Since the election for player councilor is up for a vote soon, I thought I'd present myself, some of my ideas, and my vision for FAF. In essence, why you should vote for me to be the next player councilor.
Briefly about myself:
- Studied industrial management and engineering
- 25 years old
- Hobbies include: games, cars, gym, computers and tech in general
I started playing at FAF around December 2014, since then Supcom and FAF has been my main game. I've played RTS games since Red Alert 1, but SC:FA is just from another world, and I'd like to help it stay alive and flourish.
I have some previous experience that would be useful as a player councilor.
Before I joined FAF, I was running servers and a gaming community for another game, ArmA 2:OA and the DayZ mod for it.
I managed the servers, databases, forums, website, administration, development and so forth for about three years. Servers had on average around same amount of monthly unique players as FAF currently has, give or take 1000 players.
Ever since I've been an active player at FAF, I've noticed similarities between the communities, both from a player’s perspective and from a management/developer point of view. I can relate to both parties and see things from different perspectives, which perfectly fits in the role as a player councilor whose task would be to be the link between the players and the Council of Setons.
What would I do as your player councilor, what are my ideas and goals?
- I would be there for you, if you have any concerns or want to discuss about anything regarding the community. I'm online 24/7/365, if I'm not at the computer at the time then I'll get back to you later.
- Represent the interest of the players for the council, via:
- Surveys
- Few surveys in mind already: List of problems players face, Three big changes/improvements you'd like to see, Three small changes/improvements you'd like to see
- Balance, a proper survey about what balance direction the community wants for FAF
- “Hanging out" in general in #aeolus, forums and slack, discussing with people, listening
- Playing games
- Find and gather other contributing individuals
- Assign responsibilities
- Team projects
- Organize contribution efforts
- From ideas to action
- Condense information that is flowing around FAF
- Currently we have many different channels for information regarding what is going on in the community, it is hard to keep up-to-date with everything
- Github, slack, devblog, what's new, forums, #aeolus and so forth.
- Goal is to have one "news dashboard" that has all the essential news and hot topics about what is going on in the community.
- Few examples of content:
- New tourneys, development progress, requests from dev team, patch status, general news, new videos or something fun going on in the community (eg. kevin0009)
- Dashboard would be updated by selected people regularly
- What’s new page contains a linear flow of only a part of the information, news dashboard would gather information from all relevant places
- Make FAF "easier", especially for new players
- Most people on FAF are regulars, people who have been in the community for a long time and know the ropes of everything
- FAF is not too easy to get started with as a new player, things that seem obvious to old players are just question marks to new players, I remember this from personal experience when I joined FAF
- Moderator tags for moderators, I can't even begin to count how many users think OPped bots are moderators
- Autojoining #noobs/#beginners channel for players with x amount of games or less
- Channel would have other more experienced players guiding and helping
- Channel autopings the higher rated more experienced players that are in the channel
- A proper "Get Started"-page for new players that is easily VISIBLE, there are many tutorials, guides and helpful topics, but not a completely essential all-in-one swiss armyknife
- Revised and refreshed version of: http://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3058
- Information more condensed and easier to search
- Expandable topics
- Common troubleshooting help
- Gather useful tutorials and videos to one place and categorize them
- Show a popup message containing this link on the first login (maybe also later) or integrate that into the client itself
- Link FAF account with forum account, it is illogical having to create separate accounts for the client and the forums
- Currently forums are not used by that many players, yet some information only available there
- Bring forums up more in the client
- Some discrepancies, rules for #aeolus (upon registration afaik rules are not presented to the user and only recently was a link to the rules page added to the channel topic)
- Document undocumented things
- Features
- Bugs
- eg. Many new players don't necessarily know how to overcome the connectivity issues in the lobby, "refaffing" is unknown, imagine trying to launch a 12 player game in that situation.
- Ideally user could get feedback and given a tip on how to solve this while inside the lobby (or problem fixed, even better)
- Update client UI
- Remove/replace/update unused tabs (eg. Tutorials)
- User report, bug report, forums etc.
- Plug the gap between players <-> github <-> developers
- Unreasonable to expect the average player to create a github account in order to report a bug
- I've personally seen and heard players encountering different bugs several times, but they don't get reported because of the required github account
- Same applies to bug status and patch status checking, github is just not too user friendly
- Easy bug report function
- Ideally bug report function in client/game with Github API
- Currently acknowledged bugs categorized and easily searchable to avoid duplicates
- Easily visible patch status for players, eg. if beta patch is crashing, unplayable, stable or only minor bugs
- With status information devs could also relay messages to players if and what specifically needs to be tested
- Shout outs for required testing could be put on the "news dashboard"
- Development processes
- I'm going to be blunt, the big server update a few months ago was not executed too well
- Too many features broken
- Too many bugs introduced
- No rollback
- I understand there were many moving parts in the update, and reverting changes would've probably been a whole lot of work as well
- If FAF had any "competition", most players would be there now. Historically, players either suffered through the updates or simply left the community.
- In the future I'd try to make sure players don't have to encounter similar events
- If game breaking bugs occur a rollback should be made ASAP unless a hotfix gets done quickly
- Feedback for solved reports to users
- Now players might report some issue to moderators once and stop reporting in the future, because they don't get feedback if the report was processed or not
- If players are acknowledged that reports are processed and actions taken it gives them incentives to report in the future too
- More reports -> less problems in the community
Many ideas above are already formed by listening to feedback from the community and its players. I would continue listening to your feedback and representing the players in the council. A big part of the proposed changes and upcoming tasks are not something one man can undertake, but as the player councilor I’d work together with other councilors, developers and contributors to bring them to completion.
If you think I’d be a fitting player councilor and give me your vote, I would sincerely do my best and represent the players of Forged Alliance Forever,
Giebmasse
