Ethos:

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.

Future Plans:

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:

• Communicating with as many FAF players as is possible to gather, represent, and promote their ideas and interests.
• Organizing a schedule of the FAF community project events.
• Organizing tournament directors who run tournaments for players.
• Gathering feedback from the FAF project community to determine their top desires and problems.
• Presenting and represent this information in the best interests of the players to the Council of Setons.

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:

• I will work to accomplish the interests of the FAF general userbase and FAF contributor to the best of my ability. When interests of the various userbases collide or the userbase clashes with contributors, I will work to create a compromise that best serves all involved. I will maximize the interests of FAF.
• I will maintain the same level of work ethic that I have maintained through all my years on FAF.
• I will act as the voice for players across all levels of FAF while also acting as their ears and eyes.
• I will pledge to work on both making a new Councillor Pledge and holding current Councillors responsible for their failure to uphold their current pledge. They should be expected to justify why they represent the best interest of FAF while failing to maintain their pledge minimum expectations.

And that last pledge point will be my first action as Player Councillor.

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.

Opening Post Structure:

• 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:

• Creating Events
• Finding Players
• Finding Casters

Tournaments:

• Working with potential donors to create tournament formats that both appeal to them while creating the best environment possible for players
• Working with new TDs to review tournament formats and prevent any scheduling conflicts and avatar issues
• Working with the current regular TDs to maintain a consistent tournament schedule where funds are properly allotted from the FAF Patreon
• Understand how to create avatars
• Investigating tournaments in other games in order to apply lessons to FAF tournaments

LotS:

• Collecting funds from a variety of regular private donators, FAF Patreon, and potential external sponsors.
• Organizing the promotion of the event through a variety of media such as getting casters to mention the event, creating trailers, showcasing it on relevant subreddits.
• Ensure there are zero potential issues related to TDs or casters failing to show up
• Ensure that the tournament format is as refined as possible based on prior lessons while also making sure everything runs as smoothly as possible
• Host and organize the various tournaments that are intended to feed into LotS.
• This includes the leagues, the league series, and the mini-LotS events at the end of the year.

Training:

• Be active in the training channel and assist new players with issues
• Foster an environment where you can hopefully grab players that were taught to then train others
• Maintain the list of current trainers.
• Write guides and/or make videos and/or encourage others to do so

Matchmaker:

• Organize and maintain the various matchmaker map sheets
• Organize and maintain the matchmaker teams
• Decide pool breakdowns both map-wise and what queues to implement as options for FAF
• Ensure that pools are updated at the proper times with the correct maps when responsibility is delegated
• Gauge player preferences and adjust matchmakers when necessary to foster a fun yet competitive atmosphere

TrueSkill:

• Understand the mechanisms of trueskill as well as FAF’s adjustments to the system
• TrueSkill itself is the building block which nearly all player relations rest upon, as Player Councillor you have a responsibility to at the minimum be aware of any FAF developments to the system in order to understand their potential impact on players
• Beyond that minimum, you should proactively be collaborating with server developers in order to improve the system for FAF without harming the integrity of the system itself.

Players:

• Be available in as many areas as possible (forums, discord, FAF) in order to both be aware of player issues while also being available to answer questions
• Have as large of a personal pool of manpower (read: collaborators) that are able to assist in everything from refining ideas to taking over your responsibilities when you are unavailable
• Collect player feedback as applicable while also being capable of condensing it into relevant information depending on the individual circumstances
• Act as the pipeline that not only feeds player needs to devs but dev work to players
• Keep general users aware of the state of the FAF project while also understanding what areas actually need more manpower from general users interested in contributing.
• Keeping yourself aware both of gameplay trends as well as player attitude trends across all ranges of players

Developers:

• As said before, you must act as the pipeline to ensure developers and players are constantly on the same page.
• Currently this means working on and helping maintain the new Division system being implemented.
• Giving input to improve the matchmaking algorithm for the upcoming larger matchmaker queues
• Giving input on the actual design implementation of galactic war and the niche it should fill on the project
• Working with developers on data dumps and gathering information from data dumps to get a more refined picture of the FAF playerbase and the major issues facing them.
• Being an individual that developers in general can approach for input about what would best benefit FAF

Councillors:

• Having a proper collaborative relationship with the respective FAF Councillors in order to understand the scope of the FAF Project, both for yourself and for the general playerbase.
• Picking up the slack when necessary in order to act as the voice of the Council to the players as well as other contributors while also ensuring you are acting as the voice rather than your own personal view.
• Acting as the player voice to other Councillors, whether that means approaching the Moderation Councillor over moderation concerns from an individual player or gaining information on a project such as galactic war for the users at large.
• Often being responsible for coordinating events such as elections or the selection of councillors based on the variety of criteria to be considered a councillor for a certain area of FAF

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.

the most ridiculous take of them all:

give sparky t2 build suite

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.

Centralization:

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:

• FAF AI Discord
• ANZ Discord
• SCTA Discord
• FAF Creative Discord
• FAF Russian Discord
• FAF Promo Discord
• FAF Nomads Discord

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.

The Changes:

Opt-in Roles:

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:

• Their regional identity
• The languages they can speak
• Their PvP preferences
• Their PvE preferences
• Their modded game preferences
• Whether they want to be a mapper or modder
• Whether they want to help beta test changes
• What kind of promotion notifications you would like to be pinged about

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:

1. 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?

2. 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.

Assigned Roles:

There were also around 2 dozen new assigned roles attached to the Discord. These fell into two real categories:

• FAF contributors that had their role of responsibility carry over to the main Discord (matchmaker team, vault admins)
• FAF mod developers that can now be identified by people that play their works (AI developers, SCTA developers, Map Gen developers)

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.

Final Points:

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.

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.

It’s literally all the problems people have with full share except actually realized since now suicide rambo is great and doesn’t cause a general decrease in apm/eco efficiency.

I’m sure a dude that is spending his own money just to gain utility out of making life harder for others is the type of dude that was a law abiding citizen the mods would ban for no reason.

I’m sure this was the best use of both his time and money with no other course of action viable when even bennis of all people manages to get their perm ban revoked.

I’m sure the best response as a community would now be to remove the dude’s punishment because he integer overflowed on chimp energy and broke the scales on what we’re willing to not put up with. We should also punish moderators for good measure. Surely this will have zero externalities in future ban scenarios.

My favorite part of this is that it seems you just took the word of the dude you allege is ddos’ing FAF at face value as though he has no reason to lie meanwhile you have nothing from any other party?

Rating Cap tournaments are systemically complete shitfests. I genuinely do not think a single rating cap tournament in FAF History has happened without some sort of controversy related to smurfs, alts, deranking, or dudes that "technically qualify but who are we kidding".

If people want to make tournaments that play better there are a few things that need to be done:

If you stick to rating caps, do not do it before signups. TrueSkill gives a team 400 points away from another team an approximate 5% win chance. If you want to make competitive tournaments, have people signup and close by Y date.

Once the date is closed a few things can happen. You can craft rating brackets from this pool of players using 500 rating range or so as a guideline for when games enter the realm of pointlessness. It serves absolutely nobody for the 2300 rated player to play the 1700. It is not interesting to watch. It is not interesting to play. It is a waste of time. Craft brackets. If the 2000+ bracket has 3 players, then make it a round robin. Better than putting them in with the 1500s.

Or if it's a team tournament you could either have had players sign up prior as a group and then determine rating brackets after the fact. This stops the tournament from becoming what literally all rating cap tournaments are: mainly beating the rule rather than beating the players. Sign up with a dude that is 1900 ladder and 1300 global. Sign up with the dude that is on a rating loss slump. Sign up with the dude that lost 200 rating but had the competence to hide it well enough you can't definitively prove it.

If you want to make it less restrictive, have people sign up and do a captain picking procedure. You can still try to make the tournament competitive at this front by making captains pick from a pool of players that are, well competitive. You can still use the 500 rating variance as a sort of benchmark here as it means some level of strategy beyond "give me your base" can be worked out between players.

If you go with captain picking, then give people Z amount of time to practice with their teammate if they have any interest.

But it's really exhausting to see teammate tournaments relegated to the tournament being won before it begins because the real game is beating the rules and not the opponents.

Uncapped tournaments are still fine obviously, this is about the attempts to create tournaments that are "fair" and yes I am aware this requires more TD work but I don't really care.

I’d rather factions get diff ranges for their teleports tbh. Aeon and Sera are epic aliens, they get no range limit but they have current expensive teleport. Cyb and UEF work with Earth tech, get a range cap but slightly cheaper teleport or something.

That exact same ambiguity exists for any other way of ending the game (left without consulting the team, flew his ACU into enemy air, went afk) except these are not defaulted to a ban but base ctrl+k is.

If you ask your team if they want to play on and nobody does, who cares how you ended the game? If somebody says they changed their mind, why didn’t they say they wanted to play on in the chat when asked?

Shouldn’t the ban be for leaving a game without asking anybody? Isn’t that what recall ultimately is built on? Why are you banning a hypothetical person that achieved exactly that but decided he wanted to end it with base ctrl+k instead of hitting the leave button? Is that really the thing to be prioritizing here?

I see zero material difference between

Scenario 1:
“Do you want to keep playing X?”
“No”
base ctrl +k

Scenario 2:
“Do you want to keep playing X?”
“No”
flies acu into 100 asf on a transport

Scenario 3:
“Do you want to keep playing X?”
“No”
Puts ACU in corner, drags lines of PD, sams, shields, and goes to watch YouTube on 2nd monitor

X didn’t care in any scenario. Team’s morale was 0. Game was over. Enemy team having a say in how you decide to implement your give up is ridiculous. We don’t even ban people for doing the most malicious actions here which would be intentionally prolonging the game or alt+f4 to cause a disconnect screen as both involve time waste for the same conclusion. They’re strictly the worst options and yet they don’t have any sort of rule beyond the vague “game ruining” one.

@TheWeakie I noticed you downvoted my idea about nerfing t3 air, Id like to get your thoughts on it

In a game I recently played with you, you were bombarded with several shots from strats and broadswords, you lost all your units and eventualy died to constant use of t3 air.

you are considered one of the best faf players around and yet you were powerless against air

They’re literally already good

Think it’s pretty funny that mermaids have the 2nd best torp defense for cost in the game only behind cooper while it isn’t even their job

I’ve also never done sensor upgrade…… curious……

Yeah, that's not a lot

Seton’s is a poor 3v3 map, funeral plains is a poor 3v3 map, metir isn’t great due to the transport rng involved, and skadi isn’t great unless you have an entire team on the ball understanding what matters.

There also isn’t the biggest pool of satisfactory 4v4 maps either, there’s probably like 35-40 that I’m willing to use for pools and I’d say half of those aren’t great for 3v3

Just because a map is good for 4v4 does not mean it’s good for 3v3, it’s not as simple as just closing a slot

Why is it just being implicitly taken to be a good thing that more static navy gameplay is a great thing? Why would you even bother with uef destros if uef had a 85 range (salems outrange cyb cruisers btw) t2 torp launcher?

Why do you need more reason to make cruisers again? Why are people talking about unit mix as though navy isn’t the most healthy theater of the game in terms of unit mix already? How is buffing torp launchers that already currently are problematic for sera destros, will obsolete uef destros, and god knows what else to aeon/cyb gameplay a good change?