Blackheart wrote: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.
Reformed, non toxic, non non contributor biass here; and I am a trainer of dudes.
I have been training dudes for a number of years now, including through the boycott era and - with the help of a few more trainers of dudes, have made the discord the primary outlet for training and advice. It's possible that I've trained the most dudes at this point; add on a few other discord fellas and it's not even a question.
That's cool and all, but the consequence is that we have seen the utter lows of the playerbase and the insane need for decent material and a stamp of authority.
I've been talking with some people about the solution to this off and on for a touch over half a year and I wanted to start now while I had some time.
Let's start by listing the problems of both the trainees and the tutorials given to them, namely;
For some reason, people are too busy with tutorials to actually play the game.
I present to you the FAF coombrain, a player who seems to think they understand the ins and outs of the game, including advanced theories, but then come to trainers for advice and then it's discovered a player has under 10 games or so. The advanced version of this is a player who won't budge on their percieved knowledge and thus are deemed untrainable, more on that later. NO basics, NO experience of mechanics or game pressure, and a bad player.
I would have thought that videos and such were perhaps a good supplement for waiting in a queue but they're not used like that, and what's in the tutorial tab (bet you forgot they were there huh) are a BIG cause of this, if they're even used.
Content is a bit of a hit or a miss, without audit and is fast outdated.
This is second, and the third is also placed here because of the everpresent requirement to "undo" the damage a player has in their game due to misinfomation or poor communication of said. I don't feel the need to explain this point but ill steal another quote from the pro scene thread that was necroed today:
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...
I've seen the bottom of the barrel of guides, it's pretty innane to believe some dude read some of the stuff posted by some people and actually tried to implement it into their play. Here's a fun example of one of these:
http://supcomfaguide.uw.hu/index.html
This leads on to the next point.
The people making them lack the knowledge themselves and are often solo.
This is the part where I make some people unhappy, but while it's not really big of an issue and i'm thankful for the effort, some of you have another 1000 rating to climb before you should start training people and it shows. This issue is compounded by most (99%) of guides being made by one dude on his own without peer opinions or audit. Everyone has their own playstyle and that's cool, but it's really just better to gain opinions from mutiple places and form your own, especially if you would get a dude who plays in a very one dimensional matter or is just flat out illiterate or wrong.
This issue is compounded by there not really being anything official out there, so without a quality standard in place people often just have to rely on the luck of the draw.
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I'll add some stuff later if I remember or just get told, but I'm starting work on a unified FAF curriculum of sorts to remedy this. It's a number of well written guides on the basics with consensus drawn from the top players in FAF, and placed on a website (that wasn't made in the early 2000s..) or somewhere else with additional videos and such to supplement it. Besides solving the above, the curriculum will help with the following.
Get players to 1k, on average.
It's my informed opinion that while the average rating is 700 or so - the average skill level is at around 500, and the 700s are players who decided to autopilot onto t1 land instead of some drone abomination or whatever. This guide will help players learn the basics instead of some build order guide - and rise in skill.
"Untrainable players" get to look too!
I mentioned these people earlier. I was reading back the pro scene thread and found it interesting where exotic mentioned out of 3000 players coming per month, 30 would be 1800 with our current skill disparity. That's cool and all but if you flip it around; it's 2970 players who would never make it. The time of trainers is wasted on these people who will blatantly never do so, and guides serve the purpose to provide something to those people so that trainers can focus on people who "could just be" the next 1800 instead.
It's effective gatekeeping.
This was the job of the wiki before the wiki became no longer cool. It means players have an effective means to self teach and demonstrate an effective willingness to put the time in before coming to a trainer for help. Especially if this was at lower rating. It also stops people needing to repeat themselves, which is always nice.
Be effective for time immemorial. (hopefully)
It should be easy enough to teach players the basics of the game without referencing statistics or etc that are viable to be changed and thus void the guide.
I'll add more here later if i have anything
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Enough chat, here is what happens next.
The plan for this project can be set into mutiple stages:
1: Define and concrete the curriculum, meaning what we're going to teach players.
2: Compile the existing training material and repurpose/rewrite it, because we're lazy and writing everything from scratch will take forever.
3: Create the starting material as per the curriculum.
4: Launch the site. Coding this is not an issue for me and I need to purchase a hosting package anyway, if it doesnt already end up on the FAF server.
5: Finish the rest of the guides and then add extra stuff as needed.
I have a small backlog of other tasks I need to work on but expect to be asked a number of short form questions and give opinions on lists in the next coming week or so.
Of course, i'm always happy for people to offer help where needed.
I do want to negotiate rewards for people who DO help with this so, state what you want and what you will do for it and lets see if something can be worked out.
That's all of my free time tonight gone:
Thanks, talk again real soon.
