Evildrew's Campaign for Player Councilor

[Evildrew]

Hello everyone,

I am Evildrew and have played FAF since 19 May 2014. As many of you, I only found out about the FAF community by chance, after stumbling across a Gyle cast on youtube while looking if there were still people playing Supreme Commander. I have decided to run for player councillor due to the endorsement and expressed support by many of my playfriends on FAF who have expressed their discontent with many of the patches that have been rolled out which seemed to create more new problems with gameplay and especially the content and manner in which the recent roll outs of the ‘balance patches’ were handled. I have no loyalties or affiliation with any of the current council members and thus consider myself to be truly independent. I am very active in terms of hosting and playing the game. In terms of IT literacy, I score as high as a monkey, however I have a good understanding of the game and what (apart from winning) makes it enjoyable to the different groups of people.
In addition to the ongoing duties as player councilor such as hearing from you and keeping up with current concerns, ideas and other issues I wish to also achieve some improvements to the gaming experience in a timely manner.
My program I wish to bring to the community involves useful upgrades to the player experience outlined below. It is dependent on whether they are technically possible and technical support to implement the developments is available. In addition, I hope to set the foundation to create and/or promote forums for which there may be interests to implement decentralised voluntary working groups. These I hope to promote through the main page on the client as I feel there is insufficient interconnectedness between the two (FAF forum & FAF client) and new players may not find to the forums for a long time as well as find it difficult to navigate it.

Some ideas I have received and developed myself include the following:

Client improvements:

Hosting:
1 minute ban from rejoining a lobby when kicked by the host (prevent people rejoining over and over which can be very annoying, especially since a reason has to be entered every time you kick someone nowadays)
PM from in game lobby to X up (Every host wants this!).

Aoelus:
Introduce a feature of showing people as - Evildrew_afk - when no motion is detected for more than 5-10 minutes.
Show how many players are in game/lobby and how many afk alongside the number showing how many are online.
--> In tandem these changes will make it much more visible for players, seeking to host a game, to assess whether hosting another game makes sense.


Evildrew’s political stance:

First of all, there needs to be a survey and discussion open and accessible to the whole of the FAF base who are interested about the most recent gameplay changes that were implemented under the euphemism ‘balance’. A lot of players who play different scenarios see profound weaknesses of the adhoc changes that were made and allege they were never contacted or never saw sufficient communication to suggest their voices mattered. They also claim the changes serve the interests of a minority who wish to eliminate certain tactics which may be potent in one gameplay scenario but not in others whilst severely affecting the viability of other valid tactics to the point of being very detrimental to the chances of the player employing them to win. The main criticism I have with it, is the idea that anyone in the council should from a top down perspective think that they need to make people play the game in a certain way while discouraging other ways. I dislike any attempts of changing the game to fulfil an agenda of eliminating valid tactics that CAN be countered for a lesser cost than it takes to initiate them just because some players consider them “cheese”.

We need to improve our ways of rolling out change. We need to take into account the consequences of collateral damage to the game and be willing to reverse our actions and go back to the drawing board if something does not work instead of ignoring it or treating it as a new problem that needs fixing. We also need to have a clear stated mandate to put in place changes that are not unanimously agreed upon to be necessary by the council rather than acting on assumptions of what we think other player groups want or would like. Everyone agrees that a corrupted replay serves no good, whereas the decision to change how a unit acts in combat is clearly one that some would agree to whereas others oppose it. In this case we need a survey and clear guidelines.

In the spirit of trying to represent the interests of all player groups in an equal manner, going from the new joiners who have yet to learn the craft of strategic warfare and the casual gamers to the old timers and the most skilled among us, I aim to put out some surveys periodically and propose to the council in the by-weekly meetings the most useful points stemming from my interactions with the player base which should promote primarily the gameplay experience.

Evildrew’s current agenda if elected:

Goal 1:
Survey regarding whether to keep or reverse the changes that were made with the ‘Balance Patch’ as a whole.
A second survey will focus on a case by case basis which changes the community are in favour of. To me some changes seem good such as lower TML launcher missile limits, reduced T2 arty build time, etc, whereas others (less ACU HP on tech upgrade, Aoen sensor range, T1 Bomber, Auto-toggle land-air firing mode for Cybran cruiser and mobile T1 AA, spaces occupied by beetles on transport, etc) may not be appreciated by many within the player base according to the feedback I received.
http://content.faforever.com/patchnotes/3655.html

Goal 2:
Put in place clear policies for rolling out patches which includes a reversal of the changes if new issues are created as a consequence of it and are neither understood nor immediately fixable.

Examples (current and non-current):
* ACU building and firing at the same time (introduced with the patch that enabled auto-overcharge).
* ACU assisting shield wandering off into enemy territory to his death.
* Map vault not allowing to upload maps anymore.
Clearly stated rational for changes plus quorum (percentage to be agreed upon) required with simple majority over a two-week period in order to make any change which affects gameplay. Survey to keep or reverse changes if the community changes its mind in the aftermath and decides that the changes they were believing to be good for the game didn’t turn out how they thought they would.

Goal 3:
Put in place a link between the Client and Forum. This can be a tab which will link to pertinent posts/topics the council wants the player base to be aware of.

Goal 4:
Promoting working groups to be an outlet for support:
*Promote, on the Client, the voluntary trainers who are willing to offer their valuable time to newer players for free (often those who need them most don’t know about them). It may need updating.
*A Mapping Group who will advise on people’s maps and review them for technical errors and imbalances before submission in the vault. The mapping group furthermore should have the authority to review the existing pool of maps and suspend/remove imbalanced and poorly made maps. We need to raise our mapping standards!
*Technical support group, which will advise players who cause frequently crash or lag during games to meet the PC requirements necessary to have an enjoyable experience.

Closing statement:
We've all put a lot of time and effort into this game and we shouldn't undermine it with hasty decisions relating to patches that are behind schedule and keep an open mind to accepting when our efforts lead to nothing and Ctrl-K them.

As a candidate for the player councillor, I pledge that:
1. I will spend at least 4 hours per week working on These Responsibilities.
2. I will be available at least 2 hours every other week for a voice call to discuss These Responsibilities and the responsibilities of other FAF Councillors.
3. I will use and be available on the FAF Slack (chat) as much as possible.
4. I will do my best to help the other Councillors perform their responsibilities.
5. I understand that if I am unable to perform these duties, I will resign or be replaced.

[biass]

Nice pledge, just one question, are these agendas not currently filled by the balance councillor?

[TheKoopa]

Nop

[Morax]

Hi EvilDrew,

I really liked your proposal but would like to ask you (and probably will ask other candidates) whether or not you have shared these ideas with the devs and visionik.

What do Sheeo, Downlord, and etc think of this proposal and will they be able to implement "patch reversal" and other features you would like to obtain for the client and game?

Thanks for your great write-up as it will help me in who I decide to vote for next week.

Good luck!

[IceDreamer]

From a purely dev point of view, all the bugs/problems mentioned have been fixed, or aren't as described (Build-move bug has been around forever). Patch rollback is exactly what happens when something goes wrong, and happens in <12 hours.

All the dev-linked problems mentioned could have been entirely avoided with greater (Or hell, some community participation in month-long beta programs for the changes. This will never change, as patches will always benefit from testing by the many more than the few.

Good luck with the vote @OP

[Evildrew]

Hi Morax,/Icedreamer

I have not spoken to them about my campaign. It is here for all to read. These are my stated goals and dependent on whether it is technically possible to do them will be seen. As I have mentioned I do not have a programming or IT background, but the people I play with who have a programming background, say that most of it seems possible. Of course I will seek to work together with all the developers and councilors to implement what is possible to improve the game and keep us moving forward and focused on what the player base wants as a whole. One of the main issues people want looking at are all the bugs the game has including the ones that were caused by patching the game. It took a looong time for the ACU assisting shield to not wandering off anymore I do not know if the ACU can still build&fire at the same time (this is the bug I was refering to Icedreamer, but the move&upgrade / move&build thing has indeed always been around for ever.

Regarding the patch reversal policy, I do not know how people have been working on the coding side of things in the past but I have noticed (as many others) that with almost every patch, new problems have crept into gameplay that were clearly not intended. So my main goal of bringing in a policy of reversing patches that create new unintentional problems addresses just this problem. It would involve developers keeping a log of what they have changed so that changes to the code can be quickly and efficiently reversed if a review does not help us identify what is causing the new problem. So this policy would be more of a thing looking forward than looking back.

Lets take the balance patch as an example. Previous patches rarely explained to the players what had changed and why it was changed. The balance patch on the other hand was implemented with a nice graphical display of what was changed for all to see which made it easier for people to pinpoint what they like/dislike. So having a back up of the previous unit coding which I recall is available on GitHub, would make a reversal of changes that are not working, or disliked much easier.

Personally, I am of the belief that it is better to go back one step and back to the drawing board if something does not work rather than ignoring it. I understand that sometimes changes must be made and are unavoidable like a server change from which issues can result, but other issues have come from changes that were made and did not need to be made, and those are the ones we need to apply the policy of reversing them to.

In regards to the mentioned Beta Participation numbers being so low, I will say that:
1. It is often unclear to newer players that Beta exists or what is being tested.
2. Feedback from players in posts take a lot of time to write up and take a long time to read and process by developers (surveys would do much better at gathering feedback).
3. Communication to the player base is often poor because people get on the FAF client to play and not to read what is being developed (I also often skip the "whats new" tab). Changes to the game that pop up when hosting/joining a lobby get more attention than the "what's new" tab.
4. The lack of interconnectedness between the forum and client often keeps people from finding out about news posted on the forum. I spend very little time on the forum, I am not enticed to go to the forum.
5. The forum is not easy to navigate and information is not well sorted. You have to scroll down on the "what's new" tab to find the "Recent Posts" "Recent Forum Posts". Recent posts also include a lot of posts of people who are just ranting or ideas like proposing ASF to get teleport or the likes. This hides the important posts between a jungle of posts no one cares about.

We could use a better organised '"what's new" tab with posts linking to topics that matter. For example:
A. Rules (what is considered cheating)
B. Current identified bugs (which developers are working on it and the data they need sending from users who experience the bugs to help them)
C. Voluntary trainers (for new comers who want to some basic training)

[Mozzarella]

the player councilor is someone how people are supposed to communicate with, meaning they have to be out there in Aeolus at times. which makes me think, you keep to yourself in your thermos games...how does that make it easy for people to talk to you whereas biass and gieb are constantly talking in Aeolus with other players about various things including helping some of them. in my opinion it gives them an edge over you.

[nine2]

Hey EvilDrew,

Looking at your forum posts, I'm not sure you have the calm rational constructive objective traits that would be good for a Councilor.
eg: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13453#p138705

Thanks
Anihilnine

[Darth_Google]

I dont like half of his goals and another one you gonna need someone to code in those changes. Who that gonna be?