Why FAF competitive scene is dying

[biass]

found it finally
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13920&p=142601&hilit=maybe+time+down+rating#p142540

Edit, it has now been just under 12 whole months and nothing has changed to fix that problem while the problem itself has spiralled into a huge issue of ladder being almost dead.

Keeping some "rating" is pointless when there is no-one to play for it.

[PhilipJFry]

i must have missed the part where someone said that this is a bad idea and thus won't be implemented
afaik stuff doesn't progress because of technical issues/lack of time or manpower
also downlords statement there is incorrect - 1500 + 500 -> 0 rating players face off 1200-1500 rated players when queueing (i am in that rating range so i can tell first hand) so adjusting their starting values can be a good way to solve this but an even better solution might be to just change how the system finds opponents for people with <20 or whatever games on ladder

anyway i don't see anyone saying that the idea is bad or shouldn't be implemented but there is a lot of confusion about rating, mean and deviation afaict

also surtsan mentioned this before -> new server is needed to change stuff cause doing shit on the python server seems like too much of a hassle

[biass]

Disputing the exact numbers is getting in the way of making any real changes here, as it did in the past. What should be focused on is delivering a solution to the problem instead of the minute details about said problem

[Cuddles]

would be nice to hear from the PC, instead he is just a meme.

[Blackheart]

The problem is top players leaving and no new top dudes appearing. Improving both points would improve the situation. I think there are 2 main reasons why the situation is as it is:

1) No point in being good: Scarce and low cash tourneys, no big viewer numbers on twitch (compare to aoe2 where the top dude has 1k subscribers... thats 2500 bucks per month from streaming xD), less games to play cause there is noone else up there or having to play games with really bad players which is not fun at all (in my opinion, Gieb of course disagrees).
Its hard to fix though, the game is too unpopular to have big streams or similar, the only point you can work on is having more dudes to play with and to some degree tourneys though its logical to have no bigass cash tourneys considering the community size.

2) Too much difficulty getting good:
Im not talking about the game being difficult here, im talking about the outside factors: First would be permanent balance changes which influence the meta massively all the time, how do you want to get good if all the information from 1 year ago is irrelevant today and nobody even knows what is good with what patch version of the game (see for example aoe2, no major balance changes in 20 years, i can look at a decade old information and still gain knowledge by doing so, compare it to someone wanting to learn sentons and checking out TA4Life ras BOs or similar... if he tries to adopt that he will simply die).

Back when i started playing it was much different, i was able to use TA4lifes videos and old GPG guides (by PINK for example, excellent, excellent guide which laid the foundation of 5x5 for me), i could harvest a nice eco guide which touched on subjects like perfect eco pathing and similar. This information today is either outdated or got lost in the depths of error 404 not found.

Then you look at the new information that appeared for new players, they attempt to learn by watching streams of certain people, or casts of certain other people. The "information" given there is generally either plain wrong, highly map specific but not labelled as that and also too often entirely one dimensional. I have checked out the streams of the bhedit tourney for example, and have to listen to them explaining that "early frigs on craftious are useless" or that "craftious looks like a pillar map, why would someone pick seraphim" or "t3 air is useless on sera glaciers, always go t2 navy" .... then get linked casts by other people later which upon checking them out reveal stuff like "i dont understand this game, why is he not t2 at minute X usually you are t2 at minute Y and then t3 at minute Z at this amount of power" - how should anyone be able to learn from that? There is no explanation of actions done by players, why certain units are used, why he upgrades eco just now, why he goes for a t3 mex when there are still t2 mex left uncapped... There is a dire need for good information out there, casts with correct analysis, guides that are up to date (or bhedit specific xD) simply so new dudes have the tools to git gud. Keep in mind that even though i bash some casters here badly, i understand that this might be the way to maximize viewers for them since only a certain type of person likes "analysis casts", but sadly this is the exact and only type that will ever get good.

[PhilipJFry]

i still use basically my old setons air bo with the only difference that i go for t3 air + t3 power instead of RAS
if you get a grasp of a BO from before the RAS nerf then you're not lost at all - you just need someone to tell you that early RAS can't be used as efficient for team RAS and is therefor not the thing you have to use (it would still work with some communication in the team btw)

[Blodir]

For me personally a major boner killer is the anti-competitive atmosphere promoted by certain individuals in the community, which makes this thread seem kinda ironic.

We're kinda far from sc2 where it's all about wanking over your rank and tryhard is an assumed quality. Even back when I played LoL like 4 years ago I had people sucking me off for the impressive top 1% rank. In supcom no one gives a f*** and tryhard is a bad word

[EcoNoob]

i have discovered that FAF gets ~100 new player registrations per day
thats insane (and 70% of those have steam links so they are pretty much all legit, for whoever is about to complain about smurfs, we check these thoroughly). Its 3000 new players per month. now given fafs monthly playerbase is ~13000 per month, that means they make up 25% of faf. The conclusion is that our player retention is utterly terrible. Utterly. Terrible.

This should deserve its own thread, maybe our extremely active Player Councilor could look into this?

[Voodoo]

There are indeed problems and I agree with Petric (not with all but the main points). I haven't played now for a long time. So the last weeks I had too much time and played around 100 games. I saw there is a map pool with only 7 ladder maps, ok nice, so I learned 7 build orders and after some games it was possible for me to win 19 games in a row. I won over 100 rating. But the problem is, I had only 4 games vs top 10 players. Or better to say Nexus- played 4 games with me. All other players had a rating from 1500 to 1950 and this is frustrating. You aren't allowed to lose. A win gives you around 6 points. A lose around 14. This means I need a win ratio from 66 % or more to farm points.

So I had some fun but I will stop again as the map pool will change today and I don't have the time to learn more maps. Also I don't see a reason why I should play more. As said before nearly no one is looking at the leaderboards anyway.

Also Freshy pmed me in these 2 weeks and asked for some costum games. I said yeah why not and what happend ... I lost 10 games in a row or so. I can't tell you why. My global rating is down to ~1660 now. Also some games crashed and nearly all games were lagging. So I stopped playing costum games again.

When you look at the rating, you will notice that 1vs1 ladder rating and global rating are mostly totally different. But it is using the same system. It makes no sense. But the other side is, it's easier to find a game with a low rating. But as said before, you will show your skill so how?

Solutions? We had avatars for the first 3 ladder players. We can bring this back but as you know the ladder isn't changing at all. So I would give out 6 avatars and it won't change for a long time. Furthermore we had some extra symbols to show that you own 2000 rating or you have played 5000 games. That was nice but I don't think someone is up to bring this back and no I can't use downlords client as I don't have rights there.

But what I see here is that a lot of players with a high rating have the same problem. So maybe we can use the force and bring something new. I believe Zock had a gentlemans club or something like this in the past.

At the moment I don't feel like playing. I will just lose my rating as I don't have enough time to learn the new maps and costum games are horrible and hard to find.

[JoonasTo]

Blackheart's got a very good point there. We don't have a player doing TA4Life kinda content. Heaven is probably the closest atm but he tends to mostly review noobs' games who ask him to.

TA4Life, Commander Shepard, Speed2, Brink and other's whose names I know I am forgetting have a bunch of youtube guides up but those are outdated now. Even some of Heaven's that were made this year. I considered doing some map specific BO analysis ones but never acted on that as the game keeps changing too fast for them to be relevant for long.

I've written before that we have a problem with information transfer up and down the player ladder where a lot of the perceived(because perceptions are what matter to people) problems in balance come from. This is further worsened by the problem with outdated information. Someone does something they've been taught is good and get bashed for it, of course they're going to lose some motivation from that. Just as they will when someone does something to them they don't understand, like beetledrop or mercies.

This community is too small to find someone to redo the tutorials every year or so. This is also too large to teach all new players by hand so we need tools for teaching them.

I know some of you are thinking but no, having old stupid mechanics that you have to learn make no sense and is no fun but at least for those we have documented information for. Now we're getting new stupid mechanics that noobs have to discover themselves, even if they wanted to find the information, it's not available to them. I don't think anyone has actually done a video about shooting down bombers with inties after the physics change, for example(no, click and pray to god is not an acceptable way.)

i still use basically my old setons air bo with the only difference that i go for t3 air + t3 power instead of RAS
if you get a grasp of a BO from before the RAS nerf then you're not lost at all - you just need someone to tell you that early RAS can't be used as efficient for team RAS and is therefor not the thing you have to use (it would still work with some communication in the team btw)

Except you upgrade all the mexes to T2 instead of 4-6 and maybe even cap some of them so it's not the same thing, timings are all off because of that. Wouldn't use that as an example.