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.

@lowki said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

I just played a game where the opponent build 8 novax then just whent around the map executing coms at will.

Me when my opponent invests nearly 300k mass (30-35% more than a mavor) into novaxes and actually wins the game by being allowed to do that

@jip said in Username rules updates:

since when is renaming such a vital feature of the FAForever experience that the first comment (with 14 up votes, what (!)) in this topic states that it helps the author decide whether the author wants to stay or leave?

I recommend you checking the Discord, general chat after this rule got announced. This rule is only the last droplet which lead to my response. I'm both tired and sick from the actions and I wasn't happy to be in the community for a while now, yet I stayed with the hope it might change and continued to contribute in several teams and discords. All these nonsense rules simply show me what direction FAF goes towards to, and I do not want to be a part of that if it continues aka. I do not support these changes at all.
Same for other players with things like "Area Reclaim" which causes the current mood, but I will not even start a debate here as you can check Discord again.

See these reactions not as a "this rule in specific is trash and it's the cause", see it as a "we are tired of every nonsense change and all of them together lead up to this" (Again, for more details, discord general chat)

@jip cool that you think checking the name history or posts is too much effort, I think otherwise.

"There are also no 'higher' FAF community members."

A member of the board is pretty much higher in the FAF scene than e.g. a trainer. That's what I was referring to. As in "higher instance".

@jip said in Username rules updates:

I don't even know what team you're a lead of (something name change something) but you like all the other team leads know that you can't possibly discuss every change with every community member.

Ye I'm Sladow, which you can quite easily tell by 1) my profile pic as it's unique and 2) by simply clicking on my posts for a second. There are projects like the FAQ or tables from the Trainer Team which should make it pretty clear. Also the tag should also do its thing.
Besides that, using me as an example for that is not the best idea because I'm quite literally the guy asking on several Discords about changes to get opinions of different players, basically representing every rating range from complete beginner to high ranked from different parts of the community. So yes. Before doing any change I discuss it with the team like other Team Leads, but I also discuss it with a lot of different people.

Also as I spoke with other "higher" FAF community members, FAF built in polls are a thing which just noone uses. So it's possible to ask a majority of people.

Also if a name history on the Forum is possible, that's also a fix to "who just wrote XY" so you don't have to check in FAF which is extra effort. Just a short note though as it shouldn't be the main focus.

I also dislike the "we're gonna do change XY and THEN wait for 10 user pages of good reasoning in order to revert them" mentality. As stated here and the Discord multiple times, the reasons are simply not good except for the tourney one, but there you can just not allow ppl with similar names to play.
This is not only the case for this specific name rule change as I'm speaking as a representative for multiple high ranks.

@ocelotfist After we've changed our usernames to "TheWeakie"-variants

With each recent action of the mod team, you're making the decision whether to stay or leave the community easier.

Men. Downvote the man above me for what he said. That's what we got Tryth for!

What Snoog does is not optimal imo;

There is no way around Auroras in 1v1s. Ik it's easier said than done, but you'll have to get used to proper micro the entire game and push your opponent enough so he can't get gun (otherwise your Auroras are ded). Same with air, make sure to scout eventually, at some point air is recommended so your opponent can't just stack up multiple bombers and onepass your whole army.
Now that the gun range ACU isn't straight up busted anymore, I'm not even sure if picking Aeon is smth you want to do when playing e.g. ThetaPassage. I do remember some games against a strong 1v1 player where I picked Cybran and he rolled Aeon and it was basically a gg for me bc of that one. So just maining Aeon on any 5x5 / smaller 10x10 maps is smth you have to think about for a while.

My comment above is referring to high ranked 1v1 scene. For mid rank it's enough to use your mass efficient, get reclaim fast enough, pressure etc.

@firv There is no other way to balance it really besides "just stay in your base if you know your opponent has billy".