Why FAF competitive scene is dying

[Mephi]

To all the people saying the games changes too fast to learn it:

Things, which mark you as good dont change!

-Good map awarness -> doesnt change
-Good apm management -> doesnt change
-Good eco balance -> doesnt change
-General unit use -> doesnt change
-General clue about what to do as a build -> doesnt change
-Good micro -> doesnt change

I havent seen a single player in top region, which drasticly dropped in skill, because of balancechanges. So pls stop this bs

Edit: To make it more clear: Only guides which focus on specific buildorders on specific maps, or single units like beetles, will be outdated. Guides focusing on the bigger picture still stay the same and contain useful information.

Edit2: Overall i have to say the thread goes in the wrong direction

[biass]

I'm not sure you're really still learning how to play the game if you're in the top 50

[PhilipJFry]

4. Balance. A topic even more controversial than ladder map pool which is why if you want to respond to this section please include your thoughts on other sections as well, this thread is NOT for balance rant and if you are a forums moderator please delete any balance rant posts if those appear.

[JoonasTo]

To all the people saying the games changes too fast to learn it

I just went through the last two pages and didn't see a single post mentioning this.

If you are writing of Blackheart's post(and my reply to that) then you might have missed the point.
That is not about the change making you relearn the game again. It is about changes outdating resources available for new players to learn from. For example, there is a video about firebeetles and their use for sniping. Pretty much all in it is outdated since:
A, they can't fit into transports like that anymore
B, they can't explode when the transport dies anymore
C, they can't be defended against with placing a landfactory under the drop anymore
D, auto-overcharge is not mentioned at all as a defense tool
Etc.

As such a new player sees a cool video about firebeetles, tries to do a beetlesnipe, fails horribly. Or worst case scenario, he gets banned for abusing factory under a drop mechanic.

And the big thing here is that it doesn't matter if all the resources are outdated or not. It's enough for a few of them to be wrong to mark that source as unreliable and invalidate all resources from that source. That's bad.

This will not be a problem if we have enough content creators to keep up with the changes, SC2 changes periodically but that is alright because there are tons of people making guides for it constantly so there is up to date information available. So it's not like change itself is the real issue here, cause for it? Sure, but the problem lies in the lack of this type of content creation.

That's enough of New Player stuff for this thread though, yes? Let's have a new thread for this if necessary.

[uzurpator]

@Mephi

I returned to the game from last playing it in 2008 on GPG. I concur - meta game did not change. Only the minute changes that the top players worry about have happend.

Public games continue to be T1 spam with a rush to get air control with ASF and fielding experimentals and super-weapons. Nobody cares that WTFs need extra 2 range and 3 dps to be a good counters to BBQs. At least I don't and I persume most people I play with share this view. I might be wrong.

T2 armies are almost non existant, T3 stuff barely hits the battlefield.

@OP

If you wish to have a partner to play with at your skill level, which I assume is 2000+, then there needs to be several hundread well skilled players - say 500 or so. Then you'd get a good match 24/7. Since most people are not very competetive, that implies active player count in the neighbourhood of 30-50k.

Herein lies the rub. FA has a very steep learning curve and it is a game that is hard to master, so trying to achieve that count of players is going to be equally hard. Moreover, the game has some glaring accesibility and usability issues which, it seems, nobody wants to address.

For example - strategic icons are very small, which makesthem difficult to discern, there are no ways to turn off ( or is there? sorry, the gui specialist in me fails to see them ) some categories of icons.

Another - 'Tactical missle defense' suggests that it defends against 'tactical missles' when it actually defends against all missles except for strategic one.

The whole way the rating is expressed is also a huge bummer because one can lose it, which is very discouraging from the perspective of stepping out of the Gap/Thermo cycle. While rating matters because about half of the dozen games I get are 1000+ rating and over 9000 games.

Most important however is, that balancing a game around the needs of a few top players alienates the rest of them. You know - those 30k people who would like to play this game because it has armies of robots duking it out on themselves with lasers and cannons. Address this fact, and people will come to play with robots and lasers and some 1% of them will grow to consider that T3 mobile arty is good at getting through defenses and, most importantly, can handle the immense stress of 1v1 game.

What I am getting at - is that the game itsself must be accessible and noob-friendly. People play thermo, crater and gap because those maps are predictable and offer a false sense of being in control without being overwhelmed by options and strategies that needs to be countered. For the same reason, frankly, the entire RTS genre is dying and is being replaced by Mobas.

[lilSidlil]

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)

For expamle you can look channtel Yuri The Professional: 10k+ subscribers (this number is growing and look at number of video views) and many actual videos about SCFA https://www.youtube.com/user/SuperYourassik/videos I think thanks to him many new players come to FAF.

BUT!
At last tournament, some hosts kicked him out of observers (and let other streamers). I propose in all tournaments add rule of obliging players to allow the list of casters to be in observers during game. This, among other things, will help popularize FAF.

[PhilipJFry]

the thing with the strategic icons is that you either go more for a more minimalistic approach which makes the game easier to look at for new players cause they don't get overwhelmed or you go for more diverse and/or bigger icons (like the strategic icons mod does) which might be too much for new players while offering more information without having to zoom a lot

neither options would go well if they were forced upon the existing player base so having those as mods is the best option we have imo

i have yet to encounter someone who didn't realize that tmd protects you against mobile missiles as well as the ones from the tac missile launcher

balancing the game around low rated players makes little to no sense while hurting the higher skill play disproportionately
some 500 rated player on gap doesn't care about how effective his big ass robot with a fancy laser mounted on top of it is when he sees a turtlebase that he could try to break with it

about tourneys: i don't get why livestreaming the games is allowed at all since someone with a decent internet connection could just watch the stream and get free intel

[Blodir]

This will not be a problem if we have enough content creators to keep up with the changes, SC2 changes periodically but that is alright because there are tons of people making guides for it constantly so there is up to date information available. So it's not like change itself is the real issue here, cause for it? Sure, but the problem lies in the lack of this type of content creation.

That's enough of New Player stuff for this thread though, yes? Let's have a new thread for this if necessary.

It's a problem in sc2 too, the vast majority of community resources are outdated and theres not a lot of new stuff coming in

[Viba]

Important topic for FAF brought up, good job Petric, maybe we will get something else out of this this time besides walls of texts?

I had some thoughts popping up while reading the message, many of which others already processed a bit, I'll just write a few points.

Player/user lifecycle, survey(s) and metrics
I approximated around 30 new accounts per each 8 hours, since moderators got the mod tools. With this in mind, seeing only ~1000-1050 users at peak times for a long time now feels very wrong. This got me concerned, FAF should see a stable playerbase growth with these registration numbers. Several of the culprits have already been identified in this and many other threads, but there are so many problems with varying solutions to them, some are hard and others easier to do. So what should be prioritized, maximize the effect of performed work?

- Simple analysis of the player lifecycle on FAF (eg. think pirate metrics, google it)
A lifecycle analysis would not require too much effort, but would show where we lose players, what are the worst pitfalls in FAF. What are the areas where improvements would have the largest benefits?
A database dump with registration date, games played (with dates) and logins (not sure if these are saved?) would already provide the means to see how many new players stick around, how many games do they play, which are the ones leaving, do many newly registered not even play a single game etc. The players could be categorized accordingly and a handful of each from these categories could be attempted to be contacted and simply ask their feedback and point of view. Which in turn bring us into "passively" gathering feedback. I already asked for this kind of db dump but no response.

- Feedback box on homepage? Option to give feedback after 5, 10, x amount of games? Surveys?
Almost shameful how badly we really know the "mainstream new player" on FAF, beside the occasional player who bothers ranting something in #aeolus or even creates a forum account. I know its hard to get information but if a very simple method of giving feedback is presented, I'm fairly certain we would get at least some useful information. This goes for the stats and their analysis too.

Balance
Most of these have already been brought up earlier.
- Too fast paced meta/balance changes, not addressing the real problems
Many recent changes:
- Shrink the skill spectrum
- Rob Supcom: FA of its dynamic, lush and intriguingly and positively complex gameplay, meanwhile increasing unwanted complexicity and obfuscating the game
- Lessen available gameplay options
- Make gameplay more static and dull
- Mis-match between other units and newly changed units (think intie vs. t1 bomber)
Just going to blurt out some of the changes, combine with what you feel appropriate above: HP changes (structures and ACU), bomber behavior, RAS, vet, unit group formation (air),
Besides, with all the changes going on, we don't even have an up-to-date functional unit database so people can keep track of changes and compare units
I acknowledge my POV on balance is a tad "colored", but in general I feel the elements that drew me, and others, closer to Supcom FA, are being made less attractive and restricted.

Rating
Pretty much what was said earlier. I'd rather play with players with a higher skill level, it is just very hard nowadays to even get a decent game up without waiting for several hours. Even then most of these "high-level" games today have such varying skill levels that the game result is quite a coin toss - team game problems. I'm not sure if any sort of rating changes would fix this or be worth the time investment, I'd rather see more competetive gameplay instead via other means that would even things out again. Would also be happy to throw away ~500 rating points

Map pool
I don't play ladder games, but to me a "zep-pool" where players can choose from e.g. (a pre-determined pool of X amount of maps/X most played maps their favourite X) amount of maps would be optimal for most?

*Cough*, our PC was elected to keep track/organize/find out/coordinate/deal with like 90% of this thread content...

[Mad`Mozart]

I used to have 2k ladder rating too which seems so long ago now. I lost like 150-200 points while trolling and never got to grind them back, mostly because i dont want to play this game anymore. And with few random games i play once in a blue moon, i feel like all my usual tricks and strategies are not working anymore in current balance and i honestly cba to learn any single new one. Also, like Voodoo mentioned you get punished for a loss with more rating points than you gain for a win. On top of that, i have personal prefences regarding map pool in ladder which makes me utterly hate current system (as a seasoned player i'd like to have more variety with the maps i play and explore new ones).

So while all these things kept building up and gradually making me wanting to play this game less, at some point i discovered map making. Thanks to Tokyto i discovered some really easy and powerful tools to make it accessible. I think its natural for most active players once they learnt the game and their enthusiasm to play it goes down, they still want to contribute to it. But in the current state of things, being a mapper is just depressive. After making some random map reworks i finally made one of my own and started working on a second one, but never got to finish it. Why? Because there is literally no way your map gets played or exposed to players unless its another Gap or Thermo version. Good example is Eridani and Festea maps which Farms made. I find them interesting and would like to see how people would play there (and maybe even play myself!) but they never got put into ladder after months and im 146% i did mention them to Tokyto. Then there is Abhor map by biass which did get put there once and been forgotten ever since. Thats the perspective i see for my own maps that i want to make since they are going to be 1v1 focused. Even still i get random ideas and inspiration, like i've been watching that tourney game with Petric on Glaciers and players complained about how they didnt really like the map, and i thought how i could make it more enjoyable. But ultimately, all that you have is your map taking another spot in the sinkhole called 'map vault' and never being looked at, which is sad.


PS one thing that's been forgotten in t1 bomber rant is extremely OP brutalazing t1 maa. T1 bomber is simply not worth building anymore with all the changes

PPS something something team matchmaker