An observation about the replay vault and competitive play

[RocketRooster]

Let's say you're playing in a tournament, right? You know who your next opponent is, and the map it's being played on.

You're feeling a little bit uncertain about what possible tactic your opponent might use on said map, so you search for his/her username in the replay vault, and voila... hey, here's a replay that happens to be on the map in question. So you take a peek. And see what your opponent is doing.

Sounds innocuous, everyone does it, right? Even professional sports team analyse their opponents' tactics, strengths and weaknesses.

The difference is, professional teams have the option of practicing in private, away from prying eyes.

As far as I can ascertain, if you play some practice games using the FAF client, you do not have the option of privacy for your practice session. You can't try out stuff and maybe settle on a strategy without it leaving telltales which might be used against you.

I consider it to be a serious shortcoming of the FAF client that you cannot practice in private. Your alternatives are to create sock accounts, or set up a lan game, or otherwise jump through whatever hoop you need to in order to keep your identity on the replay confidential.

What the client needs is a vault veto option. Very simple - the host of the game can tick whether he/she wants the replay saved to the vault.

JOB DONE.

[nine2]

You are correct but I don't think it matters too much.

As you say there are ways to work around the issue.

Also you can make decoy replays where you make 5 replays showing some start that you are absolutely not going to use in the real game. Like first bomber. Then he spies on you and goes down some weird path.

Once I had a WWPC match on Roanoke coming up against Manread. He was the same rating as me at the time. I spied his build order and it turned out his opening was really finely tuned and he had practiced his opening a lot to rush a transport out. I made a counter build order to have intercepters over his air factory the same second his transport came out. I worked perfectly and I managed to kill not one but his first two transports. On Roanoke this is essentially a death sentence. Then over the next half an hour, he won. Even though I kinda cheated and got a devastating advantage, he kicked my ass.

I just think you shouldn't worry too much about private replays and just concentrate on being able to play really well. Also I think it doesn't really matter 'what strategy he might use on the map', you should both be adapting to each other - the past doesn't matter too much. What does does matter is the opening 5 minutes .... if he has an optimized build for that map and you don't it could be devastating for you.

So I'd say you should focus on
a) getting your own build by making one or stealing one from a PRO (not from your opponent)
b) learning how to adapt gameplay to what is actually happening and not following some preconceived idea before the game even starts

And then you can stay at 1500 rating with no growth over two years like me!

[Blackheart]

You can play FA in private. Its indeed useful to avoid getting BO sniped and such. Used it for the clanwar to practice 2v2s (good old times) and for secret training sessions with petry that spanned dozens of games (and for even more secret games!... :O )

But in general i support a "no vault" feature greatly. I hate the fact that everyone can stalk every replay played on FAF, so you need to talk about every game that 10 random people watched and it also stops people from playing since they can also watch replays instead. Its very possible to break replays in certain ways but it would be easier to have an implemented option for it.

[RocketRooster]

And what if you had won the game, Anihilnine?

It's easy to say, "Sure, I lost the game anyway" but that becomes circumstantial. The fact is, you could have won precisely because of this "cheat", and that opportunity needs to be taken away from professional play.

[Gorton]

Anyone can launch the game with the faf-patched fa.exe which is by default in c:\programdata\faforever\bin .
Such games aren't on faf and don't get sent to the vault.

[nine2]

that opportunity needs to be taken away from professional play.

i would argue that so long as people are conscious of it then there is no huge "need" here

and if they aren't conscious of it, it's not "professional" play

devs have bigger issues to solve in my opinion. I agree with everything you say except that it is an important issue

[RocketRooster]

Ah bugger, wrong thread.