Username rules updates

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....

Maybe the moderation can give some numbers of the amount of cases related to this issue.

Obviously, a balance must be found here between the interest of players in a feature and the interest of moderation in reducing incidents. Some of the players affected have reported here and can be assessed by the downvotes. There are no figures from the other side so far.

@brutus5000 said in Username rules updates:

Maybe the moderation can give some numbers of the amount of cases related to this issue.

I dont understand why you people make it sound like a big deal. Even with the most broken identical names like barcodes it is pretty easy to differentiate people in the game to know which one to punish, because we have more than one unique player attributes:

• Differences in names. IlIlIl and lIlIlI migh look exactly the same, but you can still tell them apart by looking at the height of the letters
  

• Different countries. One barcode guy is from netherlands, the other is from america. Easy as that

• Different ratings. It is very rare to see people do this and have the exact same rating, so you can tell them apart

• Different teams. If the perpetrator is on the team 1, then everyone on team 2 are by default not them

• Different factions. You can see the factions in the game and in the client, so if the offender is playing UEF, all the other faction players are probably not him

• Different colors. I assume no one is moderating with team colors on

• Different clans. Not every single person is from SNF, so you can tell them apart using the clan tag

I would have absolutely no problems in discerning who's who using these points, and if the names are TOO similiar (like barcodes) just punish both players and problem solved.

luhhhhhh effort

@thewheeler said in Username rules updates:

Differences in names. IlIlIl and lIlIlI migh look exactly the same, but you can still tell them apart by looking at the height of the letters

I mean from a mod pov i can see this as pretty reasonable tbh (without the player ids in place). I tell people apart based on stuff like rating clan flag etc, but based on name i have no clue at all whos who even though i would be someone with the highest chance to know in general.

@theweakie said in Username rules updates:

I mean from a mod pov i can see this as pretty reasonable tbh (without the player ids in place). I tell people apart based on stuff like rating clan flag etc, but based on name i have no clue at all whos who even though i would be someone with the highest chance to know in general.

Bad vision + bad memory, old man problems

Unlucky

This post? Fantastic. Clearly addresses each of our concerns, points out problems our solution has, and describes where our communication has failed.

The situation is: mod team comes out with a (ridiculous) change. Now WE have to take the time to formulaten an article on why this is bad. You are saying it is not acceptable to just write "bad change, reverse". You want an entire article with pro, cons, examples and whatever.
How about YOU (mod team) post a 'proposal' and not a change that might be reversed if enough people complain (obviously this is not appicable to every change, but it clearly is here).

I don't even know how to say how ridiculous it is that a rule is getting an insanly strict update (not sure how to formulate that), and you expect people to go "Yeah ok, it helps moderation".

Maybe a bit of an exaggeration but this is what it feels like to me.

i am going to nuke your house (threat).
construct 5 compelling arguments to stop me.

@dorset BF2142 was the shit. I am so sad that we can never play it again. It was such a good game.

6 months is an utter travesty. Why even create thread, gather the opinions of players if you're just going to ignore them. 12 > 6 months is somewhat a compromise, but I agree with @FtXCommando
"6 months is still ridiculous, 3 months is barely tolerable, 2 months is acceptable"

For convenience, here is a list of problems the reduction in rename frequency is meant to address:

• In-game communication
• Tournament player recognition
• Player reputation

In addition, there are some benefits specifically on the moderation side of things. I wanted to stress the ones above because it seems like there has been a focus on the benefits on the other side of the moderation curtain, which was not the intent.

• Ease of reporting the correct player
• Reduce impersonation (of moderators or otherwise)
• Reduce the frequency of inappropriate usernames
• Make it harder to evade moderation action by rapid username changing

Again, I want to stress that these last 4 were never the primary reasons for this change, just additional benefits.

Example of name inconsistency being a problem

Recently Sladow (trainer team lead at the time) asked me to fix the trainer team avatars.

List of players who have the personal trainer avatar.

List of players who should have the personal trainer avatar

I can’t just compare these two lists because the usernames are different. Autopsy- has the avatar, but is he supposed to? I have to look up the account Autopsy- and then look up his old usernames, and only then can I figure out it’s (probably) Grimplex. It might not even be grimplex, because what if he username traded with someone at some point?

Now say Grimplex didn’t have the avatar but was supposed to. I look up the name Grimplex and there are no results. Okay so he uses a different name at the moment. I look up all accounts which have ever had the username Grimplex and there are multiple results. Now I have to go through account by account to make an educated guess which one of these is actually the person I want to grant the avatar to. Now repeat this for potentially all 14 members of the trainer team.

TheWheiieNoob's post (not to be confused with TheWheLieNoob)

@thewheeiienoob said in Username rules updates:

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.

This has come up multiple times in our internal discussions. Personally I think it's the worst of both worlds. It doesn't solve our main concern in that you have to take extra steps to determine who someone is. If you've gone so far as to pull up the account data it's only one extra click to see their name history. Heck accounts already have IDs, they're just not easy to pull up. Let's say I told you that account 118363 did XYZ. Does that give you any useful information? No, because you have no idea who account 118363 is. Well that's Giebmasse/Viba. You'd have no way of knowing that unless you exhaustively went through accounts one by one until you found a matching ID. Are you expected to now memorize a 6 digit number for each player you might want to identify?

In my opinion (which isn't necessarily held by the rest of the moderation team) adding an ID section like that, especially in the lobby, just adds more visual garbage without actually solving anything.

@thewheeiienoob said in Username rules updates:

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.

We don't intend to tell people what their identities are. The rule changes just lower the frequency that you can do so. If Farms wanted to change his name to TheWheelie these changes would not affect that decision, as long as he didn't intend to swap it again within 6 months. Pepsi's name comes from a purposeful misreading of a username he had previously.

@thewheeiienoob said in Username rules updates:

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.

First and foremost I want to admit we fucked up. We should not have made the original post and then same day enforced the new restrictions. That's our bad, we fucked up, and in the future we'll try to provide time for feedback in similar situations.

Second, the up and down votes on the initial post never have and never will dictate moderation policy. For the simple reason that the people most likely people to provide input are the exact people most affected by the change. If we proposed a rule change that all smurfs are going to be unbanned, then we would expect the most feedback to be from people who have gotten banned for smurfing before. It can be used for an incredibly vague idea of community sentiment, but a mere 40 downvotes in a community of thousands is a near useless measure.

General thoughts

When I and some of the other moderators wrote this proposal, we never expected this to become a big deal. I'm honestly trying to avoid the "us vs them" mentality and to understand where this hate is coming from. I've done my best to outline what issues this has been causing and why we've gone in this direction. The responses thus far have mostly been "it's funny" and "why do you even need to know who people are?"

That's the whole reason for usernames is it not? If we truly don't care then we could go the 4chan route and list everyone as "Anonymous", but I don't see anyone proposing that.

Please, I'm genuinely asking, help me understand why a 6 month rename period is unacceptable to the point of having a 157 post thread on it.

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

For convenience, here is a list of problems the reduction in rename frequency is meant to address:

• In-game communication

Who complained to you about it?

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

• Tournament player recognition

Who complained about it?

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

• Player reputation

Who said this was a problem?

Don't need names, just give me a total count of people telling the moderation team about these problems.

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

I wanted to stress the ones above because it seems like there has been a focus on the benefits on the other side of the moderation curtain, which was not the intent.

Well yeah, because you're focused on benefits "for the community" when nobody "in the community" was complaining about any of the reasons you said above.

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

• Ease of reporting the correct player

So how many false reports do you estimate are caused by this rename issue?

• Reduce impersonation (of moderators or otherwise)

That's not relevant at all to rename interval, make it a rule prohibiting it (which exists)

• Reduce the frequency of inappropriate usernames

How many of these offenses do you tie directly to rename periods rather than

1. people picking an inappropriate username at account creation
2. people malding (they will still mald and pick a bad rename even at 6 months)

• Make it harder to evade moderation action by rapid username changing

What is the number of people you gauge are doing this? Rapid being uhhhh one rename a month if done religiously? Make it two months if it's genuinely that big of a deal for you.

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

Again, I want to stress that these last 4 were never the primary reasons for this change, just additional benefits.

So surely some general quantity of people in the community that complained about said community issues exists for you to mention right? It isn't just moderators picking reasons that seem good and announcing this is what the community wanted?

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

Example of name inconsistency being a problem

Recently Sladow (trainer team lead at the time) asked me to fix the trainer team avatars.

I'm going to skip most of this because this issue is insanely easy to solve. Give Sladow a screenshot of both of the screens you posted and have him figure it out, because he will know who is on his team and what their names are. I can do it for you right now and I play like 1-3 games a week max.

Another solution which I also did when I was cleaning up avatars as PC. Remove all the people that have said avatar, announce it to said group, and wait for people to message you to give it back or give it if they never had it. This is even easier now that Discord exists. Coordinate with the Team Lead over people that may not be on Discord and to double check everything is kosher.

These solutions took me 5 minutes to think about.

@deribus said in Username rules updates:

a mere 40 downvotes in a community of thousands is a near useless measure.

Scientific? Definitely not that robust. Damn fine as a thumb in the wind, though.

Why post this here for feedback then lmao. The whole point of downvotes existing is to provide a quick way to say the idea is terrible without flooding a thread with "this idea is terrible" which granted, didn't exactly stop it though it definitely could have been much worse of a thread.

You have quite literally zero evidence of "community" support in any capacity so acting mighty about the fact a sample size is bad is just hilarious. You have zero sample size, your entire policy which by your own words is fundamentally built on being a COMMUNITY benefit and not a MODERATION benefit (on the rename interval) has ZERO grounding in said COMMUNITY. It's moderators sitting in a Discord chat going "you know I got annoyed in this Gyle cast so we should change this for the community."