Posts made by FtXCommando

t2 bombers and frankly t2 air in general is op in teamgames, but this is not a game that exemplifies why it’s op at all. Flak exists to stop t2 bombers from getting several passes or building up, acu micro can cause the majority of the damage from first pass bombers to not hit, and you can use engineers to build shields or make mobile shields for your ACU. With good play this is a mass donation situation and beyond that, if enemy team has a dude rallying corsairs into your team and your team has zero advantage anywhere else, that’s also a player issue. You’re playing a slot down.

me thinking ahead and not wasting my time playing with a bad game setting

Nobody in FAF has a problem with a lazy way of reclaim, that’s why it already exists and costs minimal apm. What people had a problem with is making the lazy way of reclaim much stronger which in turn removes one of the tradeoffs of apm in the game. For loads and loads of players it is actively better to spend 0 apm and just zoom out and look at the map for 10 seconds to figure out the next 50 seconds than it is to spam clicking for 10 seconds on units, reclaim, or anything else.

In practical games you won’t kill a uef acu with 2 tmls because regen happens every tick.

got his ass

all attacks are a skill issue because if you just defended better they would lose

the unit is like half of my uef t2 gameplay

Iffy? TML is one of the most risk free forms of aggression in the game. Combine it with TML ACU that can move wherever and cannot be sniped (but also can’t be reclaimed when no longer useful) and factions like sera which can one shot TMD with a singular notha u will never catch in time and it’s ridiculously strong.

People out here making it sound like it’s mid and not worth it half the time. It’s in the same category as first bomber in teamgames where a competent team should be abusing it every game pretty much.

A TML killing a single t2 mex is already mass efficient when you actually take into account the fact reclaim is entirely killed and you can reclaim the launcher at your own leisure.

Why would cybran get a speed upgrade when there is a faction in the game that is perpetually forced to play reactive at all times on land as soon as titans are no longer relevant damage dealers, primarily because nobody wants to do anything about the fact all the mainline battle tools are the slowest things in the land game.

If high rated players cared about that name recognition (in Gyle casts because that’s the implicit example being cited here) they just wouldn’t change their name.

If viewers cared that much about knowing the scene or the players involved, they wouldn’t be watching a guy that still thinks players that quit 6 years ago are around. It’s just evidently not a big concern judging by how little people care to move to casters vastly more actively involved with FAF. The theoretical argument about production quality doesn’t even stand because casters have moved on from FAF for the lack of that audience movement and instantly started getting 50k+ views on videos in other environments.

Not that I have a problem with the solution there, but the reasoning centered on viewers doesn’t make any sense to me given the signaling they’ve done through the years.

My take on SACU upgrades is that they should work as either:
A) A viable progression out of t3 armies
B) A viable tradeoff from t3 armies as an accommodation to t4s

Either one of these solutions require them to work in tandem with t4s which should never really be phased out (they cost a bajillion mass after all compared to both rambo and t3 and are obviously a hugely enticing part of the game culturally). Also keep in mind most of the subjective terms of scaling here mainly refer to other faction's SACUs. They're just statements on where the unit's powerlevel should be compared to these units.

So in terms of design principles:
First I think all combat SACUs need to be REALLY bad at building. Like genuinely terrible. They can have the t3 suite, but the notion of their utility should come from "we can start projects but we need support units to finish it up." They should have the buildpower closer to something like a sparkie than what they are in this readjustment where they are still superior to t3 engies. If you want to have the utility of emergency t2 shields or emergency sams with your SACUs, you need to mix engineer SACUs into your combat group rather than simply spamming combat SACUs. It should be its own tradeoff. You can keep engineers at the buildrate set here, but you definitely need to nerf rambos because if you don't, it really hampers how much fun you can have with introducing different styles of gameplay per faction.

UEF Rambo should operate like a really heavy titan, it should be faster than t4s with short range but decent HP and alright dps. The goal is for it to escort the perpetually slow and not very impactful fatboy while being able to split up to cause damage and force T4s to either be out of position or slow themselves down in order to deal with them. This gives time for fatboys to do damage to T4s that usually can just walk into it while also giving fatboys quicker damage dealing potential indirectly.

Sera should have OC boys that get reworked OC to work like old OC. It should be a fixed cost with a fixed quantity of damage. I say this because I would rather OC be a prevalent part of the sera SACU experience rather than just having like, 2. If you have 5 of them, you do not want the volatility that comes with scaling E cost OC because it makes your own damage unpredictable and it's annoying as a user for knowing whether you can take engagements or not. I do not think it's an enjoyable skill gauge. So do something like 10k e for 5k damage or something similar.

Likewise, since sera has no RAS suite, it should maintain a high base SACU buildrate which in turn gives it a competitive advantage on top of OC in SACU fights because it will be able to build support structures much faster. This synergizes well with the fact sera SACUs are going to be encouraged to be a concentrated ball in order to do major lump sum damage to high priority targets of the enemy. This enables chicken to continue to be the sera unit for dealing with spam of units while the SACUs are there to prioritize targets that a chicken will have issue with alone.

Cybran have 2 t4s that really hate being surrounded. ML laser sucks really bad at targeting around itself and mega wants things to always stay right in front of it. So Cybran rambos need to be big on stunning, but not particular damage dealers. They would likely be the most utility driven of the SACUs but the worst in "1 for 1" combat. Make them fast, solid hp, good stun, but not great overall damage.

Aeon would just be an upgraded variant of the current harb + gc dynamic. GC is a tank that absorbs damage while harbs provide cheap but efficient quantity of dps while targets focus the gc. Aeon SACUs would want to be slow, slower than t4s. I imagine them as the inverse of UEF combat preset. They would be really good damage, great range, slow speed, and not good health. You want them to force engagements on your GC but you don't want them exploring the world without GCs.

I'm not sure what the exact values would be, but something like this would create a dynamic at late t3 stage where you have the options of

A) continuing mass scale of t3 units
B) transitioning to SACUs to assist your t3 army through their own individual utility
C) transition to T4 to accommodate your t3 army

Ideally super late land armies would mostly be consisting of T4 and SACUs, with t3 units primarily being there as a utility force.

Yeah that’s all I’ve done for FAF. For a guy spending years reading my posts you sure don’t know much about me. I can’t take you seriously when you say all I do is tear things down. Even in my current level of practical inactivity I still try to tinker with balance ideas because I find it fun.

Call me an asshole as you like, but denying me my contributions to FAF is pure ideology.

No, it was not as transparent as can be.

We had a giant community choice poll advertised where people could upvote and downvote ideas they submit and we had TMM as one of the three most desired additions to FAF.

Once long term developers could devote time to the project, a plan was formulated on how the whole mechanic would work which was then publicly posted and a news letter was made.

Said policy got feedback where concerns were addressed and critiques were accommodated.

People would ask for updates, people would post about what the roadblocks are or if work has paused because of real life concerns.

TMM launched and the biggest overall concern I recall with said new feature was the map pool made for the beta month.

This does not include the variety of github and zulip conversations but these were about mechanical implementation.

That to me is as transparent as possible.

You just told me the process and I took it at face value. I then proceed to say where I have no idea when someone was involved and what was information I was operating from with hearsay.

This is the part where I match the passive aggression I have been talking about by saying maybe you should just do a better job explaining the whole story. Very tedious. Can only assume the exclusion of this balance team segment showcases how much care was put into their input!

The links you posted are exactly the problem I’m talking about. The entire early implementation process happened on github. Github is not a place that is going to work out well for a discussion on principles, because it’s completely opaque to a general user. Nobody can navigate it or figure out where to find what they need. It’s constantly after the fact. This is why there is like 6(?) people involved in all your links and the majority are game or balance team contributors.

Which brings me to the balance team point. I have no clue when the balance team specifically got involved in the conversation here but I do know this feature was definitely not getting some flying color consensus. I think I was told like one guy openly supported it? Surely this should have been a red flag to check out community onboarding with whether this feature is a good idea for the game.

Both the Discord and especially the Forum thread are will into the dynamic I was talking about where principles are attempted to be shoehorned into the mechanics. It’s about making something people view as bad for the game less bad instead of first figuring out if it is good enough to warrant a mechanical discussion on something like github.

Dunno what to tell you Jip. Area reclaim is like one of the most historical arguments on FAF. People have been against it on the aspect of principle, beyond even mechanics, since all the way back in 2014. The step of collecting some consensus on the principles was totally skipped over and development went into mechanics and now there is an attempt to work backwards and somehow fit the mechanics into principles that state it as fundamentally anathema. A lot of headache would have been resolved if you could have convinced people on how area reclaim creates some new strategic opening on FAF but instead all the people that have always not liked it now heard of an implementation and how it’s in faf develop and how there is now a game dev team vote to implement it.

Working backwards to accommodate principles was just not going to work on this specific problem.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

@FtXCommando

If this is partly related to my post:

At the end of the day, respectful communication is the prerequisite for resolving different opinions into a shared compromise. I expect you to be one of those to knows this even better than most. And you certainly can be respectfull when you want to. It was not my goal to single your comment out becaue it come from you. Id just happened to be an obvious example. We can add other disrespectful phrases from other parties too to my post if you want!

And I don't really give a shit about the progressiveness of FAF. Im playing Coop. I could not care less about any small changes that happen in FAF, other than new campaigns being developed.

But if you want to pitch it as "“traditionalists” vs “progressives”: One of those groups consistently behaves MUCH less decent than the other.

Jips behaviour for example is NOT AT ALL comparable (in terms of aggressiveness) with some of the behaviour he is facing.

Nah not you. You haven’t been either of the two and I’ve worked fine with you in the past. I do disagree with some of your arguments, going back to the ancient area reclaim threads where you argued that if people have a problem with area reclaim then you might as well as have things like a unit cap on how many things you can select because it also makes the game more difficult to play. I disagreed with this then because FAF already had an ease of use reclaim method in the form of attack move. Alongside the other reclaim methods which created a strategic choice at high levels without being essential at low levels even with low level gameplay revolving around learning how to macro.

Communication is a two way street and Jip is kind. Kinder than me, that’s for sure. But, Jip has a real problem when it comes to other stuff. One example is the disparity of evidence between supporters and opponents. He does not really care when people support something without trying it out. They can be shown it and like it and they are now people he is fighting for. This is likewise seen with the whole “silent majority” shtick, they’re silent because they don’t support anything so why are they on anyone’s “table” here? Meanwhile we might watch Farm toy around with reclaim, watch a replay, talk to the people that used it, and we’re essentially irrelevant datapoints. I don’t mind if the condition for support is as strenuous as it is, but it needs to be applied fairly. These sort of incoherencies are what make me bristle.

@phong said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

@jip It's fine, I rattled his cage, I'm no better. What's actually funny is I was asking @FtXCommando how exactly loud, dissatisfied pros might have improved my faf experience without me realizing and he hits me with "we could have been real tryhards and prevented you from playing TMM alongside your friends, but relented". Insert tyrant extolling his benevolence to his subjects meme.

My dude, you're not even an actual pro, you're a 1900. "We"? Pffff

No wonder the lobby server dev quit after TMM was up and running. Imagine working to help players more conveniently find games and having to deal with some endless-essay pretend-pro busy-body actively trying to sabotage your main goal, because, you see, the trueskill data (a mere means to an end) would otherwise be a bit noisier than it already is. Then, to top it off, they go and take partial credit for the work, calling themselves Collaborator, since starting, then losing futile arguments about dumb shit technically counts as labor, right? Also, they get indignant should their effort not be valued over yours, the actual dev.

Regardless other contributions I have you to thak for, this one's not helping change my mind about whose activity benefits me more. The boastful claim this was actually within your power and we were spared such an outcome only by your willingness to compromise would be worrying if I actually took it seriously. I'd I'd rather hope someone reasonable will always be here, willing and able to step in whenever your lot fails to be brought to your senses, which is why I'm speaking up before you drive them away.

Nothing here was something I said. This is you doing exactly what Jip is in the current process of moaning about for sympathy points but nobody cares because:

1. “he’s on our side”
2. Gosh we don’t wanna lose Jip so we gotta allow this incoherency with our supposed “good discourse” principle

It’s pathetic. If you want a list of my contributions you can go read my election post in the last PC reelection thread, I ain’t retyping allat.

I do find it funny that I just had to read like half a dozen points specifically pointing me out as a problematic attitude. Coincidentally all from the people that disagree with my principles on general FAF direction. Coincidentally said people also elected to ignore and discount said problematic attitudes that were in line with their principles.

This does not surprise me. If there is one thing that I actually have noticed in my years of FAF contribution where I had to argue against top players, contributors of all types, and casual players across a variety of circumstances is that nobody that agreed with me at the specific moment takes issue with the way I operate so long as it’s pushing their direction. I do not have the patience nor the inclination for the general FAF passive aggression that attempts to toe the lines of civility by implicitly accusing me or others of things. Say what you want to say, because I don’t intend to continue the passive aggressive dance.

I’ve worked with plenty of contributors through the years that didn’t go into the passive aggression, that did engage honestly, and I had no problems with coordinating with them and fighting for the things that would make FAF better. I met plenty that didn’t do one or both of these just the same.

I don’t intend to apologize for anything written here. Or really the more honest statement is that I don’t intend to apologize without genuine reciprocity. I’ll just utilize the same line Jip used when referring to his attack on Tagada’s ability to be a contributor and tell people to read and get a conclusion for themselves. Inevitability, as always, people will see the harm of their opponent and not the harm of their supporters.

For the record, the “shoot the dev” line is a common turn of phrase and was used for the context of stopping people from creating a false combative dichotomy. I genuinely have zero clue how this specific line got picked for the pointless drama when it’s dramatic because it’s supposed to show how silly the conversation had gotten from being any actual productive discourse on the roll between “traditionalists” and “progressives” in the game design process of a community.