if only we could point out minor misunderstandings without aggression, we would be having a productive conversation instead of an antagonistic one

I wanna know - why would you consider leaving FAF? I'm talking about new players leaving, not older players.

FAF has a big problem retaining new players. We actually get a decent stream of new players in all of the time but we lose them quickly - 90% of new FAF players will be gone after 2 years. And for this reason that I have not spent any time making FAF ads (like I said I would in my promo councilor application) or doing serious work on the website. The best way to help FAF grow is to retain players.

So why do we have so many players leave? Well it's hard to know for sure but there are some obvious things to try:

• experience for new ladder players was demoralizing (getting matched against 1300 rated players etc)
• toxic and abusive players
• get crushed in team games
• steep learning curve
• lobby simulator

I think what would be good for FAF is to have some sort of "kindergarden" process where new players are babied for a while - their experience unfolds in such a way that they have positive experiences. So for example they could only match with other new people for a while, or they have to be able to be Sorian Rush AI once before they can unlock the rest of the game. Or there are dedicated helpers who can join the kindergarden games to offer advice. Or there are dedicated noob games automatically hosted, where you cant join unless you are in kindergarden. Or we could give them a properly organized training course, set their expectations. You need to be able to do this this this before you can expect to compete on Setons. Or we could put them in the kindergarden discord. Or we could put them in a same-language discord where they can voice-chat to people in their own language. Or we could auto enrol them into some clan. And you can skip the whole kindergarden process if you want. The idea is that we are trying to create an early positive experience to overcome the pain points.

TMM was meant to improve a lot of the pain around getting games so I'm interested in seeing if that helps at all (although I might have to wait 2 years...)

So does anyone have any ideas how we can retain our new players?

p.s. I don't want to have big conversations about poor balance choices or some such - I don't think that is a big factor in retention of new players, that is for disgruntled pros.

EDIT:
Hey guys - yes I am very interested in hearing what the newer players have to say. Please voice your opinion and just don't worry about it when people debate you -> some of us are keen to hear what you think. Don't be discouraged just because other people don't agree. I made this thread to hear what YOU think, this is your thread! Now go nuts.

Edit: FAF is actually growing overall. I don't mean to give the impression that we are declining in numbers overall. Eg:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/287/is-faf-growing

I just mean that we are losing lots of our new players, and I want to keep a much higher % of them.

Hey guys - yes I am very interested in hearing what the newer players have to say. Please voice your opinion and just don't worry about it when people debate you -> some of us are keen to hear what you think. Don't be discouraged just because other people don't agree. I made this thread to hear what YOU think, this is your thread! Now go nuts.

LANFest are enquiring if we wish to help them raise money for charity. Is there a TD and two casters who are interested in picking this up? Besides the charity, FAF might get some publicity. This is the message received from tachyon:

LANFest would like to partner with the FAF Community to raise funds for the Children's Miracle Network with a streamed and produced tournament, likely Saturday April 17th at 5p PST.

It would involve mutual social media / marketing pushes, and some hosts and casters from FAF.

My thoughts were to do a few 4v4 Seton's Clutch showcase matches with giveaways (likely CPU's or keyboards/mice) to participants, but I'm open to ideas. Definitely thinking something more open and accessible and fun than a hardcore tournament, to encourage anyone that likes blowing up robot armies to participate.
We would need at least two casters and someone to help design the tournament. My role would be communication with the LANFest volunteers and production team.

I'm still waiting to hear back if Children's Miracle network will do a mutual social media push agreement as well.

Update, the devs will incorporate the NVidia fix in the next game patch. In the meantime use the "Nvidia fix" UI Mod - found in the mod vault.

arma for Archive Councilor 2021

This shoreline looks lovely and more realistic.

Do you think there is a tradeoff with realism? As things become more realistic they might become less at-a-glance clear. Like where exactly can the ACU walk underwater on this shoreline, is there any where he is blocked? Etc.

Lets compare that to eye of the storm, which looks more cartoony and less realistic, but is very clear. In a complex RTS at-a-glance-understanding is important because everything is already too hard without having to decipher the map.

I'm not trying to say that the realism approach is bad -> im just wondering if there is a trade off? Do you have to pick one or is it possible to do both.

I have altered the newshub format slightly.

Section 1 is this week's news.

Section 2 is previous news that is still relevant. For example in this case the SCTA tourney hasn't happened yet.

Section 3 is the archive. All news from other sections will be moved here.

Thank you @F-Odin for making this tourney and making FAF a better place

I think faforever.com could be a thriving interesting place for FAF players to visit. Right now it is pretty much a dead website imo.

I guess it is geared towards getting new players - but I think that could be done better. First up - who visits our website that we want to convert anyway? Is it some random RTS fan? Or is it someone who already knows about supcom and is wondering what FAF adds over supcom? I am guessing the latter. You see, every year a new wave of kids buys supcom and plays it for a bit and we convert SOME of those people. Our strategy should be to focus on converting lots of Steam people and retaining them. FAF offers a lot over traditional supcom (ladder, replay vault, auto mod management, etc).

So what I would do is make the FAF landing page something like newshub that shows thriving interesting community. We could soup it up to have more live stats (games played right now, number of games in replay vault, active forum posts, youtube vid, live casts). When a steam-user comes to faforever.com they would see "wow thriving community" then a big fat link saying "what is FAF" that would take them to a page explaining all of the advancements we have made over steam FA. At the bottom would be a "what is supcom" just in case some people made it here without knowing.

NVidia released a new driver (466.11) on April 14 which they claim fixes the supcom stuttering issue:

[Supreme Commander/Supreme Commander 2]: The games experience low FPS. [3231218/
3230880]

http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/466.11/466.11-win10-win8-win7-release-notes.pdf

However we are getting mixed reports from players about its effectiveness.

If you upgrade the driver and turn off the ui fix mod, do you still get an issue?

Don't forget:

Laticlave has helpfully made a UI mod titled "Nvidia fix" to correct the driver issue until we can get a proper patch out. Feel free to download it from the vault!

@femtozetta said in About Neroxis map generator...:

Map knowledge is mostly negligible until you get in the top 50 or so. You are vastly overestimating people's map knowledge advantage.

I think map knowledge counts for heaps in the 1500 ish ladder matches. I can rehearse the build from a much better player, but my opponent cannot improvise it.

Is it ad revenue or something?

Where do the faflive funds come from?

There is actually a map that performs a performance test. Sounds perfect for this.
https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=7232&p=71412&hilit=performance#p71412

Does it happen with no ui mods?

Hi Morax, haven't heard from you in a while. Please its hard to undersand, what news was hysterical?

Yeah ok, cool. I wonder what else we can do to light a fire under it.

@FtXCommando said in TMM Weekend:

What makes you think TMM is failing now?

Nothing, I didn't mean that. I was more suggesting, let's get on with the show.

And if a weekend is controversial. What about a TMM hour? We can find the hour with the lowest amount of active players.