Don't worry, it could be worse...

...and this is how it should look like

Since Seton's is the holy place I feel the need to comment.

In my opinion "King of Setons" tourney should have no rating limit, you want the kings and not the princes and princesses, the best of the best, right?
Mixing in NOMADS with its own specific balance I feel dilutes the "Seton's" part. A King of Seton's tourney should emphasize on the Seton's gameplay and not who finds the best Nomads balance exploits?

This tourney with the current ruleset being honored with the "King of Setons" title feels a tad questionable.

I sincerely think disabling pings & markers for dead players should not be done. There are so many other avenues to cheat in terms of what the change is trying to "fix" if observers are on, not to mention by having observers on in the first place you knowingly open that box anyway and risk players leaking information about the game.

To be honest this change feels quite absurd to me and I'm amazed it even progressed so far that it is live in fafdevelop now. The pros for the change are almost negligible, meanwhile removing pinging and helping your teammates once dead is a core feature of the game supcom players and the community have used every day for years and years now.

There are blinking lights?

With the current energy crisis better shut them down.

Everyone encounters lag in multiplayer games at some point.
Remove the guesswork and witch-hunting of "who is lagging" by storing more persistent connection quality data of the players per game session. Currently we mainly have ping that is easy to look at but often isn't very informative. The connection stat screen has packet loss and shows who is behind in the sim, which people who know how to interpret can much faster and reliably identify the source of the lag. Two usable metrics from this could be aggregated and shown in a more user friendly way (perhaps there is more or even better data available?):

• Who drops most packets during the game session/per X amount of time
• Who is "behind" the longest time

Additionally if those metrics would become more reliable, perhaps users could start to distinguish network lag from sim lag more too, as currently those are easily mixed up with each other in the user base too.

I'm assuming this could be fairly easy if we can access the data, do simple math and pipe it into some added UI element, e.g. in the same view where you have the ping currently per client?

This seems a bit complicated, I skimmed the thread but my first thoughts were that it overcomplicates current system, and someone has to maintain that system as well. Micromanaging over a dozen of badges to various people might not feel like much, but I'm fairly certain those would almost from the get go be outdated and thus lose their value.

I'll try to address some of the questions/topics briefly as I'm short on time right now.

Stating that we the moderators "freely allowing people to ruin faf games and not caring" is just not correct, furthermore you can probably imagine how uplifting it must sound to a moderator who spends part of their limited freetime moderating misbehaving users in our community.

About the report backlog, we had recently cleared all the report backlog, but as work and school starts again so does the time decrease for our voluntary moderators. The current backlog brutus already provided. Besides clearing reports we also moderate our other platforms (aeolus, discord, forums) and help community users in other ways, acting as first point of contact to pretty much any issue/question our community members might have.

As brutus kindly already showed the amount of reports, and thus moderator workload, has also grown steadily since the report system was taken into use. Partly because the community has grown and partly because people report more minor offenses more actively (this is a trend I've clearly seen happening since I've been moderating at FAF going a few years back). Certain maps also attract a large amount of the users causing a majority of the reported misbehavings, which often happen at min 55 of a large team game -> moderators often need to watch the replay which is quite time consuming.

And yes, moderators have lives too. As with any voluntary project some people have time to do more than others, and we can't force anyone to spend X amount of hours each week on moderation tasks. I am also not in favour of imposing some activity requirements on FAF moderators. I'd rather have a moderator who might not be too active e.g. with reports, but is online from time to time and might help with other things not directly visible to the public eye (such as team communication, helping with consistent moderation etc.). Additionally simply having a moderator presence acts as a deterrent for misbehaviour, you would hesitate robbing a store if a police car was parked outside, right? A potential risk with requirements could also be that we'd start running out of moderators, I remind you again it is a voluntary project.

As FtX pointed out we have been looking for and onboarding new moderators. You might still ask why we simply don't get more moderators on the team and hand out a moderator badge to anyone interested? For this I'd like to highlight a few requirements/key points we have for a FAF moderator:

• Moderation standards, applying and enforcing the rules in a consistent, just and fair way I'd say is
  the most important bit. For instance I doubt anyone in the community would like a moderator who bans people for their own gain, or just outright bans a reported user from a report even if the supposed offender actually did nothing wrong.
• Game and community knowledge, hard fact is if you don't know the game well enough you can't enforce the rules properly either. Same applies to community aspects, if you are really new to the community you can't be expected to help out users and be the first point of contact.
• Moderators need to be representing the community, a misbehaving moderator might even cause overall more damage to the community by setting a bad example for other community members.
• Communication skills, english is a must and you need to be understood by community members and other moderators.
• Onboarding takes time too from the rest of the team, like with most job positions, you need time to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the job and everything involved with it.
• How do we know how motivated the applicant truly is? As this thread is a statement to also, moderating is most often quite a thankless job. Do we spend our already limited time onboarding a new moderator only to see him/her going silent after a week or two? I atleast prefer to see some longer time commitment or previous contribution within the community from potential applicants.

If we onboard a moderator who is not fit for the position, I bet you'd quickly have different kinds of moderation related threads popup here and the rest of the team would have even more work on their hands.

@FtXCommando If some user has broken the rules in a major way before a big tourney, feel free to pm me or another moderator about it and we'll look into it with a higher priority.

I'll end with a plug here, if you feel qualified and want to help, feel free to apply: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/433/moderator

You mean this?

Got inspired to try a bit more minimalistic poster too:

One thing against offmapping that could be cool to test, add the shield bounce mechanic for map borders?
Not sure how "small" of a thing this is, figured could just copy paste some of the shield code and define it for map borders?
E: This is partly balance too, but would require testing anyway I guess.

If you didn't change your memory speed in BIOS, you are most likely using the default SDP settings which are slower.

I am also interested in the approach when the tables are turned. Say the community indicates via some polls or other ways that they would want thing X. Now it might be that this thing X would actually be bad for the community, just because it gains popularity doesn't mean it should be implemented for the overall good and success of the community.

Can you say no and filter out bad apples like that, instead of just straight piping all good and bad ideas forwards just because they get popular?

Could very well be nvidia driver issues.

These colors can be distinguished without issues, don't see a need to remove.

Keep the old colors.

Did you read the statement why it was created?

The simulation is already run for each client, where the info is grabbed from currently afaik for the lights. That loop sounds like just another layer on top or replacement of current control system, just added complexity and not really resolving the need for the mentioned bookkeeping? If the loop would process each factory you'd have to bookkeep the factories to be included and run them in a batch or start a separate loop for each factory and kill it once not needed anymore.

I'm not familiar with all the technical bits regarding the lights, but in general triggers that rely on game engine functions are usually way more optimized than manual loops done on the scripting side.

And all that complexity for lights that most don't even know about

There are blinking lights?

With the current energy crisis better shut them down.

Very one dimensional, your mass income might not even matter much if in the game situation you have 300k reclaim on the map.