@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.

I was gonna link to his twitch but I guess he doesn't save past broadcasts. I did see it though and so did Bully.

There were major server changes in February 2016 which led to rating bugs so that's why you see almost all the lowest ratings being recorded then.

Why are you using slots 3/4 for desert joust?

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.

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.

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

I just wanna note that the league system is currently not working.

@sheikah said in Client Problems:

For the chat showing older messages the client should scroll you to your last seen message similar to how discord works.

Yeah it often just takes me way back to the same point over and over and I have to scroll down again.

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.