Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

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.

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.

> 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.