Username rules updates

I think I have a good nickname for a whole year

I like how an inside joke between people who mostly play together has somehow triggered the mod team to make sweeping changes to restrict user agency. These particular renames affected literally no one outside the 1800+ community, who already know who everyone is. That is, unless there's been some surge of 800s ban evading by confounding mods with monthly renames - I doubt it.

Meanwhile, the thread to discuss this bizarre change is slowly filling with slurs, as if our ability to trust moderation wasn't already low enough.

I think all the constant renaming memes are cringe, and I like it when you guys are crushed under the boot of oppressive moderators. We haven't had any good forum drama for a while either, so these are good and necessary changes.

It seems clearly better to auto revert names in violation of the rules instead of forcing people to go into disgusting, anime-ridden places like discord to contact the moderation team. This would be an excellent use of development resources.

@thomashiatt This is the first time in ages a group of people have got together to change their names similarly. Idk how they are constant

I was about to become WeakieSnoog

I honestly think that once a year is a little overkill, let it be a month sure, even three month cycles, but a full year is too much.
If the main issue of name changing is really impersonation with malicious intent (very important detail!) and breaking rules, then just warn/ban all the offenders, enforce said rules, so that people won't be so eager to break them. Report system exists for a reason.

Not sure about forbidden symbols, that are "intentionally designed to be hard to read", as the rule itself just sounds like too much work, because with such things you want to be extremely specific and draw black and white lines that are clear to everyone.

The 6 month grace period is complete reasonable, with one detail - if the owner of the old name changed his mind wants it back before 6 month.

To answer your question: When renaming an account is required due to rule breaking, should the account be locked until the account owner contacts the moderation team, or should the account be reverted to the last used acceptable username?
Yes, that would be the most sensible decision, just make sure that the communication to the moderation is accessible even for the most basic technologically advanced people and the locked account message displays a call to action for contact.

Only a caster that doesn't interact with the community would ever fall for a name swap.

@giebmasse Nice clown mod team at it again might as well close faf while at it.

This change is actually insane. Aswell as the reasoning behind the decisions. Imagine creating rules based on the size of the community. Say faf suddenly grows by 100k people. Are we now changing rules because of that?

The real question is "who asked" (as in who asked to check / control usernames). I do not mean this as a joke. Up to now literally no moderator cared until there was a report. So it literally did not matter unless someone is annoyed about you and wanted to pay you back. Now I'm supposed to stick to username from myself and i better not rename to somebody else (even by accident)!

You (moderation team) are now saying EVERY player must know the other players. There can be no confusion on usernames. Do I even have to talk more about this?

The example with the confusion regarding screenshots also has little relevance in my opinion. Surely chat logs must be saved somewhere, so reports should only be possible with a timestamp. Just like when reporting something ingame.

Also, when is the discord username purge coming?
Apparently there is a guy on FAF since 2013 or something called Nugget, so i guess i'm not allowed to have my username anymore - gg (also getting ready to report anyone with Nugget in their name).

Maybe the moderation issue could be addressed by linking reports to an account name or ID, that is separate from the nickname that you can freely change. Moderators could navigate accounts by the account ID instead of the changeable nickname, which will prevent any confusion. Meanwhile allowing players their expression through changing their nickname.

I also dislike the "we're gonna do change XY and THEN wait for 10 user pages of good reasoning in order to revert them" mentality. As stated here and the Discord multiple times, the reasons are simply not good except for the tourney one, but there you can just not allow ppl with similar names to play.
This is not only the case for this specific name rule change as I'm speaking as a representative for multiple high ranks.

Are all accounts not linked to Steam? Could users not be tracked via their Steam IDs?

Hey guys i dont like these changes

Hey guys i dont like these changes

"Usernames can be renamed:

Once every year"

This is a terrible decision. Your post has -18 downvotes and counting @Giebmasse.

There is little support for this as a community. Are you going to implement this rule against the will of the community?

With regard to impersonation too, of all the thousands of players that play this game, who actually cares about this? Even in the most literal cases of players literally impersonating others by merely using their username or something close to it, that is not a big deal.

Players can easily check their username history to see who said player really is.

I am sure there has only been a handful of players that don't like this for whatever reason. By and large, I am confident that most players simply do not care. They are here to play the game.

@goodgamepleasety 25 downvotes

I vote for allowing people to change their username daily. If the community wants to have fun with usernames then let them.

Being a moderator is likely the most thankless approach to contribute. On one hand you're critical to keep the community sane, yet at the same time you not only get shit on while processing reports but you also get shit on by everyone else in the community for the tiniest of perceived inconsistency.

This topic is an example of that where one and the same user cherry-picks the posts of a moderator without a reference to the discussion and then proceeds to question whether the moderation team can be trusted at all. edit: this is apparently not the same person, cheers for that.

Meanwhile that same person is impersonating a balance team member and the only reason I know it's not the balance team member is because the actual balance team member that I thought he was made a post (who also changed his name) with a type of humor that only he write. Oh, and the tag that states he's part of the balance team.

@theweakienoob said in Username rules updates:

I also dislike the "we're gonna do change XY and THEN wait for 10 user pages of good reasoning in order to revert them" mentality.

I don't even know what team you're a lead of (something name change something) but you like all the other team leads know that you can't possibly discuss every change with every community member.

The far majority simply doesn't care and just wants to play and of those that care enough to post (like here) the majority is usually not informed, miss informed or are unable to look at the situation objectively. Just look at this topic, there are about four people (@OcelotFIST / @TheWreck / @Sinerium and @StormLantern ) that are in my opinion constructive comments out of ~38 when writing this.

And to top it off: the team responsible did not only took the time to discuss it internally, to make an extensive post about the change and the reasoning - they even have a separate paragraph at the bottom where they state they're open to constructive comments !

What more do you want?

@giebmasse said in Username rules updates:

We'd like feedback on:

When renaming an account is required due to rule breaking, should the account be locked until the account owner contacts the moderation team, or should the account be reverted to the last used acceptable username?

I'd revert to the last user acceptable username and if it happens in quick succession you lock (ban-lite?) the account.

edit2: and for if it is unclear; I fully support the moderation team in this decision and I thank them for taking the time to write up a post to be up front about the changes and their reasoning.

edit: while trying to figure out who @TheWeakieNoob is (sladow?) I found out that when a user changes their FAF name all the soft links (the use of @) break on the forums. See for example this post, where the use of @TheWheelie is no longer referencing a user.

Which makes me wonder what happens when someone renames to the old username of someone else; would the soft links then suddenly reference the wrong user ?

@jip said in Username rules updates:

I don't even know what team you're a lead of (something name change something) but you like all the other team leads know that you can't possibly discuss every change with every community member.

Ye I'm Sladow, which you can quite easily tell by 1) my profile pic as it's unique and 2) by simply clicking on my posts for a second. There are projects like the FAQ or tables from the Trainer Team which should make it pretty clear. Also the tag should also do its thing.
Besides that, using me as an example for that is not the best idea because I'm quite literally the guy asking on several Discords about changes to get opinions of different players, basically representing every rating range from complete beginner to high ranked from different parts of the community. So yes. Before doing any change I discuss it with the team like other Team Leads, but I also discuss it with a lot of different people.

Also as I spoke with other "higher" FAF community members, FAF built in polls are a thing which just noone uses. So it's possible to ask a majority of people.

Also if a name history on the Forum is possible, that's also a fix to "who just wrote XY" so you don't have to check in FAF which is extra effort. Just a short note though as it shouldn't be the main focus.