disallow renames in lobby for normal users?

[PicassoCT]

One idea is to let users rename only each 3 months.

sounds to complicated... why 3 months? why not 3 years? or 3 days?

then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.

[NeonStorm]

A name for summer and winter, and maybe a name for the time inbetween both :D

[PicassoCT]

We could allow rename limited to local carneval and mardi grass..

[Kapytii]

People renaming their names sucks major cock! Bloody endless !whoissing. Messes your team playing too as you cant right away know whos behind/front/near you, is he bad player or a good one you can rely on a bit if need be. Get an option for a player to choose to see some certain name he wants to see, no matter what name the other funny guy has changed to? To whatever that !whois or whatever is based on... like lets say I know who is Kapytii and about how bad a player he is, and then the arse master changes his name to (poop)FatFartagon, but I could still choose to see him as Kapytii in game.
Sometimes the !whois tells nothing, but the player is super good rank 1 player, that makes me very scared :´(

[bibim]

If your problem is just to know how good or bad a player is, you can check TrueSkill values of other players easily on SPADS hosts:
- in lobby, if you use a lobby client compatible with TrueSkill (NOTALobby, WebLobby...), you will see the TrueSkill values directly in the battleroom. Else you can type "!status" (or "!status battle" if game is running)
- in game, you can use the SimplePlayerList widget to directly see the TrueSkill values as explained here

[very_bad_soldier]

+1 it is really annoying. Having ways to find out the TS value is not enough. It is confusing and costs micro to find out and remember who is who on the battlefield (anyone able to tell cats apart?). I feel like I want to apply that attention somewhere else (like microing my units). Smurfing gives you a real advantage ingame which is kinda stupid and should be stopped imo.

I think players should not be able to rename accounts. I see rarely a legit use case for it. If there really is a reasonable need to do so then they can contact an admin and let him do it.

[bibim]

+1 it is really annoying. Having ways to find out the TS value is not enough. It is confusing and costs micro to find out and remember who is who on the battlefield (anyone able to tell cats apart?). I feel like I want to apply that attention somewhere else (like microing my units). Smurfing gives you a real advantage ingame which is kinda stupid and should be stopped imo.

I think players should not be able to rename accounts. I see rarely a legit use case for it. If there really is a reasonable need to do so then they can contact an admin and let him do it.

Personally, as long as anyone can have quite a good estimate of smurfs skills, I'm not that much against smurfing. Anonymity isn't bad by itself, as long as it's not used to bypass rules, break balance etc.

And anyway, let's imagine we block renaming. Then all these players would create new accounts instead. We would have much more separate smurf accounts. And since it wouldn't be possible to rename anymore, it would even become "hype" to have some funny name, with extra points if you manage to get high lobby rank with it...
What I mean is that imo there is no point in forbidding renames as long as we don't come up with a way to prevent creating several accounts for same physical person (without penalizing uers playing from same IP or even same computer of course), which would be very hard. Imo it doesn't worth it.

Currently I see renaming as a way to limit smurf accounts, which is a good thing.

[very_bad_soldier]

Smurfing was ok when here and there someone did it but it got quite out of hand. In every game there are like 5-6 smurfs and you have to figure out every time who is who. Also knowing the TS value isnt the whole story. It is also useful to know who exactly he is regarding playing style and stuff.

If smurfing is disallowed admins could just ban smurf accounts as detecting smurfs is quite easy nowadays.

An idea: It would be cool to have a game mode in which all enemy units are shown in the same color so you dont know which units belong to whom. Does this exist already?

Either way... I guess I have to start smurfing too now

[bibim]

Detecting all smurfs with 100% confidence and no false positive is not possible...

I guess you could customize your playerlist widget to show the true names of some account IDs, as configured in a file for example.

Or you could configure this at SPADS level and write a plugin which puts these true names as additional info in the startscript. Then your customized playerlist widget just has to read it from here.

[cheapsheep]

Renames do not change accountID, right?

Why not simply keep an history of names associated with an accountID that could be queried (with extra metadata such as timestamps bounding associations)?

A bot could keep track of previous names, as IMO this should not be handled by uberserver itself. And with proper integration into lobbies, rename becomes a pointless smurf technique.

[PicassoCT]

Zero-K did it right. Bind value to the account, and the smurfing dissappears..

[klapmongool]

TASclient keeps track of playernames somehow. Works great.

[abma]

Renames do not change accountID, right?

Why not simply keep an history of names associated with an accountID that could be queried (with extra metadata such as timestamps bounding associations)?

A bot could keep track of previous names, as IMO this should not be handled by uberserver itself. And with proper integration into lobbies, rename becomes a pointless smurf technique.

that exactly shows how stupid rename is. there is a bloat of code to keep track of renames, why do we keep it at all? we allow renames but on the other side we keep track of it, so it is "ignored".

[bibim]

that exactly shows how stupid rename is. there is a bloat of code to keep track of renames, why do we keep it at all? we allow renames but on the other side we keep track of it, so it is "ignored".

I will try to rephrase my previous post:

1) For some reason some players enjoy changing names
2) Renaming allows them to do so without having to create a smurf account
3) Preventing renames will not prevent players changing names, as they can recreate a new account each time they want to change name
4) Preventing renames will make the number of accounts in database grow much much faster
5) Preventing renames will make it much harder to recognize a smurfing player, because he won't change just his name, he will use brand new account

Can you explain exactly what is the benefit of preventing renames?

[abma]

1) For some reason some players enjoy changing names

thats nice for people use it, but thats annoying for all other peoples as they don't know who they renamed accounts are. it could be implemented in lobbies, so they can keep track of renames and show the first name, but this would make renames useless.

2) Renaming allows them to do so without having to create a smurf account

i don't think real smurfs are so nice and don't create new accounts.

3) Preventing renames will not prevent players changing names, as they can recreate a new account each time they want to change name

you can't prevent them creating new accounts. when looking through logs it seems most people rename like this:
user1 renames to user2
user2 renames to user1

4) Preventing renames will make the number of accounts in database grow much much faster

unused accounts can/will be deleted. current user-db is about ~25MB, i don't see this as problem.

5) Preventing renames will make it much harder to recognize a smurfing player, because he won't change just his name, he will use brand new account

still i don't think "real" smurfs won't create a new account when needed.

disallowing renames is more work for people to have a high-level account with an unknown name. you can't prevent people creating new accounts, as we want new players.

[bibim]

thats nice for people use it, but thats annoying for all other peoples as they don't know who they renamed accounts are. it could be implemented in lobbies, so they can keep track of renames and show the first name, but this would make renames useless.

I was just stating a fact, without saying it is good or bad: some people enjoy changing name, that's a fact. So if you remove one way to do it (renaming) they will do the other way (create new account). But it's better if they only rename, because it's easier to recognize them through accountID, that's all.

i don't think real smurfs are so nice and don't create new accounts.

What? I didn't understand.

you can't prevent them creating new accounts. when looking through logs it seems most people rename like this:
user1 renames to user2
user2 renames to user1

I don't see your point here. If most people were only renaming to swap account names, how come preventing them to do so would limit their alternate names if they already have them?

still i don't think "real" smurfs won't create a new account when needed.

What are you calling real smurfs? I don't get at all what you mean here again.

disallowing renames is more work for people to have a high-level account with an unknown name.

What do you call "high-level" account? High lobby rank? But they don't care at all, on the contrary, some even want to look like new players. If you prevent them from renaming and keeping their lobby rank, then they will have a reason to create a new account and hide their true rank, they will say they just wanted to rename.
In a system where you are totally free to create a new account whenever you want, showing your true lobby rank should actually be seen as a courtesy, not an advantage...

[Silentwings]

I large agree with what bibim is saying, but put in my own words:

Groups of people fairly often like to rename to some clan, similar theme or some 'fashion' and then play together. Sometimes this is 100% legitimate e.g. people from the same country getting to know each other and forming a clan. (BA has actually benefitted alot from just that)

So its true that many renames are not done for 'good' reasons, but I don't think just disallowing renames would help; because (1) it takes no time to make a new account and (2) renaming has happened for years - some people won't want to lose that ability and would happily just make a new account 'in protest'.

In short, I think the result of disallowing renames is that the 'good' renames wouldn't occur as often and the 'bad' renames would all convert into 'hurhur i make rank 1 account'.

I would much rather people had a single account which never renamed, but for as long as making a new account is no time/effort/loss, I can't see how it could be made to work. And of course, we want to make it easy for newcomers to access Spring so it does need to be as easy as possible to make a new account.

[abma]

What? I didn't understand.

trolls always will troll, if they can rename or not. not renaming will be more work for them, as they have to remember more account names, risk to loose a high level account, or ... in other works, they have more work!

and not we have more work by coding more stuff to allow renames.

also the renames are missused for clan-tags, imo renames weren't made to join a clan. if we need that, we have to add the ability to join a clan without a user rename.

i still don't see why renames are good they only introduce a bloat of code and work for the nice people.

[bibim]

trolls always will troll, if they can rename or not. not renaming will be more work for them, as they have to remember more account names, risk to loose a high level account, or ... in other works, they have more work!

But they just don't care. If you prevent them from renaming they will recreate new accounts all the time. Some players already do that. If you prevent rename, there will be much more.

and not we have more work by coding more stuff to allow renames.

Coding what? All this already exists and works.

i still don't see why renames are good they only introduce a bloat of code and work for the nice people.

They are good because they limit the number of alternate accounts.

What's worse: having several names associated to correctly rated accounts, or having lots of badly rated fake newbies accounts with unknown names?

[abma]

and not we have more work by coding more stuff to allow renames.

Coding what? All this already exists and works.

lobbies don't use account id's. so stuff like ignore doesn't work after a rename.

i still don't see why renames are good they only introduce a bloat of code and work for the nice people.

They are good because they limit the number of alternate accounts.

What's worse: having several names associated to correctly rated accounts, or having lots of badly rated fake newbies accounts with unknown names?

i prefer having fake newbie accounts as its visible that they are newbies and so possible fake accounts. also there are very few renames, about ~100 (where the same accounts where renamed multiple times) in one month and most of them are by the same persons, so # of fake users can't be so high. having a high-level account without knowing who is he is much worse imo.

edit: 50 unique users have renamed 100 times in ~1 month. so in average every user has renamed twice, top renamer renamed 17 times...