I'm looking for ways to make life easier for new players, in the hope that this will prolong this game's life in the long run.

@Deribus said in the Q&A Thread that noobs are often confronted with the following problems:

• Getting kicked from custom lobbies
• Long queue times in matchmaking, and very imbalanced matches for the first 10 or so
• Few similarly ranked players willing to play anything but dual gap and astro
• Very steep learning curve

The #gameplay-and-training discord channel is focused on helping with that last bullet point, and I commend everyone there for their effort and success, but upon talking to the members, I got the feeling that the other issues are not really part of their mandate (which, upon reflection, is reasonable)

So could a similar community effort help make those critical first few games more straightforward to get, and also a pleasant experience? How did #gameplay-and-training get started? How were the trainers recruited and how are trainees finding their way there? How do big clans like ANZ or CpC organize so well to fill lobbies so fast? Does anyone have any thoughts on what such a community might do to help? Are you interested in taking part?

I'm thinking a good starting point would be finding people willing to host around the clock, build enough reputation to fill lobbies reasonably fast, and compete with the endless gap/astro lobbies for noob attention, with a focus on making a good first impression, but I'm kind of lost when it comes to the organizational part.

After having hosted countless all welcome games on randomly generated maps I can attest to the fact full share makes the games more fun to play, for both sides. Without it, games end at around 10 minutes, after the first player death, with no chance of recovery for their teammates, after some 2v1 or unfortunate first engagement. This drastic, game-ending outcome often comes as a result of rock-paper-scissors dynamics in the build orders (much more prevalent on random maps), not some grand masterminded strategy that could potentially be scouted and countered in time.

I am, however, dumbfounded by the amount of people that join only to immediately throw a tantrum because they see full share on, then begin to educate me on its shortcomings. Very few games have ended in victory for the team down a player, so the oft repeated argument that full share makes snipes meaningless just doesn't ring true to me. Being down a com and placing more burden on another player does not make the game easier for the losing team, and, at least around my level, it takes time for the the unified economy to compensate for these disadvantages.

I really hope more people give it a chance, and, as funk said, learn to adapt their decision making to this change in rules. Snipe economy, and press the attack once you get a kill instead of zoning out and going sim city.

I generate random map. Looks like it might be good, but the preview, it's the size of a stamp. A tiny stamp because I made 12.5km and it's got a big black border. There's this black gradient over the bottom that ensures the very interesting map name spanning 2 lines is readable so I squint harder than Clint Eastwood. No use, can't see shit. My old man vision can't even pick out the spawns if the map is of the darker kind. So I click create game. I zoom into the map using the NEW BIG LENS BUTTON and notice something I don't like. Close lobby. Go back to host dialog.

I realize this host dialog was never designed to nitpick generated maps, count mexes per spawn, see the difference between cliff and ramp and all that stuff. We didn't have mapgen back when it was made. But maybe it's possible to add the NEW BIG LENS BUTTON in the game creation dialog thus fixing it?

There's another point to be made regarding player experience.

Since without full share, you are usually punished with an agonizing and inevitable defeat when your teammate dies, sometimes through no fault of your own, player deaths are often followed by toxic interactions between teammates, "moron" tags peppered around the map and stuff like that. Full share helps a lot with this problem.

It also seems to me that people more often stay in the game instead of leaving immediately when full share is on, maybe partly because they want to see their stuff put to use. For one thing, this means defeat feels less bitter since fewer rage quit. But it also increases the chance that dead high rated players instruct lower rated players on their team, and that dead low rated players stick around to learn from their teammates. These are the only times casual players get to see high level play and actually pay attention to it, since very few of them spectate games or watch replays, and actually incentivizes high rated players to teach, since they can salvage their rating if they guide their teammates to victory.

These are not minor concerns. This community is plagued by the unreasonable popularity of maps like astro craters or thermo or gap. If a lobby features some other map, it's almost always rating limited. New players end up joining the only lobbies that will have them, the aforementioned shit map trifecta. Some never leave this comfort zone even after gaining a white rating.

TMM is one of the few developments in years that has a chance to change this, and, if I'm not mistaken, it's whole purpose is specifically remedying this situation. We should not overlook player experience when deciding how to structure team play. Even if it turns out full share is not the best option, TMM should arguably use it at launch to be more noob friendly.

@askaholic said in Introducing Mapgen Week on Ladder:

Let’s rename it to "Neroxis and Sheikah Map Generator". And while we’re at it let’s rename the faf client to "Downlords and Axels and Brutus’ and Sheikahs and All those other guys FAF Client"

Praise Neroxis when mapgen is good, blame Sheikah when something is wrong with it. This is the way

Is it possible to add a slight snap when building stuff if there are benefits to be had from adjacency? Same as mexes have but maybe less range.

I think it would be a very intuitive way to teach the benefits of adjacency and could help with sim city generally, like when building an air grid to avoid off-by-one bad placement (don't know if it's possible to add snap-to-unbuilt-blueprint but would be nice).

Another benefit might be that this snapping could nudge blueprints out of overlap with existing or planned units, this making base building less fiddly.

Maybe it could be off when adjusting queued blueprint positions to allow players to override this snap if desired.

What do you think?

I think progress since the mapmaker was publicly released has been huge. I'm hoping experienced mapmakers and high level players get a bit more involved with this project now that it's been brought back into the spotlight by the recent tournament. If I'm not mistaken, Sheikah had put out a call to mapmakers for help with the look and feel months ago, but I'm not sure how much attention it got.

I understand that inclusion in the ladder might pose some technical issues but I think they're worth investigating. Random maps are very noob friendly compared to regular maps: no meta, no specific builds - a level playing field. If the long-term goal is to encourage people to shift to ladder rather than custom games, ignoring the map generator's potential to help in this regard would be foolish; it's common knowledge already that many people stay away from ladder because they feel it's too tryhard.

I'm not advocating one way or the other, just wanted to point out that TML is one of the potential rewards when going for an early t2 com, and since it threatens such a large circle, it is the primary threat if one manages to gain mid map control early on ~10km maps or to do a t2 drop on 20km.

It's worth noting that TMD is one of the very few defensive buildings you usually see built preemptively by veterans, only other I can think of that comes close is a shield over your t2 power. All other threats in the game are better countered by units, not static emplacements, or afford defenders enough time to respond if the scouting is on point.

What would change if they were removed? I think, in some team games, guncom + spam would get a relative buff compared to t2com + fire base. I also agree with your premise, noobs would have an easier time overall, and while this can be said of any simplification brought to the game, this change would make a bigger difference than most for noobs

10 games were launched by it last Sunday, 17 players with less than 500 rating participated. I think AutoHost is off to a great start.

@jip I think help with the learning curve is already well handled by tutorial content creators and the #gameplay-and-training community. Giving those efforts more visibility is one of my goals, although I'm not sufficiently familiar yet with the landscape of existing tutorial content, especially in russian, and would appreciate help in compiling a relevant list.

I'm happy the programmers are doing what they can to increase player retention. I still think a more focused community can help where scripts cannot. For instance, a human host has the opportunity to be nice, gets friended more, then their lobbies fill faster. They have the ability to pick good random maps from all the mediocre ones. They can adapt their lobby size to timezone-related wax and wanes in the player count. They and their friends can direct new players willing to get better to those very useful resources I mentioned earlier, tutorials and the discord channel for training, and doing such would be easier if we were more familiar with these resources. They can moderate lobby chat and do their part to change the culture around kicking noobs from all welcome games. But most importantly, robots suck at making good first impressions and don't make friends. This is crucial to having new players return to our game rather than going and playing whatever the latest steam release is.

But there is one coding-related feature I'd love to see, maybe you know who could help me: lots of people don't mind playing with noobs among them, but there's no equivalent to the !setons rallying cry in #aeolus to summon them. Could a bot be put together for this purpose? Who do I bribe?

i know it's been talked about before but it would be nice if someone from the balance team gave an update on the mercy, any plans to change it and any difficulties with that

I like how the slopes are illustrated in these BAR screenshots with those contour lines. It makes the topography readable even when viewed top-down, but it's subtle enough not to be distracting or to spoil the look.

Would this help with the playability of existing bumpy maps? I wonder if it's possible to modify the terrain shader and provide, as an option, similar visual cues in faf, without having to redo all the maps. Maybe the density of the lines could be tied to zoom level as well, so we could see finer subdivisions the closer we got.

I'm not advocating one way or the other, just wanted to point out that TML is one of the potential rewards when going for an early t2 com, and since it threatens such a large circle, it is the primary threat if one manages to gain mid map control early on ~10km maps or to do a t2 drop on 20km.

It's worth noting that TMD is one of the very few defensive buildings you usually see built preemptively by veterans, only other I can think of that comes close is a shield over your t2 power. All other threats in the game are better countered by units, not static emplacements, or afford defenders enough time to respond if the scouting is on point.

What would change if they were removed? I think, in some team games, guncom + spam would get a relative buff compared to t2com + fire base. I also agree with your premise, noobs would have an easier time overall, and while this can be said of any simplification brought to the game, this change would make a bigger difference than most for noobs

My own suggestion is some sort of automatic announcement in lobby chat upon joining. Still requires significant work to implement, 4z0t would know more about exactly how much

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I think the decal idea @Blodir suggested is better than skins as a reward because it's immediately visible even when zoomed out. And part of the work's already done

@Jip knows more but i think the answer in general is yes with a bunch of caveats, footnotes and asterisks. What stands out to me as a lot of work is getting the game to render both vanilla UEF and reskinned, pimped out UEF units with special shaders right alongside them.

@veteranashe I'll do an acu for you if you pay me for a few week's worth of work haha

Aside from the client+server+game issue pointed out by @Jip we would also need an artist with lots of spare time, highly specific skillsets and possibly some graphics shader development to boot. Creating new textures isn't just 2d work if you want to do something more interesting; it requires creating an all-new hi-poly mesh that matches the game model, texturing it, and then projecting this highly detailed geometry onto the game meshes used to render that unit (lod0 + lod1 times however many independently-animated parts a unit has) to create the new textures. Even an otherwise experienced artist will be pulling their hair out before finishing a t1 scout reskin if their ambitions are to do more than just paint over the existing textures.

@arma473 the older I get the more I resent change, I understand. Have no idea what the leagues mean either, maybe we need some infographic to make it clear. I'll make one at some point. But the current system is just so absolutely terrible for new players. I'm confident that this change will increase player retention more than it makes vets quit the game, especially in the long run. And after mumbling about it for a week or two, us old men will grudgingly learn it and then forget about it.

@Pearl12 Comparing it to the monkeylord is a bit unfair since that's the ultimate rush experimental and it only manages those memorable base wipes when it's brought to bear early enough to encounter little resistance. But the balance team was afforded a luxury when making it so: cybran have 2 land experimentals so they could specialize one of them for early-late-game. Fatties, on the other hand, we should instead compare to chickens, GCs and megaliths.

All that being said, you are still right, I think. The fatty is more dependent on supporting units than all of those, since it can't tank and its damage is so low. This, I think, was also a deliberate design choice by the balance team, justified at the time by the fact that UEF had what was perceived to be a stronger-than-average t3 land unit mix, some even said the strongest, before snipers became so popular.

I think that by trying to make it's extreme range the defining characteristic though, the balance team sort of painted themselves into a corner. With this constraint, they had to reduce its speed, damage and health compared to other experimentals, otherwise it could just kite them too effectively. This, in turn, made it disproportionately vulnerable to air snipes and t2 artillery, as people have mentioned. To be clear, I don't think it's a bad design direction to explore, but maybe toning down it's range, projectile speed or shot spread a bit might allow some buffs to it's weaknesses, health and damage. As long as other experimentals, while dodging, can still take it down 1v1, that might be ok.