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?
- 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.
- 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.
