Non-mandatory country flags in lobbies (or anywhere)

[DeivisJenkins]

The idea is to add a privacy-related option to the account profile to be able to hide or anonymize one's country flag.
I know this idea has been considered before but I feel compelled to suggest it once again.
Previous requests were rejected with "why would you want to hide it if not to missbehave", but I find several valid reasons.

• Politics drama / Real-World conflicts
  i.e: "You're bad because you're X" or "I don't wanna play (or share energy/mass) with an X"

• Prevent tracking for privacy/personal reasons
  i.e: Personal targetting

• Streamer/content creator safety
  i.e: Targeted harassment, tracking, or doxxing

• Regular privacy
  i.e: "I want to play with a newly made friend and we're not yet comfortable with knowing this information about each other"

• Misrepresentation
  i.e: Being tagged with the wrong flag for any reason, like living near the border.

I also realize the tendency is to answer to some of these reasons with "you just have to report anyone that does that" but that's a failing strategy on the long term.
For anyone else that still defends the flag system, I should say it has never been too reliable either, many people have the question mark flag, or manually mislead it with a VPN.
Other competitive games (i.e: Beyond All Reason) allow hiding flags without a worry, It requires so little technical work that it could be done in a single patch. I really think is a no-brainer to let it be optional and let users agree to share their information.
If the problem is to remove the flags altogether, then they could be customizable with other non-country related flags: neutral, question mark, UEF, Cybran, Aeon, Nomad or whatever.

Sorry if this makes some go "we already talked about this" but I really never saw it being properly discussed anywhere, just discarded or ignored.

[Deribus]

I don't remember it being discussed as a privacy concern, but there was an update a few years ago that removed them from everyone and people were... unhappy.

@DeivisJenkins said:

Prevent tracking for privacy/personal reasons
i.e: Personal targetting

Streamer/content creator safety
i.e: Targeted harassment, tracking, or doxxing

I don't see how country flags allow tracking or doxxing. Outside of the Vatican (which doesn't fit the typical FAF demographic) even the smallest country narrows you down to tens of thousands of people. That's not doxxing territory.

@DeivisJenkins said:

I really think is a no-brainer to let it be optional and let users agree to share their information

Mandatory flags do have some benefits. People who host custom lobbies may not want to play with countries which tend to have poor connections or which are actively at war with their own. It can also help team organization and communication by giving a decent idea who speaks what language(s).

[DeivisJenkins]

First things first, thanks for the answer.

@Deribus said:

there was an update a few years ago that removed them from everyone and people were... unhappy.

The key point of the suggestion is to make it an optional feature. A middle ground between forcing or removing it.
The backlash you mention was because there are users that like it, which is perfectly fine.
What I suggest would be more of an optional cosmetic toggle.

@Deribus said:

I don't see how country flags allow tracking or doxxing.

While the flag itself doesn't doxx a street name, it's more of a matter of cross-referencing.
Combining a country flag with a username, playstyle, time zone, and language can easily narrow down an identity faster than intended. You or I wouldn't even think of that, but the world is wide and there's REALLY stubborn people out there.

@Deribus said:

Mandatory flags do have some benefits. People who host custom lobbies may not want to play with countries which tend to have poor connections or which are actively at war with their own.

While this sounds great at first, it is also subjective. It's probably true that someone from another continent would have bad ping, but if it's not the case, that player is being isolated for no good reason.
Similar can be said about the politics. Those players may be isolated or targeted in-game (for example, teaming up against it) for no good reason. (I didn't see this happening, just brainstorming)

I think there are more objective ways to measure connection, like regular pinging. (Also this can be dodged without actually solving it with a VPN)

@Deribus said:

It can also help team organization and communication by giving a decent idea who speaks what language(s)

This is great, I didn't even think of that.

[Blue-]

Would be bad
I very much enjoy seeing a fellow polish patriot in the lobby and then just casually speak our native language. If the flags werent there, id have no clue

Also knowing that someone is from a poorly educated country i can assume that its likely that this person wont speak english so if i need to communicate in game and i see that english didnt work, ill try using pings and drawings (if i thought that this person speaks english and just ignores me, i wouldnt bother)

Also it brings a feeling of the international community that FAF is, playing with people from all around the world and putting our differences aside to have a fun little game people need to learn to coexist, and not pretend that reality is different

[DeivisJenkins]

@Blue said:

putting our differences aside to have a fun little game

I'm afraid this is wishful thinking

Maybe all of that could be solved by simply leaving it enabled by default?
That way, people that don't mind wouldn't even have to worry about it and those that do care would have choice.

[wilson_]

I mean, if you don't want to disclose your nationality, just use a VPN. FAF has a 500ms delay anyways.

[DeivisJenkins]

As far as I know, VPNs give pretty much two options for this:

• Regular tunneling: All your internet connections (not only FAF) is rerouted and you lose speed and stability on anything you do over the internet, which is obviously not desirable.

• Split tunneling: Certain connections (yes, you can cherrypick FAF) is rerouted.

However, the second option is a paid feature.
I hope I don't have to explain why "pay a VPN then" would be a lazy, selfish reply.

Statistically speaking (I know this is kind of a cheap shot), if I'm suggesting this here, there must be other people out there who would consider the toggle option as a net positive feature.

From a technical standpoint, the entire flag system is already set up and I know being able to straight up disable would bring problems on it's own, so all that would need to be done is to allow it to show something else. It could be something nice like a faction symbol, or even just the question mark that it can already show.

[Deribus]

@DeivisJenkins said:

The key point of the suggestion is to make it an optional feature. A middle ground between forcing or removing it.
The backlash you mention was because there are users that like it, which is perfectly fine.
What I suggest would be more of an optional cosmetic toggle.

That's rather idealistic. If we make country flags optional then people who turn them off are going to be harassed because the impression is they're doing so because they have something to hide.

Reddit has a feature where you can hide your profile. If you do so, someone clicking on your profile cannot see your post and comment history. It's a common sentiment in the Reddit community that if you stumble across a hidden profile they're either a bot or a troll, because there's something on their profile they don't want seen and they went through the trouble to hide it.

Overwatch went through this some years ago with hiding profiles because people would get harassed for playing certain characters. They avoided this by making ALL profiles are hidden by default and you have to click a button to un-hide your profile. If you see someone with a hidden profile they at least have the plausible deniability that they never bothered to or didn't know about clicking the button.

Given these two approaches (which were both controversial) I don't expect an option to hide or reveal country flags to go over smoothly.

Combining a country flag with a username, playstyle, time zone, and language can easily narrow down an identity faster than intended.

I really don't think that's true.

• Username
  -- Usernames are already unique. There's no Deribus with a Brazilian flag so flags don't let you narrow anything down within FAF. I suppose if someone uses that same username in a different service which does allow non-unique names then you could get some information, but again you can only narrow down to an entire country.

• Playstyle
  -- I fail to see how playstyle gives you any information you could use to identify someone in real life

• Time zone
  -- First, that's not something FAF reveals, so this would only affect people who both are uncomfortable sharing their country but also are comfortable sharing their time zone in chat. Second apparently the smallest population country with multiple time zones is Micronesia which has 114,000 people, so even in that edge case it doesn't narrow down a ton.

• Language
  -- Not sure how this would work. If I see someone with an Italian flag speaking Russian they could be living there, on holiday, or just using a VPN.

I think there are more objective ways to measure connection, like regular pinging.

Ping is already displayed in lobby if over 500ms. It's just not enough to establish connection stability in anything other than a 1v1. You would need to somehow check their network stability over time, with higher unit counts, across every single other player in the game. That is possible to do but it's a much more complicated request than just turning flags on and off.

[DeivisJenkins]

@Deribus said:

If we make country flags optional then people who turn them off are going to be harassed because the impression is they're doing so because they have something to hide.

Can't say that "that will never happen", but I think that would be more in line with hidding the entire profile (flag, player rating, games played, etc.) rather than just the flag. No one would trust the intentions of someone who hides all, not even me.
The same applies for the Reddit and Overwatch cases you mention below.

@Deribus said:

I really don't think that's true.

I think you missed the "combining" point of it. Separately, each bit of info doesn't offer anything, but once you put them all in a pile, you can 'triangulate' who someone is and recognize it, this applies both for the "hey it's my friend" and the "not this guy again".
I know these two examples sounds like a win-win scenario, but we should look at the other side of the coin too:

"Is it my only option to make a new account if i don't want to play with my friend this time without being interrogated?" (suppose the friend is manipulative, idk)
or
"Do i have to enable a VPN and have my entire connection halved just because they don't like my country or they think I'm the one lagging the rest?"

Now I'll try to clarify each point but before that, remember these points are about player info that have nothing to do with the flag system on their own, but rather add up to each other and allow to build a profile on someone:

@Deribus said:

Username
-- Usernames are already unique. There's no Deribus with a Brazilian flag so flags don't let you narrow anything down within FAF. I suppose if someone uses that same username in a different service which does allow non-unique names then you could get some information, but again you can only narrow down to an entire country.

There are countless examples of people creating account names that mimic the names of others: streamers' names, nicknames they know, and so on. I haven't seen anyone with malicious intent, but these features should also be considered with an eye toward the future.

@Deribus said:

Playstyle
-- I fail to see how playstyle gives you any information you could use to identify someone in real life

This one is actually the hardest to catch. You obviously can't infer in who someone is by how they play, but someone (I've seen this happen several times in other games) might say "Oh no, we're playing with a [nationality], we're going to lose" and such. It sounds absurd, but prejudice often leads players to attribute specific playstyles, mistakes, or bad behavior directly to a player's nationality.

@Deribus said:

Time zone
-- First, that's not something FAF reveals, so this would only affect people who both are uncomfortable sharing their country but also are comfortable sharing their time zone in chat. Second apparently the smallest population country with multiple time zones is Micronesia which has 114,000 people, so even in that edge case it doesn't narrow down a ton.

(reminder again: this is apart from the flag system, so suppose you don't see the flag)
This is indeed information that FAF doesn't reveal, but it's as easy as noticing when someone is on.
If someone connects at -let's say- 4 AM and leaves at 9 AM pretty much every day, you can easily deduce this player is from another continent, which as I said it's not much info on it's own, but it's about stacking different info.

@Deribus said:

Language
-- Not sure how this would work. If I see someone with an Italian flag speaking Russian they could be living there, on holiday, or just using a VPN.

As a fictional example, let's say someone has:

• a username that sounds vaguely Eastern European.
• plays on FAF between 11 PM and 3 AM UTC.
• writes "I play FAF since 3 years" and similar broken English phrases in chat.
• usually picks Seraphim,starts the games with a distinctive move, like building land and air factory without making extractors before.

By themselves, these traits mean almost nothing. However, if the user also has a mandatory german flag, cross-referencing it with schedule, playstyle, and language creates a recognizable profile.
The flag is not a privacy problem on it's own, but it's an excellent point of data to pinpoint who someone is.

PS: Relying on VPNs as the only workaround creates a double standard: Users who care about connection quality and privacy are forced to experience high latency on other programs (or pay VPN), while anyone wanting to spoof their location or misbehave can bypass the mandatory flag system in seconds anyway. A client-side toggle solves the privacy issue cleanly without forcing players into VPNs.