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In order to provide some structure to balance threads and make things easier on the OP, the participants, and moderators themselves, I've decided to create a benchmark for threads. This benchmark should be followed in order for a thread to not be removed due to a lack of material to warrant any sort of meaningful discussion. Why is this necessary? Because currently a lot of the balance forum is reading more like a general tips & gameplay subforum where basic stats or unit relations need to be explained to people. This is meant to flush out a lot of the low effort posting around here. People that repeatedly break the rules here may face a general forum ban.
Some Sort of Ethos No you do not need to be 2k in ladder and global with 1000 games while somehow managing to play every map on the vault. However, it is beneficial to explain things like what kind of games you prefer to play, the maps you tend to play, even just something about what direction you want FAF to move towards gameplay wise. This is mainly intended as a way for you to be able to identify your own bias as a poster and allow posters from other areas of experience to input their own viewpoint. For example, I'm pretty much entirely a teamgame player and first and foremost most of my ideas/criticisms are going to revolve around how they impact 2v2-4v4 games.
Identify a Problem This should be either a problem in base FAF or FAF Beta (please identify which and please do not include sim mod issues here). For example, explain how t2 torps are somewhat overtuned in naval combat and a slight nerf would enable healthier gameplay.
Showcase the Problem The opening post of all balance threads must contain a replay of one of the following: A) Ranked game showing issue B) Gameplay of mod with proposed fix C) Sandbox testing showing issue Any posts not meeting this restriction will be immediately locked.
Find a Solution Look into the unit. Look at the values it has. Find some sort of statistic change that could accomplish addressing your problem with as minimal indirect harm to other elements of FAF. Yes, minimal. There are very few things that can be done that would not involve harming some sort of game situation.
Justify the Solution Do not just say "do x." Explain why you would need to adjust this stat. Why this stat or stats specifically? What is the intended result of the solution? Are there any possible indirect problems?
This should give not only threads a reason to be read by members of the balance team, but it should also improve the general discourse between people on the subforum. If there is a flaw in someone's argument segment, it will be much easier to pinpoint it and address it constructively rather than the flailing around going around now.
To repeat, threads that do not meet the structure of this post (from this point on) are liable to be removed.
Here are the current responsibilities that I’m managing as Player Councillor and what candidates should expect to either have a plan to directly control or individuals which they expect to delegate the responsibilities to.
FAFLive Management:
Tournaments:
LotS:
Training:
Matchmaker:
TrueSkill:
Players:
Developers:
Councillors:
I probably spend a sum of 16-24 hours a week on FAF administration duties on average. This is with the sunk investment of having already established all the necessary personal connections I need to maintain all of my responsibilities and understanding the various idiosyncrasies of both individuals that I need to work with as well as FAF itself.
As Player Councillor you are essentially the circulatory system of FAF, with the developers as the heart and the body itself as the rest of FAF. Personally I would strongly recommend those interested in taking the position to work with me in Player Councillor duties in order to get exposed to the necessary FAF systems and individuals which will allow them to smoothly transition into taking the role as it might be the most complex role outside of Developer Operations Councillor with many implicit responsibilities in order to keep the project moving forward. You are the person that keeps the gears turning in this volunteer project and are often the one that needs to step in to smooth over issues between various subgroups on FAF or explain why one path is the better path forward. The thing is it's easy to say that in a sentence, but these sort of "faf drama crises" can end up eating up several of your days to resolve. Unlike a boss, people don't actually need to listen to you unless they want to listen to you and for people to want to listen to you on FAF, they need to trust what you're saying actually comes from a well reasoned place that takes a variety of factors into account. Not just you deciding you like person X more or are only interested in decision Y because you are a player that would like that.
With regards to my platform as Player Councillor, I’d like to think that I’m a known entity at this point. Essentially, you get what you have. I can guarantee the operation of the responsibilities I’ve mentioned above as I based it upon what I’m currently doing.
If you’d like me to give larger explanations on specific points, feel free to ask a question in this thread about it. Otherwise, I will wait for opposing platforms in order to understand what decisions in the past, current, or future I need to justify to the FAF playerbase.
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1571/an-election-will-soon-take-place-for-the-player-councilor-role-apply-here/2
I have proven myself consistent in maintaining my duties and responsibilities across 3 years and have over the time proactively taken additional responsibilities in order to keep the FAF Project operating at the highest level we can attain with the resources available to us. I will continue to do precisely the same for my next mandate.
Divisions Over the last few years I have worked with BlackYps to create a working structure to replace TrueSkill as a metric of players to identify one another. This is intended to give people a larger motivation to keep playing games as it gives people small scale goals that incentivize playing while also eliminating the inevitability of treating TrueSkill as a highscore rather than a gauge of player ability.
Essentially, you will need a certain amount of points to rank up or down from your division. Once you reach some arbitrary count, say 10 points, with a win being 1 point and a loss being -1 points, then you would rank up. In addition, certain division levels will be attached to certain TrueSkill levels and if you are considered "underrated" for your division (for example you are 1200 but your division is intended for 1000 TrueSkill players) then you would have your point gain inflated. This way, even if you maintain a 50/50 win rate you will reach your intended division for your TrueSkill level.
This in turn allows us to operate with "rating resets" or rather division resets across seasons as we can have people get a soft reset down 3 divisions and then work back up. There's more to the system itself and how it will work with other parts of FAF, but that's the general ideas.
FAF Promotions I'm planning on hedging the FAFLive channel as a way to garner interest in external promoters for some of the bigger end of the year events. With about 100 reliable viewers at any general point in time and (hopefully) aiming for 250-300 during this year's LotS, we should be entering the realm where sponsors may be interested in helping support community events. Ideally this results in both more tournaments and more exposure for FAF through coordinated media campaigns and connections to real world firms.
Matchmaker Since there has been a lot of interest in revisiting the concept of polling for map ratings, I'll bring back the idea and see the level of participation for the next few months. In order to minimize work on my end, I'll have it primarily focus on new maps and have players be able to vote on which new maps they would be interested in seeing in ladder.
I also plan on working with BlackYps to create a better matchmaking algorithm that has an additional variable to account for range in TrueSkill between teammates. Mainly, it will give a bias to creating teams that are closer to mu when possible.
I also want to fish around and find someone to help create a no-repeat function for matchmakers. Askaholic and I have been talking about a way to make it work as it scales up for larger team sizes without requiring massive ui changes, but we haven't ironed much out.
Tournaments I will be trying to fish for additional individuals to help out in utilizing tournaments as a way to promote the 2v2 matchmaker. Mainly, hosting events that are based around the matchmaker such as doing an invite for the top 8 or 12 players and having them choose teammates through a Captain system.
And to reiterate, I will be working on these new projects on top of the work I do in the link above. Nothing is getting dropped.
I commit to:
I do not take the Councillor Pledge because it is folly and the current writing of it calls for several current Councillors to resign or be replaced. Read: "I understand that if I am unable to perform these duties, I will resign or be replaced" & "I will spend at least 4 hours per week working on These Responsibilities" in combination with "avoid bringing FAF into disrepute"
I will instead pledge:
And that last pledge point will be my first action as Player Councillor.
So as time has gone on, I've noticed that there is a lot of general inefficiency with how FAF manages itself through Discord (yes there is no need to mention other areas). This is basically the only community I've been part of where you need to be given a yellow phone book of Discords with each having an answer to 1 or 2 of the questions you might be looking for.
Beyond that, I also feel like the FAF central Discord itself has done a pretty bad job at engaging users with the segment of FAF they wish to engage with. It's a 13k user Discord with hardly any way to ping more than like 20 people on it. Why would I want to use this Discord to organize a 1v1 game or set up some game in coop or find people my rating to shoot the shit with? It's not even remotely possible unless you want to go and pm every dude online.
Finally, I feel like FAF in general could benefit from keeping its various subcommunities under a single umbrella in order to maintain proper project communication. What I mean is that everyone can read a single announcements channel that pings them depending on their interest in pan-wide FAF events. Likewise, while subcommunities are certainly critical in providing user engagement as they connect with people that share similar traits to them, it should also be possible to allow fluid movement between said subcommunities. This goes back to the 2nd paragraph where I feel the best way to have Russians play with Australians or any other sort is to having rating divided channels where people can engage with people that share similar FAF game interests as them.
I've contacted and worked with every major FAF Discord (that I know of at least) in order to see whether there is much interest in this idea. To my surprise, it actually seemed like nearly everyone could agree with the vision and was willing to at least put in the effort to work with me. I've contacted:
Of these, the administration of each Discord didn't have a problem with the idea aside from Promo Discord. The Nomads Discord, however, decided to keep things on a "wait and see" mode to see how it practically works for other mod developers on FAF.
The only Discords I have not contacted were clan discords as I viewed them as more of a private operation than something that should be associated with FAF administration.
It should also be noted that I've only been talking to the people that manage these Discords generally. It's hard to speak with the 3000 users in the Russian Discord when I don't speak Russian, but the moderators there are all bilingual and I figured if I could get them on board, it should be possible to at least make the general population curious about the new plan.
So basically I've added like 70 new text channels to the Discord alongside about 50 new roles. Sounds like a total shitfest right? Well it's organized chaos so don't worry.
Everything here stems from a tree of opt-in reaction roles for the general user, let me give a picture to give a representation: *It should be noted that I will have both Russian and English translations for these react role explanations.
Essentially, you will be able to pick roles to identify yourself by various characteristics that will then open you up to relevant FAF Discord categories for the type of FAF player you are.
I am sorting players by:
So while the Discord has like 80 channels in total now, you as an English speaking American that just wants to play dual gap might be able to access around 10 or 12 total.
The first two opt-in categories would be self-explanatory. The regional identity doesn't actually do anything aside from Oceania which opens up to an ANZ category as they are their own little world far away from the rest of the English speaking majority in US/EU. So to respect that, their region has special consideration.
Currently Languages are only really impactful for Russian users. Russian users will get access to a more condensed version of their current Discord (alongside some channels that are default to let them contact FAF administration for things like moderation issues or map/mod vault issues). The English language will open up the current FAF Discord topics channel. I did not do anything with French, German, and Spanish/Portuguese as I first need to see how many users that speak these languages are present to gauge whether it's worth giving accommodations.
PvP, PvE, and modded games are the most unique change for me personally and the one I'm most interested in seeing whether it succeeds. Essentially we had a couple problems:
If we give roles to everybody to identity them as 1v1 players etc, how do you stop the 400 rated player from pinging Blackheart for a 1v1?
How can you make it clear on a userlist that has 4000 or 5000 online at any point in time that people share your game interests?
Since Discord does not support anything that allows you to ping subsets of a role category like idk, @U300>@2v2, the solution here was to create a specific rating channel based on the current established league ratings. So <300, 300-800, 800-1300, 1300-1800, and 1800+. Then, in each of these channels, people can ping a variety of roles in order to try to set up games. This means a new player can ping everyone for a small teamgame at his general rating level quickly and efficiently, which hopefully leads to faster game setup and more interaction at lower levels of the community.
The same setup exists for PvE and modded games as well. However, if you have interest in playing a particular mod that is actively maintained, you'll also gain access to that mod's channels where you can get answers to various FAQs, announcements on updates, and a chance to give feedback to the active developer. This hopefully encourages developers to work on their mods as it directly connects them to those that have an interest in playing their work.
The mapper/modder preference will give you insights to help you contribute to FAF through these projects as well as a way to get into contact with veterans in these areas and the matchmaker team for getting maps into the matchmaker pools.
Finally the promotion notification is to stop the absurdly bad practice of pinging everyone in a 14,000 player Discord about stuff like tournament streams. You can get pinged for when a tournament is up and looking for signups, when a tournament event is being livecasted, when FAF player feedback is needed, when things like FA sales or other FAF promotionals happen, and when new FAF Development updates happen.
There were also around 2 dozen new assigned roles attached to the Discord. These fell into two real categories:
This should stop with some weird vague roles that we have on the FAF Discord like "developer" which covers tech support, mod developers, client developers, server developers, and a few other areas. Now the role should strictly apply to people attached to FAF development that happens on Zulip.
This in turn would also make it much easier to contact the relevant dev or person to your interests. Or at least it would make it easy to find them when you get pointed to them.
In addition, a lot of these assigned roles carry what are essentially moderator rights over their relevant segment. This should allow the various idiosyncrasies that are needed depending on group preferences to be managed by the people that are intended to be actively interacting with that area.
Overall I hope this makes everything way easier for both FAF administration (besides the mods that have like 80 channels on their feed now) as well as FAF users. Every issue that used to require links to a variety of random Discords should now simply require a single Discord and a sentence to explain what roles someone should pick. Hopefully it leads to more parts of FAF being aware of the existence of other parts, in particular the development parts of FAF whether that's the work mod developers do or the development team of FAF services.
I expect the changes to be made public within a week or so.
Hello everyone,
Due to a variety of administrative and logistic concerns, the Council has determined that FAF's future would be best secured via the creation of a nonprofit voluntary association. This association is intended to bring additional transparency to aspects of FAF such as FAF's financial accounting alongside the division of funds amongst several projects.
This association will also assist in legal concerns regarding FAF ownership. While there is no real need to go into the issues here, just be aware that the actual ownership of FAF itself is a needlessly complicated affair that really needs to have fat trimmed. This association is a way to trim some of the issues FAF currently has administratively while also allowing us a stronger foundation to build FAF's future on by ensuring ownership is held by active volunteers in communication with the day-to-day Council administration.
If participating in this association is any interest of you please come to our preliminary meeting on March 20th at 8pm UTC. It will happen in a private Discord voice channel on the FAF Discord (https://discord.com/invite/hgvj6Af). If you have any interest in participating, message me or a FAF moderator for the role and you'll be able to join on the day of the meeting.
Coming to the meeting does not mean anything on your end, you can come out of pure curiosity or because the idea deeply interests you.
The Statutes of the FAF Association: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hvEtv6hCD3-ZUhTHDzyYpNAcHc8PYY3BMT_-UDyc0uM/edit?usp=sharing
Some FAQ (I Imagine):
Originally we planned on the UK, but had to move to Denmark because we wanted to keep the association in the EU. Beyond that, there is no real significant difference between any of the EU nations that we looked at. Denmark allows English to be the standard of communication at said association meetings, which works well for international organizations such as FAF.
No. Being a Board member gives you no additional privileges regarding moderation, deciding FAF operations, making balance changes, or anything of the sort. The central role of the Board and the association in turn is meant to provide a system of accountability for the financial aspects of FAF. It's essentially another form of administration for FAF separate from the Council, with both needing to work together to accomplish tangible goals.
No, that is part of the point of the preliminary meeting. We want to make any necessary adjustments to the statutes at the meeting, so feel free to come if you have any concerns regarding them.
No, the fact you don't is why this whole idea is viable. The meetings are able to be held online, we simply have to meet certain obligations regarding announcing the meetings ahead of time and so on.
Yes.
Note: A "player" is defined as a person that plays at least a single game during said month using the client's services. Every data point is a month during that year.
They aren't "OP" in the sense of being a dominant strategy but they promote inherently toxic gameplay. The only thing that should combine mass + e + flexible BP is the ACU itself. When other units do it, you open up the ability to do things like protecting infinite eco in a single, condensed area. Lategame eco should be about factoring in the risk/reward of additional eco adjacency efficiency and additional risk of exploding mass fabs. Not make boys and forget.
They should just be nerfed into irrelevancy or even removed just for the sake of promoting a healthier game.
Lately I've been approached by several mappers that were curious about the process utilized to review maps for the ladder. Since this process is going to be extended to team matchmaker maps as that feature gets closer and closer to reality, I figured I might as well as give people an insight into how maps are reviewed so they can both figure out how to get their maps on the matchmaker while also improving their own craft.
I'd also like to say that the process itself isn't some solidly ironed out way of approaching maps. Through the years we have adjusted how we calculate final scores, how we interpret various values in our criteria, and the weight we put on the various factors that we look at when reviewing maps. But overall, I think we've hit a nice groove and we're quite comfortable with what our system allows and what it doesn't allow into the map pools we make.
I will be breaking this post down into the 3 categories we use to look at maps: Aesthetics, Gameplay, and Variance.
A lot of people operate under the assumption that the look of a map is irrelevant. All that should matter is if it plays well, and if it looks like a piece of shit then who cares? Well, they're kind of right and kind of wrong in that dissection.
First, aesthetics is not simply the "look" of a map. While the artistic merit of your map is what determines say a 3.5/5 or a 4.5/5 map, it is not what causes a map to be a 1/5. Your map must meet the baseline criteria of having terrain that is both clear and concise. If a map lies to the player, by, for example, having things that look like plateaus that cannot actually be dropped, then it is a bad map aesthetically. These are the things that stay in the mind of a player and quickly make them dislike the map as it can easily cause a game loss through no real fault of the player. If your map cannot meet this bar, then your map could expect to be a 1.5 or a 2 out of 5 even if it makes me cry at the beauty of your decal work.
Beyond that area, we begin to enter the more subjective area we tend to define through the competency of your design and the effort put into it. How do we define both? Well, we have several people on the mapping team (biass, petric, farm, morax) who have made several solid maps aesthetically and have the eye to review whether the decal and strata work put into a map reflects serious effort. Generally when it comes to reviewing this side of aesthetics, we leave reviewing maps up to our circle of highly competent mappers.
So why did I say that the critique that map aesthetics don't matter is kind of right? Well, because we actually do agree with that. We weigh aesthetics to account for 25% of a map's overall score. This is below the expected proportion of 33% if we weighed it equal to gameplay and variance. Your map could look entirely generic and still be a 2/5 so long as it doesn't lie or frustrate the player. This shouldn't harm your overall score (and therefore entry into the ladder) assuming the gameplay and variance are still up to par. I mean, look at badlands. It looks terrible, but it's still a pretty common map in pools because it plays pretty well.
General Guidelines: 0 - Eye gouging; super badly scaled textures/decals, terrain makes no sense, color scheme makes the eyes bleed 1 - Quite ugly; maybe not actually painful on the eyes but extremely bland undetailed and wacky, badly indicated terrain 2 - So-so; a playable configuration even if uninspiring or amateurish. Perhaps not very obvious heightmap in some places. Nothing disgusting tho 3 - Fine; A solid average-looking map, won't win any prize for looks but can't find much fault with it 4 - Good; A very appealing map, maybe because of high detail, pleasant color scheme and lighting, maybe something else 5 - Great; One of the best looking maps in your opinion. Something just makes it stand out and above others
Now we enter the classic social science experience of redefining common terms so your explanation makes sense. Gameplay has a very specific meaning for us and it's critical to understand it before commenting on it. If you have a tough time with it don't worry, it had to be explained like a dozen times to select people on the ladder team itself.
Here is my go-to explanation for gameplay. Imagine I had some sort of hypothetical vault. If I went into said hypothetical map vault which has 2000 high level, competent games of purely your map and then proceeded to use a random number generator to pick one of these 2000 games, how high quality would that singular game be? So essentially, "gameplay" is a rating of the "meta quality" of your map.
Now of course we don't have 2000 high level, competent games on your map. There's maybe two dozen maps on FAF that could even think of approaching such a criteria. And that's precisely why the ladder team itself exists! It's a pool of 2k+ players that have the ability to determine how a map is likely to play out based on little data. Is it perfect? Certainly not, but since we lack the neural network AI that can play a map ten thousand times to show us the peak efficient play on it, it's the best we got.
Ultimately this part of maps is also graded on a curve. For example, we can't just call Theta Passage a garbage map because it results in t1 spam and a com battle in every game while Roanoke's Abyss let's you do frigate rush or air abuse. You very clearly need to judge every map size in its own category, and so while Theta might be a relatively "simple" map, it does what it does very well and so it is still a highly rated 5x5.
So how do we decide between a low, middle, and high gameplay score? Well this is quite subjective, as you might imagine, but we attempt to balance it out by synthesizing a general score out of the opinions of everyone on the team. In general a map is considered to have a high quality meta if it involves gameplay that requires some level of thought and interaction with the opponent. Maps can be all t1 spam and still be fairly decent on gameplay so long as the t1 spam meta still requires you to maneuver around your enemy and wins you strategic control of various contested areas. If the map is just a flat, boring map where you have a mex every 500 pixels in every direction and so spam can go anywhere and be efficient, well that's just boring and tedious to play.
As you might imagine, gameplay is the most important factor for us and we weigh it as 45% of a map's overall score. The gameplay is the foundation that everything else is built upon.
General Guidelines: 0 - Gameplay makes you pull your hair out 1 - Gameplay is uninspiring and boring or highly annoying 2 - You can live with the gameplay but you still rather avoid this map 3 - Average game experience for your taste 4 - You find gameplay to be interesting and stand above the majority of other maps 5 - This might as well be your favorite map, you love the way it plays, you wouldn't mind to host custom 1v1s on it whole day
Finally, the Siamese twin of gameplay. People often have a hard time figuring out where one begins and the other ends, and I sometimes wonder about it myself too.
Ultimately variance is your reaction to gameplay. Basically, it is the measure of how viable and interesting the "rogue" or "off-meta" tactics on your map will be. Maps that have a strictly dominate meta will be able to manage a strong gameplay score while having a terrible variance score (Theta for example). Likewise, some maps are able to have anything and everything as an option but all those options are terrible and not fun to play with because it results in a minute 2 rock, paper, scissors match (Voi Vittu for example).
The best maps are those that have a strong general meta that is consistent and able to lead to long games where a large variety of potential seams could be found. In return, those seams are often the off-meta tactics that allow you to throw your opponent off balance and reward innovation in player gameplay.
We currently give this category a weight of 30%. It used to be higher, but ultimately we weren't fans of the kinds of maps it was putting into pools and so we adjusted the ratio.
General Guidelines: 0 - One viable com path, one viable build, one viable win plan 1 - Very confined gameplay but maybe can squeeze a suprise build or cheese 2 - Some strategy is probably safer and easier than others but can make a different approach work, likely can send com in a few different directions 3 - Generic middle of the line. Has multiple builds, acu paths and strategies to pick from. 4 - A versatile map, various builds, strategies and ideas are all usable. Can win with something completely unexpected. 5 - A map where imagination is the limit. Land focus, air focus, naval focus, 1st land or 1st bomber. Acu or no acu, eco or no eco, anything is viable.
the 3rd Showmatch, $100 Petric vs Blackheart BO7 on randomly generated, unexplored maps should happen this weekend, likely Saturday. I'll be confirming a precise time later today.
People on occasion improving or over-performing for their rating does not equate to smurfing.
Running a !smurfcheck command does not equate to ironclad proof of smurfing.
For every 100 accusations of smurfing, maybe 1 is actually legitimate. Most people just can’t take the ego hit of losing to someone they imagine is worse than them.
There would hardly be enough variance between RMG and premade ladder to warrant yet another TrueSkill.
The two systems I’d say are viable are: 2 queues, one premade one not, both using the same rating.
1 queue, using premade maps for lower rated players to make the transition of learning the game easier and then transitioning to RMG in higher rated pools.
The notion of casual queues was never discarded by me nor anyone else? It was put in the Soon(tm) pile just as all other additional queues.
IMO best returns for this stuff would be doing coop-style scaling missions on traditional FAF maps. Introduce how to do a 2 land fac into air fac start with no hydro. Have the map use a unit cap of like 50 or something (no idea if you could set it to something very precise) so that you can't spam up a ton of units or factories. Instead have players need to build a small force of tanks to kill an ACU walking around mid (that has some aa towers around). This all would be locked on tech 1 and other stuff.
Then you can do similar stuff for a hydro BO. Except this time you get attacked by a first bomber and need to learn how to properly respond to it. Then you go raid the enemy with early LABs.
Then you got a map where you go first bomber and get told what things to go for, you establish a stable base while learning to micro the bomber.
Then you do a map like Loki where you learn to send engies to trees to cut down on the pgens to make 2nd air.
Really tons of possibilities.
I think they had no chance in that tourney and I think you would agree with that.
They taking a game off of BH, Adjux, Mozy, and Luxy back then? Cmon.
Though now I'm mixing up tournaments lol, I don't understand why the 2v2 missed like a ton of the players I recognized as high level in early FAF.
@fremy_speeddraw said in Stats from $10000+ of high level 1v1 FAF tournaments:
Yes they were competitive, and yes they had very fair chances. Just because chosen nowadays is out of the picture doesn't mean he was "bad" back then or everyone was bad, people don't get better as game ages, meta progresses and it's up to everyone individually to keep up with it or to step back if they aren't interested.
Well yes but regardless, these people were still not close to one another in TrueSkill. It shows a higher competitive drive back then as even lower rated players were trying to join into events they had 0 chance of getting beyond 2 games in. But as always I'd rather see whether this holds true or not based on the interest in lower rated tournaments that do get hosted. Unfortunately those do not exist at the moment.
If you define competitive level by the quantity of players able to take a win off of top players in a BO7, I don't know which era has the most competition.
50 people competing then and 50 people competing now is the same 50 people competing, even if me from now would crush me from 2013 because by now there had been a lot of developments as a whole to meta and my experience, there is 0 doubt in my mind me in 2013 was the superior player in every way and the effort I had to put to compete was certainly higher than find the FAF icon once in 4 months and get my 3rd or w/e place. And same goes for GPG, you can laugh at how "poor" they played but Zock in 2017 said the same thing to me, even tho was crushing he knows that him from GPG days had been the better player.
I'm not sure what you're really saying here. To me competition is relativist in a game. I don't really think a scenario where 1 person is so high above the rest that he always wins everything means that a game or event is at its competitive peak. That player could have reached a new peak in skill, but competition is impossible without comparison. Rock Paper Scissors is always competitive even when you're Rich Piana against a 90 year old granny. But that doesn't make it interesting as a spectator 4head.
Also just did a quick count through the top 75 in that thread from 2015, looks like 12 or 13 are in the top 100 on ladder nowadays. I think that's still a decent sign of turnover since there doesn't really seem to be any reason to think a 2015 1600 is any better than a 2021 1600. (But then again I don't even know if these guys were all above 1600 back then)
That's crazy, why has there been a general trend toward moving into hyperrealism in most games? To the point we have now peaked with intentionally not fun game mechanics in Death Stranding 4head.
Hills allow for the tradeoffs between units to shift and introduce another factor into calculating how to play a matchup. For example, artillery can become viable to mix into unit mixes much earlier if they're being sent to an area where hills provide cover from direct fire. It also makes it possible to attack pd that was placed poorly or keep things like radar safer.
It also makes any sort of large impassable terrain much easier to look at. I'm not even "the aesthetics guy" but I don't think there is very much more awkward in this game that having a straight 90 degree impassable slope rise out of entirely flat ground. It's obnoxious and immediately makes you think "this is a game" when you see it.
And how many of those players had a 5% chance of winning the tournament? It hardly makes a fair comparison if no tournament in the past 3 years has gone ahead in an attempt to pool wide ranges of players with no competitive chance. The closest one that was recent was the Holiday tournament which pulled like 40 players at the 1000-1500 level.
That 2v2 tournament also looks like either it intentionally removed a high swath of the toppest tier of players back then or they just all randomly decided to not be part of it. If we made a 1600-2100 rated 2v2 tournament, I'm sure you could get like 8 teams or so for sure, no idea if it would be 16.
Teams with csoller and sui in the "back then things were competitive and vibrant" post, brother.....
Can’t imagine a more frustrating experience than losing a game because you had the misfortune of getting the new player that doesn’t speak English.
Also, tying bonuses to the performance of the worst dude in your game is exactly how you increase in game toxicity.
Also disagree with the competition stuff, 2016-2017 FAF had periods where you could find like 15 active players maybe in the top 50. Nowadays the level of activity has certainly increased and whether you want to pull teeth about there being no new age you or Zock to dominate 80% of tournaments, the general tiers below are about as vibrant as they were in the early days. And the fact that’s true with the larger distance from the veterans of GPG shows that things are improving.