They try to make you feel like you accomplished something, and release feel good chemicals in your brain. That way you will become addicted to FAF.

Is it possible to just have a target priority window that works with UI scaling without changing and breaking the entire UI of the game?

I don't think playing the game is inherently satisfying. When I play competitive games, I do so because it is satisfying to learn new things, improve at the game, and defeat increasingly stronger opponents. Once the learning and improvement have plateaued the game is no longer fun. There is generally nothing useful to be learned by extending the game time unnecessarily, so the optimal thing to do is win the game and go on to the next stronger opponent where you can actually improve and learn something. If the opponent is strong there will be no way to win in 15 minutes because they do not make game losing mistakes in the first 15 minutes. With stronger and more balanced opponents the game will naturally last longer.

It is a quantity vs quality debate, which gamers seem to be particularly confused about. Gamers typically want to spend money to receive a product which will occupy the largest amount of their time. Alternatively, you can spend time in order to receive concentrated quality experiences. If you value your time then you would prefer to watch many good, unique, short films as opposed to 4 hours of bloated fan service. What do you value more between time, money, and quality of experience? Do you just want something to keep you occupied until you die or do you want to have a variety of quality experiences? I tend to feel bad about myself when I think I've "wasted" a large amount of my life, but I actually think that all approaches are fine and it doesn't really matter in the end.

@insidiousnoob said in Matchmaking Seasonal Prizes:

Long-Term Activity Grind: Unlike a tournament, where players are highly active for just a week, this system encourages sustained engagement and long-term participation throughout the entire season.

The benefit of tournaments is that they are likely to bring inactive players back, for a brief period of time. If the tournament is enticing enough they will practice a bit beforehand, play the tourney, and maybe play a little after before returning to inactivity. Another benefit of tournaments is that people like to watch and cast the games, which results in good content to support the community and potentially attract new players.

A ladder event is probably not enticing enough to bring inactive players back. It will just make the existing ladder players play more games. People also don't seem that interested in watching or casting random ladder games, since many of them will be low quality, so you don't get the content you would from a tourney.

It would seem that even the $600 Summer Invitational was not enticing enough to bring back inactive players though, so if FAF has extra funds they might as well be used for ladder events if there are no better ideas.

I don't really know if encouraging people to grind ladder is all that beneficial. Other games want you to grind because they want lots of daily active users to impress shareholders and sell cosmetic items to. People should play FAF for fun because they are intrinsically motivated to do so, not because someone manipulated them with a division system and possibility to win $50 after months of grinding. However, there does need to be a minimum amount of activity in the matchmakers so that people who want to play games can find them reasonably quickly. I would personally feel like an unethical psycho if I spent $600 to make people grind ladder though.

The competitive scene seems pretty dead judging by the lack of interest in the Summer Invitational. I think they should have just gone ahead with whatever players wanted to play though rather than gatekeeping them just because some old AFK pros didn't want to show up to crush them. If you prevent the up and comers from playing they'll never be able to replenish the ones who left.

FAF players love it when simulated missiles and simulated shells randomly collide with simulated air planes, probably costing you the simulated game.

FAF players hate it when you suggest normal simulated weapons should collide with the simulated units in reasonable and predictable ways.

I like TML being an early game ender on small maps where you get it first and TML the HQ.

Being able to assist any building project with any unit of build power is a fundamental part of the game. You can't just disregard it for one structure arbitrarily. Well, you can, but it just becomes arbitrary bullshit that will confuse people and make them think the game is poorly designed.

You could reduce the health of TML so it would be more effective to kill it with t1 bombers. Proactively scouting the TML and sniping it should be cost effective, since it requires attention and air, but right now you would need 8 t1 bombers which costs too much mass.

You could let Cybran Support SCUs rebuild the wrecks of dead units.

Tree groups need to be visible on the reclaim overlay since they are important to reclaim on many maps. A more generalized solution that shows energy contents on the reclaim overlay instead of just mass would be preferable to showing some arbitrary dots. Though currently tree's are pretty much the only prop containing energy.

You can already determine the trajectory of units by noticing the trees falling over, or if the tree groups have enough mass they appear/disappear on the overlay already. You also already get free intel by seeing what bits of mass your opponent has reclaimed. 99.9% of people probably don't utilize this information, but weirdos like me and ZLO sometimes look at the falling trees to know there are labs coming, or to know precisely where to raid engineers that are reclaiming.

Having labs not break tree groups makes sense to me since they are tiny units and I don't think the deliberate breaking of tree groups is an important game mechanic anyway.

I've kind of said all this before, and it is essentially an anti-FAF post. But I am curious about what motivates talented people like @Jip to add features to mainline FAF rather than creating a fork, mod, or their own game.

In my opinion, if you are a good programmer and smart game designer (or think that you are) you should work on your own game instead of contributing features to this community of people who don't want your features. It sounds like a very mean thing to say, but I really don't know why people want to contribute to FAF. I have decent programming skills, have watched/read a massive quantity of game design things on the internet, know a lot about FAF, and am even one of the highest-rated players on FAF. Outside of some very brief moments of delusion, I never considered contributing to FAF to be a reasonable thing to do.

Even if all your ideas are truly amazing and make the game way better, it will still be a dead 20-year-old game. You will get no merit or money or anything for your effort. Everyone will be mean to you on the forum no matter what, and you end up in miserable forum threads like this one. The only benefit I see with contributing to FAF is that you have a pre-existing captive audience, so it is to some degree impossible to fail and you can feel like a smart and successful person and get fans and whatever. The downside is that this preexisting audience is old people playing an old game, so you can't treat it like your own early-access indie title. If you do the bare minimum to keep the project alive it will probably go fine, but even if executed perfectly, getting feedback and implementing new things will have large amounts of friction.

There are finally some reasonable competitors coming along to fill FAF's niche place in the market. Either work on one of them or start your own. Or make something totally different. You will probably still be subjected to the same toxicity as here, but at least you will have your own thing, make money from it, and leave your mark on the world. When I'm not too lazy and depressed to work on stuff, I work on my own little game project. If I ever release a game, I fully expect to encounter toxic assholes like myself, but since it's my own game I can just do whatever I want and tell them to fuck off.

In my twisted view of the world, the toxicity of FAF is somewhat beneficial because driving talented people away to make new things is better than having them contribute to this dead-end project. I thought the people working on [redacted] were pretty cringe and annoying, but since they went off to try their own thing I have a lot of respect for them and look forward to seeing what they accomplish.

I've never really seen it as a FAF-specific problem. It is just another aspect of the very aggressive, divided, tribal culture that is accelerated and encouraged by the internet and social media. Similar to how at this point, Star Wars "fans" are people who go on the internet to create and watch videos hating on the latest Star Wars content that comes out and the people who make it.

Everyone wants to feel like they are smart and better than other people, and it is quick and easy to get that feeling by talking shit about what other people are doing. Joining a tribe that says how stupid and/or malicious others are and implying that they could do it better. Nothing is perfect, so people can always find flaws to point out to justify their toxic behavior. I think many people, particularly the type who spend a lot of time online, don't have very enjoyable or meaningful lives and that makes them more likely to engage in online bullying and tribalism.

I have been quite guilty of this behavior on FAF. I admit that I am an arrogant asshole and probably caused some harm to FAF by being mean to people. I do often feel bad after I write mean posts on the forums, which is why I pretty much checked out of the community entirely and tried to focus on my own projects.

The following paragraphs are intended to be some armchair psychological evaluation of myself and why I do not respect FAF and am mean on the forums. I do not claim this logic is objectively true in any way, or that it necessarily applies to any of the other people who write mean stuff on the forums. Being mean on the forum is less than useless and makes my life, and others' lives, objectively worse.

I have never had a very healthy relationship with FAF. It was just an addiction and coping mechanism for my own miserable and pointless existence. Even when I played every day for years, I never had much respect for the project, and still don't. It's just a video game that offers little more than a way to burn time. On top of that, nobody here even created the game. I never really cared, and still don't care, if FAF dies.

A big difference between FAF and the other games mentioned in the thread is that those games were actually made by the people who are changing them. It is their creation and they have the right to do whatever they want with it. There is reason to believe that the changes they make will be good because they come from the same people who made the game you chose to play in the first place. On FAF every change comes from some random amateur who appointed themselves the authority to change whatever they want without earning the right to do so. So I think it is reasonable for FAF changes to be met with more contention than normal games.

In response to criticism, these people will usually point out how they are unpaid volunteers keeping the game alive so we can all play it. It comes across as an attempt to gain some moral superiority as if perpetuating some useless videogame someone else made two decades ago is some kind of charitable cause that benefits humanity. Just because I waste my time playing this game, rather than some other game, doesn't mean I owe you anything. When making a contribution, you take on the responsibility for whatever happens as a result of that contribution. It doesn't matter if you were paid for it or not. This attempt to gain superiority and avoid responsibility only encourages further hostilities. I think it would be better to either say nothing or admit some responsibility which would then generate sympathy and make further aggression more difficult.

These points are even more true for moderators since they don't even have to have some coding skills or anything to contribute. They just get power handed down to them from the beginning of time that grants them the right to judge players and make up random new rules. I haven't personally had many conflicts with moderators though.

I can't comment on anything that's happened in the last two years since I haven't been participating in the community. I left as a result of my self-induced suffering, not because of any FAF issues or changes that were made.

I have noticed that there are almost zero casts of 1v1 games on YouTube anymore, outside of major tournaments, which are also quite rare now. It seemed to me that the focus of the community shifted away from 1v1 once mapgen and TMM became things. I also disagree with the ever-increasing shift for 1v1 games to be played on larger and more complicated maps. These factors mean I will never return to FAF since I play almost exclusively high-rated 1v1 games. Though my return is unlikely regardless. So those of you who dislike my toxicity can celebrate, and the few people who keep trying to get me to play 1v1 can be sad.

I like the map picking format because you could pick 20 5x5 maps. Almost makes me want to play the FAF.

@phong said in Bring back 1v1 ladder notification like in python FAF:

I think the suggestion in the OP is great but if I were forced to choose, I'd rather have a fix for the ddos that affects all players faster. That's probably been the no. 1 issue on the devs' list for a while, not "voice commands" or other such assleakage. That being said, if anyone can and would like to work on this feature I would certainly be grateful.

The kubernetes post says nothing about resolving the DDoS issue. Does it have anything to do with that? If it does then the post is majorly underselling and failing to communicate.

We had ladder notifications 12 years ago with ancient server code and the Python client. It was supported by the server up until https://github.com/FAForever/server/pull/816. The notifications worked in the Python client a couple years ago when I still played FAF and the Python client was usable. My understanding is this pull request removes the functionality in favor of creating a version that works with more than 1v1 games, but that version does not exist yet, so it seems illogical to remove the existing functionality.

I'm not going to play FAF again either way, but this is just past trauma from being forced to use the Java client which is clearly still not at feature parity with the Python client after many more years of development.

@nuggets said in Username rules updates:

might aswell remove rename altogether (i don't even have to talk about how ridiculous that is)

I am pretty curious as to how and why renaming every month became an essential part of FAF. What are the downsides to not changing your name all the time? To me it is just an arbitrary technical feature that some online services have and some don't, and I don't care either way, but it seems people here think it is an essential human right or something? It's very rare for people to change their legal names, and they almost always use the same name when they go to school, go to work, or meet someone at a grocery store, so why do you need to change your name every month on FAF?

https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/issues/2056
https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/issues/2943

Seems like the necessary server code was deleted randomly and/or the issue is just gets closed because TMM exists.

I think all the constant renaming memes are cringe, and I like it when you guys are crushed under the boot of oppressive moderators. We haven't had any good forum drama for a while either, so these are good and necessary changes.

It seems clearly better to auto revert names in violation of the rules instead of forcing people to go into disgusting, anime-ridden places like discord to contact the moderation team. This would be an excellent use of development resources.

It's like the single most important feature to keeping ladder alive (especially at higher ratings), but nobody cares. Been asking for it to come back for years.

It is pretty ironic that a community based around violating copyright laws to keep their favorite game alive after the developers stopped supporting it is now so concerned about not violating the previously non-existent copyright privileges given to mappers and modders (who are also mostly not supporting their creations).