonge.com/tjc4t0ye

This is the return of competitive MapGen play. Each team will consist of 4 players whose combined rating must be below 6400 Global.

This is a double elimination tourney with the top (winners) bracket hosting 20x20 generated maps and the bottom (losers) hosting 10x10 generated maps with the default settings:

Number of spawns: 8
Water: Enabled
Mountains: Enabled
Plateaus: Enabled
Ramps: Enabled

Leaving the map name empty and changing the size dependent on bracket.

Fullshare is off

Each team will be able to veto 1 randomly generated map per round, to do so inform the TD who will instruct for a new map to be generated, though inform through a team "captain" to prevent confusion.

Other than that usual tournament rules apply i.e. drawn matches are replayed, disconnects before 5 mins are replayed once, after 5 mins are played on etc. and TD gets final say on these.

Prize pool includes:

1st Place: Unique MapGen Avatar 2nd Place: Faction Face Avatar
3rd Place: Faction Logo Avatar

Sign up with full team and each players global rating.

Players Looking for a team:

HintHunter
Skorius
Mvk
ReclaimNoob
Archsimkat

Signups close 30 mins before the start (14:30 GMT)

@Tagada playing verses AI is nearly the worst thing you can do if you want to improve your game vs other players. For people who do want to play against AI, and there are many, you can host a game on any map vs a number of AI difficulties. I can't see the benefit of developing a matchmaker only to save some people from learning how to host a custom game.

As for 1b) I agree, for the tutorials tab to be so empty when there is content to fill it is harsh on those who are totally new. If you saw a tab dedicated to learning, would you be annoyed if you saw it starts with four map specific build orders and with the remainder of content being a link to heavens tutorials.

Even then if these maps are in and out the pool, these tutorials are useless as people who use them will have to wait a month at least until they are back in the pool.

Would it be hard to port the blank slate tutorial from FA over? (For those who don't know what I'm talking about, I mean the one below.)

It's not your golden coated tutorial with Gyle voice acting, but it was designed with the intention to give players with 0 experience, somewhere to start, which beats them trying to learn the game through skirmish.

Wonder if they have experienced true lobbysim

Total map reclaim count in lobby or map details

Bit late for an April fools joke

AI has never been something a lot of trainers recommend playing against when trying to improve. It does help playing AI when brand new to the game and trying to learn basics, eco, units & buildings, commands etc. but it can be quite detrimental to use to improve. The AI's inherently make stupid moves: terrible unit composition, no real micro and easily exploitable. To counter this, AI have little cheats which they use to be more difficult to play against. These can lead to people developing bad habits, which don't transfer well when playing vs other players. If the idea is to play with ai to then transfer over to traditional ladder, then new players will still see themselves being beaten, and may be more down hearted, as they've now invested X amount of hours into playing AI, whereas the same amount of hours vs human players would teach them a lot more applicable skills.

The academy idea could be worked on, however the biggest shortcoming is the amount of time trainers and volunteers are willing to invest. All trainers dislike holding players hands through the game as they end up investing multiple hours into games when the same replays can be analysed in a quarter of the time. Trainers aren't there to teach core fundamentals of the game, they are there to help people improve once they have that understanding and are willing to improve.

I like the idea's but finding people who are willing to sacrifice multiple hours a week to observe is probably going to be too hard and learning vs AI's results in bad habits and people finding a comfort zone playing said AI's

Congrats to:
Zlo Resistance Neytron and Jaden for 1st Place
Narnerdpower Gingerbreadman Blackrock and Kavat for 2nd place
Amygdala Ise ReclaimNoob and NotHIB for 3rd Place

@khabume, I cannot see the majority of people leaving because of Gap, just a select few who have enough experience of the game to know otherwise. For it to be as high as 40% seems way too high as this would account for numbers in the hundreds leaving per month which would be very obvious in the multiplayer community. If that claim is right then about 600 players are leaving FAF a month due to this reason alone. If you want you can see the stats in the forum posts linked. Babysitting new players also isn't an option, if people want help, they are old enough to ask for it.

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/287/is-faf-growing
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/705/faf-statistics-megathread

My original point was that I think the majority of players who leave FAF are those who go completely under the radar I'm talking people about who get the game, play it for a week and then leave. Their reasons for playing are mainly based around being able to play an old game again, with the possibility of cool mods, coop campaign and possibly the attraction of multiplayer. Now those first two reasons, the mods and campaign require little community interaction and you'd expect these people to disappear in a matter of months, let alone 2 years. Now rather than looking at reasons why people might leave isn't the view we should be taking, you could be playing 100's of other games, why stick to FAF. Community will be an integral part for those who do play for over 2 years. Its nice to read comments saying that people can get on with the community.

Maybe what's required to increase retention is to involve newer players; have regular events each week such as group teaching sessions (different to babysitting players as the emphasis is finding people with similar skills to encourage early friendships/rivalries). Noob friendly nights where someone hosts different maps throughout the night specifically for new players (as @Amygdala suggested earlier)are also a good idea, again with emphasis on creating common friendships and rivalries. I feel this would be far more effective than any rebalances/babysitting as people will learn if they have an incentive to learn, they won't learn if they are being spoon fed missions vs ai. The idea is to routinely allow newer players a couple of nights a week where they can interact with one another and build this community. I'm happy to even regularly host one of these idea's a week. If @nine2 is onboard, you can feel free to PM and I'll work with you on implementing some of these newbie events.

Saying that, no one has mentioned the elephant in the room here, 90% or so of new people are leaving FAF is because some major worldwide pandemic might have resulted in a large influx of players who simply don't have the time to invest into the game under normal circumstances, and so these people are more than likely to have joined, played for a bit during lockdowns, and then left. Even many of the older players who had left came back to try again and have since left again. FAF is still growing, people will come and people will go. You cannot force players to stay, and many won't see FAF or Supcom as a long term game. As long as the influx of players is greater than those leaving then is there an issue? I can't see there being one. This will hopefully be the last long post from me in a while.

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FtXCommando said in Why would you have left FAF?:

I removed it because I dominate the discussion and kill any input from new players. So instead I will act like a proper Councillor and not respond to anything to encourage greater discussion.

@Morax, think he removed them bud

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Remember when Sladow snagged tagada in the 2v2 tourney which utilised this very system, then went on to roll every other team in it. Or is this too soon?

"Alongside the money prizes for the upper bracket. Contact me to claim avatar rewards" ^^

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Can i sign up?

@arma473 @Jip , yeah the suggestion was based off of mapgen maps having no real hints at how much reclaim is on the map. Didn't even taken into account adaptive maps, and how unit reclaim is generated.

My initial thought was just port ozone values. Taking a look, I didn't realise how far off some of these values are. Maybe it'll be simpler just to have part of the vault description dedicated to reclaim values and allow map makers to manually input initial figures, giving a ballpark figure for mass.

Total map reclaim count in lobby or map details

AI has never been something a lot of trainers recommend playing against when trying to improve. It does help playing AI when brand new to the game and trying to learn basics, eco, units & buildings, commands etc. but it can be quite detrimental to use to improve. The AI's inherently make stupid moves: terrible unit composition, no real micro and easily exploitable. To counter this, AI have little cheats which they use to be more difficult to play against. These can lead to people developing bad habits, which don't transfer well when playing vs other players. If the idea is to play with ai to then transfer over to traditional ladder, then new players will still see themselves being beaten, and may be more down hearted, as they've now invested X amount of hours into playing AI, whereas the same amount of hours vs human players would teach them a lot more applicable skills.

The academy idea could be worked on, however the biggest shortcoming is the amount of time trainers and volunteers are willing to invest. All trainers dislike holding players hands through the game as they end up investing multiple hours into games when the same replays can be analysed in a quarter of the time. Trainers aren't there to teach core fundamentals of the game, they are there to help people improve once they have that understanding and are willing to improve.

I like the idea's but finding people who are willing to sacrifice multiple hours a week to observe is probably going to be too hard and learning vs AI's results in bad habits and people finding a comfort zone playing said AI's

Wonder if they have experienced true lobbysim