Tokyto as a Player Councilor

[Tokyto]

Dear FAForever community,

most of you probably already know me as Tokyto, a regular FAF player. But let me introduce myself a little bit more and share with you a little story about how I came to FAF. I think it is important, because it will clarify my FAF priorities and why I LOVE FAF as much as I do.

I’ve been a part of this community for a very long time. But I have been playing FA for much longer than that. I first started playing on Hamachi, because I couldn’t afford to buy this amazing game. We were playing through custom channels with a very small amount of people, very fragile and sometimes impossible to get connection. Balance at that time was very poor and maps had to be uploaded manually and waiting times for a game were sometimes reaching over 3 hours long. But I still played it. Later on we moved our tiny community to Tunngle. Worked pretty much on the same principle as above, but with slightly more people playing.
Then something amazing happened, FAF was born. We were a stubborn little community, so we stayed a little bit longer before moving to FAF, but when we did, the connections between players still weren’t perfect and for some it meant that they could not play with their friends. FAF had a great future in front of it so we decided to stay anyway, and it payed off, the connections got better, Map Vault saved us all hours of time downloading map-packs and uploading maps to new-players. Mod Vault made it possible for us to find new and exciting mods like Nomads, Black Ops and many more. And balance? Balance improved drastically! You probably already spotted where I am heading with this little story of mine. FAF is great, and I surely will do my best to keep it that way.

But this topic isn’t about me meeting FAF, but about a Player Councillor (PC) nomination and what I would do as PC. First of all, let me remind you, what would be my responsibilities.


1) Organizing event schedule
2) Organizing tournament directors
3) Gather feedback from the community about top desires and problems
4) Stay in touch with the community as much as possible on general issues
5) Organize player surveys


Now I would like to address the points above in more detail and how imagine running them.

1) Organizing event schedule

In FAF, this point will mostly mean organising Tournaments, so that’s what I will focus on.

I am an active Tournament Director, so I know what can be done to improve current Tournament system. A working avatar system would be a nice start, but I would also like to have a better system for advertising tournaments inside the client. Many new players don't actively participate in FAF forums and Tournament Tab is broken, so I would like to have it working or at least have a banner informing players about upcoming tourneys, so more people can participate.
I would like to work on a Clan League. Currently clans ingame don’t have much competition going between them apart from Intergalactic Colosseum, which is a great event, but I just don’t think it's enough.

2) Organizing tournament directors

Tournament Directors are a very important part of this community. They keep the competitive nature of our top players satisfied and they also work closely with streamers and casters, whom then have fresh content for their viewers. Currently FAF uses challonge.com to run tournaments and I think it’s a good system, that with a more integration (Tournament Tab) will satisfy our needs more then enough. Unfortunately the development team is busy fixing other features for now, this very important feature will have to wait for now, but definitely a goal in the future.
Organising Tournament Directors will mostly be about assigning periodic tournaments such as Intergalactic Colosseum to TDs, making sure that there are streamers to stream and there are not two tournaments running at the same time.
Recruiting and training new Tournament Directors would also be one of the responsibilities I would gladly take over, because right now we have a lack of TDs.

3) Gather feedback from the community about top desires and problems +
5) Organize player surveys
Probably the most important responsibilities for PC. In my opinion regular polls to gather feedback from the community are crucial for the developers and can help them focus on important issues and stay in touch with the community. Polls should decrease the gap between players and developers as well, which is very important for them to keep the trust and support of the community. My idea would be that at least every 3 months there will be a large survey about server stability, in-game balance and possibly more. Also more irregular, smaller surveys that would focus on specific issues.

4) Stay in touch with the community as much as possible on general issues

I'm a very active player and i'm in touch with a lot of players, giving me feedback and ideas how to improve FAF. You too can talk to me anytime about what you think can be improved or what problems you are having. I read forums on a regular basis so I know what is going on in the community and I can redirect what is important to other councilors.


Next, I would like to share my opinion on general FAF issues:

A) Development (patches, connection issues, bugs reporting, Downlords client, new features)

One of the most important feature I would like to implement would be reversing to old patches. This is a very important feature. If a patch is implemented that would breaks some essential FAF features like Mod/Map Vault, I think it should be reversed and these features should be fixed before releasing again. Mappers are important to me, they make for new exciting gameplay and the fact they express their creativity and spend so much of their free time on maps for FA surely deserves a lot of support from FAF Developers. Modders spend even more time making their mods and the support for modders should be on equal level as well. A Patch that breaks mods (Nomads, TotalVeterancy) is unacceptable in my eyes and unless necessary should not be implemented. All of this might have been avoided if ‘Mod & Map Councilor’ position wouldn’t be vacant, so filling councilor positions would be my priority too.
That being said, the highest priority for FAF should always be connection. Connection issues should be fixed as soon as possible, for it is the most annoying of issues.
Ingame bugs should be caught by balance team and beta-patch testing. But if they are not, they should be easy to report. To be honest, I don’t yet know how to achieve easier bug reporting than it is now (forums), so I would need to have a discussion about this with the community (a list of all FA bugs could be done to prevent double-reporting). Also I’m aware of most of the ingame bugs myself, since I play a lot of FA.
Next thing I would like to do, is to promote Downlords client more (http://faforever.github.io/downlords-faf-client/). It is not ready yet, since it’s missing some important features, but the development on it is moving really fast and is not stale like our current FAF client.
Regarding new features, I think the old ones need to be fixed first. Lot of people want Galactic War back, but i’m pretty sceptical about it for now. First we need fixed Map Vault, Mod Vault and then there should be time to make GW again and empty promises aren’t going to bring it back either.

B) Balance

Balance of FA itself is not the agenda of Player Councilor, yet gathering feedback about it is. So I would make sure to make regular polls to make sure balance is heading the right direction, and that balance team has something to work with.
Also there has been a movement for Blackheart to be a balance councilor and part of listening to community is also doing something about it. Things should move forward here and a poll about balance needs to be done as soon as possible.

C) New Players, Vacant Councilors

New players in FAF need a better approach. FA is a very hard game to learn and with Tutorial Tab broken and trainers team not being very active, I think we have a problem. Tutorial Tab links needs to be fixed as a start and hopefully we will find enough development time to integrate some ‘new players’ tutorial feature.
Filling Promotion councilor, Mod & Map Councilor, Game Councilor positions should start right after Player Councilor vote, although not the agenda of Player Councilor, so all i could do is encourage Visionik to try and fill them faster.


Lastly I would like to talk about my achievements and actions in FAF.

I’m a relatively high ranked player. My Global rating is currently 1800 and my Ladder rating is 1723. My favourite mode would probably be 2v2, which offers wide variety of strategies and teamplay. I’m a member of [e]mpire clan and I am one of the most active Teamgame players.
I’m also a map author, I‘ve made the Diversity map and I’m currently working on my new map project, The Funeral plains (hopefully releasing soon). I’ve been helping Ithilis code some basic things in his balance mod - Equilibrium and also made some fun mods, so I can also handle basics of .LUA.
I’m a Tournament Director, hosted Tournaments like Prime Commander, LegendOfTheStars Tourney, 2v2 WWPC and more. Last thing worth mentioning is my youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Tokyto22 (happy to see you there!).

I hope we have the same ideas how to push FAForever forward and I hope to see you guys ingame!

With regards, Tokyto.

P.S.: Happy to answer any questions!

[Exotic_Retard]

yet another reason to vote tokyto:

[Blodir]

Tokyto is genuinely a great guy and his skill-set fits perfectly for the position, I can't think of anyone more fitting for the role.

[Mephi]

most important question:

are you going to make the beetle great again?

[Tokyto]

most important question:

are you going to make the beetle great again?

I actually made a mod called 'Tokytos Balanced Beetle'. It's in the vault and i don't think beetles can get any more great than that

[Morax]

Phenomenal write-up.... This is not a simple effort to do this

[IceDreamer]

Dammit. Three decent candidates. Well that makes my life tricky :/

FYI: Map and Mod vault are working now. It took too long, but that's what happens when life throws a nuke at someone's expected schedule.

About mods breaking... People are going to have to accept that there is 0 possibility, in any game undergoing active development, for an abandoned mod to not break eventually. That's just... How it works. How it's always worked. RA2, Homeworld, TA, Quake, TF2, Skyrim (Actually all of TES), Dungeon Siege... When a modder abandons their work for whatever reason, it will break.

In the case of TotalVeterancy it gets even worse, because even if someone had stepped up to maintain it, we can't. The code has been obfuscated by the original creator

Good luck with the vote!

[ZLO_RD]

seriosly tho, if you make beetle snipes to easy, then it will no longer be fun

[Exotic_Retard]

i think you just need to check out his mod, it makes it perfect xD

[Morax]

When a modder abandons their work for whatever reason, it will break.

Yeah, this... It is unfortunate but true as I have made some Fallout 4 mod tweaks for devs there (mostly playing with weapon characteristics like recoil, muzzle vel., etc, etc) and it sucks when people leave it to die. I miss my AN-94 Abakan