Feedback should be easy and accessible. The more barriers to feedback you get the less feedback you will get. Low rate of feedback is bad. High rates of feedback is good. Quality of feedback will always be variable, and it is the jobs of the moderators and developers and designers to wade through the shit to find the useful feedback so they can improve the product or creation that they are making.

Someone might have a genius idea, or a really good perspective, but if the barriers are so high then they won't bother. As it stands you are basically asking people to make a mod to showcase their own balance suggestion, then get people to play said suggestion to showcase how a problem is solved. This is several hours of work, for the uninitiated and nigh impossible for the non-techizens in this community. Therefore, you have stifled almost all of the feedback that would otherwise occur. So this subforum really has no reason to exist. Makes your lives easy as moderators, but also means that there is no discussion here meaning the developers and designers have no source of information to draw from for balance changes.
Now if you say they don't read threads here anyway, then that's another nail in the coffin for even having a balance forum. If the designers / balance teams have no interest in community opinion, then feedback is irrelevant.

2. Having the requirement of a replay promotes toxicity in the forum as people will not argue about the merits or demerits of any particular suggestion, but instead how X in Y game was stupid and played bad, and how the opinion is by someone who is low rated and therefore invalid. Or its only a problem on Z map, or your a Setons or AC or DG player and therefore it doesn't matter.
   This is highly toxic behaviour that has no place in this forum, and that the moderators of said forum have, although being respectful about it, displayed. This sort of elitism is really not appropriate and it adds nothing to the discussion.

As it currently stands you might as well just delete this subforum and save the server company some money on storage space.

But then, when the moderators and staff members were the majority when it came to breaking etiquette, and shitposting, I didn't really expect much.

If you want a successful balance forum or an discussion forum its really simple, but it is also a lot to ask for a small community forum managed invariably by a clique.

Enforce etiquette. People cannot make ad hominem attacks, and people cannot insult others.

Enforce standards, people cannot shit post. There must be some content to a post. A post simply saying "dumb idea bro" followed by a meme pic, is a shitpost, and just derails the discussion.

Enforce staying on topic. Delete/remove posts that derail threads by side lining discussion or go off topic, or put said posts into their own subthread for discussion there.

Honestly if I did some of the things that I've seen from the staff I would have been banned years ago, no questions, no appeal. GONE

And this is why i don't get involved in the politics of small communities, because its a wasted effort.

@FtXCommando I think the MML thread was alright. The better point to be made is not that MML are weak at what they do, but that just ignoring them skipping to T3 and building MMA is just simply the better option in all cases, because MML are very niche, and are completely outperformed by T3 arty, which have a significantly better stat for mass to dmg/aoe/range ratio than MML. And the discussion progressing towards this realisation.

The strongest units are often the most versatile units.

Whether you disagree with an opinion or not, is irrelevant as to whether that post is part of a valid discussion. Unless, you want discussion that only conforms to your own narrative, and that is not something I think would be healthy for this forum not this community.

Sometimes, its the craziest the ideas, that are the genius. Obviously, before you hit that nugget of gold you'll pull up lots of duds.

The purpose of discussion is not always to garner consensus on a preproposed solution.

There are multiple stages in a discussion:

Consensus of a problem
Consensus of a need to resolve said problem
Consensus of a solution.

Discusion will take place at each stage, with varied answers/argumnets/assertions/opinions/etc. The person who provides the solution, does not need to be the person who highlights the problem and this is why discussions are so efficient in effecting organised and productive change, when in the correct environment that fosters proper discussion, as it is the coming together of minds all with varied experience ideas and opinions.

Discussion of implementation

You can do this in a variety of ways. I would need to go investigate more about the current implementation of some of the game featuers to give a more informed opinion about how this could be implemented.

From my current position and with the information I have. I would propose what I currently think would be a seamless implementation by adding an option for "ranked/unranked" and this option is selectable by host, and forces its application onto all clients in the lobby, this will disable the UI for UI mods and all currently selected mods are also disabled. Whitelisted UI mods are those integrated into the FA client already and any future mods that want to be integrated.

If your question is more about enforcing this to avoid people replacing integrated mods with their own cheated version, then I would need to look more into the implementation of the the integrated FA mods already. I suppose verification of the UUID might work, or have each UI mod on load send some data to the server, and verify its there, and if the data is not received by the server to disconnect the client, or raise a flag to moderators/admins that this is a potential cheater.

As a further comment to those who simply say "cheating doesn't exist" provide evidence. We do not currently have a definition of what is cheating.

Example of gamebreaking information modification:

If i make a mod tomorrow that automatically pings any t3 bombers as soon as they are in vision of a radar, even if the models are physically not loaded, that gives me a competitive advantage. In fact if I made this mod I bet it would be very popular to those who take this game too seriously. I'll call it the "Anti-Snipe" mod. It will ping the location of any beetles/mercy/T3 bomber/T3 solace detected within a certain radius of any ACU, and then send out a message into allied chat "WARNING SNIPE".

Obviously, this would drastically decrease the effectiveness of ACU snipes. It would actually ruin a complete part of FA gameplay.

Is it cheating? Well technically no not under the current definition as many other information mods are allowed and are not "cheating" per se.

Evidence:

As to evidence of cheaters? If i make a mod tomorrow that shows me the income of enemy or hell on the "mass" overlay incorporated other information about different units, this mod as of current is impossible to detect by observers or opponents and gives me an advantage. With such a basic observer function in FA and a huge amount of complexity when it comes to gameplay, it is very difficult to assess if people are cheating or not, unless they are overly blatant about it.

Why is cheating so problematic?

When a cheat becomes ubiquitous among certain users that have influence, they defend said cheat as a "normal function" of the game and deny competitive advantage. This leads to nothing getting done about it.

Auto-eco mods that auto pause engineers are no different from recoil macros in an FPS game.

Information mods can be no different that wall hacking (seeing location of all enemies) in an FPS game.

Essentially, there are number of users, many of whom are high rated and play in tournaments on a regular basis, who use these said cheats, and they find it offensive to tell them that they are cheating. Because they assume everyone uses the cheat they think it is morally okay.

@biass

On your question to do with evidence, please read above. It is physically not possible to detect non-blatant use of UI mods that are cheating. Which is why I favour a whitelist, as then it puts everyone on the same level playing field. The mods are integrated so that everyone has the same information and options.

On your second point, I would argue that any competitive advantage is cheating. If I install modification that allows me to select or configure or macro my units in a way my opponent does not have the same option of doing without installing that mod, then that mod is a cheat. The argument "install the mod" is facile. The same logic could be used to aimbotting and recoil macros in CS GO for example.

All players should have the same base starting point functionally wise in the game. If you have to install something which is external to the base game to be put on a level playing field then that modification is a cheat as it means one player has a competitive advantage over another. Mods are genuienly useful and provide QOL fixes can be implemented (as many already are) through a whitelist.

If the game is not-ranked then people can use whatever they like, so we're not squashing or restricting creative talent in the map and mod making process. This will also mean that UI mods have a testing environment before they are integrated.

Sounds like a useful addition, although the amount of lobbies open at anyone time waiting to be filled are so few, there's probably not much cost/benefit if the developers have to spend much more than a coffee break worth of time on it.

What are you on about? You just spam t3 engineers, they're more mass efficient and you make more t3 fabs before you build ras sacu spam, because of the lower build time on the t3 fabs. This means that you are able to consume most of your excess without needing hive spam, so you are probably delaying your overall build by about a minute while you pump out t3 engineers.

People just use hives because you don't have to deal with the bullshit dodgems where there is a 2% chance all your units sit their idle because one asshole engi wants to play smart and sit on your construction plot.

Also using Stec as an example of early eco times.... go watch some of the 2k dual gap players lol.

IF you wanna beat stec go seraphim get 2 t2 bombers and watch as he rage quits because you killed his t2-t3 mex, and his pgens. while he still has yet to even start a t3 fac.

@Brutus5000

That is how I thought it worked, and that is why I suggested it would be a seemless integration.

You're missing the point of my suggestion. If the server does not receive the notificaiton, that is when it flags. The only way to circumvent this is for the cheater to replicate the exact same encrypted message, which would require editing the FAF client itself and then modifying an integrated mod to incorporate they're cheated code. That is significantly harder and more effort for them to do than simply load up a local UI Mod.

@speed2 said in Cheating in SupcomFA:

Each post just confirms even more that you have no idea what you're talking about.

And unlike you, I actually know the game code in and out. I know what's possible and what's not and I've spend quite some time experimenting with it. Even fixed several real exploits.

Speed as it stands you're not actually contributing anything to this discussion, and as Brutus pointed out already my expectations of how the client works are correct.

If you actually wanted people to help you develop stuff then you instead of being condescending to everyone who makes a suggestion or who offers there help, maybe be more constructive or don't post at all. As it stands all you are doing is venting on another member of the community.

I've modded a much more limited engine than Supcom has and all limitations have workarounds. If you wanted to be constructive then point out the problems that would be faced with the implementation, and then alternatives can be thought out.

And I, like you, look for the easiest solution, because it means less work instead of more. And there is nothing more frustrating than spending 10 hours on something and completing only to subsequently learn that it could be done in 1 hour.

So the only thing we currently need to figure out is how to block out UI mods from loading and how to verify the integrity of the integrated mods. I've made a suggestion for both, you're welcome to explain why these are not possible.

+1 to OP. Unofficial tournies should just be able to run as unofficial tournies.
Would also increase diversity of tourny type.

If you want more offensive gameplay, then ACU need a buff. The nerf hit them hard and turned them into a turtle mess.

You also need to increase the power consumption of all t2 shields, and then decrease the build time for t2 fac and t3 fac.

SCU changes wont solve jack. Ras SACU are not problematic. They hare a 600 second pay back time as it is, which is 10 minutes. 10 Ras sacu, is the same as 2 T3 arty in mass equivalency accumulation to payback. The optimal income to build a para is 400.

Tele sacu should be made significantly cheaper, and other non-game ender expendable strategies should be made cheaper. As it stands the infrastructure required to counter Para or other game ender is very expensive, almost as much so as building the game ender itself, which leads such strategies to an inherent disadvantage as they have a risk to them, while building a para does not.

Sams should also be made more expensive. 1200 mass cost should suffice.

Increase strat hp by 1-2k. And you're golden.

Also you won't get anything intelligible from Ftx when it comes to balance discussions he is not interested. He has his own incorrect view. His job is to listen to the community and then provide feedback based on what we say, but instead he just foists his own beliefs in a very dogmatic way. Its a waste of time. I've tried before.

If that's the case then just draft a google doc form that people have to fill out for a tourny, and then you check its completed fully, and it gets posted on the tournies subforum.

The whole process is streamlined with minimal involvement and minimal requirements and it avoids problems such as "forgetting" to include certain rules. The rules will only be as listed on the forum post.

And if you are scared about "poor" TD managers, then if a TD flakes, just ban them from hosting future TD or have a strike system. Do it post the fact, not before.

If there is any prizepool for the tourny (obviously a different case scenario) then to streamline it and avoid fraud, organise a centralised system for this, such as all tourny funds going into the FAF or a subcompany account and is managed by FA staff,. in fact I think potentially battlefly already offers this.

@biass Suggesting, that a unit fundamental to the design by Chris Taylor is toxic, is spitting on his ideas. Are you suggesting we should start removing Vanilla units, because of someone's idea on balance?

Posting random meme's is really not productive here, nor is blatant bias among COS members.

Please have a rethink biass.

@arma473

Teleport doesn't need a nerf, you just need to build t1 pd on your SMD and layer your shields properly.

You need 2-3 SACU just to attempt a tele-snipe on an SMD and that alone is a 50k + investment on Sera only. Aeon would need 4 SACU.

Removing the ability to convert or upgrade SACU and having only certain presets, is restrictive and doesn't add to gameplay, it only reduces it.

If you want different movespeed then incorporate it into certain upgrades, and if you want to avoid OP stuff, then shove upgrades into the same compartment so they can't be upgraded together.

@Kweef_Chief_Noob If you're sacu are sitting in your base, reclaim doesn't matter, because if you manage to be in a position to kill several SACU in the enemy main base you've already won the game.

Increasing mass cost of SACU would also nerf them into oblivion.

A straight 10 mass 1000 power is better. As it is, RAS Sacu are horribly inefficient compared to fabs.

@Resistance On the maps where RAS sacu were a problem, you could just build t3 fabs at back of your base with sufficient sam coverage and gaps/shielding that bombers are not effective. The only difference is that eventually you will run out of space for fabs, but then if you're going over 500 income you're wasting your time anyway.

What's the point of having access to T3 technology if that engineer takes 3 years to build a unit.

Literally we're just promoting stale Hive gameplay where you sit at one point in your base and build 50 hives and make a game ender. This will kill any sort of proxy T4 gameplay that you get in team maps where naval /water is near the enemy base.

The reason engineering suite doesn't get upgraded is because HP etc are more important for most SACU, rather than an extra bit of BP.

I fear that all of the above will just increase the problems that changes are meant to be resolving. But I guess this is all yet to be seen once this is released as the new version so that a significant portion of games are playing on that balance patch.

@Freedom_ All that proves is that your opponent was incapable of bombing you with the 6k mass advantage, and that they'd rather run random t2 units into your com on a mass feeding frenzy.

For reference 6k mass in bombers will get you 16k dmg each pass.

@Deribus Usually when using Yotha in a land fight rather than as a suicide unit, I would either have it at the very front and supported by sniper bots or, at the back heavily shielded.

When Yotha is going to die you should push it to front as much as possible as close to enemy units as possible, and then in the space it creates you can fire with your sniper bots without enemy being able to come into range.

Sera have the strongest mobile shields by a mile, so absolutely dominate the range t3 game, so Yotha is a good space maker for sera range units like sniper bots or mobile artillery.

Seraphim have the strongest land units in the game, and the only faction that comes close is cybran because of megalith spam, but the critical mass of megalith required is unrealistic in a normal game.

This is all kind of irrelevant though, since you will never see huge t3 armies in a normal game, because its so much easier to defend than it is to attack, and game enders are so cheap, that the viability of large land armies quickly diminishes.

@advena Wagner basically is everything the t2 floaties are but worse, and missing the ability to properly damage navy. Blazes are much better at raiding than a wagner.

The stealth is pretty irrelevant.

@techmind_ If its 2gC v 2 Yotha, the yotha walk into the gc and damage the GC more than the ally Yotha. Its not rocket science.

@ThomasHiatt that would make Yotha overpowered. You can imagine you barely reach enemy base and it blows up, now irrelevant of that fact their whole base explodes because the death effect is now a shield avoiding nuke.

@techmind_

When am I ever going to be in a game where you have spent 300k mass on GC?

I think at that point you could have just built a Yolona then 1 shot them all.

Anyway, you bring up several points in your post that are some what disjointed.

As to ahwassa:

Ahwassa is also a very good counter. If enemy is building 10 GC then you would outrageously win air. You could get by on 2 Ahwassa. Although for killing single targets its more efficient just to use normal bombers.

As to the TLDR

Now you've changed from 10GC to 3 GC and 12k in ASF. if that was the case then you could coutner 3 GC with 15k ASF and the other 56k in bombers. For reference you get 250 dmg a pass on t1 bomber which is roughly 2.7 dmg per mass. So for 56K mass you get about 150k frontload damage. Meaning you would kill 1.5GC per pass. So you can kill 3 GC in 2 passes, this would be 620 or so t1 bombers. Or you could use 100 Notha which is roughly 40k mass. Or 30 Sintha which is about 60k mass.

I mean at this point you could also just kill the GC with a t3 mix of sniper bots and shield bots. Or you could use OC Sacu. There's lots of choices for Seraphim.

Spamming all mass on only GC is very dumb, and you won't ever see that in a game, you will see mixed armies, such as GC with mobile shields, flacks, and some sniper bots, or Harbs.

As it currently stands a Yotha can already kill 2 GC with some support of T3 mobile shields. And Yotha is much better than a GC at killing t3 clumps. So this may inadvertantly cause Yotha based t3 armies to dominate at the earl T4 stage.