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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
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- They broke the connection loss recovery (the most important part of the game). It used to be that you could still reconnect after a minute of silence or more. That hasn't been working in years now. A few seconds of silence and you're gone.
- Connection losses between 2 people in a match have become significantly more frequent at some point, not that long ago.
- Moderation doesn't give a ♥♥♥♥ about griefers and abusers or flamers/harassers. The report system is still in place from the time when people who were actually competent were still working on the FAF client, but there are only clowns dealing with reports now. I had times when a player lost connection to 3 or more others, but instead of leaving, so the rest can go on, they just went silent and sat it all out until, half an hour later, all the others had finally given up and left. And they don't ban these or other griefers. They don't give a ♥♥♥♥.
- Factory queues often don't respond anymore. They just broke it and never fixed it again.
- Artillery stopped firing uphill at some point for no apparent reason. Never got fixed either.
- The player score/rating system is an absolute joke. It's made for 1v1 matches, win or lose, nothing else matters - except nobody plays 1v1. Most people play 6v6 or other team vs team setups. As a result, ratings are just completely random and lobby hosts stack their games, instead of using opti (auto-balance), to ensure they don't drop to a 400 where they can't join any serious games anymore. Most games are decided by who has fewer disconnects anyway.
- The game still constantly freezes and crashes, usually on starting. Maybe 1 in 4 games started can actually continue at all, and that's a generous estimate. Rarely any of those also finish without several disconnects, though. When it's not the crashes, then it's lag from bad p2p connections beyond playability. I'm sure it would be possible to do a stress test while still in the lobby before starting and figuring out first-hand that the match is an unplayable lag-fest...
And on top of that, you can't even properly report an issue with bugs or balance without getting swarmed by the local redneck trolls on discord. It's mostly a place where idiots hang out, circle jerk, post funny gif memes or gang up on "woke" people.
The connection recovery isn't broken, but doesn't work anymore because of the connection methods used by FAF to get decent connections worldwide. It's a shame, but it's either that or having one half of the world unable to connect at decent speeds to the other. A trade-off.
Connection losses have indeed become more frequent, FAF has been under a DDOS attack for over a year now - and no effort to mitigate it has produced any great improvement.
Moderation is an iffy topic, and prone to emotional outbursts, from both sides. Complaints about the quality of moderation have been the same since FAF first started - it's not really any different.
Factory queues are working just fine - in fact, additional features have been added that permit the mobile factories (which previously couldn't build while moving) to function like all the others.
Artillery fires just like it always did - just because the range rings (which are 2D and don't represent elevation changes) say you can hit something - doesn't mean that you can. The ballistic rules are locked in stone, FAF made no change to how that works.
The scoring system versus the player ranking system are two different things, and I imagine you're referring to FAF's player ranking mechanic. The mechanics are sound, but you're correct in one thing you said, players often do contrive their lobbies to 'game' the scoring, either stacking their teams, or booting out those players who would impact the scoring mechanic. That's the toxic nature of the PvP community at work, and the disconnects don't help that any.
Freezing and crashing is something that FAF takes quite seriously - problem is - they have to support a community that also wants a gazillion mods, user made maps and all the monkey wrenches that implies. FAF has made fantastic strides in the last two years performance wise, but a good portion of the community insists on playing on lesser machines, or overheating laptops, over shaky wireless connections, and other technical issues, all beyond the control of FAF. The lobby does in fact do a very simple stress test, but it cannot account for many of the factors that will become an issue once the game is actually underway - either connection-wise - or performance wise. Throw in the player who insists on checking his email, browsing the web, and even playing a 2nd game, all while playing FAF - and you see a problem.
As for the problem reporting issues - I agree with you here. Any dissent, or problems, are often confronted by open hostility, both on Discord, or their forums, and even online in game. This toxicity issue has been baked into FAF and allowed to mature, pretty much since Day 1. The dominance of this aspect of their community, over the general populace, is at the heart of FAF's lack of retention. You need to have a thick skin, and keep any probing comments you might have, close to the vest - if you say anything.
I'm positive that the DDOS attacks are not the cause of the frequent connection losses between any given 2 players that started a year ago or so. Before that, connection losses were also quite common, but people usually lost connection to everyone else. Now the most common connection losses are between 2 players and much more frequent. The DDOS attacks target the servers and the lobbies, not the p2p games in progress.
That's great when your factory queues are working. Mine suddenly stopped responding much of the time half a year or year ago. Then I have to remove units from the queues first before I can add any new ones. It happens so often, it's a pain and it never got fixed.
Don't ask me how they broke artillery, but it used to be that you could counter-arty-attack an arty-fire-base on "dual gap" built on a plateau around your bases. Suddenly that stopped working and artillery from ground level doesn't fire up anymore.
The DDOS attacks are against the infrastructure that supports these kind of connections, so one minute they can be fine - and then overloaded the next, resulting in connection loss. This is why it can impact specific tunnels between specific players. It's not an attack against only the the lobbies and the FAF servers - it was initially, but the nature of the attack spread out about nine months ago when FAF made changes to try and defend itself.
As for the artillery, you should ask that question pointedly - I don't myself play FAF, but have a close association with the lead developer, and the mechanics are not something they can, or would have, touched. As I indicated, the range ring visualization was changed, but this has not affected the mechanics of firing - artillery from ground level fires up on elevated targets precisely the same as it always did.
Alternatively, this is a ballistics issue - and would mean that someone changed a specific value in a specific unit (muzzle velocity) - which would be a balance change. The balance team has a long history of making decisions that may have unintended side effects on unit behaviors that may originally been operating outside the stated norms of the unit in question .
I don't want to belabor specific things, since this post was about FAF in general, but, yes, you can stay away from FAF for a lot of reasons, or you can join it and take advantage of the many features it can offer, provided you're aware of the pitfalls as well.
Now, if you want to play locally, and you want the ability to reconnect - then Steam is the place for that - but ranting about FAF, on the Steam forums, by claiming they're incompetent, isn't not only the wrong place for it, it's just misleading. After all, it's just a game, and you have so many more choices you could be wasting your breath on.