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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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!

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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.

Hi Rick-, as explained on the website:

For reports filed through the FAF client, the reporting player may check the status of their ticket through the ‘Moderation Reports’ menu. This menu may be opened by clicking your username at the top right of the FAF launcher, which will show a drop-down menu containing the option ‘Moderation Reports’.

All reports are confidential and will be treated as such with regards to your and the reported player’s privacy. We do not comment on moderation decisions in public, except in some exceptional circumstances. We similarly do not generally share the exact penalty applied to a reported player. This includes sharing such information with the reporting player.

Are you looking specifically for Co-Op maps? If you're interested in good looking multiplayer PVP maps, you can check my work below.

You can read everything you want to know about the report system, including an explanation of how to report someone, on the FAF website under community > moderation. (Or click that link).

To quote the summary from that page:

You can report players who breach FAF rules in-game by finding the game in recent replays, right clicking on their name, and using the report player option. Alternatively, you can use the Moderation reports menu (click on your username in the top-right of the client to find this menu). For more details on the reporting and appeals system see below.

And in detail:

When filing a report for an action that happened during a game, it is critical that all fields of the report form are filled in. Without a valid replayID, a clear description, and an accurate timestamp your report cannot be processed. Such reports will be dismissed with a message asking you to resubmit your report. Reports for offenses that happen in the FAF IRC channels naturally do not come with a replayID, in which case you may leave this field empty.

FAF does not own the FA game or its IP. We're essentially just hosting maps, mods, different balance changes, and allowing players to create lobbies. That is not a game.

@Jip said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

They're just not transparent to the average user.

We've recently released a webpage that explains this whole system in quite some detail. To be found on the main FAF website at https://faforever.com/moderation.

It should help, thought I doubt more than a few people will take the time to read it.

There's always the option to host 20 minute no-rush games. That'll go some way in giving you your high-eco long-duration games. Not sure how much luck you'll have filling such a lobby, but you can try I guess.

@Vindex I am unsure if this is possible to do automatically. However, I'm not sure if allowing challenge accounts to only play unranked matches is a good idea. The general idea is that they are still viable players after all, just at a much decreased rating than the original player's rating.

I know it's been done before, but not by whom or how. (So my answer is pretty much useless, sorry).

Try looking through the discord message history?

@xclkvnspoijfoisn said in Proposal for [Challenge Accounts] | Feedback Wanted!:

Alternatively, allow everyone to create a second account that is linked to your main account somehow. Like how you can see previous names of a player, you can see other accounts. That way everyone can participate in challenges or whatever. Not just a select few content creators.

We do not believe this is an option. Challenge accounts will always affect normal games, because they must use very unconventional playstyles. Allowing a limitless number of these accounts. with challenges that haven't been vetted for how disruptive they are, will only lead to chaos.

One of the core parts of this proposal that we want feedback on is how to allow something like this while minimally disrupting normal gameplay. Allowing only a few of these accounts at a time, with vetted challenges and on new accounts so that their rating actually reflects the strength of that account are a few ways we think we may achieve that. Creating a new account is essential to make that work.

@Brutus5000

Several ideas, such as a '0 to 2500' series, cannot be done unless with a new account. Other interesting challenges, such as engineers-only games, will be such a large handicap that we believe that the original rating of high ranked accounts will make it impossible to have a fun game. A player who is normally a 1800, for example, may very well only play at the 1300~ level when sufficiently handicapped.

Having a fresh account would allow it to reach an actual valid rating (for that challenge), which means that games will actually be balanced even with the handicap. We'd like these challenges to be still competitive, after all, albeit at a lower rating than what the player of the account normally would rank at.

We'd aim to only allow challenges that would make this possible: clear 'prank' gameplay is likely to be too disruptive, and we don't think it should be allowed. That said, I think there is a lot of room for interesting challenges that are still competitively viable if enough sweat is put in.

I thought this was a great suggestion and would love to see it in game. It'd make comsnipes on low ranks something you want to do again, rather than having to fight to keep them alive against their own suicidal tendencies to make sure the 2k on their team doesn't get fed 3 extra bases.

@xclkvnspoijfoisn said in 15minutes of gaming?:

. In the long game when everyone has big bases and big eco, your options are limitless as far as what the game can offer. The same can not be said for the tech 1 state of any game since you are obviously restricted to tech 1.

I'd argue that the late game has just as many if not more limitations as the early game, just in different ways.

Once you're in late stage game, air is mostly locked out of most of the map due to SAMs, most experimentals have to move in clusters to get anything done, none of the T1 or T2 units will see any play, and most of the game just devolves into shield micro and arty wars, plus the occasional satalite and game ender.

That kind of base-to-base war feels very stale to me. I find it much more enjoyable to play with armies pressuring armies, trying to win by manoeuvre and being able to use stuff like drops and snipes.

@xclkvnspoijfoisn said in 15minutes of gaming?:

Rushing gun at minute 9 and pushing your unsuspecting and caught off guard enemy by surprise. It's a thrill sure, obliterating your opponent is rapid fashion. Nice one.

You write this as if the attacking player is in the wrong here. The goal of the game is to kill the enemy commander. If my opponent is dumb enough to overexpose a commander, then he'll get blown up for it. If you're not taking the kills when they are offering to you, you're essentially playing worse just to extend the game. I don't find that any fun nor competitive.

The bottom line is this. There is no argument that can convince me that playing this game for 15minutes is more fun than playing this game for 1 hour.

Right then, shall I lock the thread for you?

@magge said in Uploading Custom Made Map Issue:

AFAIK, it is not necessary to write "v2" or any version in the map name

Rather than not necessary, it's not actually allowed. Versioning of maps should be done with the "save as new version" option in the editor.

@Freelancer54 said in Uploading Custom Made Map Issue:

Hello, I am new to making maps and I have an issue with uploading maps to FAF.

Come join us in the FAF discord and head over to the mapping channel. You can share your mapfile with us there and we'll have a closer look.

@BlackYps Perhaps a system where a person can request a pause for a minute, or two minutes, which has to be accepted by vote. Don't allow the pause to be cancelled before, except by the person who initially requested the pause?

@waffelzNoob said in Proposal for [Challenge Accounts] | Feedback Wanted!:

Also, currently elo is gained too quickly for an actually educational "road to grandmaster" series. They'd hit 1500 in like 5 games and that's way too little to teach an 800 how to get past 800.

This might be a consequence of the rating in the beginning not yet being settled. An account that already has a bit of a 'steady' rating at ~800 would help, I think.

Considering this I think there should be 1 MAYBE 2 of these accounts active at a time, and that the user does not play more than 1 game at a time because playing more could temporarily drive people away from matchmaker.

Yes, a hard limit on the number of challenge accounts available at a time seems like a necessary requirement to me too for this to work. Given that they're intended to only be active for a specific timeframe, we can then lock one and start another for another person and challenge.

Not sure what you mean with 'not play more than one game at a time'. You mean per day, or?

@Sainse said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

Is it possible to implement forced in-game pause with a time limit?
Meaning player can force 1 or 3 minute pause and no one can unpause the game for that duration of time.

Currently the only in-game lobby settings regarding something similar is “3 time breaks, 7 time breaks, unlimited”. And the 3/7 options are terrible cause if someone’s keep unpausing you are quickly out of limit

@Crofis said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

I suggest a possible solution to unpausing: make a system where every player (or team) has a set maximum pause time (like 2 mins per player or around 5-6 per team, idk), and make the unpause work on a majority vote or when time runs out. That way, i can pause and have a few minutes to deal with IRL and come back, if a single annoying guy tries to unpause due to bad manners, he can be blocked by the more civil users in the game.

If this is possible, that would be an elegant way to solve the issue too. Thanks for the suggestion.

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@Strydxr said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

it creates more of a backlog for mods to handle

Don't worry about the extra work for the mods; with the systems we currently have in place moderating this rule more strongly would not add significant amount of work to our plates. I wouldn't be suggesting this idea without considering the effect on our team, ofcourse!

@Dorset

Yes this is true but if someone makes a new account and then never act out of line again the net affect is we have 1 more person in the community. I think it would be very rare for someone to repeatedly be toxic and make a new account over and over. These types probably do it anyway.

Allowing people to evade their bans is not how the moderation system can work. Most bans we hand out are one or several days. Only when someone has been repeatedly banned over and over will they start receiving bans that can be counted in weeks or months. We hand out some permanent bans too, but those are very rare: from the top of my head I can think of maybe 10 permanent bans last year. (see also this page for more info on how bans are applied)

People that need an account to evade a long ban are not the people who 'then never act out of line again'; people with long bans have already proven that they are not people who will receive a warning and then improve. And these are not the kind of people you want returning to your community.

While there is a lot about the proposal for challenge accounts that we are unsure about, the one thing that we are sure about is that we want to make it exceedingly clear that this is not a free ticket to a smurf account. Nor will we start to be more lenient towards new smurf accounts. This challenge account is very much intended to be treated like a carefully managed exception, and we hope we can trust the community to treat it as such.

I am curious how many new players are onboarded each month to know if this would be a legit reason.

Last month we had about 3000 new users register. I don't have the data to how many of them are now regular players.

The other points you made regarding smurf/secondary accounts should be best addressed in their own thread if you'd like to see the rule changed. Continuing the discussion here will probably derail the conversation about the challenge accounts themselves.

I've had the same issue and reported it in discord.
Since then several other players shared they have the same issue. Devs should be aware now