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.

"Experience: people will push things to the limits as much as possible as often as possible if they are not getting their way. What is the point of a leader if the team can just overthrow said person at any time?"

Well.... yeah? Are you paying the people you're working with so you have some sort of leverage to necessitate them listening to you as a leader? No? Then you're working purely on good will and good faith. If you fail to maintain that good will and good faith you failed as a leader in a pure volunteer project and are now tightening your grip on sand and only causing more to fall out of your hand.

Cooperate and collaborate with the team, ensure things are done in a way where all voices are heard but accept that sometimes a fork in the road is hit and a direction must be chosen. If some people leave or stop contributing because of that it just means new people need to be found. If you chose a terrible direction that goes against the vision of the rest of the team then you should be replaced because then you're losing all your manpower for zero real reason. Easier to replace a single person than an entire team and in most situations the whole team is capable of carrying the weight of a singular person more than the singular person can carry the weight of the entire team.

"Who is going to decide who the "matchmaker team" is going forward when this breaking up of the player council takes place? I don't believe the current members should simply carry over."

You have no explanation for why membership cannot carry over. The current team has been responsible for probably the most difficult ladder transitions in FAF history with the least complaints about how things operate relative to previous PC management. It has absolutely proven itself to be capable of working together and also working in a way that does not directly harm FAF, two things that any team you suggest have failed to prove.

Beyond that, the matchmaker team itself is more than capable of choosing members for itself. This is how new applicants were decided in the past. Someone pm'd me, I gave them a list of 5-7 maps. I asked them to rank them. I then pressed them on why they ranked certain maps certain ratings. I would then post these conversations in the ladder team channel and see if anyone has any issues with recruiting an individual. If it's alright with the majority I let the person into the team.

This solves a few things. For one, it generally means that the person asking to join the team has some motivation because he went through this whole process with me and will actually engage in these sort of discussions. For two, it means this person isn't joining as some unknown entity into an inherently collaborative yet subjective environment where a baseline of respect for the credibility of all parties is necessary for conversation to actually go anywhere. If you think canis is an F tier map equivalent to high noon in 2v2 while I think it's A tier, then the conversation is dead from the start and one of us needs to be disregarded for the conversation to lead anywhere. If it was a situation of canis is B or A tier, then discussions can happen.

"Set a minimum number of people that must be on the team ( let us say 8 )"

This is bad. No minimums need to be set because this already puts tension with the rest of your argument about ensuring people are active. Inactive people will be kept purely to maintain the magic number of 8. No other team on FAF operates like this and in fact I wish there was more effort in removing inactive people that just hold roles to more correctly showcase where manpower issues exist on FAF. You make your team consist of people that are willing to help while having the baseline level of competency to help. Doesn't get more complicated than that.

"Let us say that the matchmaker team must consist of 2 high-level players, 2 mappers, 2 developers (Sheikah & Penguin for example as they code and update map gen), 2 middle-level players to keep discussions as all-encompassing as possible"

Seems arbitrary. I want 2 low rated players, I want 2 new players, I want 2 promotion team members, I want 2 popular casters, I want 2 Tournament Directors, and I also want 2 aoe4 players so we can compare cross-game ladders.

All this does is create conflict and tension. Penguin was already rejected because he has an entirely alien idea of what makes a decent map compared to the rest of the matchmaker team. Tinkering with map gen doesn't qualify you whatsoever for making decent pools or having the competency to discuss maps, it qualifies you to talk about tinkering with map gen.

The same applies to mappers. When I was PC, I had high level players that were also mappers because they were interested in helping my vision. Now they aren't there. When I had mid-level mappers they knew their lane and generally stayed in the area of rating maps based on aesthetics while leaving gameplay and variance to high level players. They got involved of course, but they knew it wasn't their "field of expertise" and that the conversation was guided by those with the ethos in the area.

The middle-level players is entirely arbitrary for the reasons stated above, you can extend this all the way down to include 2 of every group of FAF. The rational restriction is what I already posted. Is the dude motivated to help ie does he contact the leader or does someone on the team find him interested in helping? Is the dude competent enough to not be disregarded immediately in the discussion? Congrats, he would join the team. Doesn't matter what his rating is or what else he does on FAF. Same as how balance team works.

"The future matchmaker teams MUST be built from the ground up to remove any previous bias, voted upon by the association and reviewed by the board"

You have failed to showcase any problematic bias or any reason why this is true. You just implicitly hold it to be true.

"The matchmaker team will follow a set of guides to allow new content into the pool by majority voting in favor of using new maps, adding/removing quanitity of map gens, allocating weights to maps showing up in ladder, anything that deviates from a typical map pool"

You have now made a matchmaker team redundant. This is the Association (who consists largely of people with zero credibility in something like map pools) deciding all the rules and obligations which the matchmaker team operate under. If there is zero faith in the matchmaker team to determine their own guidelines and decision-making process then nobody will join the team because I have zero interest in volunteering to do a process some dude that plays 1 FAF game every 3 months has decided to vote is in the best interest of FAF.

"Let us say that a "typical map pool" is one like we currently have where there is a certain number of 5x5, 10x10, 20x20 (excluding other sizes for simplicity here)"

See above, you have given the matchmaker team zero room to maneuver and nobody is going to work in that environment in a volunteer project. You are not paying the matchmaker team.

"Set a guide where community feedback MUST be taken into account by creating discussions with "x number" of people to weight decisions by yy%."

See above. Also, just a terrible way to approach it. Feedback is as good as the way it's asked and for what it's asked for. Something being popular doesn't make it right nor does it make it reasonable. The obligation of a matchmaker team is to synthesize realistic, doable ideas and then if something is inherently subjective and outside the scope of knowledge of the team (such as what sort of pools people like at certain ratings) then you hold a poll to gather the information. Polls are utilized to multiply the efficacy of decision-making, not do the decision-making for you.

"When votes do happen, leader gets a slighty edge % vote, all other teams members are split, plus the % from 7)"

If odd - majority, if even - team votes and leader acts as tiebreaker. This is how anything operates.

"Why? Because the matchmaker team in current is thin at only 4 real members (you really can't just let inactive members sit there and decide things once a year). I don't think it's feasible to expect a leader to be accurately portrayed as doing their job effectively with such a low amount of people. Because there are not enough people it becomes a stalemate and we experience issues like we saw in the association chat when a decision was forced."

Then remove inactive people. I removed like 2-3 people for inactivity when I was PC and nobody had any problem with it. People generally don't have a problem with removing people for compelling reasons like inactivity. Just as people don't have a problem with introducing new people when there is a compelling reason to introduce them.

This isn't a situation of evil matchmaker team trying to be a dictatorship and grasping onto power. This is a situation of a matchmaker team feeling disrespected, ignored, and discarded. Of course you get pushback. Incorporate the team into decisions rather than dictating terms to them and you don't. In the end that's how all teams on FAF are required to work because otherwise nobody is going to do the work except you.

"We need to really do a better job of setting hard requirements so people do not get confused and "run to the board" to settle matters. If we cannot find enough volunteers to create a sizable team then there should be no team and just an assigned person for the 1v1, 2v2, 4v4 pools that exist, let them be judged by the association / board / community."

Hard requirements do exist. The problem is that they were disregarded. Feel free to ask me about any of the hard requirements that exist on the team I made.

"When you say "we should just be able to vote whenever we want" it sounds like we can't work as a board-association and decide what we actually want."

Makes no sense. The Board and Association shouldn't be babysitting any team on FAF. If they are, the team is a failure and the reason for the failure needs to be reviewed.

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.

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.

3000 games and I’ve literally never heard anybody refer to any of the colors with something more complicated than green, yellow, blue, etc and now people expect FAF players to gather the nuance between violet and purple, lavender, and light green vs lime lol

@melanol said in No-share ranked:

@magge But does it hurt to have that button?

Yes.

Having 60,000 buttons to press when only 4 actually work with maybe 2 others working for a 2 hour period per day or per week should not be something that needs to be explained as poor design.

Having 1 button that is totally dead and serves no purpose (literally like 1 game a week) is also poor design.

How is that possibly up for discussion lol, might as well as remove groundfire so you don’t get pds abusing range, strats abusing aoe, or battleships abusing aoe.

Not using units the way they should be, or figuring out ways to make that work, is a decent bit of the fun in the game.

Mixing flares and auroras defeats the strength of either unit. It’s not a good idea for the same reason mixing mongoose and pillar is not a good idea, to properly make use of the units in a mix you’re basically required to spend 90% of your apm on your army and then while you might get slightly efficient trades your macro is so awful that you’re behind in twice the units.

Time for ur backup force to arrive so you sit and do nothing and let enemy surround ur ACU? The only way this works the way u want it to work is by removing sniping as a reality in the game. Instead how it will actually be used is to abuse it with OC micro by getting enemy units to clump and then u get out to instantly kill something like a group of ilshies. Don’t see the point in making defense even better in the game.

Isn’t the whole point to just make snipes more difficult? I’d argue it’s already closer to being too hard to recover from a lost position than it is to do damage from it in FAF so I fail to see what would even be gained by implementing it.

@thomashiatt said in Legend of The Stars 2022 Qualifier 2:

5x5 players on FAF are totally extinct after being ignored and disadvantaged in tournaments for the last thousand years.

virgin 5x5 players needing tournies to sustain themselves vs chad 5v5 players thriving in bliss

The fall damage nerf is gonna happen in combination with the cost increase (and across all air t4), it just isn’t in the upcoming balance patch. The other two would not really justify making the washer cheaper. Most washer abuse involves hover bombing so the 2nd doesn’t really hurt it much at all and might actually make it even easier to hover bomb. The third is dealt with by proper micro, basically being irrelevant.

feel for the caster trying to explain theta in a new way

Really disagree on your late game air take. Restorer is solid as a comfy unit that allows you to scale an air win’s lead while continuously increasing your air to ground ability, but wailer and broadsword are great units regardless for being immediate dps dumps with massive hp. We don’t even need to go into the fact Cybran have the best strat.

I also absolutely do see a difference between asfs, the ability to stealth means that you can decide the first turn of engagement which, barring proper scaling, is the penultimate factor in deciding who wins an air fight. The only counter against it is proper spy plane screening ensuring enemy air cannot sneak up on you but that in turn creates weaknesses for cyb air to focus on. This is before even taking into account that if there is no spy plane coverage, cybran asfs can pop out of thin air and shoot your asfs while your asf did not have enough time to react and thus your air flies through them without doing any damage.

Does soul ripper suck? Sure, but Cybran still have the best strat and a broadsword equivalent t3 gunship. Finally, in a serious teamgame you don’t really want your air player to be responsible for washer/czar in current balance. Better to let some stagnant slot make it while air continues to secure their air win since the units cost nothing in terms of energy infrastructure. And for that security, Cybran is certainly one of the best.

Some of that stuff got me fucked up, Cybran is an autopick on any map where navy matters and is a strong pick on any air map. Navy is self evident but air has the combination of corsair (how is that the worst t2 bomber when it’s the most flexible in terms of air to ground utility) and stealth t3 air.

Only issue Cybran has in their roster rn is that every other faction has mobile shields. To rectify that, all they really need is a redesigned version of disruptor given to them while fitting Cybran aesthetic.