Username rules updates

@exselsior said in Username rules updates:

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

That is not what I meant actually. What would help (or rather would have helped) is, if we would split up account names and display names, like Steam or nowadays Discord does.

The reason for this is the complexity in account management and single sign on setup. In FAF we try to not reinvent the wheel if we can use 3rd party tools. However right now when changing your display name also changes your account name. This is something no 3rd party identity provider supports (because it's a bad idea to do so). So we had to work around it and invest a lot of time. The problem continues: if you change your name, we have to update all the 3rd party tools: forum, wiki or whatever you come up with. Again: not every tool even supports that (-> we can't use them) and/or we need to implement additional API/middleware features. This is why this forum is stuck on a 3 year old version and not updated. It causes problems and breaks on updating.

So if we introduced a display name for mostly lobby purpose only, and in all tools that don't support display name change you are bound to your FAF account forever, that would simplify things.

But that requires to show the account name still visible for moderation reports & co.

Index cannot read confirmed

Also if the moderators refuse to acknowledge what the elite and regular players do for this game and continue to ignore them you will find youv wont have any left.

Index you like singlehandedly caused one of the major communities on the Discord to die off out of some personal vendetta. I feel zero sympathy for you and I have zero problems being negative about this policy when the vast majority of the hate here relates to rename time intervals and it’s barely been made any less ridiculous.

There’s a lot of hate for mods recently because they just keep doing pointless stuff for seemingly no one but themselves and ironically creating more problems while perpetually complaining about how much work they need to do.

I cannot be less tired of reading mods talk about some phantom general will of people they are trying to represent when they can barely manage to get anybody that isn’t a mod themselves to support their policy. Just start being honest and say you make changes because you want them instead of rhetorically spitting in my face about some “community you represent.”

Self righteous people should not be moderators

@indexlibrorum said in Username rules updates:

Making name changes less frequent will make usernames more stable. I sincerely believe this is very beneficial to the community and significantly more important than being able to joke with usernames. Leave that for chat, discord, and (for all I care) wall templates.

5 of the 11 are mods btw

@ftxcommando I would call it a 7/11 mostly cuz they involved as mod party private dance club. At the same time 2/4 - are just non-competent to vote, as 700 rated guy thats tired of gaps. 2/4 are just Swatoslaw - idk what is his reason there, maybe he doesnt like to read what is that new settons player. Skrat are tournament director thats getting troubles with understanding who is who, when the brackets begin.

Personally, I don't care much about the rename feature.

I will probably never rename myself and I do get annoyed sometimes when I don't know who I'm playing with or when searching for replays that I now can't find because someone renamed themselves again.

Still though, at least from a player perspective, people renaming themselves to SNFPoopieButtholeWheelieNoob seems like harmless fun that quite a few people have fun with and seemingly feel strongly about keeping.

I think the best solution would be some version of what Archsimkat, BlackYps, Tagada and Brutus already laid out: Distinguish display name from account name/id and use the latter for when you really need to identify someone.

I would be much more hesitant to see this solution as viable, because it's yet more work for the devs, but considering @brutus5000 said in Username rules updates:

This would solve a lot of technical problems in the long run.

it might be useful to do anyway.

If all of this is truly a big problem I think the technical solution is the one to go with.

@ftxcommando said in Username rules updates:

@indexlibrorum said in Username rules updates:

Making name changes less frequent will make usernames more stable. I sincerely believe this is very beneficial to the community and significantly more important than being able to joke with usernames. Leave that for chat, discord, and (for all I care) wall templates.

5 of the 11 are mods btw

Closed bubble. I didn't give it an up-or downvote because I don't give a fuck. and this applies to 90-95% of the community. You cannot interpolate these numbers for the whole community.

The downvote ratio while simultaneously trying to claim it's what the community wants is pretty damn funny. Hell, even taking out the army of wheelies downvoting it then it's still something like +11 -~33, and that's while leaving the mod team in as upvotes.

Also @Brutus5000 I was just about to post this when I saw your response, not sure that actually goes against the point FTX is making? I fully agree most people don't give a fuck. It doesn't impact me because I never change my name. The point is that people are either strongly against or just don't care. There's hardly anyone who's strongly for that isn't in the mod team.

Anyway, I'm still trying to operate with at least some level of good faith, so question for the mod team. What happens if someone joins with my name but spelled correctly? So we get a new Excelsior. Or if we get a new Mize who happens to play setons or whatever who just so happens to share a very similar name. Are these hypothetical new people going to be forced to change their names just because their name can easily be confused with someone already in the community?

Well done team. A non-issue made into an issue for seemingly no legitimate reason just to piss off a good chunk few remaining high rated players.

@brutus5000 said in Username rules updates:

@ftxcommando said in Username rules updates:

@indexlibrorum said in Username rules updates:

Making name changes less frequent will make usernames more stable. I sincerely believe this is very beneficial to the community and significantly more important than being able to joke with usernames. Leave that for chat, discord, and (for all I care) wall templates.

5 of the 11 are mods btw

Closed bubble. I didn't give it an up-or downvote because I don't give a fuck. and this applies to 90-95% of the community. You cannot interpolate these numbers for the whole community.

certified “general will” moment

read theory
https://is.muni.cz/el/fss/podzim2019/POLn4102/um/blok1/Bourdieu_PO_Does_Not_Exist.pdf

Outta curiosity, if 90% don't care, why are the 10% that do care that are a supermajority against the change still not considered the community voice about it? If an election has 20% turnout does that mean it's by default null? Sad to say that makes just about every polling or survey or vote done by FAF null.

Looks like that still leads us to the conclusion of the mod team doing what they want to do and we should still drop the whole "it's for the community" or "it's for the greater good" spiel.

If you don't like the verdict

Question:
With this screenshot here I understand that one of the two TheWheelieNoobs (I guess the one that renamed later?) would have to rename, because their names are impossible to tell apart. With the new rules are the other names fine? They are similar but discernible.

What I don't get with the rule change is that I think we are generally in agreement with most of the goals (preventing mod impersonation, preventing malicious impersonation of other users and preventing identical names). The thing that fuels the fire is the massive increase to rename time. But this doesn't solve any problems at its core. People can still change their names, so the the situation that I don't immediately recognize a player will still occur, just less often. Are there even many people that rename once a month? If most people only rename once in a few month then the positive impact that this rule change has is minimal. At the same time it affects everyone with rename aspirations because they are now stuck with a rename for at least half a year.
There wasn't really a solid justification why that change is necessary, but at the same time the mod team seems pretty determined to keep a significant increase in rename time. But why? You all see the negative community feedback. You see how the mod team's reputation is suffering. It would be so easy to drop this change. There must be a reason why you are willing to keep your stance despite all this. Please, tell me the reason! I really don't get it.

The two identical wheelienoobs would have been punished with old rules anyway, at least if a mod was made aware of it. I’ve gotten banned over barcodes using that capital i lower case L trick.

h-hey!! go back to discussing the rule. leave us alone!!!

Honestly, the more i read the less i have hope that this will have a good result. Which is also implies that future descisions will go down this path

Ok fine, PR speak deactivated to hopefully get the point across better

The massively condensed answer to "why are these changes being implemented?" is "so people, including moderators, can tell who tf people are."

Take a look at BlackYps screenshot, I have absolutely no idea who any of those people are. I assume "TheWheelie" is Farms, Sladow is one of them... and that's it.

What we mean when we say there has been little argument against this idea is most of the posts just say "lmao mods power tripping again" or something to that effect. Okay? What are we supposed to do with that? That doesn't tell us any useful information.

This post? Fantastic. Clearly addresses each of our concerns, points out problems our solution has, and describes where our communication has failed. I'll write out a better reply to this specific post when I have time.

Anyway, to reference our reply post

The position of the moderation team is that the primary use of usernames is to tell users apart.

A lot of the arguments against this policy have boiled down to "I want to change my username more than every 6 months because it's funny." And then we reply "we might even agree that it's funny but it causes all these issues". "Nuh uh!"

To paraphrase TheWheelieNoob (because rather appropriately, I don't know who that is):

Understanding the motivation [against] this update has been challenging

Why do you need to rename so often? Imagine you had a coworker and every week they went by a different name. Do you seriously not understand how that would be problematic and bother people?

Why exactly does it matter for you to know who somebody is? They either broke a rule in the game or they didn’t. Then you can assign a punishment after looking through the history of the fafid of the person. Who cares if it was Terraria or Pepsi or Farm breaking the rule?

coworker going by a new name every week is called working with office zoomers in 2024

There doesn’t really need to be some “pertinent” reason. It’s fun. Most people are either unbothered about it or enjoy the feature. You are taking the fun thing away. And every ACTUAL argument is actually one more related to name mimics or impersonation rather than renames happening often.

The greatest first person shooter game ever created was Battlefield 2142. There never was a game like it and there never will be again. When Battlefield 3 came out the community kept 2142 going.... Right up until the moderators scared everyone away and ruined the fun of it all....FAF has all the ingredients to survive whatever next gen game comes along to compete with it... Unless the people get scared off for no good reason.

It's shocking to me that the moderators can't see from this thread that the will of the people is clear. Just do the right thing and switch it back.

I got one week left in my 7-week shift up north and I get to come home and play FAF for 2 and 1/2 weeks straight while I get day drunk and realize that I can't handle my weed anymore and get yelled at in chat by young RAGErs because I'm playing like crap... but I'm getting worried that there'll be nothing left for me to play when I return.....

Please just do the right thing and switch it back....