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aetherspawn 17 hours ago [-]
Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units.
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.
PtaQQ 15 hours ago [-]
Hey, PtaQ here, BAR’s Community Manager. I’m sorry this was your experience. There are definitely some very competitive lobbies, but harassment is not acceptable. Please report any players involved, as reports are the only way we can identify patterns and take action. We have an active moderation team and do review them.
For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “rotato” rotate maps after every game and are usually among the chillest. Players tend to be less rigid about roles and expected builds there, which generally leads to more positive interactions.
aetherspawn 8 hours ago [-]
Hey PtaQ, I appreciate the comment and that BAR is putting effort into improving the community, but I raised a pull request to edit the community code of conduct to clarify that players shouldn’t be banned simply for allowing a game to run its natural course, and virtually every dev disagreed with me and favoured the idea of kick banning a player who won’t surrender immediately after front is lost because “the game is clearly won”.
If you want to make the community better, delete all the rules that encourage players to gang up on other players for subjective reasons. These kinds of rules punish non-verbal players, who easily fall prey to verbal players (I’ll just call them bullies) who can use the rules as a justification basically to harass someone whilst getting branded a hero.
Also, a large majority of players have fun, even when they’re losing. Asking those players to accommodate a hyper-competitive few who want the tightest loop possible to winning and restarting is anti-fun. Both from the perspective of the person winning (I get so disappointed when I win front and they just surrender before I get to blow up their base) and from the perspective of the non-front players who are pressured to quit as soon as front is lost.
Won plenty of games in more casual lobbies (kind of rare) where the front player, after dying, was happy to just receive T2/3 units to control, and due to being able to focus on just controlling a few units, won the game.
herodoturtle 12 hours ago [-]
Just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to comment here and for offering constructive support too.
searealist 8 hours ago [-]
I quit over a year ago when one of your moderators banned me for reclaiming an allied unit that was attacking ground on my factory (he was mad at me).
avereveard 12 hours ago [-]
Does BAR have chicken maps?
icexuick 11 hours ago [-]
BAR offers some 'hold the fort' maps, where there is a strong/fortifiable area and then the 'outskirts'. These are catered to offer great gameplay for battles against Raptors (previously known as 'chickens') and Scavengers.
avereveard 10 hours ago [-]
yeah been away from a while. thanks!
nekusar 15 hours ago [-]
These days, online public lobbies are almost always hostile. Doesn't matter the game, either. You can ban words, phrases, etc. The hostility is also through actions and not just insults.
The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.
Teifion 15 hours ago [-]
We have support for a variety of ways to limit who can join you (passwording lobbies, locking lobbies etc). I get a lot of value playing with a regular group of friends on a Sunday night in part because of it.
giov4 8 hours ago [-]
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killerstorm 9 hours ago [-]
There's not much hostility in Beyond All Reason outside of certain "newbie" lobbies. Occasionally somebody has a conflict, but people who take game seriously avoid offensive words as they don't want to get banned.
IshKebab 14 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's true at all. I mainly play Rocket League, and while you do have bad games, I'd say at least 80% of them are fun.
It does benefit from:
1. Limited coms (nobody seems to use voice chat, perhaps partly because it was completely broken for years), and while you can type, it's too fast paced to write much so mostly people just use quick chats sarcastically (What a save!)
2. Games are really short (about 7 minutes). You're not losing hours of your life if you get stuck with an arsehole.
3. People play a lot of games because they're so short, so the matchmaking is very accurate usually.
goodmythical 13 hours ago [-]
Trackmania (in all of it's online incarnations) seems to have mostly avoided toxicity.
But I think that's because you can't really impact other players. Everyone's racing their own lines, just sharing a chat room while doing so.
thunfischtoast 14 hours ago [-]
Matchmaking is a real problem in most games because of smurfing.
energy123 13 hours ago [-]
BAR has very sophisticated anti-smurfing, so many bans to out to people who thought they could trick the system.
giov4 8 hours ago [-]
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IshKebab 14 hours ago [-]
You occasionally get smurfs in Rocket League but it's like 1 in 10 games so not a big issue IMO.
sitzkrieg 3 hours ago [-]
this is completely ignoring the botting issue that was so bad lately it pushed pros out of ssl and severely messed up MMR. this season is the first one that is remotely playable in a while
anal_reactor 14 hours ago [-]
What if hostility is a feature? They have a culture that works for them. Many organizations do not survive massive influx of new members - numbers inflate quickly, community adapts rules because you cannot manage a big community the way you'd manage small community, old members leave, new members get bored and also leave, the community tries to manage a small community the way you'd manage a large community, whole thing collapses. Meanwhile if you're hostile to new members you avoid unsustainably high expansion and complete collapse of the organization's management structure because there is no expansion. Expansion is not a measure of success if it sacrifices maintaining current culture. Asian societies famously function like that.
rout39574 11 hours ago [-]
Hostility might be a feature for someone who is (or views themselves as) in an "in" clique. But it's poison for the long term health of the game, because it discourages most participation. The only ones attracted are those who view vitriol as a pleasant environment.
oh_my_goodness 9 hours ago [-]
"Hostility as a feature" has been tried many times, from the old newsgroups of the late 80s to Quora and Stack Overflow. It tends to herald the death of the platform.
fhn 12 hours ago [-]
what do you mean you have no way? chats private and/or encrypted? lobbies are public. Use AI to identify harassing comments and take action.
arwineap 3 hours ago [-]
This is not a commercial game, and tokens cost money.
estearum 17 hours ago [-]
It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy whatever the Youtubers figured out.
stouset 11 hours ago [-]
I think M:tG was ruined by this too.
Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.
crassus_ed 1 hours ago [-]
I’ve had the same experience getting into MTGA recently. If you don’t play the meta its very unlikely you’ll win the higher ranked you become.
But this must be the case for all competitive games right? At some point the meta has been figured out and there is no real way to deviate from that.
samhclark 11 hours ago [-]
I think that's why I like prerelease (and sealed, generally) the most of any format. For day 1 prerelease, a lot of the players are reading the cards for the first time. For sealed later on, even if you know the meta for that set, it's more about playing the best deck with the cards you've got. Knowing the meta doesn't change your pool. (As opposed to draft, where if you don't know the meta you might inadvertently pass excellent cards and miss signposts other players will catch)
gesis 10 hours ago [-]
This is why I primarily play Old School 93/94 and other non-rotating, niche formats.
The player bases are a lot more "chill" overall, despite still being attracted to playing their best.
calvinmorrison 10 hours ago [-]
Well playing Fortnite is the opposite. If you suck you get into crappy pools. Every once and a while it someone resets and you spend a few matches getting victory royale until the competition gets better. Way more fun for everyone this way.
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
> It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
estearum 16 hours ago [-]
I don't see how your comment makes sense. You're not part of any "community" but you also never play with random strangers?
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
falcor84 15 hours ago [-]
Well, while every group of people is definitionally "a community", you can absolutely have your friend group not be part of "the community" of the game. Just like you can have a LAN and not be "on the net", watch implies the internet.
estearum 12 hours ago [-]
Uhh if you are playing games consistently with your friends, then they are a community that you're playing with.
If what GP is saying is "play with people you know personally and then you won't have to play with people you don't know personally," well, sure. Great insight.
Most people don't and can't do that. That's why online matchmaking exists and constitutes 99.999999% of online gameplay.
blks 14 hours ago [-]
I think by “community” he meant the whole community of a particular game, where you communicating with people, consuming same content, get influenced, etc
estearum 12 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of people don't fall into the category you're describing, but they nonetheless have to compete against the very few people who do, and so larger and larger proportions end up falling into the same "meta" bullshit.
kridsdale1 15 hours ago [-]
He could be playing with his real friends.
kbelder 14 hours ago [-]
What? I don't... understand...
estearum 12 hours ago [-]
"Real friends" is also known as "a community."
s1artibartfast 13 hours ago [-]
Doesn't match making and self-selection solve this problem?
Ideally, it should allow non-competitive players of similar performance level to play against each other.
estearum 12 hours ago [-]
Not really, because there are players at every level who watch Youtube. So at every level of skill, those players who are up to date on the latest "meta" will win. Not enough to beat the meta players at the next level up, but enough to beat the non-meta players at their own level.
ffsm8 12 hours ago [-]
The bigger issue is that these springengine games don't really have large communities. And they're usually team battles... So yeah, you're not getting 8-16 people with similar elo rating within reasonable timeframes
im3w1l 11 hours ago [-]
In the equilibrium those playing the meta poorly will be matched with players who use suboptimal strategies with good execution.
estearum 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, correct.
Which think about what that feels like: getting semi-consistently beaten by worse players who just all "happen to have" the exact same loadout and exact same strategies and exact same everything.
That's exactly what I'm describing. It's incredibly boring.
fc417fc802 9 hours ago [-]
If matchmaking is working correctly you should win some fraction of your matches, probably ~half.
Losses against someone with better logistical choices is normal and expected. You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
I recognize the adjacent commenter's point about the small population though. It might be difficult to be appropriately matched up unlike a AAA title at launch.
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
Correct, and if 100% of the people who beat you are using all the same "meta" then that suggests it's not a skill variation that explains it. That makes the game extremely boring.
> You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
You must not be familiar with what "meta" means. Modern video games seem to all have an across-the-board superior configuration. And yes, the way to "counter it" is to copy it, which is why this strategy spreads like a virus through the game until 100% of the people who beat you are all doing the exact same thing.
If the desired outcome of the game design was for everyone to use the same configurations (the meta) in order to "counter" the meta, then why have configuration options at all? Give everyone the same exact thing all the time.
The reason they don't do that is because it's extremely boring. But unfortunately the "meta-finding" capability of the streaming community yields the same functional outcome anyway. Ergo: the games are made boring by the community, as stated at the very top.
fc417fc802 7 hours ago [-]
I'm familiar with the term, thanks. I'm suggesting that if you're consistently losing to it that's a skill issue. Sure, you might find the gameplay boring but then that's a complaint about a perceived failure in the game design (notably only from your perspective, not necessarily other's). I appreciate that you're more interested in casually playing off the wall builds for fun rather than competitively playing to win but casting that as others being less skilled or the community being in the wrong is just petulant.
estearum 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is a game design failure (obviously) insofar as it seems not possible to make a perfectly balanced game. But games weren't previously perfectly balanced either, presumably. But they didn't have this same "herding" dynamic because there wasn't an entire industry (literally!) of people trying to discover and disseminate knowledge about the imbalances.
And no, the issue isn't "I like to casually play with off-the-wall builds." The issue is "video games were a lot more fun when you encountered different types of opponents."
This is, of course, why game designers put so much work into supporting variations in builds, so obviously they agree too.
I didn't criticize anyone for being less skilled or anyone for being "in the wrong." I'm observing a game dynamic that makes games less variable than their designers clearly intend.
fc417fc802 5 hours ago [-]
I think you aren't appreciating how varied other's views are here. I'm not a fan of starcraft because I don't enjoy how important micro is to it but that's clearly an integral part of that particular game. As far as meta goes there are clearly lots of people that greatly enjoy trying to win by optimizing every last detail out of a build, fully playing into the current meta or alternatively going against it in an attempt to score a win by surprising the opponent.
If you don't like it that's fine - I'm actually mostly in agreement with you. But I don't think it's necessarily a flaw in the game any more than chess openers are necessarily a flaw with chess (although chess960 does exist so clearly not everyone appreciates the typical openers).
estearum 4 hours ago [-]
If the intent was for everyone to use the same build, then game designers would not invest in the concept of builds. The convergence is clearly not intentional (it is a flaw in the game design) but also basically impossible to avoid in the presence of 1) high-dimensionality balance space and 2) highly-motivated meta-seekers.
I'm not saying people who do this are evil or bad. I'm saying they make games not fun, and it's not clear at all that this is solvable by the game designers except by vastly simplifying the games (e.g. getting rid of builds).
The fact they design for variance so much but then do not achieve variance is an empirical proof that it is a flaw in the design.
Yes, this is also a flaw with chess and is why chess is an extremely boring game. You can just ask someone their Elo and know who will win. As you get into higher Elos, variation in play style becomes less relevant, i.e. more homogenous. This makes the game boring.
It's not my job to lend airtime to other people's opinions on the matter. I'm sharing my opinion. You can share yours if you want.
wafflemaker 12 hours ago [-]
I remember playing Malzahar support before it was meta, because that was the only character I could play well in League of Legends.
Sometimes people would even rage quit. But I could do really well as support, even if it was slightly worse than some other characters. It made for a very fun playthrough.
And I would totally get the people. Sometimes somebody in a bad mood joins your game and just messes everything up because they didn't get to play mid. And I might have looked like someone like that.
But dealing with toxic players is surprisingly easy.
I initially looked down at LoL, but later wanted to learn to play to spend time online with my younger brother that was having a hard time. So I had a friend show me something.
First time I played jungle, I died on the first monster. Before people could finish typing flaming messages, my friend typed into the chat
/ignore all
Voila - silence and no flaming.
Later I stopped preemptively ignoring everyone. Just used no second chances tactic. If anybody cursed, was mean or even used the word noob, I instantly ignored them and then kept playing.
Sometimes told a teammate that had a bad steak to do that to the flaming person. Many games I've one because of being nice to my teammates, trying to keep their spirits up. Wasn't super hard - 25 year old at that time and reading some philosophy books and meditating vs regular 13 year olds.
It was still important to ignore people before they could push your buttons and anger you.
I wonder if it's the same in other games. Definitely not the case in Eve online when I played that. But over there you meet the same people again and by having no style and being a bad winner and a bad loser didn't give you any respect.
ipsi 11 hours ago [-]
Overwatch has similar issues - common advice for playing Competitive is to just completely disable text chat and voice chat. Yeah, you'll miss genuine, helpful suggestions, but they're a tiny, tiny minority of messages at the lower ranks. Not that it necessarily improves a lot at the higher ranks, as I understand it, but is less awful.
I don't play a lot of competitive Overwatch, but it's definitely a much nicer experience with chat turned off, even if I'm not the one being flamed, even if we lose because people are typing instead of shooting.
snerbles 8 hours ago [-]
EVE to me is an odd duck because it's an explicitly cutthroat universe - many people log on expecting monsters. There are a lot of supportive players out there among the trolls; where the knives of betrayal really come out is in the politics of player-controlled space.
What's weird is that I love EVE for that sort of nullsec drama and sociopathic players eating each other in crazed gambits, but a couple of matches in Overwatch competitive a decade ago put me off the idea of matchmaking lobbies altogether.
tm-guimaraes 10 hours ago [-]
I think more than meta chasing, the problem comes from laxk of actual community due to the crazy effectiveness of online matchmaking. When all you had where community servers and rooms, toxicity was more manageable. With other players all being nameless folks you will never play with again, the worst side of people can more easily come out.
v3ss0n 9 hours ago [-]
Nope , you haven't been in this community. The most fun i had been in gaming . They teach each other and help each other , share unit , share economy. Its not like COD or LOL communities.
TrueSlacker0 8 hours ago [-]
I agree. It is crazy how much sharing units is a major part of bar. T2 cons, transports, even units to micro by the front line. Simply typing im low on energy will often result in teammates sending a few windmills or tidals. Its a great change in rts games. Plus when i play vs bots with my kids i can send them more metal production so the can be the one marching in titans or dropping nukes and destroying all the bots without realizing the extra componding econ i sent them. They have a blast.
SkepticalWhale 12 hours ago [-]
Yes and the worst part of that is that I really enjoy working out my own strategies. My best RTS memories are on StarCraft 1, playing with friends in the early 2000s, and we all just were figuring it out for ourselves.
bob1029 16 hours ago [-]
I think Overwatch and League of Legends are the best examples of this effect. Both games are entirely unrecognizable today compared to 2016.
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
eutropia 16 hours ago [-]
it's because sc2 is usually 1v1.
and also it's a lot harder
falcor84 16 hours ago [-]
A lot harder than Beyond All Reason? How so?
Alexss 15 hours ago [-]
A lot harder than overwatch or league of legends presumably
paulmist 15 hours ago [-]
I think that's a normal evolution of these games? In the end they are cooperative so your teammates depend on you. Although you'll find plenty of people at the top of the ladder spamming werid strategies and being successful.
estearum 12 hours ago [-]
Normal evolution yet somehow wasn't really a visible force on video games until streaming and is now the predominant force on pretty much every single online competitive game.
(Unless you play with cloistered private communities)
Bratmon 4 hours ago [-]
Even in cloistered private communities, "not playing the online meta" is an unstable equilibrium.
As soon as someone loses a bunch of games in a row and decides to Google "$GameName strategy", the community's unique meta disappears.
paulmist 8 hours ago [-]
I think you're confounding streaming with the rise of solo-queue but cooperative (CS:GO, LoL...) games around 2010. Both were enabled by cheaper computing and alllowed competitive ladders to scale to millions of players. Games where you have to queue with a pre-made team (or pro teams for that matter) are considerably less toxic. Toxic streamers are more of a consequence of an already toxic community.
estearum 7 hours ago [-]
No, you are confounding what I'm talking about (fast discovery and dissemination of meta-optimal strategies) with toxicity. You could have 0 toxicity at all and still have a game totally ruined by the behavior I'm pointing out.
ecshafer 4 hours ago [-]
I agree. streaming has ruined gaming communities. My idea is that every instance of a game should have randomized variables that make it impossible to find the optimal position generally.
bheadmaster 16 hours ago [-]
Meta-gaming is a natural progression in all human games. Chess players find "metas" like openings. It's just that video games are too simple and have very restricted meta set.
fluoridation 16 hours ago [-]
The point is not that games have meta, it's the attitude of players.
estearum 12 hours ago [-]
Which is also why chess is profoundly boring unless you're playing a casual game against a casual opponent.
doctorwho42 14 hours ago [-]
Id say it's only natural when importance or value are placed on the outcome of the game.
By it's very nature, games are supposed to be fun and bonding experience for a community of humans.
But the modern interpretation is one of direct conflict to show ones superiority for the sake of feeling superior. Which ultimately leads to the imbuing the games with a level of importance or value for the victor.
s1artibartfast 14 hours ago [-]
I think that is projecting a lot of expectation on what games are supposed to be like. Cometitive games have always existed, from knights jousting to sailors gambling.
rpdillon 15 hours ago [-]
Wait, are you suggesting BAR or StarCraft are simpler than chess? I can't imagine that's true.
summa_tech 13 hours ago [-]
Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any moment, to make an optimal move. You can predict if you lose 2 or if you lose 3 pieces because of your next move, and you're expected to use this knowledge. The strategy of chess is about perfection in every turn.
RTSes present continuous, large choice spaces. So it doesn't really feel like as much of a logic puzzle, and perfection does not appear to be within ones grasp at every moment. Whether you'll lose 4 or 6 of the T2 fighter-bombers is not relevant. The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction.
chongli 11 hours ago [-]
The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction
That's not true in all RTSes. Take StarCraft, for example, and there are plenty of games on record that were decided not just by 1 unit, but by 1 attack from 1 unit. There are Zerg players, for example, who have developed a reputation for creating havoc after getting a single zergling (the smallest and cheapest attacking unit) into their opponent's base. A single shot from a Protoss reaver can mean the difference between taking minimal damage and losing half of your workers (and subsequently the game).
summa_tech 11 hours ago [-]
Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc. are pretty deterministic. But in more complicated situations it's still a lot less predictable than chess. Even the examples you're giving can only happen probabilistically outside very early game.
But I'm thinking about TA-style games, the topic of this discussion, which pride themselves on large armies. Though, to your point, early game of Supreme Commander is also quite chess-like, because of how restricted the set of opportunities is.
zemvpferreira 15 hours ago [-]
Simple is definitely the wrong term. Chess's simplicity is where its inherent difficulty comes from. It's paradoxically much more difficult to optimize than more complex games like SC.
nextaccountic 11 hours ago [-]
Starcraft might be more complex in absolute terms (not sure about that - discrete combinatorial problems can be genuinely more complex can continuous ones, from an algorithm point of view, because solutions are harder to come by)
But chess theory, the human activity of analyzing chess, is hugely more complex than whatever human players have analyzed about the game of starcraft
What I mean is, perhaps the best neural networks that play starcraft are as complex as chess neural networks, and this complexity is irreducible, but starcraft players haven't developed as much theory in comparison
kbelder 13 hours ago [-]
Perhaps simpler in the relevant choices presented to the player? The fact that a specific meta can be found, and victory requires using the meta, means that many important choices have been removed from the player.
Chess surely has a meta, but it's been honed so the meta is a huge number of significantly different paths. It's a balancing issue. Give Starcraft another few centuries of play and maybe it'll be the same.
annasnna 15 hours ago [-]
I don’t know but I can imagine many of the levers in games cancel each other out or don’t turn out to be useful while in chess every variable is orthogonal. It’s all important. Complicated versus complex, like how untangling Christmas lights is time-consuming and gnarly but it is not complex fundamentally.
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
Insanity 15 hours ago [-]
Agreed on “finding meta” as just being part of any game. But thinking games are more restrictive than chess might just be a lack of exposure to competitive gaming.
irishcoffee 15 hours ago [-]
Video games have a lot more entropy than chess, I think you have that backwards.
negergreger 16 hours ago [-]
I wish LLMs played games, I'd never need to see a human again.
TrueSlacker0 8 hours ago [-]
Watch the videos of alphastar as it challenged the top starcraft 2 players to win. This was back in 2019 and was amazing to watch.
That's called a single player game, or playing against bots.
Otp333 16 hours ago [-]
You and the parent comment just described academia in a nutshell
mannanj 14 hours ago [-]
Seems people in general have started to project their lifes disappointments, stresses, and greater human needs onto a digital dimension like video games. Growing up they used to be about fun. I have endless memories as a child playing Mario N64 and it not needing to be about playing a particular way; only as a I got older and competition and disappointments being human as an adult added up did I notice this shift you mention in online game communities.
I like to ask now, "have you heard of playing for fun?" It's surprising how little people seem to remember that games are made for fun & learning ("play" as a human construct).
edit2: taking back this edit on political conjecture to say something shifted that I'm not sure what. edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
parineum 12 hours ago [-]
> edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
Tying this to politics is odd to me.
Online gaming has been toxic since day one. Anything that depersonalizes is going to be toxic and that is inherent in the online space. In the smaller communities you can actually get to know people and have some kind of reputation but as the community size grows, the consequences of bad behavior fade because nobody can remember.
mannanj 12 hours ago [-]
ah yeah I could have just not said that, it was just a brash thought dump, not really thoughtfully considered and not something I'm too pressed on digging a moat into. i.e. its not a strong belief I hold, but an intuition. The goal really was to explore the idea that something shifted that has led people to lose the fun in games. If I were to repost that, I'd say that instead and not try to make conjecture about politics.
Sorry.
Apocryphon 13 hours ago [-]
Games have also become more like work, bloated Hollywood blockbuster budgets lead to endless busywork content that pad out playtime.
s1artibartfast 10 hours ago [-]
kinda funny sentiment to express in a thread about a completely community built free game without adds. You should play it!
Apocryphon 10 hours ago [-]
I’m talking about AAA games in general, it’s not commentary about this title, which my computer likely can’t run.
coryrc 6 hours ago [-]
It probably can. The game is pretty lightweight.
goodmythical 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know, I won a friendly Super Smash Bros tournament circa ~2011 with kirby spamming down b with what was it, the c-stick? Whatever it was where you could do the super move or whatever automatically instead of having to choose how much power you wanted and just generally clicking random buttons.
The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.
Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.
edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.
StopTencent 15 hours ago [-]
It's amazing the degree tencent shills have taken action to stop people in the west from enjoying games online. This is not natural and it didn't used to be this way.
jpwgarrison 16 hours ago [-]
This is a common reaction and the response is common too: this is only the case if you follow the herd to 8v8 and the two club-like maps they fixate on. But if you study the community for 5 minutes first, you can walk past those two “pubs full of toxic jerks fighting” there are a dozen other options. Single player, PvE, 1v1 through 4v4 and FFA. These (smaller) game modes lack the level of drama you see in 8v8. You just have to go into the quiet restaurant with nerds playing chess and other board games instead of the obvious mess of a drunken bar across the street.
giov4 8 hours ago [-]
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Wherewolfed 11 hours ago [-]
BAR is a deep and challenging game. It's also a team game. If your plan is to jump right into PvP you're going to be deadweight hanging around your team's neck and will rightly be criticized for it. You will never experience toxicity in 1v1 games, and only the normal amount of toxicity for online team games if you can pull your weight. Also, the community rarely surrenders early so OP clearly didn't play that many games and let 1 or 2 lobbies distort their perception of the game. Just remember, if you can't beat the AI, you don't belong in PvP games yet. Take your time, learn patience, walk before you run.
aetherspawn 5 hours ago [-]
I played for a year, got my friends into BAR, one of them is OS 25 (that’s high) and still plays. We still share this viewpoint with each other which we both agree with.
giov4 8 hours ago [-]
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RugnirViking 17 hours ago [-]
Wow, that sounds awful. That's beyond optimising the fun out of a game, it's straight up refusing to have fun. One wonders what they get from it?
NikolaNovak 16 hours ago [-]
My best friend is the great optimizer.
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
tasuki 17 hours ago [-]
> That's beyond optimising the fun out of a game
I'd even dare to say it's beyond all reason.
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
Different people get different things out of video games (and everything, really). For some, the fun is learning, and the game stops being fun when you understand it (this is me). For others, the fun starts after they're learned, and starts being good at it, but still have competition with others. For yet others, mastering it and being the best is the fun.
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
killerstorm 8 hours ago [-]
I think the situation aetherspawn is "highest rank in a low-rank lobby", e.g. an experienced player playing together with newbies. That might be a person who's just enjoying executing a specific strategy.
True top-tier players are very flexible and love high-risk tactics like flying your commander to enemy base. They also happy to "go next" if something went wrong.
scns 17 hours ago [-]
Imaginary superiority
mock-possum 15 hours ago [-]
Bullying is a way to have fun. Additionally, some people are desperate for approval, and will even chase being bullied as a way to get attention from others. It’s not exactly a mystery, it’s just sad.
Panzer04 17 hours ago [-]
This very much depends on the lobby. I don't think this is unique to BAR either - it's just that 8v8 is the most popular mode.
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
aetherspawn 17 hours ago [-]
My OS floated around 10-15 and I virtually always ended up having to go front in every lobby, which is the position I hate the most because I don’t like playing my strategy game like an RPG - that is, micro-ing just a dozen of units and optimising every rocket or bullet hit or whatever, which is kind of what front is like.
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
ghosty141 12 hours ago [-]
> My OS floated around 10-15 and I virtually always ended up having to go front in every lobby, which is the position I hate the most because I don’t like playing my strategy game like an RPG
So the truth is, "Front" is the absolute standard. There are only two other "types" of positions which are tech and air. And a good tech player usually also plays that role more like a front player just with more time in the early game to scale his economy. (with the exception of a few maps like supreme and glitters)
What I'm saying, if you don't like playing front then you should not play the regular 8v8 PvP lobbies on most maps since playing front is the optimal play.
> What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive
Again this is the somewhat optimal play. It is much more efficient to only pay for 1 T2 lab instead of 8. This being said, if you don't "pay" the player giving out t2 you MASSIVELY slow down the production of T2 constructors since the player can't get the economy to comfortably produce 8 of them by 6-7 minutes. Thus not paying leads to the whole team massively losing tempo and upgrading their mexes etc. more slowly which will lose you the game.
> the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
You should be able to save up 400 metal during the 5-6 minutes of early game by building some defenses and playing more passively around that time. You will notice your opponent will too. All-In'ing in T1 is a very risky strategy and 400 metal are usually not the deciding factor if it succeeds or fails. Ofc there are cases were you ARE poor, in those the tech player should understand it and not require payment, but this is usually only the case if you got raided early on for example.
On last thing:
> and never really get to strategise.
Soooo there is a lot of strategy but it's essentially locked behind very high skilllevels. As a 10-15 OS player keeping your units alive and managing your eco is hard enough and what you should be focusing on. Only once that becomes second nature you will notice the more strategic part of BAR.
Source: 37 os with 58% wr playing only in the highest OS rotato lobby.
aetherspawn 5 hours ago [-]
I just want to say that I have a friend that floats around OS 25-30 and he tells me exactly what’s required to reach that level.
I’m 100% aware that most high OS players on Front are using interface mods to manage their units and send back hurt units automatically to get healed.
In fact, he’s not even that much better than me. We still do 2v2 lobbies together, and we have good and bad games and carry each other.
I know what other people are doing. I’ve been playing for over a year (200 games?), and BA on Spring for years before that (500 games, I think). I’m not naive or particularly bad at the game. It’s just not how I want to play, and when I play those positions I’m at a disadvantage because I know other players are “legal cheating”.
And don’t gaslight me lol, every single game I could see the other players falling back their individual units in big crowds 1 hit before death, and I’m telling my friend about it and he’s like “oh yeah everyone above OS 20 uses this mod, which is basically a cheat”. That’s kind of when I decided to stop playing.
Also, the community wasn’t like this in Spring BA! That community was the nicest ever despite the game being basically identical, engine and all. This is a BAR issue.
izacus 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure what are you trying to prove and refute in your post really.
The OP - which you're replying to - is saying that they're not having fun playing RTSes like that (which I understand - sounds awfully limited). You're just trying to prove them they're wrong for not having fun or something.
What was your goal with this post, really?
Sabinus 7 hours ago [-]
aetherspawn is playing in a complex 8v8 team game. They don't want to play and don't enjoy 6 out of the 8 roles/positions on each team.
Unless you're the highest score player in the lobby you don't get to reserve a role. And the back line roles are pretty crucial and can lose the game for the team. They're not going to have a good time in anything that isn't a very noob or a vs AI lobby with the way they currently understand and approach the game. Salty veterans and meta players notwithstanding.
aetherspawn 15 minutes ago [-]
I don’t mind playing 2nd from front. On a lot of maps this leaves 6/8 roles that I like. On others, it leaves 4/8 roles.
If people really liked playing those roles, why am I always forced to play them? Shouldn’t everyone else be jumping to grab them? Lol
adammarples 11 hours ago [-]
Understanding a bit about BAR but not really understanding those multilayer games, I found it a helpful counterpoint to the assertion that front is basically t1 spam then die. The idea that you should budget and save for your t2 con because your opponent also has to is useful, and the idea that greater strategies also open up after micro becomes second nature actually makes me want to play these multilayer lobbies more, whereas the initial post seemed quite negative and just intending to moan.
s1artibartfast 14 hours ago [-]
Mechanics of course depend on the map and meta. However, you cant really go into a 16 player game and expect to get the spot you want. Both backline and front line should be working non-stop and both have a lot to do. It is a sweaty game.
Paying for t2 that is usally a noob mistake. High OS play rarely asks, or has a meta for who pay to run specific plays.
One of My favorite 40 OS streamers leaves every losing game asking what they could have done better, which I think is a good mentality.
9 hours ago [-]
bar2 9 hours ago [-]
I was top 30 in 8v8 a few years ago. The recipe was pretty simple.
Step 1 - Raid and harass nonstop in the early game, never fight fair engagements, abuse range, tax your opponent's attention. Ideally harass multiple players to mess up all of them. Greed behind this, it's not expensive to raid.
Step 2 - spam pulsars (Clyret's meta)
stephen_cagle 14 hours ago [-]
Context: So I have 3 friends that I have been playing video games with for over 30 years weekly. So we would be playing half (as a team) of a 4v4. Now, we are never going to be competitive, we are basically playing to socialize.
Will we be able to play on the "leagues" or whatever they are or will our group just get banned eventually from play? I think we would probably enjoy playing against others, but realistically non of us are sweaty enough to care about being anything beyond good at this (or any) game.
Also, we are all (obviously) older adults. None of us really care if the other team is trash talking or being toxic. We are doing the best we can as a team, we are polite to others, if they have are having a breakdown that is a them problem.
Also, is there a "casual" league? Or do you all just play laddered and end up paired to people who are similar in ELO to you?
Aside: Some of my core memories are setting up "Big Bertha" canons over the entire map to keep my friends at bay. I don't care if it strategically makes sense, it was just fulfilling!
NortySpock 10 hours ago [-]
I play with my brother and an old friend of mine. I'm getting close to forty.
There's no "leagues", it's just lobbies you join, and you gain or loose OS (Elo) per battle. Party up with your friends, find a lobby that says it's for noobs, has some other nonsense in the title ("rotato" is for map rotation) or just seems to have a lot of low-OS players, and have fun. You can avoid or mute/ignore people. Or start your own lobby so you can be boss and set the tone in the title.
Spectate a full match or two before you just jump in, to sort of see the pacing. Announce to the team that you are noobs... But yeah, I think it's perfectly possible for old friends to have fun in BAR PvP ranked; you just ignore / tell off the flamers, or bounce to a nicer lobby. Most people are friendly if you are friendly. Heck sometimes the spectators jump into the player chat and banter while the battle rages.
And yes, the artillery still hits just as hard as it did before.
stephen_cagle 10 hours ago [-]
Awesome, that sounds fun. I'll do as you suggest.
And good idea about spectating a match to get the flow of things. That probably will reduce 50% of friction.
dgently7 38 minutes ago [-]
i just started playing this last year, and tbh ive seen way more patience in "noob" lobbies than i would have expected for an online game. the bar (pun intended) to having a good experience as a noob is not hard but also not obvious. my observations are:
1. have at least played some pve, the "scenerios" are good for forcing you to learn a lot of the basics. if you literally dont know how to do basic interacting with the game there is nothing that the other players in the "noob" lobby can help you with. you will struggle they will struggle no one will have fun. pvp is just an objectively bad way to learn the game. don't even try to play pvp until you are at 2 or even 3 "chev". its a complex game with lots of mechanics, its going to take time to get the basics down.
2. watching replays/specing is helpful. so are some of the yt basics guides. find someone elses build and strategy and try to copy it. you can get to a pretty high os just by doing that. if you get beat bad in a round go watch your own replay. see what the other guy did. copy it next time.
3. remember that its an apm taxed kinda game, players will spend their apm trying to help you, but they wont have time to say things nicely. its not them trying to be mad or rude usually, they just dont have time to write you a novel. use the inbetween matches chat to ask for details. assume good intent on in game chat most of the time.
4. remember that os is literally just a number, it really doesn't mean anything. but finding lobbies with similar os to you helps. like even though there are lots of lobbies with like 30+os who will allow your 10-15 os noob self in its not the right match for you. find lobbies with like 25ish os cap. or no more than 10-15 os higher than your current rank. even better ones that are "unranked" but they seem more rare.
5. the rotato suggestion i saw on another thread is good but also the glitters/supreme with the consistent roles is also kinda nice. its much easier to find lobbies and follow replays and stuff, pick the same lane and watch how a few different people play it and copy what looks like it works as best you can.
bavell 15 hours ago [-]
Not my experience at all when I played around a year ago. There were plenty of noob-specific / noob-friendly lobbies with a mix of helpful players and fellow casuals.
MikeTheGreat 12 hours ago [-]
I've played beyond all reason for a little bit, although I'm not very good at it. I've managed to avoid toxic lobbies by searching for terms like co-op or noob.
giov4 8 hours ago [-]
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sitzkrieg 3 hours ago [-]
if a games competitive scene consists of a small old boys club tier rules do yourself a favor and don’t bother. bar was very much this when i tried it last year. i also got kicked at the start of several games for no apparent obvious reason as a new player lol. very unwelcoming community
v3ss0n 9 hours ago [-]
I disagree . the best community so far.
Sabinus 4 hours ago [-]
I agree. It's the robust old-school lobby type community and it's great. Multiple sub communities with different cultures and players depending on the tradition of map type and settings.
New or casual players going into the wrong lobbies (non-noob 'All that glitters' lobbies for instance) are going to have a bad time.
v3ss0n 1 hours ago [-]
yeah , those who just tried this and went to wrong lobbies i guess.
also they havne't play any games for quite a while it seems, they haven't met LoL , CoD communities.
b3ing 17 hours ago [-]
Does it have a solo mode?
PtaQQ 15 hours ago [-]
As other mentioned it has singple player Scenarios and Skirmish mode, including two special tower defense/survival modes. We are also building a dedicated campaign now.
kbelder 13 hours ago [-]
I might try it, then; I liked Total Annihilation, but have absolutely no interest in multiplayer online. I think that the passionate fans, that obviously are the ones that drove the creation of this game, may not realize the abundance of more casual players that just want a decent solo experience. It seems I've seen several recreations or homages of games that drop the single-player aspects.
Or, creating a decent AI opponent and engaging a story might be really hard.
semi-extrinsic 12 hours ago [-]
I'm a casual gamer who also played TA in the olden days. I have enjoyed playing through the BAR scenarios / tutorials and have had fun playing maybe 100-ish hours against the built-in AIs.
It's a good solo game, especially with the focus on "quality of life" improvements that reduce the need for raw APM to play well.
NortySpock 16 hours ago [-]
BAR does have a series of scenarios for singleplayer / offline play.
Or in multiplayer you can arrange a co-operative game with humans against AI opponents, which often has substantially less flaming involved, especially when playing a "survive against an onslaught of enemies" scenario.
Also the account system of course allows for muting, avoiding-being-paired-with, or fully blocking players. For more egregious behavior a player can be reported to moderators and temporarily / permanently suspended if they break the community code-of-conduct.
somat 16 hours ago [-]
No campain but there are stand alone scenerios you can play. There is also a fun swarm defense sort of thing(rapters) if you like tower defense style gameplay.
Teifion 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, it also has a lot of co-op mode and a non-trivial portion of the player base focuses on that instead of PvP/competitive modes.
adammarples 11 hours ago [-]
Me and my friends just play against the AI. We'd last 2 seconds against real players but we're slow and old RTS gamers and just have a good time stacking up a few AI opponents and smashing them.
HeavyStorm 16 hours ago [-]
Yes!
hdgvhicv 12 hours ago [-]
I used to enjoy TA back in the annihilated.com days. Does this not have stand alone offline story/skirmish modes? Does online with random people not work any more?
killerstorm 9 hours ago [-]
Sorry, but it's just not true.
Pretty much the only case I've seen where a person is kicked out is either griefing (deliberately playing bad) or refuse to listen to advice.
If you don't know basics there's plenty of opportunities to learn outside of a real match (spectator, bots, special lobbies, etc.) Learning basics during 8v8 match is just extremely disrespectful: you're wasting time of 15 people. I think you missed that part.
And JFYI generally high-level lobbies (20+ is) have less drama. So it's mostly beginners having drama between themselves
singingtoday 13 hours ago [-]
This mirrors my experience. I still play occasionally, but quickly remember the community isn't it.
reactordev 9 hours ago [-]
This is by design as it’s built by seniors unwilling to let go of their lawn. It’s a brilliant game, built by jerks. If they truly cared, it would be random spawn somewhere within a polygon of territory.
Melatonic 10 hours ago [-]
Sounds awful - do you have to play as a team ?
rayiner 11 hours ago [-]
This sounds like an arbitrage opportunity.
antisthenes 14 hours ago [-]
This is a classic take by a non-competitive player that would be better suited playing PvE or campaign games.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with that. Just understand that when people are trying to win, they have skin in the game, and are investing time and effort to win every game.
> Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
Yes, it is courtesy not to waste other people's time. Not sure where the controversy is, rather than your misunderstanding. Usually it's quite evident whether the game is lost (again, if you are a somewhat competitive player).
> I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game.
You need somewhat of a thick skin to play competitive team games. This goes just as well for more popular games like DoTA or CS2. It just seems you didn't, but it's not the game's fault or its community's.
Chance-Device 14 hours ago [-]
It’s not the community’s fault for being toxic? Whose fault is it then? God’s? The fabric of reality made you do it?
Sabinus 4 hours ago [-]
It's about a mismatch between expectations of new players and existing players.
Some new players want to learn in multiplayer and they want to play how they play and don't want to change that. That attitude simply doesn't work in an up-to-an-hour long technical 8v8 RTS game with experienced players.
The game could do a better job communicating this to players and try to direct them to appropriate lobbies (noob friendly or vs-AI), or ditch the lobby system for queues like more modern games, but I understood this after looking around, having a few chats with communicative players, and using the excellent game spectate function.
antisthenes 13 hours ago [-]
You really don't understand that some people will interpret any comment in a competitive environment negatively?
It's just a bad culture fit.
> It’s not the community’s fault for being toxic.
What's toxic to A can be good advice to B. With the person saying it being person C.
Chance-Device 13 hours ago [-]
It’s not a bad culture fit, how did the culture become toxic to begin with? We have toxic people who perpetuate and defend being toxic. They take over and push out anyone who doesn’t act like them. This is how communities become toxic, and it’s exactly what you are doing now.
antisthenes 12 hours ago [-]
> We have toxic people who perpetuate and defend being toxic. They take over and push out anyone who doesn’t act like them. This is how communities become toxic, and it’s exactly what you are doing now.
How so? You have provided 0 evidence of the BAR community doing it or me doing it.
All we have is the original GP post that is an accusation (without facts).
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about and are trying to silence people by accusing them of being toxic (which is subjective).
redsocksfan45 13 hours ago [-]
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scotty79 15 hours ago [-]
I feel like many team games would benefit from full mute by default. I played Valorant like that for a while and my experience was infinitely better.
giov4 8 hours ago [-]
Playing RTS since long time, TA to SupCom to FaF, I need to say that I totally understand your condition, especially considering my own experience and evolution on BAR.
I've seen lot of new or learning players being disoriented from the start, trolled and attacked during games, even kickbanned because of their sub-optimal playing after being FORCED to play front because of rating and placing/slot login in BAR.
While personally having a strong RTS background and even very specific to TA and FaF (basically BAR) I had to went through the same high toxicity problems.
The solution has been to don't give up, self learn through pain and few friends tips all the gaming micro details expected by other players and hidden in pro player knowledge.
IMHO this happened mainly and simply due to the lack of a well structured and established learning path for new players, that instead of opening a lobby list and joining the heat to get instantly rammed by toxicity should have the possibility to obtain basic game positioning, build and control knowledge in an more appropriate and structured way, in game info guidance on start -> tutorial?
Regarding the point of the poor newbie have to go as front player and holding while the pros stay in the back, is still kinda normal since the back positions, as especially the tech ones, are more fundamental later in the game, meaning that having a newbie there would be much worse game wise. and dont forget this is valid only for skill draft mode, there are othe draft modes too, even if the skill one is used "99%" of the time.
I find totally off topic and even offensive talking about needing to have had hard skin to go through this toxicity, or referencing completely different game types and generalizing on community and human interaction problems.
Again, a new player should have an "onboarding" path easily available and providing necessary basic logic to be able to start decently. And based on long and wide experience this seems to be mainly a BAR problem!
While I always heavily appreciate the effort behind such types of games/communities and respect it a lot (due to having done similarly in other game cases) I keep playing, learning and evolving with BAR because I miss TA and FaF BUT I often receive stress and leave after a series of bad toxic matches with "bad back taste" and this is sad for any game and community, abd should be reduced as much as possibly.
Sadly I also need to underline that I've personally seen unprofessional and sometimes also abusive or corrupt moderation from staff members, including abusive lobbies or manipulation behind player bans. Hence asking for player reports here doesn't seem decent neither, and a more legit and rock solid moderation could also help in compensating this type of issues.
And the last sad cherry (being an OSS enthusiast) is about having heard about strange forks and attribution from past work that leads now to publishers and money being involved, sad feeling but details would be needed before confirming any judgement.
I play it, I like it (because of TA and SupremeCommander Forged Alliance) but still (with all due respect for all the members behind and their effort) I often leave with a bitter or fishy back taste leftover by a generally hostile setup and community.
sevenzero 15 hours ago [-]
Welcome to any competitive game ever... Your team isn't winning within within the first 3 minutes of the game? Better forfeit and go next.
cboyardee 14 hours ago [-]
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LorenPechtel 12 hours ago [-]
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tobinfekkes 15 hours ago [-]
This is amazing to see TA on HN.
I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day.
So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time.
Games aren't the same anymore.
I still have the original game and expansion packs. Highly recommend playing it.
whartung 15 hours ago [-]
TA is the only game I consciously went out to buy a faster machine to play. Upgrading from my 133MHz to a 400MHz so I could run more units in TA.
I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.
Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.
You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.
All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.
But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.
The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.
And a special Flea scenario is hilarious fun.
Loved that game.
taplayer 14 hours ago [-]
I set a scenario against multiple AIs on the large metal map. The only way to survive was to quickly construct barriers between the buildings to seal off your base because the AIs weren't programmed to destroy barriers. Then came the job of hunting down the AI commanders (I played killing the commander kills all of his units otherwise it was impossible to win).
Great game!
blindriver 3 hours ago [-]
I got the largest metal map and created a basically impenetrable base, and then left the game running overnight.
It turned into a huge battle between the highest level of units and it was so much fun, but even then the AI wasn't extremely challenging.
moffkalast 14 hours ago [-]
You know, just the other day I dropped back into RA3 for a few hours and left wondering why they set every map up so that everyone runs out of resources 15 minutes in as the collectors go empty, so nobody can really do much. Makes for battles that are really limited in scope for seemingly no reason.
Hose vs. hose sounds epic af.
whartung 10 hours ago [-]
Al (most?) of the other RTS games are very resource constrained. So, you have to focus on tight unit mixes, concentrate on individual battles, doing micro, and running about.
TA is more a game of raw tonnage, not of finesse and subtlety.
As the same time, original TA is notorious for not being finely tuned or balanced. And I'm sure that's much more important in PvP.
But in PvE flinging two industrial powerhouses against each other, where subtlety is replaced by 100, throwaway, Flash tanks, it's just a different play experience.
samplifier 9 hours ago [-]
Bullet hell, or rather bullet heaven. TA was the first game where I saw the PC struggle during big battles and it was a pleasant experience, unlike the lag in multiplayer games where I mainly played against people across the pond.
jadbox 10 hours ago [-]
I once reported a bug to Cavedog and stated I didn't have Internet access out in the country to download a patch. They were kind and sent me the patch with the fix via floppy in the mail!
jq-r 13 hours ago [-]
I really enjoyed TA back in the day. And I still remember the fantastic music background which dynamically changed if you went into battle. Starcraft was released after and it looked so ancient compared to TA in my view. But all my friends played SC at the time so it took over.
parpfish 15 hours ago [-]
I always love RTS games and am sad to see how they've largely disappeared.
some of my first experiences 'hacking' were modifying .ini files for command and conquer to make a new version of the game for my friends. it was... very unbalanced
blindriver 3 hours ago [-]
TA is my most favorite game of all time. I bought it on Steam and got all the modern Escalation mods. I will spin it up every 6 months or so and play a new game just for fun, I just with the AI were more challenging.
nekusar 15 hours ago [-]
Not to mention "Buy 1 game, 2 OTHERS can play against/with each other for free"
jansan 15 hours ago [-]
I had the most intense battles with my brother, even well into our 30s when we only met a few times a year.
It is sad that there never really was a successor that was as good. They could have lifted the 255 units limit, made the game more balanced, added a few more maps and units (but not too many), enhace the graphics (but keep it 2.5D, I do not want 3D in this kind of games) and make connectivity easier.
Cavedog released a fantasy game after that, which I wanted to like, but it was crap. And the Command & Conquer games were never for me. Tried them but never felt them.
jon-wood 12 hours ago [-]
Supreme Commander was that follow up. Basically the same team as worked on TA, making more or less the same game but with larger maps and higher unit counts.
LorenPechtel 12 hours ago [-]
I've got it. For me, I can't hope to beat the AI using low tech spam to grab wide open resources. But when resources aren't to scattered I almost always win against the AI.
caspar 5 hours ago [-]
There was/is a patch available that lifted the unit limit significantly. I played with it constantly. Even played a match at a lan party with friends last year.
mboerwink 16 hours ago [-]
I play Zero-K (a related open source game) a few times a month. I really enjoy their 'cold take' blog series discussing game mechanics and the history of TA derivatives. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
WillMorr 12 hours ago [-]
I played a ton of ZK back in 2016-21, it's the most polished game of its kind imo. The cold takes series is excellent, rts balance is such a hard problem and it makes for interesting systems analysis.
gavmor 10 hours ago [-]
The cold takes themselves are a fantastic proof of the care and attention the devs put into this game, as well as the depths of their design philosophy.
bar2 10 hours ago [-]
Best RTS ever made, in my subjective opinion, but incredibly toxic player base despite active moderation.
I think it's a numbers issue with 16 players in a standard game, and if you play five games in a session, with all chat enabled, you're going to run into a small handful of truly nasty people, which is souring of the experience and why I put the game down in the end.
I know the standard advice is to ignore it but it's just not fun to be constantly exposed to aggressive and unhappy people.
SockThief 18 hours ago [-]
The game is very mature and well thought RTS. The user experience and performance is beyond anything on the market now. It beats all well known AAA studios attempts at it by far.
It's still actively developed and very free to play.
Just note, 40 vs 40 are effectively "meme" games. You can't play them normally, they are special events only. 40 vs 40 is very much not representative of BAR experience overall ;).
j4k0bfr 18 hours ago [-]
I love watching BAR multiplayer games but definitely felt a bit overwhelmed in the midgame with this one. How anyone can comprehend a 40v40 in real time is beyond me haha. I guess it's just a muscle to build.
Looking forward to a break where I can get into BAR, I've been utterly nerdsniped. Uthermal's VODs are good stuff [1].
BAR is amazing but there's a hurdle for new players.
If you download it, don't join the first lobby you see.
My advice is to watch some videos on youtube, play some games solo, then look for new player lobbies or create your own and set restrictions on it.
It only takes one player on the enemy team who regularly plays the game and you'll get stream rolled.
Or you'll join a game of regular players, can't hold your lane and everyone will get frustrated when their base is blown up from your lane not holding.
Sabinus 7 hours ago [-]
This is very important advice if you want to have a good time playing the game. Picking the right lobby is changes your experience drastically.
dgently7 22 minutes ago [-]
this. also realize its a complex game with a legit learning curve. you literally cant just drop in to pvp and expect to have fun.
and also at least in lobbies with noob in the name its pretty rare for people to be actively hostile to the low os ppl who at least know the basics. but you do have to remember that in the middle of a match nobody has time to type and tell you what to do politely.(its an apm heavy game). try to assume good intent, its not ppl being rude usually.
energy123 10 hours ago [-]
You do need to lose a few games to be rated properly then you'll be stacked with the best players (relative to average skill in the lobby). Good players will eat the whole map for you.
giov4 7 hours ago [-]
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bob1029 18 hours ago [-]
If you are into playing with others, you might find a more stable community with FAF.
Lobby wait time is rather extreme, and false-starts are really tough (40m to get full team -> get it balanced -> launch game -> someone disconnects on start, or went AFK because of the long wait time -> re re re re in chat -> launch new lobby -> only 60% rejoin -> match is now unbalanced -> wait 20m -> some god among men with 2500k ELO joins -> match is un-balancable
bob1029 12 hours ago [-]
My approach is to queue up for a FAF lobby before I start a work sprint. Being interrupted from my tasks by the loading screen is always a pleasant surprise.
energy123 15 hours ago [-]
What's the toxicity level of the FAF community?
Aerolfos 13 hours ago [-]
They're not very toxic, but my experience is that it's a small, elite community and they're very good at the game.
You're going to have to go all in on learning the game, putting in massive effort into every game just to keep up, and will still probably lose most games. I just don't have it in me to play that kind of competitive RTS game like you're trying to climb the SC2 ladder to the top during peak Heart of the Swarm playercounts or whatever, so FAF multiplayer was a no-go.
chainingsolid 8 hours ago [-]
Fully second doing some learning. A lot of the critical 'meta' is fairly basic. Factory first, don't stall energy, reclaim wins games, commander strong early.
Also if you see me(same username) online and are starting out, feel free to reach out over the FAF chat system, for some simple coaching. Game gets a lot easier after some of the meta is learned. I can't garentee I'll even respond, but I would hate for someone to bounce off due to the learning curve.
foolfoolz 15 hours ago [-]
FAF has a good community. it’s clear some people are better than others and you won’t get yelled at for not knowing what to do and can ask for help. the problem with FAF isn’t community, it’s technical. the game and connectivity are so painful that it might take you an hour to get into a game. and then you play 30 mins, get to the core part of the game, and someone drops. it’s a 10/10 experience when it’s good but it might be good 10% of the time. you’ll frequently see comments that it’s a lobby simulator
unfortunately FAF is an evolved TA with better mechanics than BAR. BAR is just modern graphics TA. which just feels old and outdated to me after spending so much time playing FAF which is better across every angle
energy123 15 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the feedback.
Do you think the BAR community is good too, if you've played it? I want to hear what you think so I can get a comparison/relative viewpoint across the two games.
s1artibartfast 14 hours ago [-]
It is an intense game with open chat, so someone will inevetiably let you know if they think you blew an hour long game. That said, I have found the community to be quite nice. there are noob clans and people running training clinics.
Even the guy that let of steam after losing will probably give you tips on the next go round.
adammarples 11 hours ago [-]
It's not as bad. I came from faf to bar and was an ok setons player but my first setons/supreme match on bar I was literally being flamed out of the gate for not being totally optimal from the jump. On faf it seems you will get flamed if you don't know the broad strokes but people will cover for you especially if you're lower rated.
NBJack 17 hours ago [-]
Some of the folks who give running commentaries on matches make it entertaining even if you don't play. Derp, Gyle, Willow; I've spent way more hours listening to their humorous takes on plays and strategies than I would care to admit. And frankly, it's the "average joes" of the game (lower ranked players) whom don't really follow the meta that often make it the most entertaining.
somat 16 hours ago [-]
I definitely enjoy RTS more as a spectator sport than as a player(I am probably not competitive enough to enjoy playing vs people) but I do enjoy a good match every once in a while. But... I hate the "casts" I much prefer to watch a single player just play the game rather than inane talking points and jumping all over the place loosing the narrative.
This is such a dissociative experience (what I enjoy vs what everyone wants to provide) I wonder if there is a market opportunity somewhere here for professional sports. Just a cam feed focused on on a single player and their contribution to the game. A second person cast rather than the normal third person view.
abc42 17 hours ago [-]
I know this is kind of silly, but even though TA's game mechanics are obviously great, I really liked its ambience and story. The sort of a melancholic vibe of a slow-moving neverending war.
BAR in contrast is a bit of a PvP clickfest, which I don't enjoy. I wonder if there's a game mode or another Spring mod that would give me a more authentic feel? Single-player or perhaps PvE.
qznc 16 hours ago [-]
The engine website shows some other games which might be closer to the original TA: https://recoilengine.org/
Apocryphon 16 hours ago [-]
Looking at this website, BAR seems to have oodles of lore, but it’s giving an LLM-written voice.
icexuick 12 hours ago [-]
The voice on the website is a full real person. He's a professional voice actor that goes by the name of "Razkharn". Awesome guy.
Apocryphon 12 hours ago [-]
I don’t mean the voice actor I mean the writer of the lore entries
queuep 16 hours ago [-]
Interesting, tried this game just 2 weeks ago and beat one of the pve modes with a friend just yesterday.
Joined some 8v8 for noobs and some were very friendly but they also wanted to kick me for not knowing the game. After all they let me stay but I stuck to pve or vs bots with friends now
plopz 17 hours ago [-]
Theres been some drama with this game where a few of the core admins have claimed ownership and sold out to a publisher. They are taking the free open source game and selling it on steam with a free demo. In addition to the toxic community, its made the whole thing a bit radioactive. Curious to see how it all plays out.
Teifion 16 hours ago [-]
I'm one of the contributors and from everything I've seen it's not a sell-out situation. The game is GPL so will be remaining open source, the paid-portion of the game will be developed solely by funds from the publisher (I do server stuff so won't be involved in any of that bit.
redrobein 15 hours ago [-]
I'm curious, why isn't the the free version of the game on steam? It'd be a lot easier to get my friends to try it, and setup parties if it used steam friends.
NortySpock 15 hours ago [-]
Speaking as an occasional contributor: there's a roadmap towards that, but there's a few components that need to finish baking before we release on Steam. e.g. the current lobby protocol isn't capable of handling Steam levels of traffic, so we are working on replacing it.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)
The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.
The current version isn't on steam due to a variety of (mostly infrastructure related) issues, the free version _will_ be on steam in the future though you will still be able to get the free version from the website for those who want to avoid steam.
Panzer04 17 hours ago [-]
Well, they can't sell out the game code. That's not how GPL works.
gacgacgac 16 hours ago [-]
Yes they absolutely can? Anyone can. I can.
The thing the GPL requires is that I also provide it for free. Now, why would anyone buy a free thing? To support the devs. To encourage this sort of business model. To get a build that's known to be working and supported and not have to deal with the hassle of compiling things themselves.
kcb 16 hours ago [-]
That's not it. They will keep the assets closed and under license. There will be no free version of the full game.
Not sure why we should encourage using open source as a vehicle to market and get free work building your fundamentals. Just to reap the profits yourself later.
gacgacgac 7 hours ago [-]
Which assets? The textures, models, and animations are Creative Commons (various flavors, mostly non commercial).
If the code is open source, one can always build a client that works with the Creative Commons assets or community contributed ones.
Teifion 15 hours ago [-]
The multiplayer game (the thing available now) will remain free including all the updates and improvements to it. What will be behind a one-off-payment will be the campaign. We've had a few bad actors spread word that the entire thing is going to be behind paywall, microtransactions, pay-to-win etc but none of that is true.
kcb 16 hours ago [-]
I think their plan is to make assets closed licensed. It's all pretty lame. Now any open source code contribution is packaged up and sold with someone else getting the check.
falcor84 15 hours ago [-]
Fighting fire with fire, what's to stop me from using GenAI "create new versions of all of these assets but with a Norse twist" and publish these under my GPL+CC BY-SA 4.0 fork?
etdznots 14 hours ago [-]
They’ll probably suck and the only person that will care is you.
orthoxerox 14 hours ago [-]
Nothing at all.
netsharc 16 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure you can. But if it's GPL, you need to provide source to the buyer, and the buyer can publish that source for free.
inigyou 16 hours ago [-]
Yes they can. Firstly, you can do anything and then someone may or may not sue you for it and they may or may not win. Secondly, if you're the copyright owner you can do whatever you like.
fluoridation 15 hours ago [-]
The owner of the copyright can do as they please with the licensing. What I've not seen is someone retroactively changing licensing terms, but even that might be possible.
gertrunde 17 hours ago [-]
The blurb in game suggests the multiplayer side of things will be open, the 'premium' thing on steam gives the one closed bit, which is the single player campaign.
(In theory!)
insanitybit 16 hours ago [-]
What do you mean?
PtaQQ 15 hours ago [-]
Hi, PtaQ here, Community manager for BAR. The idea behind the monetisation is to sell what has been built through the publishing funds. Everything available today and a lot more content will be released for free too and always available.
Basically, the paid content will boil down to a single-player campaign.
The funds help us finish and release the game which still needs a lot of focused effort which is not something you can reliably sustained without commissioning some of that work.
This game is so great, particularly the depth behind the different roles you can play. You could be in the frontline and fight for every cm, or be behind, following your carefully crafted recipes to build an exponential economy that will eventually sustain your team late game.
The learning curve could be a problem though, sometimes a game ends really quickly because a player is slightly less experienced than the others and it’s over.
There’s a very “we’re selling business software” feel to this webpage, which makes me wonder what it would be like for business software to be marketed like a video game.
inigyou 16 hours ago [-]
Isn't that most business software these days?
hilariously 17 hours ago [-]
Honestly it feels like someone whose used to internal metrics and management at Large Company made this.
pohl 19 hours ago [-]
Been wanting to play this. Alas, macOS support is table stakes for me.
gloosx 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because:
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.
gloosx 13 hours ago [-]
It's great to hear, yeah I researched this topic a bit further and there are clearly some very determined people who want to bring BAR to more platforms, excited about the progress! Floats will be a big pain in the ass for sure and will cause countless desyncs, same story prevented playing supreme commander FAF on ARM processors, though a lot of attempts have been made
dimitar 10 hours ago [-]
There is an interesting technical reason why its a challenge (and they can't just swap in a supported library):
> What makes the “simulate inputs” approach work is that the engine takes utmost care to keep calculations identical on each client. This is not trivial because you still have to work with things that naturally differ on each client, such as mouse position or which units are selected - this is called the unsynced state. On top of that, there can be hardware differences that have to be worked around to get identical results - the huge effort involved is one of the reasons why Recoil is not available outside x86-64.
As someone who loved Supreme Commander, I really wanted to like BAR, but I found it felt like death by a thousand cuts. I last played more than a year ago, so things might be different, but the QoL felt really lacking.
willis936 9 hours ago [-]
SupCom was my first RTS and I have fond memories of turtling on massive maps that would crash after hour 4.
Planetary Annihilation scratches the itch and reminds me that I am very bad at strategy games whenever I think I might be smart. It's probably the most fair game I've played that I am completely awful at.
adammarples 11 hours ago [-]
There are so many qol things in bar that I would love to see in faf. Area mex build, for example. Sticky unit grouping, draw unit formation is essential. Reclaim/repair area. Unit and command queue jumping. That said there are a few faf ones I would like to see in bar too.
icexuick 10 hours ago [-]
Guessing this would be: Good Transport mechanics?
BAR is working on this.
adammarples 9 hours ago [-]
The main one would be just picking up and moving command points
gbuk2013 18 hours ago [-]
I used to play the original TA a lot and BAR is very well done. Much harder than the original though - I had no trouble with TA campaigns but I have not even made it halfway with BAR before hitting skill wall. Not a teen anymore so it’s hard to motivate myself to try and push through. :)
Perz1val 18 hours ago [-]
There's also Zero-K on steam and it has an actual campaign. Last time I checked BAR had none, but it was on the roadmap
gbuk2013 17 hours ago [-]
You’re right - it’s not a campaign as such - it’s a set of scenarios (currently 22) in increasing difficulty. I haven’t played for a while after getting stuck but checking now I got stuck on the 5th scenario - even worse than I thought. :)
I played Zero-K several years ago and it didn’t stick in my mind as much but maybe worth revisiting it - thanks!
Reading about it seems to suggest that it’s even deeper in terms of strategy and tactics so I will probably struggle even more. :(
WillowWithAWand 3 hours ago [-]
Just from playing a bit in skirmish, this game seems really tryhard and that's not really what I want from my RTS games
killerstorm 9 hours ago [-]
I tried playing SC2 for a few years but controlling units was too difficult: the only thing I could do is to send entire army to fight.
No such problem with BAR, at least in early game: quite feasible to control each unit even if you don't have fast reflexes. That's pretty much unique in RTS.
Late game is more chaotic, but it's fun in its own way...
It's a decent game, but not a good 1v1 game. Fun to watch the massive 100+ player brawls though.
Thundernerd 13 hours ago [-]
Is it PVP only or can I play this against bots as well?
I would like to play it but the comments about the community make it so that I never want to touch PVP with a 10ft pole.
CrzyLngPwd 10 hours ago [-]
What is singel player vs computer/bot experience?
I'd love to wile away some time on a single player, short adventure/mission, game from time to time. I have enjoyed lots of fun times with game like cmomand and conquer in the past so something like that wouldf be amazing.
Is this game it?
bartvbl 9 hours ago [-]
The game has an easy and hard AI. Easy is great for getting started, hard difficulty varies by the map. They are nearly impossible on a large map where you try to turtle in a corner, but if you get the frontline close to them they're usually fairly straightforward to get under control. The game also has a raptors PvE mode that's great fun, especially with friends.
italiansolider 5 hours ago [-]
Looks like supreme commander.
15 hours ago [-]
jonplackett 8 hours ago [-]
No MacOS support (cry emoji)
bigyabai 7 hours ago [-]
It's probably translatable with Crossover or GPTK. Waiting for a native Metal port of most games is a good way to speedrun old age.
zeafoamrun 18 hours ago [-]
This looks really slick and also very detailed. Is it free as in beer or free as in freedom?
Teifion 16 hours ago [-]
It's completely free to play (though they/we have recently signed a publishing deal and there will be a paid for campaign mode later) with a combination of GPL and MIT source code.
p2004a 14 hours ago [-]
Free as a beer due to assets.
- All the code is GPLv2, MIT and other open licenses.
- Some assets are CC-BY-SA but there are also a quite a bunch proprietary ones
What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?
cwillu 16 hours ago [-]
And your evidence for this is what exactly?
PtaQQ 15 hours ago [-]
Hey there, BAR Community Manager here. Nothing on the website is written by AI, we have a strict no AI art policy. Admittedly the text there is a bit old and we should update it soon.
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
I literally just said it's not AI and you felt the need to disagree with me saying no, it's not AI, because you skipped past that and focused on the word "slop". AI slop isn't the only kind of slop out there.
amitayk 17 hours ago [-]
Been playing BAR for couple of years now. Do not sign up if you have a minor addiction problem to fun things.
encom 18 hours ago [-]
>All development updates, tech support, finding friends and all player and developer communication takes place on Discord.
[ eye rolling emoji ]
Sharlin 17 hours ago [-]
It's unfortunate, but what can you do? It's where players are, for better or worse.
MarsIronPI 17 hours ago [-]
At least bridge to something the freedom-loving folks will use, e.g. Matrix, or (better IMO) Jabber.
p2004a 14 hours ago [-]
We had Matrix bridge for a few months to some channels related to development. Pretty much no interest (except for 1 person that asked for it), no legitimate activity, yet, there were spammers showing up quite often.
Bridging also didn't map all the discord functionality so it caused some confusion at times.
s1artibartfast 6 hours ago [-]
One thing people might find interesting about bar is how popular spectating matches is. It's not uncommon for the top 16 player lobbies to have twice that many players in game spectating and commenting on plays. It's currently a small community so it has a recurring cast of characters and people know each other across months or years of playing together.
You have the Divas and the workhorses, the air or sea specialists, and the goofballs and communists
goels 16 hours ago [-]
Looks great
mgc_blackbox 4 hours ago [-]
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tsouth2 5 hours ago [-]
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swordlucky666 16 hours ago [-]
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mciair_alpha 15 hours ago [-]
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joseph_council 16 hours ago [-]
Is that AI ?
Qision 15 hours ago [-]
Everything is AI, you are AI, I am AI, my kettle is AI and soon atomic particles will be AI.
etdznots 14 hours ago [-]
Wow, AI is really getting good these days, I had no idea!
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.
For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “rotato” rotate maps after every game and are usually among the chillest. Players tend to be less rigid about roles and expected builds there, which generally leads to more positive interactions.
If you want to make the community better, delete all the rules that encourage players to gang up on other players for subjective reasons. These kinds of rules punish non-verbal players, who easily fall prey to verbal players (I’ll just call them bullies) who can use the rules as a justification basically to harass someone whilst getting branded a hero.
Also, a large majority of players have fun, even when they’re losing. Asking those players to accommodate a hyper-competitive few who want the tightest loop possible to winning and restarting is anti-fun. Both from the perspective of the person winning (I get so disappointed when I win front and they just surrender before I get to blow up their base) and from the perspective of the non-front players who are pressured to quit as soon as front is lost.
Won plenty of games in more casual lobbies (kind of rare) where the front player, after dying, was happy to just receive T2/3 units to control, and due to being able to focus on just controlling a few units, won the game.
The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.
It does benefit from:
1. Limited coms (nobody seems to use voice chat, perhaps partly because it was completely broken for years), and while you can type, it's too fast paced to write much so mostly people just use quick chats sarcastically (What a save!)
2. Games are really short (about 7 minutes). You're not losing hours of your life if you get stuck with an arsehole.
3. People play a lot of games because they're so short, so the matchmaking is very accurate usually.
But I think that's because you can't really impact other players. Everyone's racing their own lines, just sharing a chat room while doing so.
Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.
But this must be the case for all competitive games right? At some point the meta has been figured out and there is no real way to deviate from that.
The player bases are a lot more "chill" overall, despite still being attracted to playing their best.
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
If what GP is saying is "play with people you know personally and then you won't have to play with people you don't know personally," well, sure. Great insight.
Most people don't and can't do that. That's why online matchmaking exists and constitutes 99.999999% of online gameplay.
Ideally, it should allow non-competitive players of similar performance level to play against each other.
Which think about what that feels like: getting semi-consistently beaten by worse players who just all "happen to have" the exact same loadout and exact same strategies and exact same everything.
That's exactly what I'm describing. It's incredibly boring.
Losses against someone with better logistical choices is normal and expected. You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
I recognize the adjacent commenter's point about the small population though. It might be difficult to be appropriately matched up unlike a AAA title at launch.
> You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
You must not be familiar with what "meta" means. Modern video games seem to all have an across-the-board superior configuration. And yes, the way to "counter it" is to copy it, which is why this strategy spreads like a virus through the game until 100% of the people who beat you are all doing the exact same thing.
If the desired outcome of the game design was for everyone to use the same configurations (the meta) in order to "counter" the meta, then why have configuration options at all? Give everyone the same exact thing all the time.
The reason they don't do that is because it's extremely boring. But unfortunately the "meta-finding" capability of the streaming community yields the same functional outcome anyway. Ergo: the games are made boring by the community, as stated at the very top.
And no, the issue isn't "I like to casually play with off-the-wall builds." The issue is "video games were a lot more fun when you encountered different types of opponents."
This is, of course, why game designers put so much work into supporting variations in builds, so obviously they agree too.
I didn't criticize anyone for being less skilled or anyone for being "in the wrong." I'm observing a game dynamic that makes games less variable than their designers clearly intend.
If you don't like it that's fine - I'm actually mostly in agreement with you. But I don't think it's necessarily a flaw in the game any more than chess openers are necessarily a flaw with chess (although chess960 does exist so clearly not everyone appreciates the typical openers).
I'm not saying people who do this are evil or bad. I'm saying they make games not fun, and it's not clear at all that this is solvable by the game designers except by vastly simplifying the games (e.g. getting rid of builds).
The fact they design for variance so much but then do not achieve variance is an empirical proof that it is a flaw in the design.
Yes, this is also a flaw with chess and is why chess is an extremely boring game. You can just ask someone their Elo and know who will win. As you get into higher Elos, variation in play style becomes less relevant, i.e. more homogenous. This makes the game boring.
It's not my job to lend airtime to other people's opinions on the matter. I'm sharing my opinion. You can share yours if you want.
Sometimes people would even rage quit. But I could do really well as support, even if it was slightly worse than some other characters. It made for a very fun playthrough.
And I would totally get the people. Sometimes somebody in a bad mood joins your game and just messes everything up because they didn't get to play mid. And I might have looked like someone like that.
But dealing with toxic players is surprisingly easy.
I initially looked down at LoL, but later wanted to learn to play to spend time online with my younger brother that was having a hard time. So I had a friend show me something.
First time I played jungle, I died on the first monster. Before people could finish typing flaming messages, my friend typed into the chat /ignore all
Voila - silence and no flaming.
Later I stopped preemptively ignoring everyone. Just used no second chances tactic. If anybody cursed, was mean or even used the word noob, I instantly ignored them and then kept playing.
Sometimes told a teammate that had a bad steak to do that to the flaming person. Many games I've one because of being nice to my teammates, trying to keep their spirits up. Wasn't super hard - 25 year old at that time and reading some philosophy books and meditating vs regular 13 year olds.
It was still important to ignore people before they could push your buttons and anger you.
I wonder if it's the same in other games. Definitely not the case in Eve online when I played that. But over there you meet the same people again and by having no style and being a bad winner and a bad loser didn't give you any respect.
I don't play a lot of competitive Overwatch, but it's definitely a much nicer experience with chat turned off, even if I'm not the one being flamed, even if we lose because people are typing instead of shooting.
What's weird is that I love EVE for that sort of nullsec drama and sociopathic players eating each other in crazed gambits, but a couple of matches in Overwatch competitive a decade ago put me off the idea of matchmaking lobbies altogether.
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
and also it's a lot harder
(Unless you play with cloistered private communities)
As soon as someone loses a bunch of games in a row and decides to Google "$GameName strategy", the community's unique meta disappears.
By it's very nature, games are supposed to be fun and bonding experience for a community of humans.
But the modern interpretation is one of direct conflict to show ones superiority for the sake of feeling superior. Which ultimately leads to the imbuing the games with a level of importance or value for the victor.
RTSes present continuous, large choice spaces. So it doesn't really feel like as much of a logic puzzle, and perfection does not appear to be within ones grasp at every moment. Whether you'll lose 4 or 6 of the T2 fighter-bombers is not relevant. The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction.
That's not true in all RTSes. Take StarCraft, for example, and there are plenty of games on record that were decided not just by 1 unit, but by 1 attack from 1 unit. There are Zerg players, for example, who have developed a reputation for creating havoc after getting a single zergling (the smallest and cheapest attacking unit) into their opponent's base. A single shot from a Protoss reaver can mean the difference between taking minimal damage and losing half of your workers (and subsequently the game).
But I'm thinking about TA-style games, the topic of this discussion, which pride themselves on large armies. Though, to your point, early game of Supreme Commander is also quite chess-like, because of how restricted the set of opportunities is.
But chess theory, the human activity of analyzing chess, is hugely more complex than whatever human players have analyzed about the game of starcraft
What I mean is, perhaps the best neural networks that play starcraft are as complex as chess neural networks, and this complexity is irreducible, but starcraft players haven't developed as much theory in comparison
Chess surely has a meta, but it's been honed so the meta is a huge number of significantly different paths. It's a balancing issue. Give Starcraft another few centuries of play and maybe it'll be the same.
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)
I like to ask now, "have you heard of playing for fun?" It's surprising how little people seem to remember that games are made for fun & learning ("play" as a human construct).
edit2: taking back this edit on political conjecture to say something shifted that I'm not sure what. edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
Tying this to politics is odd to me.
Online gaming has been toxic since day one. Anything that depersonalizes is going to be toxic and that is inherent in the online space. In the smaller communities you can actually get to know people and have some kind of reputation but as the community size grows, the consequences of bad behavior fade because nobody can remember.
Sorry.
The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.
Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.
edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
I'd even dare to say it's beyond all reason.
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
True top-tier players are very flexible and love high-risk tactics like flying your commander to enemy base. They also happy to "go next" if something went wrong.
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
So the truth is, "Front" is the absolute standard. There are only two other "types" of positions which are tech and air. And a good tech player usually also plays that role more like a front player just with more time in the early game to scale his economy. (with the exception of a few maps like supreme and glitters)
What I'm saying, if you don't like playing front then you should not play the regular 8v8 PvP lobbies on most maps since playing front is the optimal play.
> What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive
Again this is the somewhat optimal play. It is much more efficient to only pay for 1 T2 lab instead of 8. This being said, if you don't "pay" the player giving out t2 you MASSIVELY slow down the production of T2 constructors since the player can't get the economy to comfortably produce 8 of them by 6-7 minutes. Thus not paying leads to the whole team massively losing tempo and upgrading their mexes etc. more slowly which will lose you the game.
> the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
You should be able to save up 400 metal during the 5-6 minutes of early game by building some defenses and playing more passively around that time. You will notice your opponent will too. All-In'ing in T1 is a very risky strategy and 400 metal are usually not the deciding factor if it succeeds or fails. Ofc there are cases were you ARE poor, in those the tech player should understand it and not require payment, but this is usually only the case if you got raided early on for example.
On last thing:
> and never really get to strategise.
Soooo there is a lot of strategy but it's essentially locked behind very high skilllevels. As a 10-15 OS player keeping your units alive and managing your eco is hard enough and what you should be focusing on. Only once that becomes second nature you will notice the more strategic part of BAR.
Source: 37 os with 58% wr playing only in the highest OS rotato lobby.
I’m 100% aware that most high OS players on Front are using interface mods to manage their units and send back hurt units automatically to get healed.
In fact, he’s not even that much better than me. We still do 2v2 lobbies together, and we have good and bad games and carry each other.
I know what other people are doing. I’ve been playing for over a year (200 games?), and BA on Spring for years before that (500 games, I think). I’m not naive or particularly bad at the game. It’s just not how I want to play, and when I play those positions I’m at a disadvantage because I know other players are “legal cheating”.
And don’t gaslight me lol, every single game I could see the other players falling back their individual units in big crowds 1 hit before death, and I’m telling my friend about it and he’s like “oh yeah everyone above OS 20 uses this mod, which is basically a cheat”. That’s kind of when I decided to stop playing.
Also, the community wasn’t like this in Spring BA! That community was the nicest ever despite the game being basically identical, engine and all. This is a BAR issue.
The OP - which you're replying to - is saying that they're not having fun playing RTSes like that (which I understand - sounds awfully limited). You're just trying to prove them they're wrong for not having fun or something.
What was your goal with this post, really?
Unless you're the highest score player in the lobby you don't get to reserve a role. And the back line roles are pretty crucial and can lose the game for the team. They're not going to have a good time in anything that isn't a very noob or a vs AI lobby with the way they currently understand and approach the game. Salty veterans and meta players notwithstanding.
If people really liked playing those roles, why am I always forced to play them? Shouldn’t everyone else be jumping to grab them? Lol
Paying for t2 that is usally a noob mistake. High OS play rarely asks, or has a meta for who pay to run specific plays.
One of My favorite 40 OS streamers leaves every losing game asking what they could have done better, which I think is a good mentality.
Step 1 - Raid and harass nonstop in the early game, never fight fair engagements, abuse range, tax your opponent's attention. Ideally harass multiple players to mess up all of them. Greed behind this, it's not expensive to raid.
Step 2 - spam pulsars (Clyret's meta)
Will we be able to play on the "leagues" or whatever they are or will our group just get banned eventually from play? I think we would probably enjoy playing against others, but realistically non of us are sweaty enough to care about being anything beyond good at this (or any) game.
Also, we are all (obviously) older adults. None of us really care if the other team is trash talking or being toxic. We are doing the best we can as a team, we are polite to others, if they have are having a breakdown that is a them problem.
Also, is there a "casual" league? Or do you all just play laddered and end up paired to people who are similar in ELO to you?
Aside: Some of my core memories are setting up "Big Bertha" canons over the entire map to keep my friends at bay. I don't care if it strategically makes sense, it was just fulfilling!
There's no "leagues", it's just lobbies you join, and you gain or loose OS (Elo) per battle. Party up with your friends, find a lobby that says it's for noobs, has some other nonsense in the title ("rotato" is for map rotation) or just seems to have a lot of low-OS players, and have fun. You can avoid or mute/ignore people. Or start your own lobby so you can be boss and set the tone in the title.
Spectate a full match or two before you just jump in, to sort of see the pacing. Announce to the team that you are noobs... But yeah, I think it's perfectly possible for old friends to have fun in BAR PvP ranked; you just ignore / tell off the flamers, or bounce to a nicer lobby. Most people are friendly if you are friendly. Heck sometimes the spectators jump into the player chat and banter while the battle rages.
And yes, the artillery still hits just as hard as it did before.
And good idea about spectating a match to get the flow of things. That probably will reduce 50% of friction.
1. have at least played some pve, the "scenerios" are good for forcing you to learn a lot of the basics. if you literally dont know how to do basic interacting with the game there is nothing that the other players in the "noob" lobby can help you with. you will struggle they will struggle no one will have fun. pvp is just an objectively bad way to learn the game. don't even try to play pvp until you are at 2 or even 3 "chev". its a complex game with lots of mechanics, its going to take time to get the basics down. 2. watching replays/specing is helpful. so are some of the yt basics guides. find someone elses build and strategy and try to copy it. you can get to a pretty high os just by doing that. if you get beat bad in a round go watch your own replay. see what the other guy did. copy it next time. 3. remember that its an apm taxed kinda game, players will spend their apm trying to help you, but they wont have time to say things nicely. its not them trying to be mad or rude usually, they just dont have time to write you a novel. use the inbetween matches chat to ask for details. assume good intent on in game chat most of the time. 4. remember that os is literally just a number, it really doesn't mean anything. but finding lobbies with similar os to you helps. like even though there are lots of lobbies with like 30+os who will allow your 10-15 os noob self in its not the right match for you. find lobbies with like 25ish os cap. or no more than 10-15 os higher than your current rank. even better ones that are "unranked" but they seem more rare. 5. the rotato suggestion i saw on another thread is good but also the glitters/supreme with the consistent roles is also kinda nice. its much easier to find lobbies and follow replays and stuff, pick the same lane and watch how a few different people play it and copy what looks like it works as best you can.
New or casual players going into the wrong lobbies (non-noob 'All that glitters' lobbies for instance) are going to have a bad time.
Or, creating a decent AI opponent and engaging a story might be really hard.
It's a good solo game, especially with the focus on "quality of life" improvements that reduce the need for raw APM to play well.
Or in multiplayer you can arrange a co-operative game with humans against AI opponents, which often has substantially less flaming involved, especially when playing a "survive against an onslaught of enemies" scenario.
Also the account system of course allows for muting, avoiding-being-paired-with, or fully blocking players. For more egregious behavior a player can be reported to moderators and temporarily / permanently suspended if they break the community code-of-conduct.
Pretty much the only case I've seen where a person is kicked out is either griefing (deliberately playing bad) or refuse to listen to advice.
If you don't know basics there's plenty of opportunities to learn outside of a real match (spectator, bots, special lobbies, etc.) Learning basics during 8v8 match is just extremely disrespectful: you're wasting time of 15 people. I think you missed that part.
And JFYI generally high-level lobbies (20+ is) have less drama. So it's mostly beginners having drama between themselves
That being said, there's nothing wrong with that. Just understand that when people are trying to win, they have skin in the game, and are investing time and effort to win every game.
> Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
Yes, it is courtesy not to waste other people's time. Not sure where the controversy is, rather than your misunderstanding. Usually it's quite evident whether the game is lost (again, if you are a somewhat competitive player).
> I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game.
You need somewhat of a thick skin to play competitive team games. This goes just as well for more popular games like DoTA or CS2. It just seems you didn't, but it's not the game's fault or its community's.
Some new players want to learn in multiplayer and they want to play how they play and don't want to change that. That attitude simply doesn't work in an up-to-an-hour long technical 8v8 RTS game with experienced players.
The game could do a better job communicating this to players and try to direct them to appropriate lobbies (noob friendly or vs-AI), or ditch the lobby system for queues like more modern games, but I understood this after looking around, having a few chats with communicative players, and using the excellent game spectate function.
It's just a bad culture fit.
> It’s not the community’s fault for being toxic.
What's toxic to A can be good advice to B. With the person saying it being person C.
How so? You have provided 0 evidence of the BAR community doing it or me doing it.
All we have is the original GP post that is an accusation (without facts).
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about and are trying to silence people by accusing them of being toxic (which is subjective).
I've seen lot of new or learning players being disoriented from the start, trolled and attacked during games, even kickbanned because of their sub-optimal playing after being FORCED to play front because of rating and placing/slot login in BAR.
While personally having a strong RTS background and even very specific to TA and FaF (basically BAR) I had to went through the same high toxicity problems.
The solution has been to don't give up, self learn through pain and few friends tips all the gaming micro details expected by other players and hidden in pro player knowledge.
IMHO this happened mainly and simply due to the lack of a well structured and established learning path for new players, that instead of opening a lobby list and joining the heat to get instantly rammed by toxicity should have the possibility to obtain basic game positioning, build and control knowledge in an more appropriate and structured way, in game info guidance on start -> tutorial?
Regarding the point of the poor newbie have to go as front player and holding while the pros stay in the back, is still kinda normal since the back positions, as especially the tech ones, are more fundamental later in the game, meaning that having a newbie there would be much worse game wise. and dont forget this is valid only for skill draft mode, there are othe draft modes too, even if the skill one is used "99%" of the time.
I find totally off topic and even offensive talking about needing to have had hard skin to go through this toxicity, or referencing completely different game types and generalizing on community and human interaction problems. Again, a new player should have an "onboarding" path easily available and providing necessary basic logic to be able to start decently. And based on long and wide experience this seems to be mainly a BAR problem!
While I always heavily appreciate the effort behind such types of games/communities and respect it a lot (due to having done similarly in other game cases) I keep playing, learning and evolving with BAR because I miss TA and FaF BUT I often receive stress and leave after a series of bad toxic matches with "bad back taste" and this is sad for any game and community, abd should be reduced as much as possibly.
Sadly I also need to underline that I've personally seen unprofessional and sometimes also abusive or corrupt moderation from staff members, including abusive lobbies or manipulation behind player bans. Hence asking for player reports here doesn't seem decent neither, and a more legit and rock solid moderation could also help in compensating this type of issues.
And the last sad cherry (being an OSS enthusiast) is about having heard about strange forks and attribution from past work that leads now to publishers and money being involved, sad feeling but details would be needed before confirming any judgement.
I play it, I like it (because of TA and SupremeCommander Forged Alliance) but still (with all due respect for all the members behind and their effort) I often leave with a bitter or fishy back taste leftover by a generally hostile setup and community.
I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day.
So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time.
Games aren't the same anymore.
I still have the original game and expansion packs. Highly recommend playing it.
I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.
Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.
You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.
All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.
But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.
The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.
And a special Flea scenario is hilarious fun.
Loved that game.
Great game!
It turned into a huge battle between the highest level of units and it was so much fun, but even then the AI wasn't extremely challenging.
Hose vs. hose sounds epic af.
TA is more a game of raw tonnage, not of finesse and subtlety.
As the same time, original TA is notorious for not being finely tuned or balanced. And I'm sure that's much more important in PvP.
But in PvE flinging two industrial powerhouses against each other, where subtlety is replaced by 100, throwaway, Flash tanks, it's just a different play experience.
some of my first experiences 'hacking' were modifying .ini files for command and conquer to make a new version of the game for my friends. it was... very unbalanced
It is sad that there never really was a successor that was as good. They could have lifted the 255 units limit, made the game more balanced, added a few more maps and units (but not too many), enhace the graphics (but keep it 2.5D, I do not want 3D in this kind of games) and make connectivity easier.
Cavedog released a fantasy game after that, which I wanted to like, but it was crap. And the Command & Conquer games were never for me. Tried them but never felt them.
I think it's a numbers issue with 16 players in a standard game, and if you play five games in a session, with all chat enabled, you're going to run into a small handful of truly nasty people, which is souring of the experience and why I put the game down in the end.
I know the standard advice is to ignore it but it's just not fun to be constantly exposed to aggressive and unhappy people.
It's still actively developed and very free to play.
Here's a cast of 40 vs 40 players by a former Star Craft 2 pro player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1a5dkjUq3o
Looking forward to a break where I can get into BAR, I've been utterly nerdsniped. Uthermal's VODs are good stuff [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBIBYkD7tyY
[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winter_(American_player)
Thank you very much.
If you download it, don't join the first lobby you see.
My advice is to watch some videos on youtube, play some games solo, then look for new player lobbies or create your own and set restrictions on it.
It only takes one player on the enemy team who regularly plays the game and you'll get stream rolled.
Or you'll join a game of regular players, can't hold your lane and everyone will get frustrated when their base is blown up from your lane not holding.
and also at least in lobbies with noob in the name its pretty rare for people to be actively hostile to the low os ppl who at least know the basics. but you do have to remember that in the middle of a match nobody has time to type and tell you what to do politely.(its an apm heavy game). try to assume good intent, its not ppl being rude usually.
https://www.faforever.com/
You're going to have to go all in on learning the game, putting in massive effort into every game just to keep up, and will still probably lose most games. I just don't have it in me to play that kind of competitive RTS game like you're trying to climb the SC2 ladder to the top during peak Heart of the Swarm playercounts or whatever, so FAF multiplayer was a no-go.
Also if you see me(same username) online and are starting out, feel free to reach out over the FAF chat system, for some simple coaching. Game gets a lot easier after some of the meta is learned. I can't garentee I'll even respond, but I would hate for someone to bounce off due to the learning curve.
unfortunately FAF is an evolved TA with better mechanics than BAR. BAR is just modern graphics TA. which just feels old and outdated to me after spending so much time playing FAF which is better across every angle
Do you think the BAR community is good too, if you've played it? I want to hear what you think so I can get a comparison/relative viewpoint across the two games.
Even the guy that let of steam after losing will probably give you tips on the next go round.
This is such a dissociative experience (what I enjoy vs what everyone wants to provide) I wonder if there is a market opportunity somewhere here for professional sports. Just a cam feed focused on on a single player and their contribution to the game. A second person cast rather than the normal third person view.
BAR in contrast is a bit of a PvP clickfest, which I don't enjoy. I wonder if there's a game mode or another Spring mod that would give me a more authentic feel? Single-player or perhaps PvE.
Joined some 8v8 for noobs and some were very friendly but they also wanted to kick me for not knowing the game. After all they let me stay but I stuck to pve or vs bots with friends now
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)
The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/development/steam-release#M...
https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
The thing the GPL requires is that I also provide it for free. Now, why would anyone buy a free thing? To support the devs. To encourage this sort of business model. To get a build that's known to be working and supported and not have to deal with the hassle of compiling things themselves.
Not sure why we should encourage using open source as a vehicle to market and get free work building your fundamentals. Just to reap the profits yourself later.
If the code is open source, one can always build a client that works with the Creative Commons assets or community contributed ones.
(In theory!)
Basically, the paid content will boil down to a single-player campaign.
The funds help us finish and release the game which still needs a lot of focused effort which is not something you can reliably sustained without commissioning some of that work.
The post below explains it in detail.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
The learning curve could be a problem though, sometimes a game ends really quickly because a player is slightly less experienced than the others and it’s over.
Beyond All Reason – open-source RTS game built on top of the Recoil RTS Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42826983 - Jan 2025 (4 comments)
Beyond All Reason – An Open Source RTS Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431216 - May 2024 (2 comments)
Beyond All Reason – Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39012392 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)
Beyond All Reason: Open-source RTS reimagining Total Annihilation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201265 - Aug 2021 (101 comments)
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
https://appgl.pages.dev/
On the Recoil engine releases (https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/releases) page, we have had experimental Linux arm64 builds since March of this year.
Additionally, several people are trying to get the graphical pipeline and overall build working on Mac; you can follow their progress at https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/issues/936
The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.
> What makes the “simulate inputs” approach work is that the engine takes utmost care to keep calculations identical on each client. This is not trivial because you still have to work with things that naturally differ on each client, such as mouse position or which units are selected - this is called the unsynced state. On top of that, there can be hardware differences that have to be worked around to get identical results - the huge effort involved is one of the reasons why Recoil is not available outside x86-64.
https://recoilengine.org/articles/netcode-overview/
Planetary Annihilation scratches the itch and reminds me that I am very bad at strategy games whenever I think I might be smart. It's probably the most fair game I've played that I am completely awful at.
I played Zero-K several years ago and it didn’t stick in my mind as much but maybe worth revisiting it - thanks!
Reading about it seems to suggest that it’s even deeper in terms of strategy and tactics so I will probably struggle even more. :(
No such problem with BAR, at least in early game: quite feasible to control each unit even if you don't have fast reflexes. That's pretty much unique in RTS.
Late game is more chaotic, but it's fun in its own way...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5F36yViPz7w
I would like to play it but the comments about the community make it so that I never want to touch PVP with a 10ft pole.
I'd love to wile away some time on a single player, short adventure/mission, game from time to time. I have enjoyed lots of fun times with game like cmomand and conquer in the past so something like that wouldf be amazing.
Is this game it?
- All the code is GPLv2, MIT and other open licenses.
- Some assets are CC-BY-SA but there are also a quite a bunch proprietary ones
Which is a fork of the Spring RTS engine: https://springrts.com/
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason
What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?
[ eye rolling emoji ]
Bridging also didn't map all the discord functionality so it caused some confusion at times.
You have the Divas and the workhorses, the air or sea specialists, and the goofballs and communists