tldr:
FAF is not living up to expectations, we need to collectively admit to the problems before we can fix them.
The more people we drive away, the worse it gets, and we need action ASAP to sort it out.
Now for the full points, ordered by how important I rate them overall (just my humble opinion).
Communications
If FAF is a society, then it is a two tiered society. There is a big gap between those in the FAF slack group, and those outside the FAF slack group. I think this is the biggest challenge for FAF right now.
Slack (linked) is the tool that's in use for enhancing knowledge sharing and closer teamwork amongst members of the FAF community who are involved in moving the project forward. This is a great sentiment, no argument there, but the reality is far from these high aspirations. So what do I think is wrong?
- 1) Slack is invite only; which means that anybody casually interested in how the might contribute would have to find the "right" person to pm, and then wait for them to get around to allowing them access. The very existence of this kind of barrier is offputting, and has surely had a negative effect on the number of new contributors coming in. This problem is compounded by the lack of advertising; if you don't know that slack is the home for all FAF collaboration, you could easily mistake the lack of github/forum activity for a dead community.
2) Slack is private; nobody not on slack can see what is going on. This alienates 99% of the FAF community, which is a big loss. If people can't see what is going on it can become easy to think that nothing is going on. By not including people in the discussion, you take away their power to contribute which is anathema to the idea of a "community driven lobby".
Messages and updates to the community through world readable channels are also woefully inadequate. A lack of progress is the worst reason to not bother communicating with the community, this only compounds feelings of frustration. If we're struggling to make things happen, the first port of call should be to call upon the rest of the community to help out!
A quick caveat I'd like to add here: I am not against slack, I'm against it as a replacement for all other communications channels. As an additional tool for improving communication, it really does have some impressive features.
I'd also like to praise two notable exceptions to the poor comms; The dev conference(s) and the dev blog. These have been a great source of information, especially for those of us not in slack so big thanks to the people arranging those! (you know who you are
)Development
Right now we're suffering a serious lack of developer time on FAF, this is plain to see from the ongoing connection problems, rating issues, map uploads etc etc (the list really does go on).
I don't think this is because we don't have people capable of solving the issues, but rather because we're not giving them the tools to help. While setting up and running the code has for the most part got easier, there's ongoing problems with PRs going stale, a lack of understanding in the direction the code is going, and non-existent access to the things like the FAF server.
While it is absolutely right that we tightly control who has access to user data, that doesn't mean we should be actively stopping people from fixing stuff. There is sensible middle ground to be had here, one which I don't think we're achieving right now. We could surely also do more to allow restricted access to the server for the purposes of development, without granting global permissions to anyone with access.
Uncertainty over the direction of FAF dev and whether or not your contributions will ever be accepted are also major disincentives for people considering dev work. The last thing we want to be telling people who contribute is "thank, but I'm not going to use any of this stuff you spent the last 5 hours on". When people put in the (non-trivial) effort to contribute, we should reward and encourage it.
Lastly here, but certainly not least, is the problem with missed deadlines. The hard reality is that when something is promised "soon" on FAF, most people understand this as meaning it will arrive somewhere between 4 months from now and never. This is why I was particularly disappointed to hear (in the last dev conference) of a commitment to do a huge new pile of work on recreating the FAF client, when what I think most would like to see are far easier quality of life improvements to the existing code. Even making basic hotfixes take hours, not weeks, would go a long way to restoring community trust.
I've also heard arguments from people about "real life" getting in the way of the devs*, but that's an argument for improving the project management, and assigning tasks to people who do have the time. Its hardly like "real life" is something that has only just been invented, and came as a surprise to the whole community simultaneously.
Council
While a "council" to take charge of FAF is a great idea, the lack of direction provided to date and the timelines for getting new councillors into their roles is farcical.
Nominations for new council positions closed almost 5 months ago, and there is still as little apparent movement as ever to get more people on the team to solve some of the challenges I already mentioned. If FAF is struggling, the first priority should be to get more people in to help, and it is absolutely not something that should be saved for a future date. While there might be a discussion to be had over how best to select people for important roles, it seems clear to me that having nobody in a council role is far worse than someone with little time/motivation to spare.
Since the "faffening" it is my belief that FAF has muddled along despite the lack of input from the council, when the aspiration is surely to have the council members leading the community from the front. A roadmap is sorely needed, even if it's there just to give hope.
Support for Newbies
If one group on FAF is being hardest hit right now, it is surely the newest players. There is a whole litany of problems causing massive issues for someone just arriving here, and to go through them all in detail would be a series of forums posts on its own. Below is the briefest summary I could manage of some of the most obvious problems:
- 1) Drawn out registration problems. Whether that's for FAF/forums/? accounts, if someone can't get to the community, then it doesn't matter how great everything else around here is, we've lost them. It often seems like fixing these problems is a low priority, which can be very damaging.
2) Smurfing. This is a dual problem, both discouraging new players when they lose horribly, and marking them as targets for abuse (since people assume they are also smurfs)
3) Tech problems. Outbound traffic blocked, disconnections, ladder not working, problems hosting/joining, unhelpful UI, etc. Honestly, the #aeolus topic is the worst place to put help for these things.
4) Abusive behaviours. Teamkilling, kicking for being a "smurf", lack of reporting facilities, harassment in chat; these things can make FAF an extremely toxic place to be as a newcomer.
I am going to have to go on record as saying FAF is absolutely not the nicest community I have been part of online, not by a long shot. We need some serious leadership and effort to go into solving this. If there's one thing I could choose to magically solve in this whole post, this would be it.
Moderation
I've posted on the topic of moderation before, but as with many things on FAF lately its not something that was ever taken forward or acted upon. The core problems are of transparency, accountability, but mainly on communication (again
).If the moderators were more prominent, and better able to connect to the community (especially newer players) then that would be a fantastic step forwards.
For those that didn't see it last time, my other views on moderation are a fairly natural evolution of my thinking when I last posted about it: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=11898
---
While the tone of this post might be a bit negative (sorry), I think that reflects the scale of the challenges being faced. Any other community with more competition in regards of server/hosting/platforms than FAF would've died long ago.
On the other hand, there is a lot of opportunity for us to do even better (sorry if that's cliche, but it is true), and I personally believe that if the right people start addressing these issues now we can all really look forward to the future of FAF
.Anyway, if you want some light reading after that there's a good book I would recommend to you
.*I am not sure who "devs" refers to however
.
