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.

Thanks for playing!

shout out to hybrid

WHERE ARE THE MAPS

@waffelzNoob said:

In my experience, no

gotcha!!!

@waffelzNoob do you think this about every game ender? Imo mavor/scathis don't really pose an issue but para/yolo are massive problems because aside from being good offensively they're also super good defensively.

Also compared to 4 years ago yolo's were massively buffed to the point were u used to be able to counter them with 6-7 smd's but now its 10-11 (someone correct me if i'm wrong but i keep hearing this from others) because it's no longer as buggy were it doesn't want to launch and/or engi assist is better.

Also if it was just sentons i would agree with you, but in the last year there have been quite some instances with different types of mapgens which let to the same situation as you see on sentons.

@Skrat said:

Not everyone wants to play one game for 1.5 hours, building 50 exp each, as if it were a t1 unit

that's not what's being talked about at all. I have seen tons of games where the optimal move is to make a game ender somewhere between the 30 and 40 min mark. The most classic example of this is 2 opposing sentons ponds winning their navies but 1 guy goes for a proxy while the other goes for a game ender (both starting at min 35 so its still "early" on in the game, not 1,5 hours in). It is way too easy to have a good shot at winning the game while doing nothing while watching your game ender slowly tick up compared to putting in 100x the effort in a proper invasion just to lose to a game ender.

Also it is true like ftx said that a paragon and yolo are the 2 main contributors to this imbalance. It used to just be a paragon that's op but since the yolo bugs got fixed it's now way too strong.

@Skrat said:

This does not happen on 10x10 maps or maps with a small amount of resources. This doesn't happen in a 1x1, 2x2, or 3x3 game. But if you are playing 20x20km slopgen, where there is a huge amount of resources, or Seton, where in late game navy gives a huge amount of reclaim that is building a game ender is an absolutely normal way to complete the game.

yea it doesn't happen on 10x10 maps, that's because t3 arties are the game enders on those maps which you do often see.

Aside from that i don't understand your argument about nto seeing it happen in 1v1 to 3v3's. Does that matter at all? We saw 0 game enders being build in LOTS so it doesn't matter that they're breaking teamgames!

If anything it's the opposite that if they were made more often in lower player count games it's an incentive not to nerf them because it would ruin the unit for those type of games, but as it stands you basically never see them being build anyway so that is of no concern.

game ender stage arrives too early. the entire design is supposed to end a game that is locked and nobody can make any progress, but you often see game enders being build in a completely dynamic game. Game enders should not be able to win against a team that's actively trying to play the game instead of sitting afk in their bases watching the progress bar of the game ender go up slowly and then win when it's done.

dw guys i got u with this beautiful extremely unique crafted artwork...

@Skrat said:

@Nuggets Bad is bad. It wasn't my goal to offer an alternative balance for each point. I've gathered the opinions of different pro players. Most people think it's better not to change snipers and sacu at all than to change it like that. Because it will destroy the balance at the t3 stage.

The other proposed changes are interesting and no one objects to them.

I literally didn't answer it because i couldn't voice my intent with a question like this.

I think that the sniper change isn't needed at all but i don't think there is anyone that disagrees with a more balanced sacu considering they are almost never build in any serious (tournament) environment. Rebalancing sacu's has literally been on the balance agenda for 5+ years at this point and everyone always wanted it to happen. Just because the current proposal of nomander is not well balanced doesn't mean that the idea for rebalancing it is wrong. It just means that the current iteration is bad.

This is why the questions you asked are pretty irrelevant because you only ask about the current iteration (which is on fafdevelop, a testing mode, for a reason) and not about people's opinion about the big picture.

This tourney sucked i did not have fun!!