Locking this as quality of discussion not exactly high nor productive, and as discussing moderation actions in public is not allowed (as we can see how well this thread is already doing). From the thread author hoping for someone to die of an illness is just over the line.

To briefly comment the first post, the moderation team is a team, actions are more often than not discussed as a team and thus taken as a team. Furthermore the appeal system is in place where you can get the team lead and moderation team to review any bans if you feel you've been mistreated contrary to the community rules and policies in place.

In this particular case the ban history does not consist solely of one moderator's actions, and the perma ban resulted eventually from repeatable (and unchanged) bad behavior and other offenses where many other community members have been affected. If anything I'd say FAF moderation is quite lenient and gives multiple chances for users to improve upon their behavior, perma bans are the last resort.

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

...and this is how it should look like

How the first Novax satellites were transported in the UEF space program

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.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/9420/Supreme_Commander_Forged_Alliance/

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.

We managed to spark some activity around these changes and have been following the discussions here and elsewhere in the community. We want to thank those who have provided constructive feedback so far, and hopefully any other constructive feedback after this post.

Your comments are taken into consideration and we aim to share our thoughts and more details regarding these changes in a few days.

Best regards,
FAF Moderation Team

There are blinking lights?

With the current energy crisis better shut them down.

IMO this would be a deal breaker for the change: For some factions you can no longer build across a cliff, this is faction-dependent

Any "normal" player would maybe make the mistake once or twice, building navy facs too close to each other and cause pathfinding issues, after that they know how to space them. I don't think making this idiotproof justifies the huge impact balance-wise it would result in.

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?

May I then correct your memory if you wish to bring it back up and by doing so also claim incorrect things.

Initial:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/7653/username-rules-updates?page=1

After feedback:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/7653/username-rules-updates/201?page=11

@Tersto said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

@Giebmasse said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

We even ask that only players participating in the game generally should report events from games. Big part of the responsibility of "is this reporteable" is up to the participating players who are most closely affected by potential events. The moderation team does not crawl through replays for fun, we have plenty to do otherwise already. Circumstances where a non-participant report of a ctrl-k event in a game would have to be something special for us not to just discard it.

The fact that FAF doesn't have a big playerbase means, that high rated players constantly play against or with the same players. If someone really wants to get another player banned, I'm sure he could search through enough replays to eventually find a reportable offence for almost everyone that happened a long time ago. This can be abused to get people banned before or in tournaments so you don't have to play against them or also just if you don't like them.
Therefore I suggest a timelimit of how old a reported "offence" is allowed to be. Maybe 1-2 month? Serious offences like cheating should be excluded, however I don't see an issue to apply this timelimit to most other FAF rules e.g. base ctrl k, griefing, exploits...
Because if it really was an issue, that was affecting someone in a negative way, then it would have been reported in a timely manner.

I'll be direct, this is not really a problem, we don't need to be chasing ghosts.
Sure, theoretically if you stretch the scenarios as far as possible and assume reports are processed blindfolded or completely isolated from any other data points we take into account when processing reports.

We've had people thrawling through reports just trying to cause problems for another user, this is easily spotted and dealt with accordingly.

Basically in any case if a report is not made by a game participant and in a timely manner, faint warning bells are ringing in the background when checking the report for its validity and if the reporter had any malicious intent.

We even ask that only players participating in the game generally should report events from games. Big part of the responsibility of "is this reporteable" is up to the participating players who are most closely affected by potential events. The moderation team does not crawl through replays for fun, we have plenty to do otherwise already. Circumstances where a non-participant report of a ctrl-k event in a game would have to be something special for us not to just discard it.

That being said, this is not be something carved in stone. There are events serious enough to not matter who reports, is it reported or if it was the neighbours cat who saw it, the mod team will take action. Easy example for such being clear cheating.

Appreciate the proposal draft. Also a bit shame seeing it as we've tried to address the mentioned problems as well as can be done with the means we have. Several of the mentioned key points are already in place too while we are also currently working on improving parts highlighted in the proposal, as mentioned by previous responses of moderation team members (perhaps these should be communicated better in some way?).

I would prefer a solution oriented approach, no beating around the bushes, so I'll perhaps be a bit more direct:
Do we have such a widespread problem or challenge on our hands that require this level of change?

• From the team's POV, the experienced abrasions recently, which probably ignited this proposal, has been from a specific player segment in the community. Segment being higher rated players, most often playing in closer groups as well.
• While this segment represents a small portion of the total volume of reports and actions we process, I'd question if there is a problem as wide-spread as the proposal actions would suggest is needed to be made.

It is also worth highlighting a few steps that could've been taken before this proposal, essentially using the existing "OCR" mechanism in place:

• Contact me, as team lead I'm not hiding nor do I bite, besides our appeal systems and support tickets in place, I can be contacted and discussed with as a next step
• If discussing with me is not enough, the board can also be contacted with if you still feel your issue has not been addressed or you have been treated wrong
  (We realized now these parts were by mistake not clearly documented in the jan 2025 rewrite albeit being in place since the association, we will add this information to the documentation, our bad.)

I would therefore like to ask if we can't solve the experienced abrasions with more pin-point actions, that require less overhead from everyone, rather than this larger suggested committee work in the proposal, of which many parts are already in place with current systems. In other words, can you please elaborate further so we can get to the meat of the issue at hand and perhaps fix it with less work for everyone involved. If there is a need to go into specific cases, feel free to pm or we can setup a channel with the relevant parties.

We have strived to document our rules, policies and how the moderation in FAF works as well as we can, we welcome any input on how we can make this even clearer. Our latest larger effort on this was in the beginning of this year.

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/8649/improvements-to-appeal-process-and-faf-rules
• https://faforever.com/rules
• https://www.faforever.com/moderation

We've also involved the community when forming new rules/policies or changing older ones, something we don't intend to stop with.

• Example with leaving games https://forum.faforever.com/topic/8372/faf-rules-on-leaving-games-have-your-say/1

As a general comment, the moderation team is currently trying to clear the backlog of reports which came due to DDoS and us being unable to access said reports during that time. Our time spent on this proposal preparation right now would be time away from processing said reports. I hope everyone understands if our answers on this topic are thus more delayed than perhaps expected due to that.

Hi everyone, as we kick off 2025 we wanted to make you aware of some updates related to the appeal process, an update to the FAF rules page, and the publication of a dedicated information page on the reporting and appeal system.

TL;DR: see the bottom of this post.

Improvements to the appeal process

Decisions by the moderation team, such as bans and mutes, can be appealed. This system is designed for requesting a second evaluation of the decision and correct eventual mistakes or miscommunications. We have previously received feedback on the waiting time of the ban appeal system. Due to how this system was organized, appealing short bans often took longer than the ban itself; less than ideal.

In order to improve the appeal process, we have adopted a new way of submitting appeals. Where before you were required to send an email, appeals may now be filed through the FAF discord using an appeal-ticket. You can create such a ticket through the #Moderation-support channel in the FAF discord. When submitting a ticket, we ask you to explain why you believe your ban should be reduced or revoked. Your appeal will then be reviewed by at least two moderators who did not handle the original report.

We have been testing this new system for a few months now, and have been happy to see that appeals get processed much faster. The feedback we’ve received on the new system has also been very positive. To make sure that people who cannot or will not use Discord can file appeals, we will also keep the old email system in place.

We have created a new webpage that explains this process in detail. There you can find detailed instructions on how to file an appeal, as well as an expanded explanation on how the report and appeal system works.

Clarification of existing rules

The FAF rules page is another subject we have received a lot of feedback on. Because of this, we have spent the past months rewriting and reorganizing the page. There have not been any new rules added that were not already moderated previously. The page has been improved by:

• Removing duplicate and/or similar rules
• Improved organization
• Clarifying previously not explicitly stated rules
• Overall update and made rules more clear

While we do not think it is possible to write a rule set that covers all possible scenarios, we have done our best to remove ambiguity as much as possible. Examples of rules that were not explicitly stated include the ban on political discussion in general chat channels (the decision to moderate was announced in a forum post), and the ban on base CTRL-K (which fell under the vague ‘You will not ruin the game intentionally by any means’ rule).

Changes to the rules relating to quitting games

One rule has been changed: the rule relating to leaving games mid-game. As part of our approach to making rules less ambiguous, and given the varying opinions we've heard within the community about leaving games, we have sought the views of the FAF association on what rules to have for people who leave games. The results of these polls have been reflected in the updated rules.

• Previously, leaving games that were not decisively lost was considered a violation of the "do not ruin games" rule.
• Based on the poll results, players will now only be in breach of this rule if they leave within the first 5 minutes of a match or if they frequently leave games (defined broadly as three or more reported incidents per week).

FAQ

Additionally, we have written a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section on the rules specifically and moderation in general. You may find this FAQ, as well as a section explaining how we determine the duration of a penalty, on the report and appeal system webpage.

TL;DR

• Appeals can now be filed faster through Discord using an appeal-ticket system, with reviews handled by at least two moderators. Email appeals remain an option, and the new system has significantly reduced response times.
• The rules page has been rewritten to improve organization, remove ambiguity, and clarify previously implied rules, like bans on political discussion in chat and base CTRL-K actions. No new rules are added.
• The rule on quitting games has been changed following a vote by FAF association members. It is now considered a violation only if a game is left within the first 5 minutes or if frequent quitting occurs (3+ times per week).
• A new FAQ which explains rules, moderation policies, and how penalty durations are determined, is now available on the report and appeal system webpage.

Thank you to the moderation team for the work with the updates and the community in general for the related discussion and feedback.

Apple Vision Pro required for usage?

Yeah newer windows (10 and 11) don't completely shut down, so you have to restart instead.

Don't hold in the mouse button while dragging.

Wow, I pressed quote on my own message but it replied to SainseRow

@SainseRow said in Dark Mode:

Similar problem including mobile devices where there is no ad block whatsoever

Like this slate theme, just change color value of the input box and its text would go a long way.