Hello everyone, today I'm announcing my resignation as balance councilor. I took on the role following Zock's resignation in February 2017 and formed a new team to work on FAF balance. With a lot of help from that team we released eight balance patches in that time with changes covering most areas of the game. I want to thank the following people for their work and support: Zock, Brutus5000, Petric, keyser, Exotic_Retard, PhilipJFry, Strogo, Mephi, Turin, Farms, Zlo, Icedreamer, Sheeo, all council members past and present and anyone who may have slipped my mind in the moment.

The balance team currently consists of the following five players; myself, Petric, keyser, Turin and Farms. Petric was unanimously selected as the new Balance Councilor with the approval of the Council of Setons. I will remain on the team as a regular member.

JaggedAppliance

I can sum up my thoughts in a single phrase. Leave it alone.

What do people define as toxic? I've seen this word so often that it is losing its meaning. In many cases people seem to see it as simply saying swear words. If this is the metric then I am as toxic as the next.

The request for consent to collect certain information is just GDPR compliance, it's unavoidable. There is nothing sinister about it, we don't even have analytics on the website.

FAF is also quite apolitical and not very heavily moderated.

Ladder is a lot more intense for me than teamgames other than maybe really good 2v2s. It sucks losing on ladder way more for me anyway.

It's true that the opening is really important and so is general map knowledge. This leads to convincing results on some maps. You will be very confident on one map, the other guy will have the advantage on another but this is not a big deal unless you are playing very few games. I can definitely see how it is a larger issue at lower ranks.

I think ladder players are actually really boring as well, I rarely have someone do anything interesting against me. Everyone is doing a poor copy of something they saw someone else do. A bit of creativity would go a long way towards making games more fun. It's also very satisfying to win in unconventional ways.

So there's a few things about the client that are really annoying.

I get disconnected from chat regularly now. Once you are disconnected you have to press a button to reconnect, then you wait for a bit and then you have to type in "aeolus" to rejoin aeolus.

There is no other channel to join except maybe a clan chat, just put me straight back into aeolus. Of course not getting disconnected is better but I'm going to assume that is more difficult to solve.

When I switch tabs in the client and then return to chat, aeolus will often be way behind and I have to scroll down to see the latest chat. If I have any other chat open it will show me that channel instead of aeolus, regardless of whether I was actually looking at that channel before.

Ironically the scrolling issue is less of a problem now that I get disconnected regularly.

The play tab does not stay sorted. I have to resort the games every time I look at the play tab.

There's probably more but this is it for now.

@pryanichek Don't worry about it, take a breath and see what you want to do. I hope you'll run tournaments and if you want any help send me a pm.

@emperor_penguin said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

This might include getting more good moderators by creating rewarding incentives for people to be good moderators, talking with the moderation team about implementing a better system for requiring ‘official’ FAF streamers to adhere to certain non-toxic standards, requiring councilors to act actually follow FAF's rules (and having them removed if they refuse), creating 'safe-space' chats, working with the FAF association to help give moderation the resources it needs to promptly handle moderation reports and moderate better, etc.

Some of these ideas sound completely unreasonable and/or near impossible to implement. Are any of these things under the remit of the PC? Also can someone please define toxicity.

accepting inv...

oh

I went through the applications and some responses for almost 3 hours on stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHyXQUIZNU

TL;DW I believe FtxCommando has a proven track record and has put forward by far the strongest platform. Morax's application was also solid and reasonable. Suzuji's application shows that he does not understand what the PC position is actually about and he is promising things which are completely unreasonable in terms of hours. A lot of his commitments are personal ones and they are commitments to things which he has no track record of ever doing before so they are not believable. Francias is the alt account of Feather and has no business even posting on the forums, let alone applying for this position.

In future meaning when?

Just to be clear I think Asteria is a lot better than sin or bluelands.

Some feedback on the high rated pool:

Tumulus - Haven't played it
Amoor - decent map no issue
Open palms - classic
Valenvaryon - decent map no issue
Vya -3 - classic macro 10x
Asteria - ok as a one off in the pool, not a normal 1v1 map at all, bo heavy macro map, 1v1 against the map
Bluelands - not good, very bo heavy, high mass navy map, one dimensional
moonshine - haven't played it in probably 8 years, don't remember it being good
cadmium green - decent map
eye of the storm - classic
Map gen 13x - who knows, probably not good though
adaptive sin - bad, completely non interactive map for a long time, macro map, nothing to do but play against the map not your opponent
crossfire canal - classic but in a pool with lots of other macro maps
gateway and rose - haven't played recently, another bo and macro heavy map

The pool is really unbalanced towards large maps where it barely matters what your opponent is doing. Just macro better or have a better bo, boring.

If you have more 20x maps they also take longer to play so they will probably take up even more of the pool in terms of time played, something to consider.

Ignore the news page.

It's fine, I won't be responding to your comments anymore.

I downvoted because point 1 completely misses the point.

"Aeon (double) shield + advanced range is easily the strongest combat ACU for its cost."

He said "For its cost." and you replied:

"Cloak mazer is way better, more expensive but definitely better. Saying it’s worse is insane."

Do you miss the point on purpose?

Your response to point 3 is also just dumb.

I made sensors today so keep your stats. The thread is not about sensors.

Aeon first range is honestly the best acu upgrade of any faction.

Put me down for testing.

Is testing done on the test server or the main server?

Novax is really annoying for people because it's an apm and attention tax. The guy with the novax doesn't have to do much to make it do damage but the other guy has to shield a lot of stuff or they ignore it and just rebuild after which is also potentially a lot of actions. Also it is really nice to have when you are trying to kill shields in an arty war and it's highly microable in that scenario. It is very expensive but not enough that you won't see it. It gives a lot of intel as well just as a bonus. The attention tax would matter a lot more at lower and average levels and it's still annoying to deal with at higher levels.

@Jip
It's not about implication, you said there should not be a balance team, there should only be a game team. I was just explaining some history.

I don't know what to say but it's completely obvious that when you work on things then you want to see them in the game. Why you would disagree here is beyond me. Linking a list of things which you made that didn't get into the game is irrelevant. I had plenty of things which did not make it too.

The pulsar thing is obviously the main point of contention for you personally here and I actually totally agree with you. It is the balance team's fault and that should not have happened. If I had been in charge I would never give it the go ahead.

Ok so the game is obviously designed already, It was released in 2007. Doing things "related to game design" is not the same thing as designing the game. Maybe this is an ESL thing, I don't know. Literally anything you do to the game could be said to be related to game design. Guess what, you're still not a game designer. Also please stop linking Extra Credits videos to me, I watched them all 10+ years ago until I realised they are a lot less knowledgeable than they let on. Just look at what the writer of the show has been involved in.

I'm not sure what the point was about the cybran nano. Just that that was game design happening? This is getting silly now but yes it's related to game design, but again it doesn't make anyone a game designer if they were involved. Also I think it was a bad change and damaged the identity of cybran.

Statutes are whatever. Let's be honest, it was probably written in thirty seconds. It reads like that anyway.

I'll tell you what I wanted to do when I was in charge. The first thing was to get other people involved so it wasn't just me deciding things. Before that it was Zock making all the balance decisions and to be fair he had a much deeper grasp on the game than I did. Then a lot of it was just improving shit units that nobody used like janus, mongoose, LABs, titans, blaze, obsidian, czar, satellite, restos, UEF destro(lmao), aeon frig, t3 maa, tempest, mmls and others. Very simple stuff, just make it not shit so it's an option. Some of these were very weak by the way, like you could be banned for throwing in this day and age if you actually built them.

One of my main missions was to keep an eye on what the game team was doing. I'm going to trigger people here but I wanted to protect the game from modders. Modders are often kinda crazy but very hard working and passionate. I wanted to try to find the line where we are still "developing" the game but we are also more or less preserving it. To me that means almost certainly no new units. It means watching for the next OP hotkey that's about to be added which will bust the game.

Sidebar on hotkeys or new commands, they're always presented as quality of life features for the slow playing masses but they are inevitably either useless or op and abused by the top players. Average players are not gonna add a new hotkey, they might not even use hotkeys.

So a big part of it was watching for stuff that was gonna skate through in the game patch and I did not catch everything that I probably should have.

When I talked about engy mod and t3 maa in the first post, what I really meant was this is what you can get when a modder is running the show. Zep put the changes in the game although he didn't make all of them. There would be no FAF without him so I have huge respect for him but he was also kinda crazy and he dealt with balance complaints by introducing new units, a new factory system and reworking every buildpower value in the entire game. And by banning by all accounts. It's absolutely a mod project from that point and it definitely meant losing a lot more players in the transition from GPG to FAF. It's impossible to know what the total effects are but I would've loved to see the game play out more without engy mod and t3 maa, Certainly the latter of those was not needed in any sense.

That's enough forum waffle.