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.

@sheeo said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

@jaggedappliance said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

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.

Trolling, lying, derogative behavior, being argumentative just for the sake of it. I don't think this is so hard to come to an agreement about.

Just using swear-words is clearly too low of a bar, though.

Trolling is not an easily agreed upon judgement, nor is arguing just for the sake of it in many cases. Lying is of course extremely negative behaviour. Derogative behaviour I assume means insults which is not always toxic in my opinion, it depends on the insults and where they are directed e.g. are they personal or aimed towards an idea or towards some very negative behaviour.

In reality all this thread has done has put out the serious disagreements from within the council into the public. It doesn't look good and I don't see where this is heading at the moment.

Please don't recommend the icon mod to new players, whatever you do. If people have played for a while and they want to switch, whatever. If they are not even used to the default icons do not suggest they switch because you personally like them.

I play FAF and no one there demands to turn on friendly fire.

To my map pool I say, Boo-urns.

To the original point, there is a branch called FAF Beta which could be used for any kind of changes without the need to make a mod. You will need to use git however.

@Jip
On the point of EQ, it was a total overhaul balance mod. Every single unit was touched in some way, and many mechanics as well. The only way it could exist was as a mod. It even became a rated mod at some point. I had exotic_retard on the balance team and wanted him to implement things like the mobile factories. It is in no way the balance teams fault that mobile factories only made it into the game many years after they were in EQ. We never stopped anyone from implementing this feature, I even tried to get it made. Maybe you could blame us for not having the technical skills to do it. Should we have just let Ithilis balance the whole game himself? That's what having no bureaucracy would mean I guess. In the beginning it was a dictatorship with no bureaucracy, and we got engy mod and T3 MAA which moved FAF away from FA in a big way.

It's silly to characterise the balance team as some group dedicated to balancing only for the top 50 players and the benevolent game team is out here trying to make the game fun for all. You have no greater mandate from the players than the balance team does. Everyone who works on the game wants their stuff to get in. Someone has to be able to say no, especially to game content. Someone should have said no to the reclaim pausing feature for example, a broken feature implemented with an engine patch. Someone had to say no to snipemode.

Your development of a low stakes feature like a painting tool will of course be much smoother than introducing a whole new unit. If you think these things should work the same, we would already have many new units. We may even have Nomads implemented. Also just a note, the game is designed already. There is no role of game designer available. I was in charge of balance for a few years, I'm not a game designer and that wasn't the role.

I do think the balance team is somewhat dysfunctional, I think there are way too many talkers(who don't know enough) and not enough doers. I think there can be a no first approach rather than considering things and trying something. It's definitely frustrating to deal with as the game guy but I think it has to exist to provide oversight on what gets into the game.

I think there's a fundamental issue around what FAF is as a project. On one hand it is an open source development project that people want to work on and learn on but it's also a multiplayer lobby where substantial numbers of people have been playing for 10+ years. It's a unique situation.

There's no reason to change this. UEF gets the regular T2 engy and it gets a T2 field engy. Field means not in the base. Sparkies are really good units with big upsides over t2 engies like hp, speed and buildpower. What's the point in allowing them to build everything when you have a unit for that already? Don't close the gap between 2 units on the same roster which are almost identical.

Optimistic signup.

There's a parameter for it, StrategicIconSortPriority.

Somehow your take is that auto oc is more 'playing the game' than manual oc. Incredible.

@Skrat said in Is Faf outside politics? Or is it a blatant lie?:

@Syndicus Would it have been funny if the footage of the death of the American military had been used for the clip?

Yes. I have no idea why you think it was a specifically targeted selection rather than just a recent famous clip.

It shouldn't have been shown on the official FAF stream but let's not turn it into something different than what it was.