I'd say it is quite important for the community to have good looking leaderboards, but they are quite lacking now imo. It's very basic/bland and doesn't give enough information at all. It's quite obvious when you compare it to something like the aoe2 leaderboards:

By far the most important one to add is the current rating. It is absolutely crucial to properly understand the players strenght. Most other categories are not as crucial but still very nice to have just to liven it up and give some interesting data.

The layout of the black row > grey row > black row is also a must imo. Especially if there is more information it improves readability a lot and it's so standard i'm surprised it isn't in the client. It should also be in the Coop rankings and custom games table tab. Just noticed it already exists in the live replays tab.

Currently you can see a players information by rightclicking > show user info, but left clicking does nothing. A bit weird to me but maybe i'm nitpicking.

Also speaking off the player graph:


You can see very vaguely see some indications on the faf graph but if you compare it to the aoe2 graph the constrast is lacking.

Also maybe an idea to mix the different rating graphs? Maybe it's personal preference but i feel like it looks a lot nicer. Most chess sites do it this way as well.

Also a little bug: You can drag away the information on the leaderboards without being able to get it back:

I know i was a bit blunt but i just think these would be some nice improvements.

Kisses from the big man

Sorry guys but this is a serious gaming community. If you want to have fun maybe try out the #memes channel on the faf discord. Thanks in advance

The problem

Most top players in faf use lots of hotkeys, as is the case with all rts games. However even though faf has tons of different possible hotkey binds you can use they end up being unusable for 1 simple reason: The lack of keys on your keyboard to assign hotkeys to. This is especially noticeable in faf because unlike other rts games there currently isn't (fully) a system in place to work around this issue.

Let me take Aoe2 (and sc2 to a lesser extent) as an example. Aoe2 has, just like faf, a lot of different hotkeys to work with. However In Aoe2 you have the ability to overload hotkeys which drastically improves the efficiency of using your keys to bind hotkeys to. You have a worker selected? Press D to make a stable. You have a stable selected? Press D to make a knight. You have a unit selected? Press D to make them go into defensive stance. Meanwhile on faf you assign D to dive your t1 subs and now the D-key is completely unusable for anything else.

Let me try to emphasize just how bad this is.

A UEF land fac has 20 possible units it can make. Just assigning hotkeys to those units already takes up every single letter key that's in a realistic range of your hand. You are somewhat spared by the current hotbuilding key binds that are currently available by being able to merge land/air/navy & build hotkeys together, but at this point you've only covered the basic hotkeys and already lost 20 keys. General unit commands like move, attack, patrol, stop, assist, reclaim, capture and repair need to be added too. Then you have tons of other often used hotkeys too like drop (from trans), OC, pause, repeat, launch tml, etc, etc. At this point i have only touched the more common hotkeys and haven't even begun assigning them for unit abilities, selection or other features.

The solution

As mentioned earlier there is already somewhat of a solution to this issue and that is the current hotkey combination list under hotbuilding. Although it isn't perfect, if it would be possible to add whatever combination of hotkeys to any button(s) you want it would already be a lot better than the current situation.

So what i'm envisioning is a mod with some sort of template that allows people that have no understanding of coding to easily adjust a few values to construct their own hotkey combination. For example You should be able to assign dive, drop, launch tml and enable/disable shields all to a single hotkey. What i think is most important is that there should be some sort of extensive instruction file in the mod for how to properly use it.

If anyone has a different idea or solution that's viable feel free to share it.

All in all the mod should allow of better competitive play since a better hotkey setup allows for more possibilities.

Honestly i dont understand why its so hard to understand. I play in this community to 1. Play the game and 2. Have fun with friends. If you remove a fun feature then ofc the overall experience is gonna leed to being less fun.

If anything, the fact that this apparently was such a big issue is only evidence that a lot of people like to use this feature. You have clans where people pick similar style names (snf), you have tournaments where players rename with their teammates (last rainbowcup where a team renamed to the 4 ninja turtles), you have random waves of renames of multiple groups of people which just creates fun moments for the community. I and some friends renamed to dave1 to dave9 like 5 years ago. We would all join a lobby only to hear responses like "aaah watch out here come the daves", and something like that would be the talk for an entire week because its a small community.

I personally have never heard anyone complain about this in my 8 years on faf. I even had a mod at some point join some joke renames as well.

You say that we're just here to see robots fight. Well youre wrong. Im here to see robots fight WHILE having a fun time with friends. The community at this point is way more important to me than any gameplay.

17/06 19:30 CET on https://www.twitch.tv/stellartactician

There will be a Q&A session about balance changes that are in beta (some adjustments will be made in the next few days).

This will be a mid patch Q&A which means no changes are finalized yet so if you have strong opinions about a change this would be the moment to voice them.

We hereby like to announce bullys disqualification from the tournament due to him having renamed and this will confuse the viewers too much.

I kinda agree with thomas on the point that the game is pretty linear/predictable and there's not a lot of variation that you can do strategy wise. Nowhere near the lvl of other rts games that is anyway. I do not however think that making factions tech stages and/or units more balanced towards each other is something that negatively impacts that. I'm not saying here that all units should become similar to eachother. I'm saying each unit should have their own unique strength that's good in atleast 1 scenario.

If we would go back to old balance then there would be tons of units that would literally never be made and could simply be removed from the game. Aeon t2 stage was so bad you would always rush t3 land. I'm not saying the old t3 land rush power spike for aeon was a bad thing, but the lack of t2 certainly was.

In an ideal world we would have both together, and it is kinda true to some aspect that some of the strongest units were made weaker to be more balanced. Maybe too much, idk, it's hard to tell, but i still do think that some of them were more than justified considering their dominance.

I'm not sure what your (thomas) idea is for an sacu change that would make is less linear to fit in the tech paths that exist in the game. It kinda feels like an empty shout that everyone agrees with. Let's make these units special and unique so they're great to play with! Sure, how?

Personally my ideal future vision of the game is that it gets unit upgrades, armor types and weapon types all balanced to make the game a lot more complex and interesting. I wouldn't even mind adding new units. You can make snipers have special penetration dmg against heavy armored units like percies while making them tickle titans, you can add an expensive upgrade to give spearheads a homing ability, etc. The problem however with this together with other suggestions that were proposed in this topic is if people even want this and from the general understanding i have the answer tends to be no. It's to leave the base game as it is aside from some minor balance changes. This aside from the fact that making such things will cost a tremendous amount of time and manpower which faf in general doesn't have a lot of.

One remark to the OP: I honestly don't know why you even wrote this. Balance team members, both past and current, tend to be evolved in tons of different areas in the community. They make youtube content, cast for FAFlive on twitch (that was co created by a balance team member), make maps, are in the matchmaker team, are faf moderators, host tourneys (some donate their own money), you can continue. Most are in the faf association as well.

Now why do you think these people tend to be on the balance team. Do you think this is because they care about faf and want to help it in some way? Nah no way right. They're just evil dictators that want to change the balance in their favor to win some more games.

At the end of the day everyone spends their free time to try and help improve the game. Now you can disagree with the changes made, but instead of screaming like this maybe it would be more usefull to start a proper discussion where you use proper arguments instead of going full conspiracy theory.

Waiting for the moment ftx can give his acu to me so it can be of some use after min 5

I think you misunderstood. You're supposed to delete all your maps before leaving

After 10 to 15 years of using the rating system i'd say it's way too late to change stuff like this tbh. Rating is way too ingrained into the faf culture and honestly it's kinda impossible to play without it.

Finally a new domain for grimplex

Just gonna answer the OP.

First of all i don't get the logic of ignoring the paragon because there are, in your opinion, more pressing issues regarding balance. If there is an easy and simple solution to fix the current paragon problem it can just be quickly implemented. Also some issues are way harder to tackle than others; A good example being the SACU rework which arguably is the most important balance rework but it requires so much attention/detail/time to work on it to properly balance it, in combination with the classic lack of manpower in the balance team, that it sometimes makes more sense to just try to quickly fix a few smaller/simpler issues.

Funnily enough out of the 8 issues you mentioned that you deem more important than the paragon change i think at least 3 aren't even issues to begin with and the other 5 are either as important or just slightly more important than the para change.

So clearly we have different opinions on what's important to change. You say you spoke to multiple people that agree with you. I have also spoken to multiple people that think para's have been broken OP for years now and the only reason why you don't notice it often is because game enders are rare to come across.

So who's to say who's right and what's more important? A ladder player would think the stealth/titan/othuum issues are more important. A teamgame player would think the novax/czar issues are more important and a seton's player would think the novax/stealth/paragon issues are more important. All of this shows that, going back to the beginning, it makes no sense to ignore an improvement to the game because somebody else thinks there are better improvements to make.

Now regarding the individual balance issues you mentioned.

• Mercies: They aren't completely ineffective, they can be pretty good, but it's extremely rare to see it happen so they should see some sort of rework yes.
• Absolvers: They are already super strong and are a sleeper unit that people refuse to discover. Thinking about buffing it is nuts imo.
• Czars: They are probably the most balanced air t4 in the game right now. They tend to perform relatively average but have potential to be absolutely insane because they're very flexible.
• Titans: They are pretty fine right now. It being weaker than a loya doesn't mean it's bad, because a percy is stronger than a brick after all. Somehow u listed the e drain as a negative while ignoring it's because it has a shield, which is basically always a good thing (the shield is why harbs are one of the most dominant t3 units). It also has a big role of protecting percies against slop while loya's have a role of charging into percies to try and stun them. Titans also have mobile shield support while loya's don't. I do agree titans are on the weaker side, but i don't think that's any issue given the current UEF roster (not every unit has to be as strong as another factions unit) and the titan covers a few specific roles.
• Spearheads: They are a great example as to why the absolver could be a sleeper unit. For years and years players in faf thought the spearhead was bad and almost nobody ever made them. Now most people see them as being too strong even though they basically didnt get a single buff. They should probably get a nerf though, it mostly being hp so its easier to try and snipe them like other long range units.
• Novax: nowadays everyone agrees it's an annoying unit, it's not really OP though. Just an annoyance that makes the game unfun, so it probably at some point needs a big overhaul (not just making it useless) but it's gonna be quite some work.
• Othuum: right before i left the balance team i already buffed the turn rate/maneuverability. I wanted to make it more but at the time ppl were against it because it would look unnatural (iirc)
• Stealth: not sure what to think. Stealth is super good but the lack of shields (which are insane) needs to be replaced by something good. Also after 30+ min in a teamgame you can't stealth your asf while building more asf if you didnt make spare pgens to overflow. 250 asf (a relatively normal amount) is -7.5k e drain. You also have to keep in mind that cybran asf are worse than the others without stealth

And last but not least: Paragon

Paragon is the most broken game ender and it has always been that way. The reason why it's broken isn't because of the game ender vs game ender balance, but because of the game ender vs non game ender balance.

Let's take setons for an example (it's very similar on almost all other maps but this makes it easier to explain):
If team 1 loses both ponds but have a mavor they still lose the game because the map control of the ponds is more important than the mavor.
If team 1 loses both ponds but have a scathis they still lose the game because the map control of the ponds is more important than the scathis.
If team 1 loses both ponds but have a yolo they still lose the game because the map control of the ponds is more important than the yolo. Yolo has a bigger chance to win though than scathis/mavor) since the assist buff it received.
If team 1 loses both ponds but have a paragon the map control is completely irrelevant and they auto win the game.

Now quite some people would say "Well you shouldn't have let them build a para" and that's one of the most wrong/stupid statements ever. Eventually lategame you can build a game ender, even a paragon, in a few min and because of defenders advantage it is extremely hard to deny it. This counts for every game ender.

The issue is that for every non paragon game ender you have a chance of winning if you don't have a game ender yourself, while this isn't the case for para's. So for some reason, for a meager 25k more mass than a mavor/scathis, a paragon is allowed to win the game while u sit and turtle in a corner and people somehow accept that as not being completely and utterly broken.

I've seen so many games, even recently one on sentons, where quite literally the entire team loses all of their slots over a 30min game. Mid lost, beach lost, rock lost, air lost. But because they had an aeon player they just gambled on a para while sitting in the corner and eventually they won. No other game ender even comes close to this being possible.

And once again this is purely about game ender vs NON game ender gameplay. game ender vs game ender is more balanced. Para's are insanely OP in this situation and it requires fixing.

Yapper out.

Wait till you hear about air units

I havent seen this issue since both crash dmg and ahwassas themselves were nerfed, so for like 2 years.

I just don't understand why we still don't have the right picture; the old aeon facs. They look imo infinitely better than the new one.

Other factions i honestly barely see any difference so without looking at the details its fine. Aeon just looks insanely bad though.

when is april fools over?

@magge said:

FAF is associated with a USK 12 game, so casino-themed gambling mods may be questionable. The casino mod deserves a discussion regarding whether this type of content should be associated with FAF at all.

Btw both terraria and dst (dont starve together) are PEGI 12 games with over 80 million copies sold and both either have gambling in their base game (dst has a slot machine) or in mods.

Also on official minecraft servers there are gambling elements as well.

What happened to the good old times of MAI in aeolus where half the mods were playing poker for imaginary chatpoints.

Did you know that on faflive during tourney streams lots of people gamble with chatpoints to bet on which player will win the match? Should we disallow that as well?

They're still insanely good, except that the timeframe in where they are good is smaller now

Seems like the td is no more...