I've played a few games where one player request a short pause to deal with an IRL matter. Often this runs along the lines of there being someone at the door, or them having to take a phonecall; you know, incidental stuff. Most of the times when this happens all players don't mind a minute waiting, but every so often there is a player who immediately unpauses, and refuses to wait even when other players explain that there is a need for a pause.

Additionally, as a moderator, I've seen several reports for people requesting we take action when this happens. However, under our current rule set this behaviour is not strictly a bannable offense, and we've left it up to the individual moderator to handle the matter.

I understand that this is frustrating however. I'd like to poll the community to see if making this situation a bannable offense has any support, or if people feel strongly about maintaining the way we currently deal with this behaviour.

If you have suggestions for how this should be moderated, or think it shouldn't be moderated at all, please share!

(This comment contains my own opinions and thoughts and is not necessarily supported by the moderation team as a whole)

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

1. 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.
2. Temporary Nature:
   • Challenge accounts would exist only for the duration of the challenge.
   • Accounts would be deleted or locked once the challenge is complete.
3. Content Creation Requirement:
   • Applicants must produce content (videos, streams, guides, etc.) as part of the challenge.
4. 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:

1. 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?
2. 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.
3. 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?
4. 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?
5. 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.

We do not share information about an account that was removed by GDPR request, insofar as we still have any information. This should be obvious.

Other questions have been answered.

@waffelzNoob Haven't got much free time to work this concept out. If you're really interested pm me in discord and we can work on it together, perhaps.

You can, just contact us through a discord moderation support ticket.

There's some interplay between the height of a missle and the max intercept height. Missles at the peak of their arc may fly above TMD. Very likely that's what you're observing. You defend against this by having TMD closer to the targets you're defending.

Right, so we're not going to allow personal attacks, especially not when they are still based on the assumption that mods are judging whether a game is won or lost or not. One of the main reasons why Base Ctrl-K is not allowed, and we insist that a player either leaves with their base intact or uses the team recall, is so that the moderator team does not have to make any decisions on whether or not a game is over.

We have spent a lot of time explaining why things are as they are, as well as laid out guidelines on how changes can be made to the rules. We'll await future proposals to this end in the association section of the forum. Regardless, as this thread has now fully turned into a modbashing session, I am now locking the thread.

@NOC The user got a temporary ban from the forum for another thread where they verbally abused the moderation team, not for these comments above.

@Deli I've got this data and made some preliminary graphs, but currently lack the time to work them out properly. It's on to-do list!

Thanks for all your hard work on this. Lots of new cool and interesting things we can do with the shaders and other tweaks.

@TheWeakie said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

I'm sorry but who is the faf moderation team to tell us how to act when your team deems the match as lost?

We don't want to make this decision. It was been made excessively clear last year, and the year before that, that there are players who feel it is not the moderation team's place to determine when a game is over. The resulting discussions about such decisions have taken a lot of time away from more important things.

Two developments last year have made it possible to remove this issue entirely:

1. The recall function allows players to vote to end the game. The moderation team no longer needs to check to see if a game is over, the team members can determine this among themselves.
2. The rule about leaving a game-mid game being considered griefing was changed after an association vote. Players that want to leave (after the first 5 minutes) can do so, so when a recall vote fails and a player still believes the game is over they can quit.

With these two changes we've given everyone exactly what they wanted: players get to decide for themselves when a game is over.

However, we also still have people who want to Ctrl-K their base to force the decision to end the game on the other participants, or to simply grief. This we do not allow. Ctrl-K'ing base will remain as a bannable offence for this reason. And now that we have multiple easy ways to handle situations, there is no room to argue whether a Ctrl-K base should have been acceptable or not. The answer, for now and all future cases, is that it is not acceptable. Ctrl-K'ing your base will get you banned.

@TheWeakie said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

I'm sorry but why would you need any vibe check here? If nobody in your team reported you do a base ctrlk then it should be de facto assumed that nobody in the team had an issue with this.

I simply don't understand how someone on the enemy team can ever, EVER, report you for a base ctrlk. They should have no saying on the matter imo.

I've floated the suggestion internally before that only teammembers should be able to report base ctrl-K. There are some arguments against it, such as that many players do not really know how to report someone. This is mostly the case for lower rated lobbies, of course.

If you want to adjust the rule so that only players from the reported player's team can report this offense, then handle it in the same way the rule change for leaving the game was handled: write a nice proposal for it and get the association to vote for it. I don't feel strongly about this change, whether in favor or against it, but will help you with setting up your proposal if you'd like.

Thanks for your kind words.
I don't know the answer to your question, but you may also try to ask it in our Discord. You'll find a reply faster, I think.

@Tersto said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

f someone really wants to get another player banned, I'm sure he could search through enough replays to eventually find a reportable offence for almost everyone that happened a long time ago. This can be abused to get people banned before or in tournaments so you don't have to play against them or also just if you don't like them.

We're aware of this possibility, which is why as a general rule we do not accept reports from players who did not participate in the reported game. We are also extra suspicious whenever we get a large number of reports for a specific player. Consequently, we haven't gotten into a situation where such report trawling has lead to a ban, to the best of my knowledge.

To name a very recent (this month) example of this approach working as intended: we received a report against TheWreck. The reported game was more than a month old, and was reported by someone who did not participate in the game. We investigated the reporter and found it was a random player with no history of playing with TheWreck, nor a history of filing other reports against TheWreck. The reporter did near-exclusively played the map that the report resulted from, so we have now assumed that this was happenstance following from this reporter looking at high rated replays on that map. The report was discarded both for the age of the game, and the lack of participation by the reporter.

Therefore I suggest a timelimit of how old a reported "offence" is allowed to be. Maybe 1-2 month? Serious offences like cheating should be excluded, however I don't see an issue to apply this timelimit to most other FAF rules e.g. base ctrl k, griefing, exploits...

This is a decent enough idea, but I want to reiterate that this is a solution looking for a problem. It addresses a hypothetical that has not happened, and is already well covered by our current methods.

@BlackYps said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

Or, better worded: there must be an identifiable harm, that the behaviour in this game did to the community (for example rating manipulation or spreading exploit knowledge in a stream), to make a report by an external person valid.

You describe the exact approach we currently use to cover non-participant reports. Because we cannot cover each hypothetical, we've consistently phrased it as "we do not generally accept reports from people not participating in the game". Even with this type of phrasing we already frequently get attempts at rule-lawyering (for this and similar rules), where people argue that "well, it's not exactly against the rules as written, so you can't ban me", which is why we have to resort to these more general phrasings. But the situation you describe is the exact protocol we now adhere to.

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

So the definition of griefing is "the act of deliberately annoying or disrupting other players' enjoyment of a game" (generally).
By having the consent of your team, you are not annoying or disrupting your teammates enjoyment of the game. Furthermore, by having the consent of your team, they have clearly decided the game is over, so the enemy can't really argue that the guy stole their enjoyment. While the offender did "steal" the enjoyment of the opponents, its with the consent of his team, so no different from recalling or quitting in their own way.

Correct, but as the game logs do not record the vibe of the team at the time or their support of someone ctrl-K'ing their base and we feel disinclined to use an Oujia board to check, we're going to insist that you use the recall option instead. That one actually leaves the necessary logs and does not later result in a discussion on whether or not everyone in the team was on board with the decision. And since the end result is the same, the continued insistence of some select players to use Ctrl-K instead, followed (inevitably) by a forum post or appeal asking why they were banned, mostly just signals a preference for plausible deniability over accountability. Which is not a standard we’re interested in accommodating.

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

I have not, to my knowledge, spread any falsehoods here or attempted to do so.

By starting your post with:

Base Ctrl-k: apparently this is bannable if an observer or someone watching the replay reports this.

you have (unintended, I understand) done so; you did not phrase this as a question, but made a statement. This is what I want you to be cautious of. There are enough bad takes about the moderation team as is, and we do not need to add more to the pile of perceived unreasonable actions.

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

However, I would still like to know the reason why the opponent team CAN report this.

The opponent team is also affected when a player from the other team ctrl-K's their base. Ctrl-K'ing a base is inherently griefing, because you take away the ability for every other player to play the game. You do not get to make that decision. Not for your team, and not for the opponent team. For games where the whole team has agreed to quit, you have the option to recall. If your team is unwilling to recall, you have the option to quit. There isn't a circumstance where a base Ctrl-K is necessary.

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

I do not have a case or example, but from the conversations I have gathered that it IS possible to report someone for base ctrl-k, even if the reporter is not in said game.

I've noticed in past conversations that there are many vague claims about things the moderation team may or may not have done. Barring exception, such statements are exclusively negative. When asked for detail, it then often emerges that either important context is missing, details are "forgotten", numbers are exaggerated, or the claimed offense never occurred.

We cannot have a constructive conversation about how rules and reports are read and processed if we are dealing with falsehoods and half-truths, and it is for that reason that I need to ask you that when you talk about specifics, you make sure you do not add to such noise.

You start off your post with claiming that base Ctrl-K is bannable if a non-participant reports the game. To the best of my knowledge this has not happened. Please verify if what you said here is correct, and if it isn't then retract your words. If it did happen, but relevant context can be provided (such as this having happened several years ago), then that is something we should add as well and is something I will help you with.

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

No, it was in fact a case, that was not from someone outside (i believe), BUT from my / others moderator conversations it clearly reads that a player not in the game (as in someone watching the replay) can report it and it will lead to penalties.
If thats not true - please correct me.

I do not understand what you have written here.

@waffelzNoob said in Proposal: Establishment of an Oversight and Review Committee to Support Fair Moderation and Governance:

The problem might not be a lack of structure, but a lack of perceived accessibility and transparency. If people don't know how to appeal decisions, who to contact, or how moderation decisions are reviewed,

All of this is extensively documented on the FAF website (and here), which we frequently reference and guide people to when asked. At some point it becomes the responsibility of the user to get familiar with the relative information. Whether we've reached that point can be a matter to be discussed, but the information is available and accessible.

@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

Base Ctrl-k: apparently this is bannable if an observer or someone watching the replay reports this.

Not sure if this is what you mean, but from the top of my head I cannot think of an instance where we banned a player for Ctrl-K'ing base following a report sent by a person who didn't participate in the game. Is there a specific case you are referring to?

Basically what I'm trying to say is: who does the reporter or moderator think they are to intervene in the game

Short answer: any game that you play with other people is subject to moderation. We are not crawling through the replay vault for offenses to ban people for, and generally only review games that were directly reported to us. For this reason, games played by a single player against an AI, or games where people sandbox things, do not get brought to our attention and generally do not get moderated.

Assisting others in using exploits or failing to report players exploiting a game you are participating in may result in penalites

This rule is included to catch those situations where people are intentionally assisting exploits by other users. One real-life example includes a map author creating a map where one slot has hidden amounts of extra reclaim. A hypothetical example for the latter part would be a team in a tournament knowingly allowing a teammate to play with a maphack. To the extent of my knowledge, this rule has not led to a ban in recent years.

In general:
By using the FAF services to play your games, you agree to adhere to the FAF rules. While you may disagree with rules and seek to change them, you are required to follow the active ruleset as long as you use this service.