Forged Alliance Forever

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-12T05:41:22+02:00

I mean, that is honorable, and sorry to hear the game gave you issues. Hopefully in time you can find a balance to work, life, games, whatever else.

Good luck, Thomas.

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 12 Oct 2019, 05:41

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-12T03:09:50+02:00

I have no idea if what I said was correct or if it would actually help or not. I am just hypothesizing and using my own experience to make assumptions. If you want more people like me spending 2400 hours playing and competing, then people like me should be rewarded for doing that. I have received no rewards so that is obviously not happening. I am a very unusual case though since I specifically set out to spend 1 year playing the game and stuck to it simply because I felt I had nothing better to do. Even with occasional small monetary rewards a normal person would probably still give up playing.

My honest opinion is that I disagree with the entire premise of competition and spending a lot of time playing as being desirable. Giving people positive reinforcement for spending 2400 hours playing a video game seems like an act of pure evil. If I were to be rewarded for something it should be for defeating my addiction to the game and getting my life back on a course towards success.

Statistics: Posted by ThomasHiatt — 12 Oct 2019, 03:09

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-11T18:50:29+02:00

FAF and it’s love affair for longing for what it doesn’t have.

When we had $20 weekly blitzes, we had people complaining that the prize is basically negligent and not worth factoring into account and so we had just as little competition going on. In fact when I first became PC one of the concerns people kept telling me about tournaments was the lack of major prize events where the best people would actually be willing to compete.

I understand that you invested a lot of time into the game and if I could pay everyone that’s good at the game I would. But how many hours have Petric, Blodir, Adjux invested into the game? Is their $/hr invested that much greater?

I would not mind hosting regular blitz tournaments with cash but the problem is I’m basically utilizing all my provided assets on the league system now. I get to use around $50 of the FAF patreon for tournaments and the league cash prizes suck all of that up.

The initial plan was to have small tournaments funded by FAF with large ones relying on private donators. However I simply do not have the resources for both funding leagues and small tournaments. It’s one or the other and personally I’m more invested in seeing leagues succeed as a way to motivate people to be regularly active.

Statistics: Posted by FtXCommando — 11 Oct 2019, 18:50

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-11T18:39:31+02:00

Thomas, that was absolutely perfect, man.

I will be raising those points at the councilor call.

My personal desire is to simply play to enjoy it, but $ definitely adds a nice element. I for example make $50+ a week playing PUBG (not very good hourly rate), but it makes more than I could ever win putting hours into FAF for $0.

I am sure others have enough talent to make bigger bucks, so why play FAF if it means a .0000001% chance of winning anything?

Lower-rating limit tourneys WILL be possible when the team matchmaker is created, as global rating is not a great way to gauge talent and set up teams. I refuse to do a "U1800 global only" for example as in 2018+ anyone can fudge their way to a high rating. It is too prone to misrepresented talent, smurfing, or straight up manipulation.

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 11 Oct 2019, 18:39

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-11T16:14:35+02:00

one of the biggest issue to this idea, is that there is fee on transaction. So that's why we prefer to gather lot of money and create big tourney instead of lots of small ones. The smaller the prize-pool is, the bigger percentage of it paypal is taking. I think ftx could talk about it more in detail.

Statistics: Posted by keyser — 11 Oct 2019, 16:14

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-11T04:06:09+02:00

I don't consider it a feasible option to play this game competitively because it takes a very large amount of time and there are almost no rewards. There are only a few 1v1 tournaments per year that give out $100-$500 in prize money and with such a low number of tournaments, the chances of me or any other person actually winning one is very low. It does not matter if a tournament pays out $100 or $10,000, the likelihood of actually winning any money is still low. If the chance of winning is so low, then I am not going to invest several hours a week to keep my skills sharpened. I played the game for 2400 hours over 2.5 years and reached #5 on the ladder leaderboard yet I still earned a grand total of $0 for my efforts. I managed to win a few events over the course of that time, but they were ones that did not have any prize money. Rather than having one or two $500 tourneys a year I would much prefer to have many very small daily or weekly tournaments so that there are more opportunities for players to have success. With one or two $500 tourneys a year chances are high that petric, blodir, adjux will just win them as always, but with 52 $10 tourneys a year most likely some of the smaller guys will get some wins and feel rewarded. The revitalized Galaxy Resistance Event is a step in the right direction, but it still rewards grinding games more than skill and I no longer have enough free time to compete with someone like Espi. When you throw some huge dollar amount tourney I don't really see it as helping the competitive scene much at all, you are just feeding the already existing pro players, not encouraging new ones. They take the money, we might get a few casts out of it, and all the smaller players are still starving. In order to have many smaller tournaments, the devs would likely need to invest time into creating an automated tournament system similar to the ladder event leaderboard.

As for the rudeness of participants, it is probably related to what I said above. It is very nice of you to put up thousands of dollars of your own money, but when only a couple of people end up beating us all up and taking it all it is hard to be thankful for it. It just feels like we are wasting our time and humiliating ourselves for the sake of the casters and viewers. After spending 2400 hours doing something it does kinda feel like I deserve a reward, and with the increasing prevalence of monetary prizes for playing games, it starts to seem like a normal thing and the few tournaments we get in FAF do feel like something we deserve.

Statistics: Posted by ThomasHiatt — 11 Oct 2019, 04:06

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-08T14:23:18+02:00

Whether you realize it or not from the statements made here, there are issues about and I am not going to simply accept "can't we just get along?" as the solution. That is the ignorance is bliss approach, and you will have to do more than simply watch games to understand why I wrote this post.

I have a large response written up to address points made thus far, but I noticed the clan war already ran into an issue with a group of people dropping out in week 1. That in itself gives some validity to my concerns, and with all the money put in it, I think it a bit lame that folks don't care enough to consider their schedules.

Running these events is a really big burden, so I am sorry corsair and all who think this is just some random spat.

Take this away: I have been running tournaments for FAF since 2014 and have plenty of reason, 5 years later, to write this up.

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 08 Oct 2019, 14:23

Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-08T03:23:28+02:00

Maybe the pro players who are also pro level designers should start to think a little out of the box and imagine outdoor levels that seem to be huge but still implement the working Descent formula of tunnels and properly sized halls. That I can see far doesnt need to mean that I can shoot far, does it?

Statistics: Posted by WendyVup — 08 Oct 2019, 03:23

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-10-01T12:54:43+02:00

No one said everyone has to like each other. Shit's boring.

Statistics: Posted by Dro — 01 Oct 2019, 12:54

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-09-28T14:24:49+02:00

As someone who's not got a stake in this stuff but enjoys watching the games, you guys are supposed to be friends, can we all chill a bit?

Statistics: Posted by corsair831 — 28 Sep 2019, 14:24

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-09-28T13:05:08+02:00

features for top level players

which features for top players are we talking about ?

Statistics: Posted by keyser — 28 Sep 2019, 13:05

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-09-28T12:10:28+02:00

Since you refered to the other topic and complained no-one of the administration (which you are part of now by the way...) cared about competetive play:

I'm very busy keeping FAF running at all and try to enable everyone to play for as many players as possible. Therefore fixing bug usually has priority compared to features for top level players.

For me FAF is like a pyramid scheme:

......./-------------- \
....../ Top players \
...../------------------- \
..../ Ladder players \
.../------------------------ \
../.......All Players......\
./-----------------------------\

Increase the player base at the bottom, and you will get more ladder players and eventually increase the pool of top players.

Statistics: Posted by Brutus5000 — 28 Sep 2019, 12:10

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-09-27T05:06:44+02:00

Well, I was debating on whether I should make a “How Things Progressed” post on Petric’s old post months ago but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I guess this thread provides me ample reason to explain how that old post has in fact been looked at by FAF Administration.

Point 1: Rewarding being good.

For the most part this has generally been done through providing more tournament funds. The last year or so has seen a huge surge in funds provided for tournaments compared to other years on FAF. I believe it was over $1500 total between all tournaments at least. Other than that we now do tend to generally have at least one person streaming a tournament as they play if not more and it seems like people are being pretty generous with funding streamers (bits, donations, subs) lately so that’s also a good sign.

The main thing that has not been addressed with regards to this point is the promotion infrastructure. I haven’t really put much thought into features like that because I figured it’s more of a Promotion Councillor concern and it wasn’t too high on my list of priorities dev-wise.

There is also the issue of getting consistent casters for tournaments as the people that covered games without being participants in the tourney has steadily declined. Currently I believe that Jagged is the only one that really does it for major tournaments. If anyone is interested in regularly covering tournaments, it’s a niche that is currently wide open.

2. Ladder

Can’t complain because he’s on the ladder team 4head. Choice system will require a lot of work dev-side and it was ultimately put on the backburner in favor of other features. The current system is the best compromise until either some new dev comes that wants to work on it or we finish things that were given a higher priority.

In regards to divisions, I always thought that the Zep-era divisions were garbage. They didn’t mean anything and were just inevitably going to lead to inflation. I had worked out a new division concept with a dev however the implementation of it is not something that is simple and so it will take some time. Until then, I’ve decided to utilize leagues as a crude substitution to induce activity and reward playing.

3. Maps

You’re the Map Councillor so this is kind of your area anyway. The only real input I have here is that I try to encourage the creation of 1v1 maps by regularly including 2 new maps in the ladder pool. Now that I have developed a more fluid system for categorizing maps, I should be able to work through the new map buildup I’ve had for the last couple months in a more efficient manner.

4. Balance

I bash noobs on balance forums.

5. Rating problems

Ultimately this is only solved by the magnum opus of team matchmaker. The only other potential solution is introducing arbitrary hidden restrictions within our trueskill algorithm that gives less rating for playing on the same map, against same players, unranking games that have a high range of trueskill, etc. These ultimately, however, do not solve any sort of issue but instead dig a moat that the sea of exploiters will inevitably wash over. The only way to resolve the issue is to create the environment that trueskill was initially built for and to make that environment as friendly to use as possible.

So beyond Petric’s post and going into the rest of the posts in this thread, I’d first like to state that the idea of requiring funds to be given to a third party for FAF Tournaments is complete security theater and an absolute waste of time. I will never support such an idea as it doesn’t resolve any larger issue for me in regards to tournaments.

I don’t really see a need for people on the Council to all play the game regularly. It’s about the time investment they are willing to put towards FAF. Playing the game is a type of investment towards FAF and helps certain positions achieve certain goals. It is not some sort of requirement and could even be detrimental to certain positions if it detracts from being able to labor through other means.

Statistics: Posted by FtXCommando — 27 Sep 2019, 05:06

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-09-27T03:47:32+02:00

Maybe I have a different point of view on this, but for me, part of the fun and excitement of a tournament is to watch all the bitching and smack talk. And to be honest I feel the FAF community too sterile in that respect. I came from playing TA on MSN Zone where moderation was almost nonexistent and smack talk rife. omg get blackflag and neoK0kani in the same room and that's your entertainment for the evening forget about actually playing.

I guess my only suggestion is that tournament directors try to see the bitching and moaning as part of the entertainment, try to remain detached and not to take it personally. And be aware that for every 1 person bitching and moaning there's 99 that fully appreciate all the hard work and financial contributions and are enjoying the fireworks. And further that the 99 do take the time to thank him and remind him that they exist.

[edit] ... and also (not to be a hypocrite) thank you Morax!

Statistics: Posted by Axle — 27 Sep 2019, 03:47

Re: Funding FAF Events and Cultural Concerns

2019-09-26T20:02:56+02:00

I'm giving until the end of this coming weekend for people to speak up on how to proceed.

Silence = we're done.

Update: hold that thought, working a deal with someone to solve this.

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 26 Sep 2019, 20:02