Since the promo councillor application thread is up, this feels like the right time to express some thoughts I’ve had in the past regarding faf long-term prospects and more specifically long-term playerbase growth.
I’ll be blunt, I feel that any meaningful effort on external faf promotion (even moreso if it’s paid) would be essentially wasted as of right now for a few reasons.
Assuming significant advertising effort was put into faf, the player retention rates right now would certainly be way too low (except maybe for people who already played supcom in the past and just found out about faf) to justify the effort, let alone spending actual money.
And yet, other competitive games with comparable levels of complexity manage to do fine. I don’t think faf is « too hard » or « too complex » to keep new players engaged past a few games. However, from first-hand experience playing
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1) : The problem with the player retention rates and the false duality of new players/pros
I would expect for a lot of people to think that the new player experience isn’t really a priority right now as opposed to growing the high-level competitive scene. I’ll briefly say these aren’t contradictory whatsoever. To have an influx of high-skilled players, they obviously need to start the game at some point and have enough time/drive to bother sticking with the game and learning it. A steady stream of new players will, maybe even a year or two later, result in more high-skilled players purely mechanically. If only 1 % of the playerbase eventually reaches that kind of skill bracket, that means we’d need 1000 players to get only 10 competent ones and with abysmal player retention rates, this only compounds the issue.
Why don’t people stick with the game? I don’t think it’s a matter of the game being too hard, rather information being somewhat hard to acquire and the learning process being very painful. Most resources online are super outdated (supcom wiki) and the faf wiki doesn’t even have the comprehensive unit list and the convenient unit matrix from the og supcom wiki
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For comparison, this is the Dota 2 wiki which is infinitely more usable and information rich : https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Storm_Spirit .
We definitely could use auto-generated wiki pages for every single unit, changelog sections to see recent balance changes, at the BARE minimum. I’ve personally started working on a script which pulls unit stats from the db and generates wiki pages for each unit, meaning whenever there are balance changes, we could export an entire up-to-date game wiki running a single command, however I definitely could use some html dev help for a couple minor issues.
Then maybe focus on an unified serie of community tutorials with better production values than disparate and potentially outdated tutorials by some nerd awkwardly mumbling into his mic.
2) : The limits of promo work right now
After a chat with Dog regarding his experience as a promo councillor, it seems there is a lot of frustration regarding the lack of coordination between teams and the promo councillor. No clear guidelines are given, social media accounts access couldn’t even be handed to him in time, I can’t imagine anyone doing this for free out of their spare time not eventually feeling disheartened.
Promo work is largely internal right now and there is precious little coordination with the other announcements (nomads for instance) or dev teams which results in generally ineffective actions.
3) : A proposed solution
I’d like to suggest the creation of some kind of team who would take a hard look at the faf new user experience and figure what would be the highest priority/least dev resources consuming moves we could make to make learning the game as painless as possible, paving the way for future external promo work and hopefully a bright future for our beloved game.
