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.
of the players do not have similiar usernames that are abusing I's and l's, and you can punish them just by comparing two names: one in the report, one in the game that was reported.
