Proposal for [Challenge Accounts] | Feedback Wanted!
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Hello FAF Community,
We’re excited to present an idea aimed at promoting FAF with fun and challenging gameplay: Challenge Accounts.
The idea is simple: under carefully managed circumstances, we would allow select players, particularly those who are willing to create streams or other types of content, to use temporary secondary accounts ("challenge accounts") for unique and pre-approved challenges that create content for the benefit of FAF.
Because this idea might have some unintended consequences, we’d like to introduce the idea and then ask for detailed feedback.
TL;DR at the bottom of the post
The Goal
- Encourage creative challenges, such as "engineers-only games" or "tech-3 only games" inspired by similar successful initiatives in other gaming communities.
- Generate content for platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and Discord, bringing visibility and new players to FAF.
- Support our content creators and promotion team, and create new promotional material to boost player numbers.
How It Would Work
- Pre-Approval by Moderation Team:
- Applicants would propose their challenge and content plan.
- Challenges would need to be unique, entertaining, and contribute value to the FAF community.
- Only approved accounts with clear restrictions (e.g., timeframe, challenge rules) would be allowed.
- Temporary Nature:
- Challenge accounts would exist only for the duration of the challenge.
- Accounts would be deleted or locked once the challenge is complete.
- Content Creation Requirement:
- Applicants must produce content (videos, streams, guides, etc.) as part of the challenge.
- Strict Monitoring:
- Moderators would oversee the account usage to ensure challenges align with the agreed-upon terms and prevent abuse.
- We explicitly do not want this to be a free-pass to create smurf accounts.
Feedback on the difficulties and drawbacks of this plan
We want feedback from everyone on refining this idea and helping us address potential difficulties.
Specifically, we’d like your feedback on:
- Fair Applicant Selection
- How should we decide who gets access to these accounts?
- Ideas that we have considered include moderator-reviewed applications, public proposals with a voting system, content pitches, and/or a mix of these.
- What would be the best way to ensure fairness in assigning these accounts, while still promoting quality content?
- How should we decide who gets access to these accounts?
- Preventing Abuse
- What safeguards should be in place to ensure these accounts aren’t misused for rating manipulation, smurfing, or other things that are disruptive?
- We are considering not allowing such accounts to be used for TMM, and to mark these accounts with a clearly recognizable avatar and username format.
- What safeguards should be in place to ensure these accounts aren’t misused for rating manipulation, smurfing, or other things that are disruptive?
- Scope of applications
- Should challenge accounts be limited to high-rated players or experienced streamers? Or should newer creators also have a chance?
- How can we ensure challenges are entertaining but also reasonable to execute?
- Community Feedback
- Should the community have a say in which challenges or content creators get approved?
- How can we best include the community before, during, and after a (round of) challenges?
- Workload on Moderation Team
- Managing these accounts will add some workload to the moderation team.
- Are there ways to streamline this process or involve the community to share some of this responsibility?
We Want Your Suggestions!
This initiative has the potential to bring a lot of positive attention to FAF, but it’s important that we implement it carefully. We’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, and any concerns you might have. How would you suggest organizing tricky aspects like applicant selection or challenge oversight? Do you have strong objections to this idea?
Let us know your ideas in the comments below!
Thank you for helping us shape the future of FAF. Together, we can make this initiative a success and continue growing our community in fun and exciting ways.
The Moderation Team
TL;DR
- The moderation team proposes to create ‘challenge accounts’.
- Challenge accounts would come with restrictions on playstyle, would have to be pre-registered, and would only be active for a certain time.
- Challenge accounts would have to provide a benefit to the FAF community at large, not be overly disruptive, and result in new promotional content to be posted on social media.
- We want feedback on pretty much all elements of this plan.
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I don't see any idea how Challenge Accounts could be used without destroying players with small ratings.
At the same time, we can do:
- Tournament, 2-3 2400+ rated players vs 4-6 around 1200 rated players
- Zeroing the ratings (if you like a bit of chaos)
- Make at least some clan event/tournament (clan should use players of different ratings)
- Streamer Battle (we can think of so many different formats).
And many other activities/tournaments with interesting and rare formats.
If there is a specific suggestion from a known faf streamer/caster and the moderation team doesn't think there will be toxic consequences from it, Challenge Accounts could be allowed as a one-time exception.
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Finally legal tele-paragon!
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The introduction of Challenge Accounts, as currently proposed, appears unnecessary, as most goals (content creation, fostering creative challenges) can be achieved without additional accounts. The administrative and moderation effort does not justify the benefits. Optimizing existing structures provides similar advantages with less risk and effort.
It should also be noted that there have always been discussions about smurf accounts, and FAF has consistently been against such accounts, even enforcing bans. Now, for FAF to allow smurf accounts under any circumstances is problematic in my view. This could lead to anyone justifying their smurfing by claiming they intended to create value for FAF.
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Two cents from a trainer perspective:
As you (aka. the ppl somewhat following discussions on the FAF discord) know, there is an ongoing discussion about the classic "how do I beat turtles?" or other things were trainers most often just give a theoretical advice bc we don't encounter turtles anymore so we can't show a decent gameplay.
With a challenge account it'd give us (= trainer team) a chance of showing exactly these type of things, similar to a thing such as "Bronze to GM series". We could play 1v1 ladder (yes, I'm basically asking for an exception), downgrade our gameplay so we play without manual reclaim and stuff and point out the important things. Atm it's the only way I see for really showing it cuz I've tried playing against low ranks with my main account, but they end up either being intimitated, trying cheese or simply not playing "standard", which we could avoid with an extra account.For challenges itself, I don't really see a reason why you'd need an extra account if said account has a unique avatar basically giving away "oh hey, I'm a secret high ranked going to cheese!", could just use the own account for that. For me it'd require the account to be somewhat undercover so the other ppl play normal.
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@Uveso said in Proposal for Challenge Accounts: Feedback Wanted!:
The introduction of Challenge Accounts, as currently proposed, appears unnecessary, as most goals (content creation, fostering creative challenges) can be achieved without additional accounts. The administrative and moderation effort does not justify the benefits. Optimizing existing structures provides similar advantages with less risk and effort.
It should also be noted that there have always been discussions about smurf accounts, and FAF has consistently been against such accounts, even enforcing bans. Now, for FAF to allow smurf accounts under any circumstances is problematic in my view. This could lead to anyone justifying their smurfing by claiming they intended to create value for FAF.
Just giving my personal opinion here, such challenge runs have the potential to provide a promotional benefit to FAF (in addition to the fun the person doing the challenge might have), but that needs offsetting against the problems caused by having a high rated player matchup against low rated players via what is essentially a smurf account, which risks a significant negative experience for the opponent as well as undermining confidence in ratings. The issue I see with the current rules is that they to some extent prevent people doing a challenge run on their main account (as an extreme challenge could be seen as rating manipulation, and for teamgames could result in a long period of unbalanced games since the person's rating will take some time to adjust to reflect how strong they are with the challenge constraints), and it feels like it's possible there's an approach where the benefits of a challenge account type system could outweigh the downsides.
On your second point I think the issue of people justifying smurfing by claiming they'd create value would be prevented under the proposed system - a big reason for the proposal being that pre-approval is mandatory for a challenge account is to prevent that, and it means people who try to justify smurfing with that reason would still be breaching FAF rules and face a ban.
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I find the idea of allowing smurf accounts under any circumstances problematic. Smurfing has always been a contentious issue in FAF, and the platform has consistently upheld a strict no-smurfing policy, even enforcing bans against such accounts. Introducing a system that permits smurf accounts, regardless of how controlled or pre-approved it may be, risks undermining this longstanding rule.
Allowing high-rated players to create temporary accounts—even for challenges—poses significant risks to the community. It could lead to negative experiences for low-rated opponents and erode confidence in the integrity of the rating system. Furthermore, even with strict pre-approval and monitoring, the line between an approved "challenge account" and unauthorized smurfing becomes blurred, potentially opening the door for misuse.
That said, this is just my personal opinion. Whatever decision is ultimately made, I will support it. I have a rating of 0, so from a personal standpoint, it doesn't matter to me either way.
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Personally I don't think there should be any restrictions on having multiple accounts for any reason across the board. If people want to go through the effort of having multiple accounts what does it really matter? I think most people wont even bother and those that do aren't going to really affect anyone else.
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I can see the value in this.
For example, Grubby who does a lot of casting of Warcraft 3 has a challenge account for literally that: challenges! These challenges originate from his viewers. Take as an example:
These challenges would never work (or be fun) against players of his rating. If you're unfamiliar with Grubby - he's similar to what TheWheelie is to FAForever in terms of rating. Not the best, but pretty close to it. And this content is viewed a lot. It is often also educational as he's often evaluating what is going on.
The suggestion here would not be much different. I'll respond to the details/questions another time.
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@Dorset said in Proposal for [Challenge Accounts] | Feedback Wanted!:
Personally I don't think there should be any restrictions on having multiple accounts for any reason across the board. If people want to go through the effort of having multiple accounts what does it really matter? I think most people wont even bother and those that do aren't going to really affect anyone else.
Allowing multiple accounts more generally could cause the following issues (non-exhaustive list):
- Ban evasion, meaning people can get away with bad behaviour that wrecks the FAF experience for others, leading to an increase in such behaviour
- Rating becomes less reliable, meaning fewer balanced games - generally a closely fought game where either team could potentially win is more likely to be fun than a completely 1-sided game where one team never had a chance. The more reliable rating is, the easier it is to come up with teams that are a similar level of skill.
- New player experience is likely to be worse if you have a much higher chance of fighting against someone who based on their rating should be a new player but turns out to actually be a smurf that completely destroys you (leading to fewer people playing FAF longer term)
It's also not that much effort to create multiple accounts, and with people often enjoying winning more than losing there'd be a strong incentive to do it (since it'd increase your chances of winning a game).
