Reboot FAF: The Kickstarter

[codepants]

First off, if you can't read the whole post, don't reply. Please don't make this a 10-page thread of people posting one-line opinions that don't consider all the facets of my argument. I'm putting time into writing this and I plan to put time into making this have an actionable outcome. Please respect that: if you want to be involved (whether as a protagonist or an antagonist), put the time into reading and understanding my suggestion that I put into formulating and writing it.

Here's the issue: FAF has bugs.

Bugs make people want to stop playing.

Are some of these bugs going away? Yes. And that's great.

But the reality is we're changing and adding a lot of "bonus" things to the game without first making it playable.

This is driving players away. Two years ago I could play FAF 24/7 and not spend more than 10 minutes in any given lobby. Now it's not uncommon to wait 45 minutes for a lobby to fill. Most games hosted are turtle/eco maps like Gap or Rohan. Is there anything wrong with those maps? No. But two years ago those of us who liked the strategy game that was FAF could play a strategy game, not a "look at my shiny toys" game that the first person who builds a t3 arty wins.

And for those of you saying, "No no! FAF is growing! I promise!" -- Okay, I'm open to that. But show me substantiated data that proves it. "I saw 1k players on yesterday" is circumstantial, not substantial. "A bunch of people have seen 1k players on the other day" is circumstantial, not substantial. I do not care how many people you saw on. Somewhere there is real data about the average number of players online over time. Not "that one time you logged in." If you post circumstantial data, I will ignore you.

In any case, whether the FAF community is growing or shrinking is not the point I'm here to make. The point I'm here to make is, the game has remained unpolished for a very long time, and that's annoying. I think that's something we can all agree on.

I know, I know. "If you don't like it, you change it!" "You don't understand what development is like!" I'm a senior developer at my company. I know what development is like. It's annoying obnoxious bug fixes that are hard to track down. It's design and planning and critiquing and testing and testing and starting over and testing some more. Good development is not easy. I understand that.

And that's exactly why we need a devoted developer to reboot FAF.

How do we get a devoted developer? We pay him or her.

How do we pay him or her? A Kickstarter.

I figure $60k is a good starting salary. I'm curious how many development hours have been spent on FAF, because then we could figure how long we need to hire this person to complete the FAF reboot. For instance, if we've spent 1000 hours to get to where we are, then we could assume it takes that amount or less to clean up all the bugs (including, but not limited to, removing features that are mostly/only buggy and don't add anything to the game). If a work year is 2,080 hours, then we'd need to hire this person for half a year, or $30k.

My proposal:
- Find a developer who is experienced with the language FAF is written in. Find this person before we do the kickstarter so we know we're putting our money down on someone who can make a difference.
- Write a contract regarding what must be done on FAF to complete the development contract (and get paid $30k, or whatever we decide). Someone here must be a lawyer or have legal experience. Worst case, I have a friend who is a paralegal who owes me a favor. Yes, writing such a contract will be difficult (some developers get more done in 1000 hours than others. What if they spend 500 hours on one really hard bug? What if they start implementing a feature and discover it'll be much harder than anticipated?). This is something that needs further discussion -- how do we define success? All bugs gone? Some gone? What features are implemented? Etc. But just because I don't have my i's dotted and t's crossed here doesn't mean we can't complete this step.
- Make a promo video about rebooting FAF.
- Start Kickstarter.
- Share with everyone.
- Raise $30k.
- Hire developer.
- Reboot FAF.

Bonus: A Kickstarter would likely grow our community and bring back players who have left because of the current status of the game.

Risks:
- We don't raise $30k --> No money is lost because Kickstarter doesn't charge anyone unless the goal is met.
- Developer doesn't do anything useful --> It is up to us to find someone who is skilled enough to make a difference, give them the tools to do that, and write a contract that ensures our money goes to good use.

Next steps:
- I'm mostly looking for a few people to help me out on this. I'm willing to put in, say, 30 hours over the next few weeks to find a developer, write the contract, make a promo vid, etc. But I'm not going to do this all by myself -- if nobody else is really willing to put in time, then nobody else is really willing to put in money, so there's no point to doing a Kickstarter.
- I also need help on making this effective. We need to know which bugs are the most critical to fix that no volunteer wants to put in time for. We need a list of all the things we want done. We need a list of skills this developer must have. Ready, go.
- By two weeks from today I'll take stock of the replies and discussion and decide if we should move forward. I'm looking to see that 2-3 people are interested in helping and 5-10 people have constructive feedback, would commit to donating to a Kickstarter, or have something to say besides "this idea sucks."

Again, yes, there are some kinks to work out. But that's never stopped me.

Constructive criticism? Agreement? Offers of assistance (please state the number of hours you're willing to contribute and any skills/areas you are interested in helping with)? Lists of bugs that need fixing that no volunteer wants to fix?

[Blackheart]

I really like this idea, but i highly doubt FAF is able to raise 30k. If this happens, it would probably need the cash support of a certain rich american, but afaik he sadly is content with how FAF is proceeding.

[Nepty]

Sounds great if it could happen.

THQ-Nordic might pull a 'Nintendo' on FAF once money that huge gets involved... When companies sees $$$ they tend to lose their minds. Especially when their IP (aka FA) is involved. Kinda risky. If you guys could execute the plan privately, it could work.

On the bright side if THQ-Nordic sees a significant increase in FA sales, they'll STFU. I'm sure.

[Exotic_Retard]

1.kickstarter - well that's cool but its not the only alternative: we also have indiegogo which afaik has the advantage of being paid out no matter how much money is raised (zep used this to collect 3-4k for gw)
also there is currently a patreon for faf, but its not getting any money because its not publicized and so the money that is there is not being used for anything because its not very substantial. might be an idea to revive that instead of a kickstarter.

2.speaking of zep, i guess that 3k is roughly the amount of money we would expect from a kickstarter like that, 30,000 is probably too hopeful unless what bh said happens
3. you would need to put a lot of maintenance effort into keeping this thing publicized, or we not not get very far.
4. since i would expect around 10% of what you said is needed to get a dev to do everything, it might be worth to change the approach to sth like this:

we had ideas for a bounty system, i.e. pay $$ for feature X to be fixed, but there was the issue that people would start expecting money for contributing
i think that the bounty idea is still great and probably more viable than what you propose, so instead of saying lets hire a dev for 1 year or w.e. it might be interesting to say lets hire a dev to fix feature X - for example mod vault upload, then put 29 stretch goals in order of priority to hire another dev and such for all the other bugs, so we get something no matter how much money we raise.

this has the disadvantage of putting devs into smaller tasks/using existing devs rather than getting one guy to do it all (adapting to the environment takes time)
unless we get a dev who is already semi-familiar and ask him to spend lots of time on it or w.e. - im not sure but i think chris might be someone like that

tldr - nice idea but i dont expect it to go that far, definitely needs all the people up top to be behind this.

[Morax]

I really enjoy the enthusiasm but visionik owns the whole thing and it is not going to be touched unless he agrees to allow it be so. He needs to be aware of this and we all need to reach a compromise as to what needs to take place. Visionik probably doesn't feel this thing needs to be fine-tuned as much as we do because he has far more things going on in life and this a quinary-thought to him at best.

Personally, I have a couple thousand dollars I could throw at this, but I would never do so unless there was a real meeting and business plan put forward...

Further, if this did take place and someone fixed all the bugs, what about the money for advertisement or methods to get players to join again? Many people left simply because they're sick of the game. And with all the new stuff coming out with polish, modern engines, why would anyone want to dedicate the amount of time it takes to get good at this game?

It doesn't make sense to me to fix this when so little people at the top don't care enough to make it that way.

[Crotalus]

If you label yourself a senior developer, wouldn't it be more realistic and effective to put your own time and effort into fixing these bugs yourself? I think that would be much better spent resources than trying to raise a kickstarter to pay someone to do work on this project.

It would be one thing if the FAF code was written is some ancient, obscure language but come on, we're talking Python / Lua here so anyone with basic coding skills should be able to contribute and fix bugs if he / she just allocate time to it.

And what bugs are we talking about? In game crashes are very rare nowdays (except the "surround-audio" one), the lua-game code is probably the most stable / bug-free it's ever been.

[Blodir]

Not going to decide if I support the idea or not, but if it does happen you would have to market it beyond FAF userbase. I believe there's a lot of unsatisfied RTS fans out there who would be willing to put money into a project such as this (given a good kickstarter campaign with a lot of grandeur and big promises)

[Voodoo]

First off, if you can't read the whole post, don't reply

Damn. I'm not allowed to replay.

[Morax]

Not going to decide if I support the idea or not, but if it does happen you would have to market it beyond FAF userbase. I believe there's a lot of unsatisfied RTS fans out there who would be willing to put money into a project such as this (given a good kickstarter campaign with a lot of grandeur and big promises)

That's actually a good point regarding outside RTS fans, but again raises my concern for advertising to get people to pay attention.

I'm interested in trying to do a test run of advertisement to see if we can gather people.

[jackherer]

Its a good idea, not sure if we can reach the goal, but we can always try.
I will give on kickstarter if there is a real plan.

If you label yourself a senior developer, wouldn't it be more realistic and effective to put your own time and effort into fixing these bugs yourself? I think that would be much better spent resources than trying to raise a kickstarter to pay someone to do work on this project.

It would be one thing if the FAF code was written is some ancient, obscure language but come on, we're talking Python / Lua here so anyone with basic coding skills should be able to contribute and fix bugs if he / she just allocate time to it.

And what bugs are we talking about? In game crashes are very rare nowdays (except the "surround-audio" one), the lua-game code is probably the most stable / bug-free it's ever been.

A lot more of ppl could help for sure, but life isnt that easy. Look at sheoo, we all got priorities and spending hundred of hour in faf is not always possible even if you have the skills.

We are waiting for years now to have something stalbe and user friendly. And personally with no real amelioration and more ppl playing i will be quitting very soon.

Lot of friend have already quit the game, and it will continue until we got something working better.
So why not give it a try?