Unique Player Tags

[nesnl]

Recently some players have taken it upon themselves to impersonate other players in game. Basically they just rename themselves to another person in the game and then proceed to say derogatory, demeaning, racist, insulting comments about other people. It's unfortunate that people do this but it brings up, what I think, is an important issue.

When this was done, the other player is in the game as well so it's easy to see that something is going on when there are two players with the same name (two people with the name player123 on the scoreboard). But it doesn't prevent anyone from renaming themselves as someone who is not in the game and then proceeding to trash that person's reputation. And as far as I know there is no way to tell who anyone really is in game.

Is there anyway you can either make it so that you have to register your screen name in the game or, as they do in other games, assign people unique key codes that is unique to each account. This way we can log when people are acting inappropriately and hopefully deter this conduct. Maybe have a "report abuse" button for people's account. Or at least make it so there is a function that when you remove someone from a game that they can't rejoin for at least a certain amount of time. As it stands right now, when you kick someone, they can just rejoin the game immediately.

-Maimer

[Ferret]

Yea I was around for some of it, it was mostly moronic and relatively harmless but I could see people getting upset. Registering names is probably a good idea, along with /kick votes lasting long enough for it to be a deterrent. 5 minutes is probably long enough for people to get bored of trolling and wander away.

[lamster]

For the moment I'm leaning away from registering a unique player name since it's a little annoying to be forced to pick one out when you first start playing, and it ends up promoting junky names as the namespace gets crowded (e.g. Ferret1337, _=maimer=_, etc). I'll add a disambiguator of some sort in the server (eg Maimer#1, Maimer#2) -- and the impersonation issue shouldn't be too important when you're (A) playing with friends or (B) using a matchmaker -- and I'm hoping that eventually you'll always be doing A, B, or A+B.

I agree that abuse of anonymity is a serious issue, and it's something we'll be looking at closely as the community expands. Each account already has an unchangeable unique code (though you can't see it directly) that allows you to add friends and block spammers. In the future we will definitely implement some lamer control systems, such as a global reputation system (annoy off enough people and you are temporarily global-muted, etc), and reworking kick to ban for several minutes.

I am especially interested in self-policing systems that have been proven effective in other online communities, so if if you know of any please post details here! Otherwise this is a great place to post any ideas that you think may help.

[Snowsickle]

I realize it isn't necessarily a democracy but I'm going to toss my vote in with unique names.

Cons of current system

• People piss off the entire community and evade any consequences with a simple namechange.
• People use namechanges to impersonate others and make people look bad
• Generally adds to the level of confusion if people change their name frequently for whatever reason.

versus

Cons of unique/registered name system

• Forced to stick with whatever you originally come up with.
• If the game ever achieves wide popularity, natural name overlap

Pros are generally obvious in this situation. Basically there are some nuisances but I think overall unique names is going to solve more problems than it creates.

Compromise ideas:

• Names are registered but changeable at will. Can change to any unused name. Prevents impersonation, but not many of the other issues.
• Registering names, but with limited chances to namechange. Could potentially add a time factor in here. Solves most of the listed problems.

[Ferret]

I've got it, "admin approved name changes." Make Karl sort through long lists of people who want to be known as @$$c10wn instead of assclown.

[DiogenesDog]

Some thoughts:

- IMO registered names are best for services that are more centralized (like an RTS) or especially if they're spread over more than one game (XBox Live). If you have strong plans to go in a direction where you have multiple games using the same matchmaker, I think this might be worth rethinking. It's VERY nice to cut out the ambiguity in systems like this.

- In less centralized setups (classic PC FPS), I like the Alt system. It gives a lot of flexibility and you don't have the same strong incentives to keep players on one name that you get with the above systems.

- On a different note, XBox Live's reputation system has a couple nice features. First off, you start off with a 3 star, middle of the road rep. This automatically will slowly increase over time if you don't do anything stupid. However, your reputation isn't just knocked down when players deliberately report you for ****... it's automatically notched down anytime you do something that might be considered lame. So anytime a player kicks you or (I think) mutes you or bans you from a game, etc., it takes a small hit. Enough of these can add up to a real loss. I think this works well because it doesn't rely on players going out of their way to manage the reputation of others... it's just a natural consequence of normal player action.