Can Blackops work without FAF?

[biass]

When running FAF, does it launch using the Steam .exe?

It's using an exe located in your ProgramData folder

I respect that there's still an active community for the game but I don't like the way FAF itself plays and how some of the members of the community behave and value themselves/FAF.

yeah i get ya

Also worth mentioning, standard maps work all the way back to vanilla supcom on steam without FA, unless they have code dependency, don't say they're made for FAF, it's just a distribution platform

[KeyBlue]

Sounds to me that most of your issues are with FAF touching your original game files.
I don't know how it used to be in the old days, but right now FAF doesn't touch any of the original files at all. (as far as i know)

I'll have to give it another try at some point. So the balance patches and bugfixes and updates that FAF contains are kept separate and I can just not use FAF if I so choose whilst still having it installed?

I just played a quick game vs AI through steam and everything seemed to work like steam FA should work.
I did have an issue initally though, but that was because i had some FAF UI mods enabled and i had to do a full restart after disabling those for it to work properly.

[speed2]

FAF is not reqriting any files, not even touching the installation folder (like LOUD does). Only file that is used is a file with a profile and settings (game.prefs)

Few months ago we found a problem that caused this file to not work with steam when it was saving some wrong army color there that was not on base steam version but that's been fixed already. That was probably the issue you've encountered.

But as it was said, we're not gonna waste our time to make mods compatible with steam version (which contains a lot of bugs and doesn't support mods so easily as FAF). So if you want that, feel free to do it yourself.

We made FAF to be very easy for users to get everything we offer, from all out fixes and improvements to mods and maps. If someone doesn't appreciate that and thinks steam is a better solution, we're not forcing them to use FAF. They can keep struggling getting everything to set up and work.

[Tanksy]

Ah much nicer, thanks for that link. This makes me wonder why people are always saying FAF is dying out, and there's often forum posts relating to it.

The CCU stats are pretty much the same as the Steamspy stats, albeit Steamspy doesn't give you a daily rundown and current player count.

I have also had a nice and smooth integration of several "FAF-Only" mods to the Steam version so far. A lot of these mods are near-enough fully compatible but with minor changes to imports and the class structure between FAF and Steam is different, but it's reverted. That way we can play the updated Blackops that has been absorbed into being FAF exclusive, without the strange FAF balance and gameplay changes.

[speed2]

People who say that are usually cry babies or butthurt for what ever reason. But single look at the statistics shows that FAF is very far from dying since our playerbase is constanly growing.

[IceDreamer]

Not sure how up to date those server stats are...

[PhilipJFry]

Well me neither but it's the only stat i have aside from looking and memorizing the number of online irc user
also just noticed that FA is 15 US dollar but "just" 10 Euro