Have I read all the messages? fuck no. Am I still throwing in my two cents? Yes.

Regarding the czar:
Most ppl dislike the czar because it feels "underwhelming". I've had this discussion a lot (especially trainees reaching from 500-1800 range) but the main issue is that they're using the czar wrong.
Especially low ranks see big laser and big unit => must throw into enemy base.
Meanwhile it's about kiting air units (while being covered by a few sams) and stacking multiple czars with the goal of winning air, if your opponent doesn't micro properly, the ASF will get one or two cycled by the czar stack => air won.

Just something to keep in mind and especially which direction the czar's purpose should head to.

From a trainer perspective:
The majority of low ranked trainees I've had over the past years struggle with the initial buildorder. It has to be memorized sadly and you usually see the struggle as most of the units they build are idle around the base. Giving the ACU a boost will make things worse as now they have to think even faster what buildings to place next

@Nuggets iirc the mod had quite some problems gameplay-wise when I played them 2-3 years ago. Everytime you reclaimed your own units or ctrl+k'd smth, they'd get transferred as well making it insanely annoying to play with.
If it's doable, putting in a criteria that unit X has to be destroyed by the zombie-player it's kinda a necessity

Trainer experience:
On MapGens my trainees (I'd say about 80%) are less likely to get depressed or to blame the cirumstances. On the majority of other maps they usually complain either about specific buildorders or about their teammates if they don't know the map meta. Basically what Jip explained already in detail.

Same here during the second game with farms etc. while he was streaming (prob like 2 weeks ago)

go

@Caliber there are multiple which are not limited to the ACU, yes. Such as ASF armor so the CZar beam doesn't oneshot them.
But the point is that the last thing the balance team wants to do is to add yet another exception. It's non intuitive and makes the game more complex so it's the last option you wanna go with.

There is no way to reset any ranking. Playing 1v1s in custom lobbies is the best option for you to either gain or lose points, so I recommend you to play some of those until you get the ranking you roughly want

@Skill-Issue If only there was a dude in the MM team you regularly talk to :psycho:

Sign me up, boss
@waffelzNoob !

Two cents from a trainer perspective:
As you (aka. the ppl somewhat following discussions on the FAF discord) know, there is an ongoing discussion about the classic "how do I beat turtles?" or other things were trainers most often just give a theoretical advice bc we don't encounter turtles anymore so we can't show a decent gameplay.
With a challenge account it'd give us (= trainer team) a chance of showing exactly these type of things, similar to a thing such as "Bronze to GM series". We could play 1v1 ladder (yes, I'm basically asking for an exception), downgrade our gameplay so we play without manual reclaim and stuff and point out the important things. Atm it's the only way I see for really showing it cuz I've tried playing against low ranks with my main account, but they end up either being intimitated, trying cheese or simply not playing "standard", which we could avoid with an extra account.

For challenges itself, I don't really see a reason why you'd need an extra account if said account has a unique avatar basically giving away "oh hey, I'm a secret high ranked going to cheese!", could just use the own account for that. For me it'd require the account to be somewhat undercover so the other ppl play normal.

I'm not sure if I understand this correctly, so feel free to interrupt me;
FAF still uses the ranking itself to balance matches and not the league. If you're 2000 rated but in diamond league, you'd still end up playing against masters / grandmasters and stuff.

The only thing which resets is the league displayed, but it has no impact on the game balance / quality, it's purely for decoration atm. So yeah, FAF doesn't just forget your skill or ranks you lower, just keep in mind your ranking number matters and not the leagues.

It's allowed

@InsidiousNoob said in Seasonal / Regular Tournaments:

Take that Sladow.

:C

My two cents (Mostly my personal opinion and not a summary of what others told me):

• Tourneys are often not fun because of the players in them.
  Not everyone likes each other - what a shocker, right? If I see a 1v1 tourney with ppl I dislike playing against me, my motivation drops. Why? Bc if I lose, there will be shittalk or references 24/7 (see Mr. Riot who linked a random PoR game we had against each other everytime he had the chance to), so this one is rather about the risk-reward situation and prestige/image (and I know other high ranks feel this as well bc I've talked to them about this). Or see teamgame tourneys, if you land in a team of ppl which you simply dislike causing a drop in motivation (e.g. last Rainbow Cup where Rowan wanted to pick me).

• The prices compared to the effort
  LotS gets the biggest part of FAF's prize pool. I think I do remember the number for this year, but as it wasn't public information I'll just say: Please correct me if I'm wrong.
  The tourneys I've played in started at around 3pm for me and finished at around 1 or 2 am. It's insanely exhausting to play, time consuming and if the prize is 25$ for the 1st team in a 2v2 together with the "Tournament winner" avatar, personally I don't see a reason why I should spend 10 hrs of nonstop FAF. It's mostly about prestige / image for me there.
  For LotS the main issue (which was already talked about) is that the best players only become active shortly before the tourney and inactive afterwards again, meaning you either have to beg for 1v1s or you literally cannot train properly for that limiting the chances to win by a large amount which further kills motivation.

• Weird rules / behaviour from TDs
  See moderation talk about this though. just my personal thing that I won't participate in tourneys from TD X anymore bc of reasons. Besides that rating cap is a system I dislike bc you most often can't sign up with friends and the tournaments are usually dominated by underranked people from that time - like Farms' team in the last tourney (even though they forfeited for reasons which don't matter here). No point in me playing if I already know who'll win.
  Also the fact there are TDs still not realizing that TMM ranks are highly inflated so every decent high ranks purposely drops to not be overranked in tourneys - I can name at least 4 right now and show their graphs if I wanted to.

These were just random things I could've thought of, if you wanna know more details about ranking cap / which rankings to take / formats / maps, ask me in VC.

Well, everything has an end. And after 15 years of Supreme Commander and many years of FAF, I decided to leave the community without any plans of coming back. I'm proud of the guides and other content I / we have created in collaboration with the Trainer Team over the years. I hope these resources will continue to be helpful for new players getting into the game (@Trainers, I'm proud of you, bois. Keep up the activity).
Thanks for the great time, even though I've had some disagreements and conflicts with people in the community from time to time, I hope you didn't take anything personal. Terarii, Yew (and probably 10 more people) I may have been rude or sarcastic towards in the past - I apologize, and I hope you can forgive me.

And for the trainees I've had over the past years reading this: Please keep me up to date with your improvements from time to time! Ofc I'm still open for questions in the future, just not on the FAF Discord anymore.

I know this part is probably not interesting for anyone, but I aim for achieving the same "career" in a different RTS game. If you happen to know good ones, feel free to tell me.

Thank you for the kind Discord DMs, they do mean a lot to me!
Cya,

~Sladow

@sainserow
I do not have the knowledge if you can just re-create maps with spawns or if there are problems with the permissions to do that;

Overall usually the technical things are not the limit, the manpower is.
If you have any map suggestions, you can always reach out to me via Discord (Or another Matchmaker Team member), I'll take a look and if something seems good, I'll post it in the MM team channel. Applying is also always an option.
I'll stop posting here for now as I want to wait until someone with more knowledge than I do responds, just FYI so it doesn't seem like I'd just ignore you.

There are already quite some lobby settings, so it's not really recommended to add even more options "just because idea XY seems neat" (Without the intention of sounding rude here). As a mod sure, but I doubt that it'll get added as an option due to overwhelming people (keep in mind there are a lot of requests to add stuff as options).

@sainserow MatchMaker always only uses the first spawns and not specific ones. Adaptive maps won't spawn additional mexes.

@lin960 said in Username rules updates:

If I was TheProperWheelie, I'd be feeling irked at someone using my name, or such a close resemblance to my name.
So I can understand the reasoning behind limiting

If he wasn't fine with it he could literally just report it and we'd have had to change names, which is completely fine and understandable. But he was okay with that and found it funny as you can see from his posts and reaction.