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.

Bit late for an April fools joke

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.

Sign me up

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

@biass said in Why would you have left FAF?:

"The industry standard retention rates for F2P games are 40%, 20%, and 10% for the aforementioned time periods."

https://gamingshift.com/game-retention/#:~:text=Game retention is typically measured,for the aforementioned time periods.

If those retention rates are at 40%, 20% and 10% for 1 day, 1 week and 1 month respectively, then having 10% retention after 2 years would suggest that retention is already above average.

Bit late for an April fools joke

-Sign up-

@Swkoll seems to have forgot how close @WoundedElkNoob is to him in ladder

@boom For players that are totally new, automatching vs AI won't help as much as a tutorial which teaches from scratch. While, yes playing vs Ai is a proportion of games, which I've stated before, many of these involve an individual or a group of mates playing vs Ai because: A) they're either all not confident enough to play vs other players or B) they prefer playing a relaxed game

Now if they aren't confident in playing PvP then in my mind, it's better to focus on prompting PvP through Ladder, Tmm, training, etc. otherwise some players never make the bridge over to PvP. If they want to play a more chilled out game then they probably would pick a setup where they can decide the map, difficulty, mods etc. over being auto matched against an Ai.

My last point would be how many people would actually use it? I write this at 12:30 GMT on a Saturday and there are no unmodded custom games vs Ai hosted. A realistic rate for this maybe what, 3 games an hour?

The intentions are good, but I can't be blindly optimistic about this idea and it's because of these reasons that I don't think it's worth the time to create a new automatching system, especially when there are other large projects in the works.

@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.

@biass said in Why would you have left FAF?:

"The industry standard retention rates for F2P games are 40%, 20%, and 10% for the aforementioned time periods."

https://gamingshift.com/game-retention/#:~:text=Game retention is typically measured,for the aforementioned time periods.

If those retention rates are at 40%, 20% and 10% for 1 day, 1 week and 1 month respectively, then having 10% retention after 2 years would suggest that retention is already above average.

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

That tiny discord button seems to run into an unhandled exception

People get paid to teach? Could have made a small fortune, but instead I only got a bunch of "Thank you" 's on discord. B(

There is a tutorial mission in FA for complete beginners, but by the look of it, it hasn't been brought over into FAF, or if it has, it's not easy to find