Username rules updates

@cocainediesel said in Username rules updates:

Call of Duty: Every six months (you get a new name change token every six months)
Starcraft II: One free change every season (~3 months)
Fortnite (lol): Every two weeks
League of Legends: "You wanna see the cards you gotta pay the money" ($10)
Warthunder: First is free, all after $2.49.
AOE2: Connected to steam/xbox username (steam you can change as much as you want, xbox first time free/second time fee--also what masochist is playing aeo2 on the xbox)
Rocket League: Platform name (steam/epic/etc.)
Valorant: Free every three months, looks like LOL is going in this direction as well.
Blizzard games: One for free, more for fee
EVE Online: You will be who you are forever

Steam: no limit (also changes your name in around 100 billion games)
Google: no limit

Honestly i dont understand why its so hard to understand. I play in this community to 1. Play the game and 2. Have fun with friends. If you remove a fun feature then ofc the overall experience is gonna leed to being less fun.

If anything, the fact that this apparently was such a big issue is only evidence that a lot of people like to use this feature. You have clans where people pick similar style names (snf), you have tournaments where players rename with their teammates (last rainbowcup where a team renamed to the 4 ninja turtles), you have random waves of renames of multiple groups of people which just creates fun moments for the community. I and some friends renamed to dave1 to dave9 like 5 years ago. We would all join a lobby only to hear responses like "aaah watch out here come the daves", and something like that would be the talk for an entire week because its a small community.

I personally have never heard anyone complain about this in my 8 years on faf. I even had a mod at some point join some joke renames as well.

You say that we're just here to see robots fight. Well youre wrong. Im here to see robots fight WHILE having a fun time with friends. The community at this point is way more important to me than any gameplay.

@thewheeler

Using the steam username could be a good solution that makes everyone equally unhappy.

Which google username? That seems unusual for... them.

@cocainediesel your google name, the one that will be used in stream chats/yt comments/whatever

Here is another approach to solving this problem used for example by Star Citizen:

Red: Character/User name (can be changed)
Green: Player Handle (cannot be changed, chosen during account creation, not related to login credentials)

@thewheeler Should we link FAF username to google/steam display name?

@cocainediesel why reinvent the wheeler~, just leave it as is

There are multiple varieties of wheelies. Hazard the ones that other online games are rolling around on are probably more germane to this situation.

EDIT/Circling back/"my man"/listen ye @TheWheeler : Man I'm not trying to sandpaper your balls here, it's just that it's obvious that most other online games with competitive scenes came to the conclusion that some kind of limitation on name changes is probably a good thing. Does FAF have the same problems that those larger communities have? No. Is taking basic precautions wise? Most likely yes.

I mean I get it! The dave story is fun and cool! Buddy of mine went up to Lake Havasu for the fourth of July with some friends, they all grew handlebar mustaches beforehand, people fucking loved it--DJs would announce them when they showed up at the club, women showing their cans out on the water, etc. etc, and my friend and his pals got fucking laid.

But lookie here--an (I would assume) upstanding member of the aoe2 community being impersonated by some moralless ratfucker. Is aoe2 a larger community? Yes. Is it that much larger? No. Do we want to have our pants down and have to deal with clarifying this shit after such a problem arises? Also no.

Does a year seem a little long when taking the rest of the field into account? Yes. Has anybody in this thread made a suggestion to just reduce the goddam cooldown instead of going apeshit about how the mod team is trying to fuck their sister? No.

Will somebody imitate this question-and-answer format in their reply? Almost certainly.

Some quality forum drama here for a change.

For a bit of context I’m someone who has never changed their name. I’m also someone who thought things like the barcode names were annoying. Additionally, I do think it’s a bit of extra work to figure out who’s who when there are renames, especially since I don’t play much these days. It’s a bit confusing whenever I show up for a day or two or whatever.

BUT. This rule change is not the answer. Even if I thought the barcode names for example were annoying I don’t see why that should be banned behavior. Let people have their fun even if my grumpy ass doesn’t like it at the time. It sounds like we’re trying to solve a technical deficiency (not having a backend static UUID) by implementing rule changes that are unpopular for the people it actually impacts.

I’d guess most people don’t rename, or at least rename very often. Those people also aren’t going to be the people on the forums advocating in favor of this change, because they don’t care. If people want to have fun and rename who cares? I’ve seen hardly any convincing arguments against it, sans things that are technical problems that should be solved technically and not by limiting freedom to the subset of people using the feature, especially when that subset involves very active community members.

Having a static backend UUID that’s the true reference + being able to report in Aeolus by right clicking their name in chat solve the majority of the problems here. I’m sure the former is a huge amount of work and will probably not happen, but it’s still a better idea than essentially removing name changes.

@cocainediesel
And people are paying for them all the time. Or admittedly making new accounts to have funny nicknames that poke fun at new memes and shit.

If you will look at many of the bigger streamers you will often see them renaming their accounts or making new ones to have a new nickname that fits the community meme that's been popular lately. Hell, they would even exchange nicknames to troll people at the highest level of ladder.

The renames also allow you to create additional bonds within said community and make for thriving communities that are closely interacting all the time. Instead of being this sad robots that are only here to mindlessly play the game.

Faf was nice in this regard that you just didn't have to cough up the money up front to actually have harmless fun with the nicknames.

Honestly, the simple fact that they are charging for the renames proves that there is a FUCKING MARKET FOR IT AND PEOPLE ACTUALLY PAY FOR IT.

Another thing is that often when making new accounts on new servers people will also decide to go with funny nicknames instead of the ones their are known for in their main server/role w/e.

Like hell, thanks to that we got some absolute bangers of a stories like the one of "Chinese Spy" on korean server.

This was pretty long and at least some of it was on topic.

If username changes are causing a volume problem for mods then sure cut it down from 1 month to 2 or 3 months for most people, but I agree a year is excessive.

How about leaving it as is (or 2/3 months) for normal people and if people were banned or something, require a year? That way the ability to change names is a perk for not doing shit that gets you banned?

Should be pretty straightforward to implement since it sounds like all youd need is an extra check in the user name change form for "was user banned in last <x> months?"

I also read someone suggest that bans/things should require contact with the mod team. I dont know how many bans the mod team dish out (maybe that would lead to a volume problem too?) but I actually like the idea a lot: ban timer starts when the user thats banned get in touch with mod team or something.

@Endranii I mean there's a thriving market for handguns in Chicago, just because people want something doesn't mean there aren't negative externalities.

Which is the main issue.

When will any silent majority enjoyer come out and explain why the supporters of this policy are:
devs
mods
grimplex shitposting

Like, no shit, the mod team is in favor of policies that reduces the amount of dogshit[0] they have to pick up, and everyone saying this is the sack of Rome/asking why their fun is being ruined doesn't have to worry about any of that.

I get it man! See the Lake Havasu story! My friend "changed his username" to MustacheMan and got laid like a brick! If we can introduce a $1-2 donation-for-name-change-token and put a little extra coin in the servers I'd be all for it. But of course all these changes are more work to implement, and of course it's mostly more work for the people who are being trashed for implementing this one.

[0]"What dogshit?"--I am shocked, I am flabbergasted that the mod team would rather not offer up for discussion in detail the motivating complaints/incidents that led them here.

That reason is bogus off the sheer facts:

1. There were more people years ago
2. The time for rename was 1 month
3. There were no complaints
4. These were never, ever a huge proportion of moderation reports/work, frankly I'd doubt if mod team got more than like 20 reports a year related to it and most of those would be due to that 3600 rated guy that feels the need to dm every high rated player if he can take their name

Where do we get the record for complaints in a given time frame?

My time talking with individual moderators and interacting with the team as a whole during said period when I had responsibilities on FAF

I'll buy what you're selling, but I knew I wasn't hallucinating about this in regards to the present day:

I'd prefer the ability to tag someone like on steam rather than the implementation of this rule. It solves the problem of annoying renames for me and also allows people to rename as they please.

Course people got banned for them, I got banned for it once. I'm saying it wasn't some "wow we really are running into problems with enforcing this rule!!!" where making it 12x more restrictive is required

It's annoying when people are referring to someone in chat by their previous name and I have no clue who they are talking about, sometimes even impeding teamwork, but thats not really the fault of the person who changed their name, but the people who expect everyone to know everyone elses identity in their clan or whatever

This change sort of mitigates that, but doesn't really eliminate it, and the year duration is really onerous...

@FtXCommando Look at the situation that puts the mod team in:

1. Keep the current vague and unequally applied rule in place under which you and others have been banned.
2. Specify the rule so that there's no grey area.

Banning people for vague and unequally applied reasons is a shitty situation, so you want to specify the rule.

But, specifying it means it actually has to be specified: if you specify the rule and it doesn't include "you can't impersonate other people" then yeah, the wheelie buddies can have their good times, but any shitbrick can also come in and impersonate people, and there's no rule to stop them.

Let take a crack at some valid points (perhaps there are more!) to address in the OP:

• "Difficult to distinguish" is pretty straightforward, but what is "otherwise too similar". Could we get a couple of examples?
• Can the length of time between username changes be shortened?

Instead we got "remember when a member of the mod team said the n-word?!?". The fuck outta here. No wonder they want to remove ambiguity from the situation.