Omg.... Thanks Nuggets for bringing this awesome mod to us!

It is quite rare to see someone have so much arguments and opinions that are wrong. Fascinating.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

The primary interest of the average high level player is to protect their skill-investement against any real or perceived threat.

The primary interest of any non-pro (the game is NOT their dayjob) player is to get enjoyment/satisfaction out of the game they play. The three main ways of getting the enjoyment are:

1. Having fun and engaging social interactions (competition/coop)
2. Enjoying the game (graphics, story, gameplay)
3. Getting a sense of progress and accomplishment (better gear, higher rating)
4. Gambling

There is no such thing as protecting a "skill investment", or even a "skill investment" itself, since your skill isnt really an investable resource, unlike time or money. You cant magically lose your skill to a few in-game changes either.

Your argument about protecting X thing only applies to in-game items like skins/weapons/armor, since having them lose their value means that you ruin player's sense of progress/accomplishment, effectively burning the hours they spent on achieving the said in-game item.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Grubby on the other hand is a pro player (that is an entirly different player category). He earns money by keeping up with changes, which is pretty much the opposite attitude to the majortiy of top rated players on FAF.
Blackheart and most other top FAF players are not pro players. In fact there have never been any respectable number of "pro players" in FAF. A pro player gets payed to keep up with changes to the game and to re-invest time to re-learn every change that happens.

And thats the crucial difference between pro players and normal players.
Pros essentially have to treat the game as a normal office job that allows them to put food on the table. This means that they are forced to side with the game devs (their employer) on pretty much everything, including stuff unrelated to the game, or else they risk losing their job.

You can find quite a bit of news articles describing yet another pro football/basketball/rocket league player losing his contract or getting fined over something like this:

On the other hand, we got normal players that play the game for the sake of enjoying it, and they can and will (and should) complain about anything that lessens their enjoyment.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Blackheart is probably a good example of the quintessentiel non-pro player, and his balance mod is probably on of the most conservative (conservative here meaning "if we just turn back time enough everything will be awesome") mod in the FAF vault. Or maybe its more nostalgia than conservatism, or maybe both, not sure. From a pro-player perspective (which i do not share), this would probably be seen as mostly a self-serving "i want to stay in my comfort zone" attitude.

You may call the "lets not mess with the core gameplay mechanics changing which will affect a trillion different sides of the game" argument a "comfort zone cope", but i prefer calling it a Valid Argument. You do you.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

On the other hand this is mostly just human nature. The average human is not mentally healthy enough to be a pro player.

Average human is, in fact, not mentally or physically healthy enough to be anything that is above average, hence the name average. Dont know why you even put this in here.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

What is also seemingly human nature sadly is the accompanying tone. And yes it seems that often the better the player in question is, the more "deranged" their elitism gets. Like imagine thinking that only >2300 rating players (probably the top 0.1%) should be allowed to propose game design changes. Like literally no game in the world is being desgined or balanced by the 0.1% top players of that game because that is a deranged idea.

And yet thats the norm for every single other area of human life.
We would rather have the top 0,1% surgeon to operate on our heart than an average surgeon.
We would rather have the top 0,1% pilot fly our plane than an average one.
We would rather have the top 0,1% designer make our new phone than an average one.
We would rather have the top 0,1% coder write our apps than an average one.

The question is, why is it videogames where you draw the line? The best players are always the ones who see the game situation the clearest, know what units are the strongest and what are the weakest, and what change would improve the game or make it genuinly worse.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

The problem is also not just about games. The "status quo bias" exists, which is normal human bias against any changes.
Whenever any big software anywhere on the world changes almost anything, like it might be the position of a single button, people flip the fuck out. They create discussions so unrespectful and unconstructive that you would think somebody was murdered.
This is sadly, what anybody that actually is trying to improve anything is constantly fighting against, and it is of course tiring.

The change in a design of a big tech software and the change of something in faf arent exactly equal.
One is made by a whole team of experienced designers and managers after lots and lots of meetings and tests.
The other is made by a few amateurs saying "Wouldnt it be cool if we had this feature"? And trying to shoehorn their idea upon a bunch of people that dont want it.

The people critiquing the changes arent the same either.
The haters of the design change on a random big software are usually a vocal minority, only a few people of which are actually educated on the subject of software design and can give a valid critique.
In faf, however, the said vocal minority has thousands of hours in the game, and if they are not eligible to express their opinion on the subject, i dont know who is.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

I can only say that i would (and have) stopped engaging entirely with people that I know are not interested in actually at least sometimes changing their own opinion or at the very least trying out changes before complaining about them. I consistently just ignore their posts in this forum, and i have no advice other than that strategy.

A bunch worthless yapping. There has been more than enough posts with actual arguments against the changes.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Last but not least, let me say that this video "Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros" is not a good video. It does not seem to produce any actual argument as to WHY this should be the correct thing to do for devs.

i Wholehearedly agree with you on the fact that this video is Not Good. It looks like that the man that made it has only a vague understanding of the industry and why games are how they are.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

That would be the level of respect towards all the work going into these changes i would expect from high level players especially. This is often not what is happing on FAF though. What is happening on FAF often is this:

"Lol devs ruining the game once again"
"Lol devs not knowing how the game works once again"
"Im not gonna explain what i dont like because its useless anyway, <insert untrue sarcastic argument that their opinion is being oppressed/ignored anyway>"
"Why are you even here typing as though you even matter with your stupid contributive mentality lol, go away."
"you are deliberatley mutilating the game"
"this is absolutely terrible, no wonder FAF is dying"
"i haven't tried it but i already know without a doubt its gonna be absolutely aweful"
<insert dismissive "funny" comment here>

That is bitching, bickering und bashing, not arguing. People talking like this have no desire to actually discuss anything, this tone is just used to shoot down something or somebody, usually in the hope that some buddies will come along and also bitch and bash it strongly enough for it to go away. Of course there are people that don't do this. And of course there are also players that are not high level that do this.

Once again, a whole nothingburger of worthless yapping and strawmanning. There has been more than enough posts with actual arguments against the changes.

@katharsas said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

And i don't doubt that some people have managed to warp their own sense of reality so much that they actually think they are being mistreated somehow. Sadly, self-victimization is en-vouge everywhere today, but it still an incredibly shitty attitude and it deserves to get called out whenever it is seen.

Yes, we ARE being mistreated, especially when an unnecessary naming change is being forced onto everyone even after all the backlash it got. There is no self-victimization here, only an objective observation of reality.

@cheeseberry said in Adjustment to the reclaim rates:

Why is the high level 1v1 ladder so dead?

bad gamemode

@cheeseberry said in Adjustment to the reclaim rates:

Are there some gameplay changes that could make (high level) 1v1 more popular?

no rush timer 15 minutes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

@blackyps said in The End of FAF:

I frequently see "there are no other high level players to play against, so it dries up" but when the game was new, nobody was good at all. How did these people manage to push the level of play to heights that nobody had played on before? Why is it not working now?

Honestly, it feels like your skill at games is decided by your genetics.
Some people get to 2k+ level or its equivalent in other games in less than a few years, some players get hardstuck in elo hell at <1500 for literally tens of thousands of games, like they just perform a script, without ever changing it or improving.
we should introduce gaming skill-based eugenics

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

Is FAF really in decline?
It is no secret that FAF has lost a lot of players this year. The distributed denial of service attacks last fall undoubtedly contributed to many people leaving. New competition is also responsible for many people leaving. Similar real time strategy games such as Beyond All Reason have been a destination of many former FAF players because of the lack of performance issues. However, I do not believe these two things can actually kill FAF because in the last ten years there have been many intervals of time where we have gained and lost large numbers of players and I believe that we can recover from them. These two issues though are largely out of our control and while they are hurting the game they are not actually killing it in my opinion.

Contary to a unpopular belief, FAF is not really in decline compared to the pre-pandemic amount of players. A few players quitting does NOT mean that the game is dying, only that the players are no longer interested in the said game.

It is a miracle that a 16-and-a-half year old game supported by a dozen of volunteers could captivate attention of tens of thousands of people for thousands of hours, and that there are players that are still loyal to this game after a decade of playing it every week or at least every month.

As for me, the three biggest deciding factor for quitting the game is still boredom (i have played it more than 4000 times at this point), lack of high-level players to play against (2400+) on most of the days of the week and an insane timezone difference (GMT+10)

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

Why has the game survived previous setbacks?
The reason FAF has survived for so many years is because there are dozens of players who have played the game for over a decade and have played the game thousands if not tens of thousands of times. It may be easy to conclude that I am only talking but the 2k+ community but this is in fact not the case. Every level of play has players who have thousands of games over many years. In addition to simply playing the games these players also keep the game alive by doing the following: They are active on social media platforms such as Twitch and YouTube and help bring in new players. They actively train and post guides for new players so that they can learn the game. They play in tournaments which the whole community can watch and enjoy which can also help to bring in new players. Even though these players may quit for several months because of server issues or to play a different game I find that many come back after sometime because like me they love this game and know that there is nothing else quite like it. This however, brings me to why I believe that this game may imminently die.

Not really. FAF survived mostly thanks to:

• The dev/balance/moderation team, constantly fixing and polishing the game sometimes unsuccessfully
• Two large casters (Gyle/Yuri the Professional) exposing the game to a huge audience
• A handful of streamers keeping the players interested in the game by allowing people to play with them

The rest of the players are pretty much doing nothing, just enjoying the game.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

Why is FAF dying?
In order for FAF to truly die the community which I outlined above has to start to disintegrate. The reason I believe FAF is dying is because many players that are a part of this community are quitting or are extremely unhappy with the way the game is being run. These players combined have contributed tens of thousands of games. In addition to playing the game these players have played in dozens of tournaments, trained dozens of players, and have written many helpful guides to help new players but now they are quitting and not planning on returning.

It isnt. The only problem is the lack of really high level players, since the old ones are kinda too old to play vidya games now, and the new ~2000 rated players are Not That Good.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

Why are community members quitting?
The reason the community is quitting is almost solely because of selfish moderation.

Not the case for me, and you are actually the only person i know that stopped playing out of spite for getting banned.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

banning and censoring players who use words that individual moderators do not like

Censorship
Another policy that has been enacted by the moderation team that is destroying the game is banning players for the use of words such R.tarded or N.zi and other mildly offensive words. Although some of the more offensive and extreme words are not words that I personally say I do not want to have a smaller pool of people that I can play with because they said something I disagree with. While these words can certainly considered offensive it takes 3 clicks to get rid of them in game, in Aeolus, or in the discord, if you do not like seeing them. Once again I will call on the communities ability to address problems on their own. If I do not want to play with someone who says these things or I have problems with someone saying these things I can refuse to play with them or mute them. Again I will state that you can disagree with my stance on this issue but this is what the community believes and once again their grievances regarding the enforcement of this policy have been completely ignored.

Contrary to what you might think, FAF is actually a game that is made to be enjoyed for people of all nationalities, ages, genders, skin colors, sexual orientations and neurodivergency. You can never know who is the person behind the monitor, and you dont get to assume that everyone's mental capacity for taking insults and slurs is like yours. Some people i know can legit start crying because you said something mean on the internet.

A game community must be inclusive and tolerable, at least on public resources like discord/aeolus/forum/games with randoms.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

The most dreadfully obvious and intellectually lacking counter argument to base ctrl k is "why should one person take away someone else ability to play?". However, this fact ignores the other 6, 8, or 10 players in the game that would likewise like to start a new game. Additionally they can still waste time and play on anyway it will just be for a decreased amount of time which is the idea.

That is because there are rules that exist for everyone's best interest, and you have agreed with them upon registering your account. You join the game to play it, not to ctrlk when you decide that its over, and since you dont want to play anymore, nobody gets to continue playing. It is NOT up to you to decide. If you want to give up, suggest a recall, and then, if team disagrees with it, just give them your base.

Other 6,8 or 10 players that died are observers, and as observers they dont get to decide to end the game because they feel like ending it. Actual manchild behavior.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

In my personal opinion high level players have a good enough understanding of the game to have the autonomy to decide that the game is over.

You dont get to decide that the game is over in a team game. You can quit playing it, but you dont get to choose if its over or not, like a little baby that starts losing in monopoly and decides to make up imaginary rules to instantly gain 10000$ and win it.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

Even the ban of a single active high level community member is near universally condemned because there are so few high level games. In the high level community almost no one reports for base ctrl k or flaming because in general these things do no bother us.

And thats a good thing about faf moderation. They dont go through every single game looking for base ctrlks or other offences, but only respond to reports made by players that were in the reported game instead. This means that you and your group of friends can do whatever you want in a game and not a single person would get banned even for most bizarre things.
The game actually doesnt even have a chat filter in 2024, which became pretty much a prerequisite for multiplayer games a few years ago. Think about it.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

The reason this policy is greatly harming the game is not because I believe that base control k should be legal but because the high level community believes it should be legal and they are completely ignored by the moderation team which has greatly angered players and has caused several to quit.

Again, the said group of players are free to do whatever they want within their community of friends, but they dont get to decide for other players when to end the game.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

The username rule change update
The single most egregious and selfish policy on this list is the recent decision to change the rules regarding username changes. To those unfamiliar with the matter the moderation decided to change the time jump between name changes from 1 month to a full year upending a rule that no one has had a problem with for the last ten years. This post was downvoted an astounding 44 times with only 6 non moderators in support of this idea. The discussion below included dozens of players grievances and suggestions but still the moderation team pressed onwards while completely ignoring them and they kept almost all the changes and were only willing to reduce the name change time to 6 months. Even still the moderation team insists that they represent the community when in reality nothing can be farther from the truth. This decision was the final straw for many esteemed members of the community who may never return because of this selfishness.

I actually agree with this one, but its pure delusion, not selfishness

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

What can be done to restore the communities trust in the moderation?
Now we have reached my main reason for writing this. I did not write this article to argue endlessly the points I have presented up to this point. The community has spoken on each of these issues multiple times. I have written this thread because it is the moderation

You should speak for yourself, not the community as a whole. For example, i myself havent lost trust in the moderators, they still do their job rather well for free, just being wrong with some of their suggestions from time to time.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

I propose that Moderators have at least 1500 games at least 5 years of experience and for new moderators to have had at least 100 games in the past year before they are accepted. A possible minimum rating could also be discussed.

This is just flat wrong, let people volunteer if they want to. Also even i dont have 5 years of experience, and 1500 games can easily be ~1000 hours that are spent on the game, and not everyone has the time to play the game like some of us do.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

I also call for some form of immunities for high level members of the community as well as senior players that are not as high rated but have thousands of games.
Exceptions of this can be for major in game exploits or for other extreme misbehavior.
If a moderator enacts or bans extremely popular players they should not have immunity from being removed.

A high level/nolifer player is not worth more than an average level player with normal amount of games played just because he is better at the game and plays it more.
A contributor like sladow/jip/farm/whoever might get some privileges, but not ban evasion.

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

Recently Sladow (trainer team lead at the time) asked me to fix the trainer team avatars.
List of players who have the personal trainer avatar.

List of players who should have the personal trainer avatar

I can’t just compare these two lists because the usernames are different. Autopsy- has the avatar, but is he supposed to? I have to look up the account Autopsy- and then look up his old usernames, and only then can I figure out it’s (probably) Grimplex. It might not even be grimplex, because what if he username traded with someone at some point?
Now say Grimplex didn’t have the avatar but was supposed to. I look up the name Grimplex and there are no results. Okay so he uses a different name at the moment. I look up all accounts which have ever had the username Grimplex and there are multiple results. Now I have to go through account by account to make an educated guess which one of these is actually the person I want to grant the avatar to. Now repeat this for potentially all 14 members of the trainer team.

This is such a tiny and rare scenario that has absolutely nothing to do with renames being once every month instead of once every seventy light years. Almost all of the players have exactly the same names on both lists, and it will take approximately 30-45 seconds to look up the other 3 that changed their names.
Alternatively, just ask sladow about it, like FTX said earlier.

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

This has come up multiple times in our internal discussions. Personally I think it's the worst of both worlds. It doesn't solve our main concern in that you have to take extra steps to determine who someone is. If you've gone so far as to pull up the account data it's only one extra click to see their name history. Heck accounts already have IDs, they're just not easy to pull up. Let's say I told you that account 118363 did XYZ. Does that give you any useful information? No, because you have no idea who account 118363 is. Well that's Giebmasse/Viba. You'd have no way of knowing that unless you exhaustively went through accounts one by one until you found a matching ID. Are you expected to now memorize a 6 digit number for each player you might want to identify?
In my opinion (which isn't necessarily held by the rest of the moderation team) adding an ID section like that, especially in the lobby, just adds more visual garbage without actually solving anything.

Believe it or not, but you actually do not have to memorize anything to moderate effectively. the Silent Majority of the players do not have similiar usernames that are abusing I's and l's, and you can punish them just by comparing two names: one in the report, one in the game that was reported.
And for the players with similiar names, just add these ID numbers to the left of f11 disconnection menu or somewhere else hidden, so they dont clutter the normal UI.

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

a mere 40 downvotes in a community of thousands is a near useless measure.

Then go ahead, send an email with a survey to every single email that was used to register a FAF account, and ban people that refuse to respond within 1-2 weeks.
I dont get why do you complain about only 40 downvotes on a random post made on a forum that is only visited by a small percentage of people.

Why does the most popular MrBeast video have only got 18m likes with 617m views? Thats less than 3% of people that liked the video.
Did the rest hate it? Should he take the video down?

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

When I and some of the other moderators wrote this proposal, we never expected this to become a big deal. I'm honestly trying to avoid the "us vs them" mentality and to understand where this hate is coming from. I've done my best to outline what issues this has been causing and why we've gone in this direction. The responses thus far have mostly been "it's funny" and "why do you even need to know who people are?"
That's the whole reason for usernames is it not? If we truly don't care then we could go the 4chan route and list everyone as "Anonymous", but I don't see anyone proposing that.
Please, I'm genuinely asking, help me understand why a 6 month rename period is unacceptable to the point of having a 157 post thread on it.

The problem is that FAF lacks any other means of self-expression.
Compare faf to any other popular game. They have skins, tags, banners, badges, achievements that you can pin to your profile, about me pages, roles, unique animations and tons of other cool things to make you unique.

Hell, even discord implemented some of those, because they understand how important it is for some people to be able to express themself and customize their profile.

and you want to take away the only way to change your in-game appearance in FAF, besides avatars, that are not available to the Majority of People.

@giebmasse said in Username rules updates:

Just a small comment as I find some of the arguments already funny at this stage.
In a store, at the cashier, would you like the cashier to manually radio check 30% of all the grocery prices for all the people in the queue? No? Would the cashier like to do it, probably not. Would the store like it to be that way, no? Would anyone? Maybe a new person who gets a job out of solving those price checks all day in and out.

You wouldnt believe it, but i have seen this happen several times. When a cashier did not have a pricing list for cigs/bread, they just asked the other cashiers/asked someone on radio to come help them out.
It is okay to communicate with the members of your team.

@theweakie said in Username rules updates:

I mean from a mod pov i can see this as pretty reasonable tbh (without the player ids in place). I tell people apart based on stuff like rating clan flag etc, but based on name i have no clue at all whos who even though i would be someone with the highest chance to know in general.

Bad vision + bad memory, old man problems

@brutus5000 said in Username rules updates:

Maybe the moderation can give some numbers of the amount of cases related to this issue.

I dont understand why you people make it sound like a big deal. Even with the most broken identical names like barcodes it is pretty easy to differentiate people in the game to know which one to punish, because we have more than one unique player attributes:

• Differences in names. IlIlIl and lIlIlI migh look exactly the same, but you can still tell them apart by looking at the height of the letters
  

• Different countries. One barcode guy is from netherlands, the other is from america. Easy as that

• Different ratings. It is very rare to see people do this and have the exact same rating, so you can tell them apart

• Different teams. If the perpetrator is on the team 1, then everyone on team 2 are by default not them

• Different factions. You can see the factions in the game and in the client, so if the offender is playing UEF, all the other faction players are probably not him

• Different colors. I assume no one is moderating with team colors on

• Different clans. Not every single person is from SNF, so you can tell them apart using the clan tag

I would have absolutely no problems in discerning who's who using these points, and if the names are TOO similiar (like barcodes) just punish both players and problem solved.

@jip said in Time to move on:

I'd love a detail or two on the game features before you go !

Here's some i could remember:

• The inability of balance team to properly (in my opinion) balance units, creating very frustrating situations in the game. For example, losing the navy as cybran is 10 times more devastating than losing the navy as aeon/sera/uef, because you do not have any hover units to fight off navy. Your torp acu/wagners/non-hover engineers get instantly hard countered by destros and subs, and the only viable land-to-navy weapon, t2 arty, has the worst accuracy in the game.
  It also takes 10 months for them to fix obviously overpowered units, like tempest, ahwassa, t3 subs, telemazer, salvation, mercy, or even aeon t2 arty that had double damage a few years ago.

• This change, that pretty much disables seraphim or cybran players from drawing uef/aeon players on t2 stage, or drawing people turtling under shields. It also makes it impossible to stop a huge pillar/blaze/obsidian army from killing your base after they snipe your acu, while a rhino/yenzyne/ilshie army would get completely destroyed.
  

• The new area reclaim replaces the hugely apm-dependent manual reclaim in most cases, only exceptions being BOs on maps with a billion trees inbetween mexes that you need to manually reclaim, and big rocks/wrecks placed far away from each other.
  At this point, just turn the game into an autobattler that randomly wins the game for one of the players.
  As bully said: "The player's intention is to win the game. Thus, a perfect AI should be created to win every game for them. I think this will best convey a player's intention when playing the game."

• This change
  

@theweakie no I'm hijacking this one

I'm quitting forged alliance forever forever as well.
For the last few years the game has been slowly dying, especially at higher ratings, and lately i found myself enjoying playing it less and less.
Hosting games became increasingly hard, and nowadays it is pretty much impossible to get a good high quality game on weekdays, or sometimes even on weekends if TheWheelie is not streaming.
Add to it progressively worsening rules/game features (there have been a lot of good changes too) and the game becomes simply not worth to play anymore.

Cya,

~Terarii

@archsimkat that kinda kills the need for names, why even use them if theres a handle that wont change

@cocainediesel why reinvent the wheeler~, just leave it as is

@cocainediesel your google name, the one that will be used in stream chats/yt comments/whatever

@cocainediesel said in Username rules updates:

Call of Duty: Every six months (you get a new name change token every six months)
Starcraft II: One free change every season (~3 months)
Fortnite (lol): Every two weeks
League of Legends: "You wanna see the cards you gotta pay the money" ($10)
Warthunder: First is free, all after $2.49.
AOE2: Connected to steam/xbox username (steam you can change as much as you want, xbox first time free/second time fee--also what masochist is playing aeo2 on the xbox)
Rocket League: Platform name (steam/epic/etc.)
Valorant: Free every three months, looks like LOL is going in this direction as well.
Blizzard games: One for free, more for fee
EVE Online: You will be who you are forever

Steam: no limit (also changes your name in around 100 billion games)
Google: no limit

@TheWeakie you up?

Search for people that only play 2k+ avg, thats the easiest solution i found

Use them whenever you feel like winning. Snipers have one of the best snowballing capabilities, and at some point they cant even be stopped by ravagers/megalth/t2 arty, they will just go straight through them

@tvnobby_starlink said in my photo of my wife talking to me welll i play FAF:

https://www.reddit.com/r/supremecommander/comments/17rrh96/my_sexy_faf_wife_your_alll_nooobs/