First of all, let me just give praise to how witty the title was. I feel that deserves recognition!
For all the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN1WwnEDWAM
If you give it a listen, you'll notice that the lyrics kinda describe what the DevOps had been up to since the DDoS issues started back in 2023

Anyways, as the song says, if you Go, there will be trouble, but if you stay, it will be double.

If you are indeed interested in learning Go, I think that would be amazing. I'm also going to presume that you yourself see this as an opportunity for yourself to use FAF as a practice target in your path to learn Go for your own personal fulfillment. And I myself support this 100% - that is to say, you should Go with that. Of course, if I'm mistaken in my analysis on motivations, do correct me, but I'm positive there's some good motivation behind it, otherwise you wouldn't bother with your detailed analysis of the problem, and this amazingly succinct brief!

As always, thank you personally but also all the other DevOps boys for all the work you do. Some might see your work as bringing FAF down to its knees, but what you are really doing is keeping us up on our knees in front of the chopping block.

An to end this on a musical note, this one's title should both serve as my viewpoint on both what you should do, and what my qualifications are on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwpCb0qW-6Y

We are aware many players and game lobbies are experiencing problems with connection issues. As of this moment, we are not aware what the cause is, and will be investigating it as soon as possible. Please be patient!

UPDATE 19/02 21:38 UCT: Work continues today, one downtime is scheduled for right now, and another one is likely within the next 24 hours. If you are experiencing issues, please keep reporting them with details, so the DevOps team has an easier time figuring out what is not working.

Thank you for your patience!

Latest update:
The issue had been resolved. You no longer need (nor should) use the steps described in the announcement. Thank you for your patience!

Update:
The issue stems from the cache size limitations on our Cloudflare service, which is at 512 MB. The latest game patch files are contained in the aforementioned env.nx2 file, which exceeds this limit with its size of 654MB. This means downloads are going directly off of our servers, which is not purposed for distribution of large volumes in a short period of time.

While the fix above does work, as more people start taking the steps, it will also slow down (due to essentially the same issue). So keep that in mind, we thank you for your patience.

Dear members, with the release of new patch 3818 we face an unexpected issue with downloading new game files (in particular the env.nx2 file). Below are the steps on how to circumvent this issue, though we hope a proper fix will be done soon. The relevant people are already looking into it. Thank you for your patience!

Latest update:

The issue had been resolved. You no longer need (nor should) use the steps described in the announcement. Thank you for your patience!

Steps to circumnavigate the issue.

1. Host a game in FAF Develop mode (see image).
2. Wait for the files to finish downloading (It may take a while, just be patient).
3. Open the data folder (use the FAF client menu link top left), or go into the gamedata folder directly
4. C:\ProgramData\FAForever\gamedata
5. Find env.nx2 and delete it
6. Find env.nx5 and rename it to env.nx2
7. Hosting/Playing FAF (default) game mode should work.

Note this fix works for the matchmaker, custom games and co-op games.

Have to agree with the most common argument here - military rank is not common knowledge at all. Not even for the populace of the countries that use them.
At best, you can argue people kinda understand the concept of captain (someone who has a larger number of men under his arm), admiral (controls big naval army) and general (controls big land army). And that's also mostly skewed from popular media (because that's how most get their knowledge).

So yeah, neither common (in its naming scheme), nor common knowledge.

The "material" badges are common place in a lot of games to represent competitive rank. I'm sure 95% of the children populace would sooner understand if you told them you were "diamond" rank rather than "corporal" or whatever.

Also, as already mentioned, there's not only 3 tiers (bronze, silver, gold) to the FAF's ranking system, there's 6 (bronze, silver, gold, diamond, master, grandmaster).

Most games have ties to the Elo system, which, although not used by FAF, is the most prominent and actually well known system to rank competitive mastery. And it has its roots in chess, from which the "master" and "grandmaster" titles are derived from.

@ftxcommando I forgot to add, which is quite important: that is a valid reason. But, at least the Draw mechanic should have a timeout so it's unrated for a sufficiently short games.

@pviddy That's because of the most recent client update that now doesn't show rating changes in matchmaker games at all. The change still happens, you just don't get informed on it

Ok, that's a good reason. But couldn't a system that punishes such behavior be put in place? Like keep track for each player what maps they get and if they DC. If someone DCs >10 times from a particular map (and always on that map), but almost never from others, the likelihood of that not being on purpose is really low. Increase the "10" number to reduce chances of false positives.

Or, could there be a detection system that sees who DCed, that person gets penalized, and the rest of the players don't. I understand it would be hard to pull maybe in 1v1 if a player comes up with some kind of DoS attack on the opponent, but in 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4... idk, 60 seconds feels like a safe bet game-wise (as in nothing really major can happen in the first 60 seconds).

Edit:
Like, I'm thinking how other games get around this issue. I'd assume a time-penalty system would work as well, but I feel such a system would probably punish willing players that just had an unlucky DC too much.

@blackyps I see. That's dumb. It should at least consider game length, and anything say sub N minutes should be unrated, where N is number of players / team (so 1 min for 1v1), regardless of how the game came to an end (recall, draw, or people simply leaving). Or you can say N/2 minutes.

Unless it's some kind of a system limit, which I highly doubt, I'd really like to hear a good reason why a game that lasted 30 seconds should be considered for rating (again, you pretty much have time to build a single factory and nothing else). Even more so for team games where maps tend to be larger.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but any game sub 5 minutes is unrated. This should be the case for draws as well!

To make it extra clear, the game in question was ended after 34 seconds because of a DC, and it was done with a Draw call. In no situation ever in any respectable system should this result in rating change.

@morgul44 You need to enable it in options: Options > Gameplay > Control groups > Add to factory control group: On

Hmmm, in that case, worth a watch (by someone, not me, I'm off to bed, gl with that one).

Kinda lazy to watch the replay, but are you using any mods? I noticed this behavior in games that have ACU's walking speed increased.

@blackyps You can have an ex member retire from contributing, but still keep playing the game tho.

But yeah, there is a ambiguity to my idea, which wasn't helped by Rowey unretiring himself a month or 2 after "retiring". We should define it better, for sure. Maybe the definition could be "avatar is granted to previous FAF Team leads", or in addition, have a "time" variable also required, say "for at least 1 (or more) years".

I don't dislike the idea of "some other way" either.

My view (omg a personal experience!) on avatars had always been that they are a type of 'badge of honor' rewarded to the few for exceptional success (note this can be interpreted in many ways).

Thus, the idea of "personal avatars" doesn't really sit well with me. I wouldn't, however, be against a 'Profile image' idea.
So you could have a profile image you can upload and have visible when someone opens your profile sheet in the client, and it would function like any other profile picture in any service ever. Ofc, this would require client and backend work, which we obviously are lacking people for as it already is, so I'd sooner place it on the back burner of "things we'd like to have but aren't high priority".

That being said, I'd still keep avatars as a way of marking those with special contributions and achievements. And not as a way of personalizing one's profile on an "everyone" basis.

@deribus
Not sure how important it is in particular RN, but I'd list "Veteran FAFer" under "Contributor" - it's original purpose was to honor direct FAF contributors (members of any team) that stopped participating in FAF (the project, not game) in their further life pursuits.

This is kinda like the smallest window size, so that's what you get sometimes, maybe minimum size could be defined somewhere so this doesn't happen any more @Sheikah

@sheikah Would not that mean they should only be permitted to assign avatars specific to the tournament - doesn't make sense their 'pallet' is all the avatars ever.
@NOC not trying to fry you here, just asking. ^^

Whatever the case, I don't mind working on special avatars for these odd cases, but they will for sure not be personal - they'd have to be based on the actual tournament avatars imo, or as I proposed earlier, we can make an avatar for everyone who ends up in this situation.