Username rules updates

I think the community has spoken on what they think of the name change rules.

Tagada for president

We managed to spark some activity around these changes and have been following the discussions here and elsewhere in the community. We want to thank those who have provided constructive feedback so far, and hopefully any other constructive feedback after this post.

Your comments are taken into consideration and we aim to share our thoughts and more details regarding these changes in a few days.

Best regards,
FAF Moderation Team

Bask has made a valid point that the rename cooldown should be shorter than the "owned by another player" cooldown, otherwise it's a dicey proposition to ever get a name back that you had before.

I was watching a replay yesterday when I spotted "TheWheelie" on one of the teams. Well, it sure looked like "TheWheelie" to me.
2000 rating.

"Has he had a string of really bad results, to bring him down to a 2000?" I thought to myself. He certainly didn't play like "TheWheelie" that I've seen on several Gyle casts and multiple Jagged Appliance streams.
Checked the name history. It was a totally different player altogether.

If I was TheProperWheelie, I'd be feeling irked at someone using my name, or such a close resemblance to my name.

So I can understand the reasoning behind limiting how often players can change their name. And how close a match they can have.

But then again if someone copied my name it wouldn't bother me as I'm an incompetent & infrequent player.

And then again, we can't have 1 rule for the well known player names and one for the lesser known players.

So I can see both sides of this.
One of those where I'm happy to shrug my shoulders and go with whatever the admins decide on this.

@lin960 said in Username rules updates:

If I was TheProperWheelie, I'd be feeling irked at someone using my name, or such a close resemblance to my name.
So I can understand the reasoning behind limiting

If he wasn't fine with it he could literally just report it and we'd have had to change names, which is completely fine and understandable. But he was okay with that and found it funny as you can see from his posts and reaction.

Nobody even calls him "thewheelie" he's farm so your confusion would just keep compounding really, same as with every person that renames. Sometimes people aren't even called by a name they actually ever had ie pepsi

If only I knew the real battle was happening on FA Forums I'd stop playing so many setons games.

Ty mod team for your efforts! This one seems unpopular and probably overkill, probs should down it to 3 months.

I just got a starlink for when I'm near the Arctic circle working and I had planned on changing my username with the word starlink at the end of it every time I'm at work just so people knew if they wanted to risk me in their lobbies or not. It's usually pretty good but I still want to give the heads up to people beforehand.... With these new changes I wouldn't be able to do that. I do 7-8 week shifts at work then I'm home for 2-3 weeks so the old rules of 1 month would have worked perfectly for me to switch back and forth.

Who is TheWheelie I only know a TheWeakie that isn't me Kappa

I dont know how this is a problem. I mean its a silly joke for one month. The only reason it would be a problem is if you completely rely on knowing which person your fighting against so you can counter what you know they will do. Which means your a noob.

@lin960 I think we should all change our names to WillowWisp

This is such a stupid rule. I hope whoever made this in their dungeon feels better about making it

I haven't changed my username is years on FAF. (PSN made me change it because it was offensive though )

Hey everyone,

We’ve spent the last two weeks discussing the feedback we received on our announcement. We thank those few of you who have provided concrete feedback and have done our best to address them with some changes.

The position of the moderation team is that the primary use of usernames is to tell users apart. If people are unable to do so or have to take additional steps (such as checking name history), then usernames are failing at this purpose. It has been made clear that this view is not unanimous among the community. Some consider the ability for frequent username changes an important way of self-expression and for creating a sense of community with FAF friends. We have weighed and discussed these arguments, but believe there are plenty of alternate ways to express yourself, such as the clan system. Therefore, the moderation team believes that user identification should not be compromised for the sake of having a humorous name.

The moderation team does not aim to create rules just to make the game less enjoyable. Our primary role is to address and prevent issues between players, many of which aren't visible to the player base due to the confidential nature of moderation. Examples include players changing usernames to avoid reports, imitating other players, or impersonating moderators to pressure other players to force name changes. Such issues make it very difficult for the moderation team to handle reports effectively and have led us to re-evaluate the current rules.

Additionally, recent reports and feedback, such as from Nuggets’ recent thread, highlighted inconsistencies in the application of rules regarding impersonation and similar usernames. Consequently, one of our ongoing projects is updating the rules page to make our guidelines clearer and less ambiguous. These changes are part of that broader effort.

Making changes in a community requires compromise between different parties, but some players have already indicated that any change to the current situation would be unacceptable. We encourage these players to consider our concerns and help us find a solution acceptable to all parties. Until we find a better way to handle usernames that make such rules unnecessary, we will continue with the proposed changes to the rules on name similarity and readability. One goal of these changes is to manage names that are purposely hard to tell apart. We have taken note of the comments explaining that updated wording of the rules remain unclear, and after internal discussion have reworded them:

• Usernames that impersonate others or are visually identical to other usernames, for example by exploiting visually similar characters, are not allowed.

We do not expect players to know each and every single username and will not issue (even temporary) bans for breaking these rules unless a rename is clearly malicious. Note that such rules have been part of the FAF guidelines for a while, and the relevant changes focus on clarifying them.

Regarding the changes on how often a name can be changed, we are considering a compromise of one change every six months, with a similar protection period for player names. We welcome further feedback on these limits and will keep an eye on this thread to see if anyone brings up any important ideas or suggestions that we haven’t yet discussed. We thank everyone who has constructively participated in the discussion.

Best regards,
The FAF Moderation Team

"We thank those few of you who have provided concrete feedback"

I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who provided downvotes. Mass downvoting is a form of collective action.

The administration wants us fractured, atomized, debating different concrete proposals. It's going to ignore all that and push forward with its plans. That's why we need mass downvoting.

Sounds like some facebook doomerposting but its true

Hello mods

@giebmasse said in Username rules updates:

The position of the moderation team is that the primary use of usernames is to tell users apart. If people are unable to do so or have to take additional steps (such as checking name history), then usernames are failing at this purpose.

I want to differentiate between two terms: identity and discernibility, both of which have been used as arguments in this thread at various points. The way I see it:

• Identity – being able to tell who a player is just by using their player name.
• Discernibility – being able to tell the difference between two or more players based on their usernames.

Could you clarify if this update to the rules is intended to lock names to make players more identifiable, or to improve discernibility between two players who might share similar names (or past names)?

Identity

The simple solution that's already been proposed is simply to make the unique player ID accessible on player cards or in chats with said player. Basic example pictured, and I'm surprised the mod team has ignored this suggestion as it fixes a lot of problems highlighted.

With this in place, you could simply have reports to require a player ID submitted as well as the username.

Outside of moderation reports, you might still need to check someone's renames to see who they really are, but I see this as outside the moderation team's jurisdiction. For a start, how do you define what each player's identity is? Farms has been TheWheelie for over a year and now TheWeakie, meanwhile pepsi is known by a name he has never used. It's not the mod team's job to make sure player X can recognise player Y, it has too many variables out of the mod team's control.

I understand that it's an issue if a mod can't identify who a report is referring to, but it's not the job of the average player to stay on a name so that I can personally recognise them in-game. I think using the player ID in reports would help solve some of this confusion.

Discernibility

This still leaves us with the problems of impersonation, using characters to create near identical names or otherwise as another player or mod.

Disclaimer: As you can probably tell by my profile, I have a biased view on this. My personal opinion is that I chose this name for a joke, the person I am impersonating doesn't have any issue with it, and I'm not using this name to cause any issues in FAF.

I do understand that mods want to curb impersonation used for nefarious reasons, so I will outline my concerns in what I hope will be an unbiased way.

Mod impersonation

Mod impersonation is obviously a big issue when it happens, and we should not allow this as a community. But to be honest, if any random player can rename to impersonate a mod, I don't even see it as a rename issue. Mods should have clearer signifiers of their role to more easily differentiate them from players.

Additionally, I could still masquerade as a mod without renaming - I could just say "hello I am a mod" and attempt to pressure players to do things.
I've also seen too many new players ping TheSetoner to ask questions, I can't imagine how many DMs it gets. A clearer indicator of mod status seems like it could be useful, whatever the final decision is on this rename rule update.

Player Impersonation

I think it would be good to know how big of a problem this actually is. Do a lot of players actually use similar characters to impersonate others with malicious intent? I can totally understand the issues with mod impersonation, but with player impersonation I would really like some stats on how widespread this is, because as far as I'm aware it's only a few meme renames that haven't offended anyone.

The existing rule of thumb is that the offended party/impersonated player has the option to report the player who renamed. Otherwise, no action will be taken. In my mind this worked fairly well, as it avoided people being banned for joke renames while allowing more malicious impersonation to be punished. The proposed solution of simply reverting a player to an acceptable name could work well in cases of reports like these.

If the mod team would like to share some more info about how much of a problem player on player impersonation actually is, that would really help understand the motivation behind these intended rules updates.

Concluding Thoughts

Understanding the motivation behind this update has been challenging, with such a wide range of differing arguments used - from curbing mod impersonation to making it easier for tournament viewers to recognise players. I didn't post any serious response until the mod team declared they'd be going ahead with the changes anyway, despite the negative backlash, so I hope they make the effort to clarify and focus their intention in a future post.

6 months is still ridiculous, 3 months is barely tolerable, 2 months is acceptable

@giebmasse said in Username rules updates:

alternate ways to express yourself, such as the clan system. Therefore, the moderation team believes that user identification should not be compromised for the sake of having a humorous name.

Clan system isn't an alternative to renaming, it's entirely separate. The same people most known for renaming have also been in the same clan(s) for however long, they can't change clan name like they can display name.

Examples include players changing usernames to avoid reports, imitating other players

This issue is only truly fixed with the technical solution of including a static ID in more places in the UI for mod team use + however that helps other FAF dev teams. I think Brutus mentioned somewhere in this thread that this would be a nice to have as well for non-moderation related work.

impersonating moderators to pressure other players to force name changes.

These people should be immediately banned regardless of any other rule changes from this thread, no one disagrees with that. Impersonating a mod is indisputably toxic and should face repercussions. Again, I seriously doubt anyone disagrees with this, and this seems easily achievable as is.

There are two separate problems in this thread, one being impersonation and the other being the rename cadence.

Impersonation without malicious intent and with the person who is being impersonated being fine with it is victimless, why are we wasting time and effort there? If the person being impersonated doesn't like it, then sure, make the other person rename. If someone impersonates someone and then acts like a toxic asshole, then both make them rename and give them a longer ban than just for acting like a toxic asshole. That sounds reasonable since it's malicious impersonation + toxic behavior. If someone joins FAF and finally takes the correct spelling of Excelsior I'd think that's funny and I'd be pretty mad if they were forced to rename, plus that would be a horrible experience for the dude who just joined. Unless of course they are toxic, but again that's a different issue. @TheWheeIieNoob did a much better job talking about this in the post about identity vs discernibility.

I feel that is largely separate from the second issue of changing how frequently people can rename. Here there are technical fixes that resolve the issue that have been repeatedly brought up and seem to even have support from some of the very people who would be involved in the implementation if I'm not mistaken. I am in no way convinced there is a significant amount of mod time wasted due to regular renames unless there are a lot of sub 1.2k players doing this while being toxic that I'm not aware of. Which is possible. I know there's no way the mod team can concretely prove it due to confidentiality, but it would be nice to have some more concrete numbers on how prevalent of an issue it actually is.