Why FAF competitive scene is dying

[SeppelRD]

Hello everyone!!!

TA was my first step of falling in love with RTS games when i was very joung
and between the exploring of supcom and faf many years passed.

Yesterday a friend and i finished our 100th game, so we are somthing the world calls noobs.
As I was showing him the game back then, he never hat played a RTS game.

He was falling in love with FAF and we are playing regulary, but we get bored of the maps.
It´s hard to find games other than gap,setons, etc... and I know (100globalG; 251vs1) thats isnt the real facination of this game.
Biass idea off grouping the maps with "casual"; "extendet"... whatever sounds nice.
We are exactly the people, who play these maps, becaues we can´t fill other maps.

The playerbase are much less toxic as in other games. Communitis without assholes arén´t possible i think.
I say nothing diffrent as many others here, but i want to give a perspective of a player of my skill level.

AND MANY THX TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS THAT MAKE EVERYTHING POSSIBLE HERE!!!

[biass]

w-what did I say?

Maybe it's a good idea to talk about these topics again? As kind of like a progress report.

Also I want to start working on a new training/tutorial thing soon, but I have a backlog. I'll write it up tonight and post it to talk about as a further discussion on these goals.

[Little Miss Murder]

Having watched my fair share of pro-level replays and streams, the utterly decisive role that BO and early reclaim queueing plays at the upper echelon needs to be addressed, in my opinion. The competitive scene has devolved into an atsmosphere where theorycommander and map analysis reign supreme and defeat and victory often pivot on the survival of an engie here or a lab there, whether your early bomber rocked the scissors, &c.

[SeppelRD]

Yeah, maybe i missunderstood something.

I´m happy to see the topic rolling again.

[JaggedAppliance]

I started casting again because of this thread.

[UnorthodoxBox]

Having watched my fair share of pro-level replays and streams, the utterly decisive role that BO and early reclaim queueing plays at the upper echelon needs to be addressed, in my opinion. The competitive scene has devolved into an atsmosphere where theorycommander and map analysis reign supreme and defeat and victory often pivot on the survival of an engie here or a lab there, whether your early bomber rocked the scissors, &c.

Those kinds of tiny things though are what sets the best players apart from the better players though. It is good to have a really high skill ceiling, otherwise the game would become incredibly boring at the upper levels. Also with the bomber/lab thing, early bomber could mean you now lose map control cause it only gets one kill and the enemy now has more tanks, or you gain an advantage from killing multiple expanding engineers, but you still have to make tanks to actually take the map which you just prevented your opponent from taking. Rarely do things like these decide entirely the outcome of the game, just the flow for the next couple of minutes.

[MrTBSC]

the primary reason competitive gaming MAY die (not saying it is) would rather be because of the given unitpools not offering many options for intresting play
but the standart assaultunits being too prevalent and there either not leaving or not giving a reason to experiment with the unitpool ..

i surely do not mind such things as builorders or early tactical strikes with bombers labs or microunits seperating the good players from the average
but the thing is that overall ballance should also see to cater to the avarage player ..

in which case things like powerloss affecting metal income may already frustrate players, or losing an HQ disabling supportfactories, things like these may raise the skillfloor more than it needs to be and as such intimidate players ..

things like lack of patrolbehaviors to not assist factories but focus on reclaim while not wasting reclaim on a full storage (sidenote both TA and PA also suffer from that issue, though TA simply is a old game) or areacommands may make the game unneccessarily clunky (if QoL functions like these can even be implemented) ..
in which case i have to question do we really want to force players to have to learn how to propperly attackmove with engineers for reclaim in order to be good?
is that a "skill" to measure a pro? is it enjoyable for a viewer to watch?

surely you don´t want a competitive scene that purely consists of high level veterans ..

[FtXCommando]

w-what did I say?

Maybe it's a good idea to talk about these topics again? As kind of like a progress report.

Also I want to start working on a new training/tutorial thing soon, but I have a backlog. I'll write it up tonight and post it to talk about as a further discussion on these goals.

Every topic in here has been addressed in some fashion. I'll regurgitate info but everything I'm going to write about has been talked about in their own threads/discussions so I feel no need to go in depth on it.

1. Rewarding being good. There are 2 ways of rewarding people for being good. Recognition and tourney prizes. At the moment there is close to nothing you gain from being a good player.

- We have more tournaments, more funding for tournaments, and the current Ladder League format to help induce ladder activity. Any other aspects (divisions, matchmaker) require additional coding work.

- Recognition. We had divisions but those were scrapped and nothing was heard ever since. Rating is obfuscated by some magical "hover over this weird box next to your name" instead of being displayed directly in said box. Original FAF website actually had a cool section displaying top 5 ladder players right on the front page. Yes, we have leaderboards, yet I'm being amazed by how many people ask things like "who are good players to watch replays?" or "who is the best player on FAF?". Having not faulty rating would also help greatly (more on this later).

- Essentially leagues. Eventually I plan on doing a more regular newsletter for FAF alongside Dog and so more exposure for the people that won these events should happen.

Another idea: Top level news feed/featured replay. Coding-required version: In the replay online vault, add a header with fixed positioning featuring one replay picked by some assigned person(s), changed with loose frequency from few days to a month. Here is a sketch of how it would look.

- I think it's not worth the time to code. This is just another version of casters. I'd rather some curated feed of the !streams command that goes directly to a tab if anything.

Ladder pool. Current pool leaves many people not satisfied, any pool will leave many people unsatisfied... or will it? I have already written a nice (salty) post describing the perfect map pool designed to satisfy absolute most people viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15110&start=10#p153945 and I would really like to hear the inherent flaws it has or otherwise I'm puzzled as to why there is no movement, being it even the slowest and slightest of them, done towards this map pool. Even if the chance of someone volunteering to work on it is small, if they have no idea the issue exists no progress can be made. I would suggest bringing this up in the next dev call.

- Ladder already has been changed, likely won't be made any better until we get some work done on it alongside matchmaker implementation.

Ladder rewards. This was done with the division system, while it wasn't very relevant for top players it certainly had a positive effect on ladder in general. Checking the statistical data each 3 month "season" and giving out some avatars based on activity is a good start.

- Already exists in a minor fashion for leagues. Divisions are their own project.

Ladder connections. I can't say if it's anything easy to fix or not but it's a problem and I'm going to list it here. It has been with us for a long time now and up to this day I'm seeing messages in aeolus complaining about getting stuck on setting up automatch or connecting.

- ICE

3. Maps. This is in regard to FAF map popularity spread and ensuing consequences of it.

- Morax and his team.

4. Balance.

- Dude writing this is a key pillar in the balance team.

5. Rating problems.

- Only solved through team matchmaker.

[Petricpwnz]

- Essentially leagues. Eventually I plan on doing a more regular newsletter for FAF alongside Dog and so more exposure for the people that won these events should happen.

We really need some sort of news categories implementation or at least tags/color coding within the client followed up by the promotion team (haha promotion what?) doing stuff with it. I got into faf because the hand of jesus led me to some top tourney casts back in the day, were i to just randomly find faf and see the thermo gap spam on the custom game page i would feel pretty damn uninspired. At least from the perspective of competition. Instead we have patch/server notes fighting against the guerilla nomads delinquents getting all pumped up when the top news hasnt been a nomad diary for at least 2 picoseconds.

Another idea: Top level news feed/featured replay. Coding-required version: In the replay online vault, add a header with fixed positioning featuring one replay picked by some assigned person(s), changed with loose frequency from few days to a month. Here is a sketch of how it would look.

- I think it's not worth the time to code. This is just another version of casters. I'd rather some curated feed of the !streams command that goes directly to a tab if anything.

How is that another version of casters? I might wanna see good top level games but not through the lens of a 900 rated player analyzing the tank explosions (no offense) jk, all the offense
Plus not all people are interested in watching youtube videos, but they might just naturally get curious as to what this fixed replay is. Alternative is to mention cool games within the news category about competition on faf if that gets implemented, but that could quickly bloat the category and overshadow actually important stuff like tourney news if done incorrectly.

[FtXCommando]

We really need some sort of news categories implementation or at least tags/color coding within the client followed up by the promotion team (haha promotion what?) doing stuff with it. I got into faf because the hand of jesus led me to some top tourney casts back in the day, were i to just randomly find faf and see the thermo gap spam on the custom game page i would feel pretty damn uninspired. At least from the perspective of competition. Instead we have patch/server notes fighting against the guerilla nomads delinquents getting all pumped up when the top news hasnt been a nomad diary for at least 2 picoseconds.

How is that another version of casters? I might wanna see good top level games but not through the lens of a 900 rated player analyzing the tank explosions (no offense) jk, all the offense
Plus not all people are interested in watching youtube videos, but they might just naturally get curious as to what this fixed replay is. Alternative is to mention cool games within the news category about competition on faf if that gets implemented, but that could quickly bloat the category and overshadow actually important stuff like tourney news if done incorrectly.

It's FAF. Solutions that don't require coding will always be preferable to solutions that require coding at the short term. Until a dev expresses any interest at the ability to introduce some sort of tagging system for news, all we can do is create some sort of biweekly newsletter that provides people with news in broad, clear categories that they can read at their leisure.

The idea is to have a sort of system where people can post their own individual news during the week, however, the weekend would be reserved for an official newsletter/news from FAF itself.

In regards to the replay idea, dunno, I just think it's redundant. Like, all we have for high-level replay analysis is essentially Jagged. Sure, other people have casted a few games (blodir, mephi, thomas) but they're irregular or dead channels now. Personally, I take it to mean that there isn't much of a point to appeal to this market. Especially when it will require like what, a team of 5-6 dudes regularly going thru tons of replays to skim which ones are worth watching?

We have tournaments to get a concentration of high level games to watch and play in, and we have casters that can introduce people to these games in either a casual or analytical style. Are we trying to appeal to the new player that has somehow squeezed out all the juice in jagged/ta/heaven/whatever videos and has no interest/idea to watch streams of high level games and is also too dumb to figure out how to search for 1800+ in the replay vault? It's just an idea that has crossed the spoonfeeding bridge to the point where I'm dumping more effort in a week than I'll see the idea give in output during its entire existence.