Best posts made by Giebmasse

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?

Issues with our email provider have been resolved, and FAF email services are fully restored. We are sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you all for your patience.

Note that previous attempts to register, that did not receive the expected email, will have to register again to get a new email. Other non-registering emails might end up in your spam folder.

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.

Add RAS upgrade to all units, the lower the HP, the higher the production/mass cost rate.

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

I wasn't going to, but you made me do it.

Thank you for the constructive feedback and discussion.

We are proceeding with a three month rename interval for now.
We will monitor the situation for its impact and adjust if necessary.

If a technical solution is implemented widely in FAF communication mediums (e.g. similar like discord unique handle), that allows better identification of players, we see no issue with going back to shorter rename periods.

Regarding the rule on similar names, the wording of the rule is as following:

• Usernames that impersonate others or are visually identical to other usernames, for example by exploiting visually similar characters, are not allowed.

Nothing of your arguments really touched the reasons why this tourney shouldn't have the king of setons title. Besides Morax as the player councilor and responsible for FAF tournaments overall explained it, you can host the tourney with another name and nobody has an issue with it. It is nice and welcomed that TD's are hosting tournaments, so nothing against you or this tournament otherwise.

As a simple comparison let's take a basic sporting event/competition, say 100 meters dash sprint race. The basic rule is that you have to run the 100 meters. Now suddenly someone is arranging an officially classed competition for 100 meters track sprint, but you are allowed to use an e-bike instead. The race results in the world record being broken by 3.1 seconds. How could people take the sport seriously after that?

The e-bike would remove the actual athletic performance from the equation and invalidate the whole 100 meters dash sprint race for everyone and all its history, it would be meaningless. This is a bit exacerbated, but in this comparison adding Nomads to the mix would have a bit of the same effect.

Upon using any of the following, you may be warned once; the second time is a ban from faf for a month; third is for 6 months; Final will be a ban from FAF, indefinitely.
You can appeal these.

This also includes any cheating involving changing rating. Examples include having friends donate rating, multiple accounts to donate rating, etc.

New exploits can and will be added without any prior notice.

Banned exploits:

1. Offmapping in order to hide units in any way.

2. Using terraforming intentionally to block units/mess with pathfinding, also flattening an obstacle to allow units through is not allowed.

3. Using unit interactions to abuse pathfinding e.g moving a unit up or down a cliff, similar to terraforming

4. Blocking or causing the game to slowdown or lag on purpose.

5. Uploading or using a blatant "cheat" map (ie. with tons of wrecks on only one side of the map)

6. Using any modifications to see through the fog of war

7. The bug that allows rebuilding of units that were in production at a cheaper cost.

8. Walking with ACU while upgrading. On purpose, that is. Walking with ACU/Engies and building would fall under this if anyone figures out how to do it.

9. Making invincible units.

10. Causing drops to die by building underneath.

11. Making units regenerate life/shields without a mechanic i.e natural health regen or veterancy

12. Anything else that is breaking the game in some fashion.

13. Glitching to get a Hover ACU.

14. Giving bases to avoid damage by enemy ythotha storm.

15. Any bug that creates mass and energy out of nothing.

16. Creating structures within structures, or their footprint. Adjacent to mex issues are not included in this, as it's an unintended consequence of another change, hopefully fixed soon.

17. Pausing to try and gain some advantage i.e dodging snipes.

18. Don't host rated FFA or rated X v Y games, (uneven games)

19. Don't play on multiple accounts in FAF

20. Using any script to alter information shown to the lobby/client or game

21. Using a mod (or any other way) on a map with random spawns that shows exactly which player has which start point and faction.

22. Using ctrl+K to avoid taking damage on the unit wreck.

23. Intentionally transferring unit control to allies to mess with enemy unit orders, targeting, recharge rates or to gain any other unintended advantage.

24. Transferring Novax satellite ownership and destroying it for resources

25. Building higher tier hives directly using exploits, instead of upgrading them

26. Artificially increasing unit speed by any means

27. Using any method to prevent opponents from building or producing without physically blocking the area with units.

If it's not here, report it. Send a pm to moderation team with a description and a replay.

Please report instances of these exploits via our report form here or contact a moderator.

Changelog:
5th May 2021 - Added point 27, broadened the scope of point 23.
2nd June 2021 - Removed exploit of blocking nukes with Novax, balance team concluded it is balanced with related costs for doing so.
30 Aug 2021 - Reworded 19, game -> FAF
22 March 2022 Added new point 27.

You mean this?

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.