Would it be possible to force challenge accounts to all have their main username with a separater character and followed by a challenge clan tag suffix? This way everyone would know who they are and that they're a challenge account and decide whether they would like to participate under such circumstances?

E.g. Stin is my main account and the challenge account must be Stin_CHAL.
'_' is the separater and CHAL is the clan tag.

You'd probably have to filter _CHAL from usernames to prevent deliberate misrepresentation.

For what its worth, VPN worked as a workaround, but the issue seems to have gone after the latest 23.3.0 patch.

Recently updated to the 2023.2.0.
My main home desktop PC took the update just fine.
My laptop did not. I get:

Client Version: 2023.2.0
java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException: Did not observe any item or terminal signal within 60000ms in 'sinkOneMulticast' (and no fallback has been configured)
	at reactor.core.publisher.FluxTimeout$TimeoutMainSubscriber.handleTimeout(FluxTimeout.java:295)
	at reactor.core.publisher.FluxTimeout$TimeoutMainSubscriber.doTimeout(FluxTimeout.java:280)
	at reactor.core.publisher.FluxTimeout$TimeoutTimeoutSubscriber.onNext(FluxTimeout.java:419)
	at reactor.core.publisher.FluxOnErrorReturn$ReturnSubscriber.onNext(FluxOnErrorReturn.java:162)
	at reactor.core.publisher.MonoDelay$MonoDelayRunnable.propagateDelay(MonoDelay.java:271)
	at reactor.core.publisher.MonoDelay$MonoDelayRunnable.run(MonoDelay.java:286)
	at reactor.core.scheduler.SchedulerTask.call(SchedulerTask.java:68)
	at reactor.core.scheduler.SchedulerTask.call(SchedulerTask.java:28)
	at java.base/java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:264)
	at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.run(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:304)
	at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1136)
	at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:635)
	at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:833)

I have tried Microsoft Edge, Firefox and Brave browsers. The outcome is always the same.

Hello,
First of all, thank you for this brilliant AI mod.
It has breathed new life into the game for us.

Has the recent FAF patch impacted this AI much?
E.g, the Aeon seem to build A LOT of shield disruptors. Attacking forces can seem composed almost entirely of them.