Forged Alliance Forever

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-12T08:48:25+02:00

github

If I hand it off to FAF to be held, sure. As long as we can reach an agreement.
I look at github the same way my grandmother looks at her mobile phone, so I wouldn't be doing it on my own right now.

ui

I still think it's a thing for the wiki but feel free to try and convince me, I wouldn't even know what to add.

build orders

:yeah:
We are only touching the generic ones at the end and focusing more about the variables that come with them, in the hopes that players build an adaptive foundation that allowed them to start in an acceptable fashion on as many maps as possible.

Statistics: Posted by biass — 12 Feb 2020, 08:48

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-12T08:38:59+02:00

Please include information on how to get the most out of the UI. I have now reached a level of incompetence where I'm constantly frustrated while fighting the standard UI and keybindings and it is having a negative effect on my success and enjoyment.

Also, build orders are cancer and bad for beginners. I've fallen into that trap too many times and have stopped parroting things and now instead trying to understand and internalise why things are done a certain way on map xyz.

Statistics: Posted by Little Miss Murder — 12 Feb 2020, 08:38

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-12T07:13:33+02:00

Can this be put on GitHub when it's hosted? I've seen too many guides to count that were the "best guide ever" 10 years ago that are linked all over the place that are dead links now because the person moved on 5 years ago. If the guide and code in its entirety is on GitHub it stands a better chance of being able to be maintained long-term, mirrored, etc.

Statistics: Posted by RedX — 12 Feb 2020, 07:13

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-09T13:20:01+02:00

Sir Prize wrote:
Are you saying "don't train new players how to do the standard 1v1 build orders"...?

I didn't say that at all, I said players focused on the economy ratio of pgens or mex, to factories, in that tutorial.
Timestamped: https://youtu.be/_6uE1-xS2uk?t=295

Furthermore, the generic build orders are in the curriculum list, so...

MikZZ wrote:
I read that project is supposed to be built around the ego. It is not right!

It is not right, because I also didn't say that. All I said is that I had a vision for the project and wanted it to deliver things in a certain way and at a certain standard, and not have it desecrated down the line by the inept. And as I also stated, i'm fine with translations.

Statistics: Posted by biass — 09 Feb 2020, 13:20

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-09T11:49:32+02:00

This leads many players to focus on bad or otherwise irrelevant information. The big example for this is the ratios for eco/factories explained in your referenced build order tutorial.

Are you saying "don't train new players how to do the standard 1v1 build orders"...? I get the point you're trying to make otherwise about people doing too much theory and not enough playing and overestimating their ability as a result, but that's the first time I've ever heard it's bad for new players to be taught basic BOs, going back to GPGnet days.

Statistics: Posted by Sir Prize — 09 Feb 2020, 11:49

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-09T07:14:22+02:00

I read that project is supposed to be built around the ego. It is not right!
You assemble a team, make a project of one person and offer to take part, invest effort. And behind this is the decision of one person - to be or not to be a project, to close it or not. This cannot be done with a collective project. You must be sure that in a month or a year the project will not be closed and everything will not be deleted only on someone’s personal whim. And you don’t have to go far for examples, as it was already in history.

I personally know examples where Heaven was asked for permission to translate his materials and he refused.

Therefore, before gathering a team and help, it is worth determining the status of the project, and the order of access to it: authors, students, translators.

I am not ready to make teaching materials, I do not have 1-on-1 games experience and there is a language barrier. I am a Seton trainer and therefore I am familiar with all the difficulties of training.

The first things to learn in order:
- brief acquaintance with all units and their typical roles, application
- basic knowledge on the balance of economics and unit production
- a brief introduction to the game’s tactics: spam, economic development, mirroring, cheese tactics
- enemy scouting
- And so on

This is known without me.
But I repeat once again, the big problem right now is the involvement in the big project of the name of one person and the decision on the access of one person.
People need clear and transparent rules.

Statistics: Posted by MikZZ — 09 Feb 2020, 07:14

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-08T11:45:17+02:00

Sir Prize wrote:
it does look like they all had high level players look at them with the exception of the Sera one.

That was co-written by myself as a 1500 and Dogfather, the current promotion councilor and a 1600. You can decide if that's pro play level or not.
(ladder rating, not global)

Sir Prize wrote:
being a lot easier said than done

I attribute the widepsread distribution of Heaven's content due to its automatic linking in aeolus whenever a player mentions a key word. That isn't very difficult to emulate. (or request when the project is nearing completion.)

Sir Prize wrote:
..ell so it gets done and isn't an burnout-inducing timesink for you, and then it does go into disuse after a few months/a year or two and we're having this conversation again in the future, it's still done a lot of good if it makes the difference in retaining a handful of long-term community contributors and/or a future 2k+ rated player.

I suppose.
I'm well aware of my ability to work on this project in the sphere of the other numerous things I want to work on, so don't expect this to be done by next month.
I already asked for interest in helping contribute to the project and people should feel free to do so if they want to speed the completion along, but I have a feeling people don't want to have what they suggest "audited" as is per the FAF standard.

Sir Prize wrote:
I'm very curious as to why those/other video guides have actual negative impacts on the newbros in your experience.

In short:

Players only have a certain amount of time they can dedicate to playing the game. tie that up between wanting to play other games, and then also watching PoV's, casts, replays, and then 13 hours of video content in one playlist. You have to start making sacrifices, and what is the hardest thing to easily get into? It's playing the game itself. Thus enters people into my space that, if we were automechanics for example: think they know the entire inner workings of a car without actually touching one.

Furthermore to that point (the coombrain topic) the large runtime dilutes the content and takes away the required focus on the important topics. This leads many players to focus on bad or otherwise irrelevant information. The big example for this is the ratios for eco/factories explained in your referenced build order tutorial. We have had to deal with MANY people like this in the discord, and unfortunately - because watching all of this content is a massive time investment and some people don't want to consider that investment a waste; they become stubborn, locked into their beliefs, and become untrainable.

Speaking of being locked in, because the real basics of the game are not as relevant as they need to be or are not explored as much in the content; players are not able to translate the rest into something that meets supcom's demands of being highly adaptable or reactive. This is why the ratios are an issue, in my opinion. Players (especially at around the 700 and under range) tend to want to explore advanced content like dropping, special unit queues or cheese strategies and then turn around to us trainers and ask basic questions like the classic "when do I go t2?" or "how many factories do I make?" which, btw are very much answerable questions if presented properly.

That's the gist of that, based off of practical experience anyway.

Statistics: Posted by biass — 08 Feb 2020, 11:45

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-08T09:31:10+02:00

Ah, didn't see the UEF guide cos it's not linked to in the tables at the bottom of the other stuff, but it's right there on Learning Supcom, my bad. Without wanting to read them all again and just checking the view history/remembering from when I was writing the Cybran one, it does look like they all had high level players look at them with the exception of the Sera one.

To be clear I'm not whiteknighting the wiki tutorials, I'm sure they have some problems, but the TLDR of my post comes down to this:

Decent promotional efforts and reference to it in actual player training, just like any other guide.

being a lot easier said than done, and the wiki was just a very good example of that - speed and Retard were promoting it pretty heavily after the 2015 overhaul. With the possible exception of Heaven's playlist, if you wanna be "just like any other guide" it will fall by the wayside before too long.

I guess it's not really that important for now to know how you'll nail it long-term but probs something to think about pretty carefully as the actual content starts to shape up. And to go anti-devil's advocate on myself, I guess if you're managing the project scope well so it gets done and isn't an burnout-inducing timesink for you, and then it does go into disuse after a few months/a year or two and we're having this conversation again in the future, it's still done a lot of good if it makes the difference in retaining a handful of long-term community contributors and/or a future 2k+ rated player.

Speaking of Heaven's guides, I'm very curious as to why those/other video guides have actual negative impacts on the newbros in your experience. I would say his videos might be too detailed after a quick look and I get why you might want more concise stuff, but wouldn't have thought they could be negative. Although now I'm thinking about it, I think I learned the basic build orders off what I vaguely remember as being a 20 minute video covering dual land, triple land, second air, third air and first bomber/first Jester (which was sort of viable back in the day, think I tried it like once). Dude's deleted his channel by the look of it, shame, can't link it: https://www.youtube.com/user/ZaphodX1

Statistics: Posted by Sir Prize — 08 Feb 2020, 09:31

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-08T07:05:10+02:00

Sir Prize wrote:
so were you by the looks of the version histories. There was/is a LOT of work done on them, even if a few of them were never fully fleshed out (and the UEF 1v1 guide doesn't exist at all, oops)

I'm not quite sure what you mean, the UEF guide is at https://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?ti ... _1v1_Guide
furthermore, I created this guide when i was but a 1100, which adds validity to the point of content not lacking real credentials.

Sir Prize wrote:
How do you make sure it gets finished

By not creeping the scope out to impossible lengths and setting a realistic workload for myself.

Sir Prize wrote:
stays up to date

By avoiding the usage of statistics and the like which are viable to change. Unless a major basic fundamental changes, the guide should not be affected by a balance patch or etc.

Sir Prize wrote:
is actually used?

Decent promotional efforts and reference to it in actual player training, just like any other guide.

Sir Prize wrote:
If you have a clearly articulated answer to those questions, then I think this can work. Otherwise, well, you aren't the first person to try something like this and it will probably end up going the same way as the wiki and other ambitious/high effort guides in various places, in which case there would probably be contributions with better effort:reward ratios for newbies than another "tutorial to end all tutorials" infodump.

If it makes you feel better, this idea was in the suggestions corner for like half a year now.

Sir Prize wrote:
POV casts by good players on Youtube

Yes, it will probably be mentioned in Help me! sorry if the headings are a little broad for now.

Sir Prize wrote:
Also, side note - where are all these terrible FAF guides written by incompetent antisocial inactives?

I don't really differentiate between guides for FAF and FA when I mention them, but i'm sure they're a quick search away. If you ask me, false advice in chat in the heat of the moment is the more rampant issue.
No names as to avoid angry people in this thread, however:

Sir Prize wrote:
I assume you're going to steal from him/imbed his videos,

No.
Thankful for the effort but in my years of training people while those guides are active, i've found the impact on new players to be largely negative. If I want videos to embed, I want short, concise, high quality explanations of basic principles with clear imagery and decent VO. That's something to work on in the future though, because of that project creep I also mentioned.

I'm not looking to embed anything from other people so far anyway to be honest.

Thanks for the questions, feel free to continue asking.

Statistics: Posted by biass — 08 Feb 2020, 07:05

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-08T06:10:16+02:00

Biass, I hope this works, but devil's advocate time:

A bunch of competent (or better) players contributed to the 1v1 tutorials and beginner's guide to FAF on the wiki which had very similar goals - I was one of them, so were you by the looks of the version histories. There was/is a LOT of work done on them, even if a few of them were never fully fleshed out (and the UEF 1v1 guide doesn't exist at all, oops). As speed said in the other thread though, the wiki in general hasn't been maintained after a huge amount of work went in, mostly in 2015, and those tutorials are all now years out of date with the last meaningful edits in 2018, by OxideIon on the general 1v1 guide and beginner's guide. As someone who wrote ~10,000 words on a few of those guides and got a bunch of better players to look over my work, I kind of feel like we wasted our time as no one is ever really used it or maintained it much, so the critical questions are...

How is this project going to be any different? How do you make sure it gets finished, stays up to date and is actually used?

If you have a clearly articulated answer to those questions, then I think this can work. Otherwise, well, you aren't the first person to try something like this and it will probably end up going the same way as the wiki and other ambitious/high effort guides in various places, in which case there would probably be contributions with better effort:reward ratios for newbies than another "tutorial to end all tutorials" infodump.

Anyway I think you'll plow ahead no matter what to start with and as I say I hope it works, so a small comment on the curriculum: the thing that moved me from well below 1k rating to ~1100 was finding 1v1 POV casts by good players on Youtube, and I still find watching POV footage on Twitch/Youtube to be easily the best thing to do for improving my understanding of the game. This should probably get it's own subheading here along with Watching replays and Trainers:

biass wrote:
- Sense of direction (what am i doing here?)
Halfmap
Scout planes
What to look for
Help me?
Watching replays
Trainers

Also, side note - where are all these terrible FAF guides written by incompetent antisocial inactives? That one with the hilariously unusable mex calculator in the OP looks like it was written in 2008, well before FAF. The client tutorial tab you're saying has trash in it is basically empty except for a few non-terrible (but probably unused) BO guides and a link to Heaven's massive tutorial playlist, which actually covers quite a few of your topics and has a good view count - I assume you're going to steal from him imbed his videos, along with speed's stuff and other tutorials out there that's still relevant?

Statistics: Posted by Sir Prize — 08 Feb 2020, 06:10

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-07T14:36:58+02:00

JaggedAppliance wrote:
"What is stalling" would be an important point in economy 101.

Indeed, while not explicitly a part of any subheading, it's going to be in economy 101 as you would expect.

edit: probably part of the what are the scary bars? topic as well as overflow.

Statistics: Posted by biass — 07 Feb 2020, 14:36

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-07T14:02:28+02:00

"What is stalling" would be an important point in economy 101.

Statistics: Posted by JaggedAppliance — 07 Feb 2020, 14:02

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-07T13:35:49+02:00

I've been at work while y'all were talking.
Replies: in order.

armacham01 wrote:
The guide should be open to improvement in the future.

Sure.

armacham01 wrote:
For the "economy 101" se...

I'm not quite sure what this is supposed to be, all of these things you have mentioned are already included in the guide. are you just telling me what to talk about here?

armacham01 wrote:
i have an entire section on reclaim, includi..

Farms more or less eluded to it, but this is a guide for getting people to 1000 rating and thus while a suitable mention about reclaim will exist, we probably don't need to explore more advanced topics here.

armacham01 wrote:
You could probably make an entire subsection in the guide all about the UI. attack move, factory attack move, split attack, selecting units on a transport, deleting queued orders, etc. etc.

I'm not looking to tell people what buttons to press to do things, I feel like that stuff is more a wiki thing.

MikZZ wrote:
So in a theory if we could get tutorials with text suppot we could translate it to russain langaige

The current plan is to have all of this in text format already.

armacham01 wrote:
The downside to this would be losing a bit of control. Biass couldn't stop some idiot from making a bastardized version of the tutorial and maybe even give bad advice. (Shocking, I know, that someone might spread bad information over the internet.) But the upside is that there is no question the guide can be adapted/improved/changed over time even if original authors disappear including that it can be put into any language. I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Of course choosing a license is for the author to decide.

Removing bastardizations and bad advice is one of the cornerstones of the project and as thus i'm not going to make some open source license or similar. Call it ego if you want, but this is "my" project, speaking to you with "my" voice and I want it to stay that way more or less. Just piling on more topics to the guide dilutes the importance of the content, busts out the scope of the project (get to 1k) and if anything is made using a stat or is just bad advice, the quality will instantly take a nosedive.

I'm happy for translations to be made. I know how bad google translate can be but at least in an text based website that should also be available for international users.

Statistics: Posted by biass — 07 Feb 2020, 13:35

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-07T12:55:57+02:00

Aside from maybe reclaiming some big wrecks it is completely pointless to teach under 1k rated players about reclaim since they have way bigger issues they need to focus on.

Statistics: Posted by Farmsletje — 07 Feb 2020, 12:55

Re: The FAF Tutorial Curriculum to end all Tutorials

2020-02-07T08:12:28+02:00

If the tutorial is released under an open source license, for example "Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License" which is what Wikipedia uses, then anyone would be free to translate it into any language, or otherwise to create an adaptation (subject only to giving proper attribution back to the original work). Such as: if a caster wanted to make a video series based on some of the tutorial lessons.

This is just an example of a license, i don't know which license would be best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... ed_License

The downside to this would be losing a bit of control. Biass couldn't stop some idiot from making a bastardized version of the tutorial and maybe even give bad advice. (Shocking, I know, that someone might spread bad information over the internet.) But the upside is that there is no question the guide can be adapted/improved/changed over time even if original authors disappear including that it can be put into any language. I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Of course choosing a license is for the author to decide.

It would be best to obtain a commitment to the license before soliciting content from people, so that everyone who contributes understands what they are agreeing to, and can't come back later and say that part of the tutorial is off-limits to a Russian translation.

Statistics: Posted by armacham01 — 07 Feb 2020, 08:12