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.

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.

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.

What's the toxicity level of the FAF community?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Does it have a solo mode?

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.

Everything is AI, you are AI, I am AI, my kettle is AI and soon atomic particles will be AI.

And your evidence for this is what exactly?

No? It's almost certainly not AI overall despite the Webflow badge; it's pretty similar now to how the site looked in 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20200806131653/https://www.beyon...

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?

You and the parent comment just described academia in a nutshell

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.

> That's beyond optimising the fun out of a game

I'd even dare to say it's beyond all reason.

Imaginary superiority

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.

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.

Looking at this website, BAR seems to have oodles of lore, but it’s giving an LLM-written voice.

The engine website shows some other games which might be closer to the original TA: https://recoilengine.org/

I wish LLMs played games, I'd never need to see a human again.

It's unfortunate, but what can you do? It's where players are, for better or worse.

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.

> 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.

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.

Well, they can't sell out the game code. That's not how GPL works.

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].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBIBYkD7tyY

This person is a former Starcraft 2 commentator, not a pro player.

It was. Not anymore though.

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. :(

At least bridge to something the freedom-loving folks will use, e.g. Matrix, or (better IMO) Jabber.

The point is not that games have meta, it's the attitude of players.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes!

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.

Video games have a lot more entropy than chess, I think you have that backwards.

They do, to a degree. See e.g. PUBG's latest AI teammate addition.

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.

it's because sc2 is usually 1v1.

and also it's a lot harder

I think that's the point of those massive RTS games, your attention is like a resource you must manage

He's actually both [0]. Probably better off as a commentator though, so you've got a point there.

[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winter_(American_player)

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.

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.

The post below explains it in detail.

https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...

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?

AI players in games go back all the way to the dawn of computers. But I still prefer them in Quake and Starcraft to humans. Humans are awful.

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.

He could be playing with his real friends.

A lot harder than Beyond All Reason? How so?