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.

[nesnl]

I think that there can be a balance between what the system is now and having a system where you register a name when you first make an account and can't change it ever again. I have to agree that having to register a name when you first start can create issues when people want to change it later on.

I think that what would be nice is having some sort of identification of a player outside of their name that never changes. Like you mentioned lamster about how you have unique code that you can see for each account. I played Quake 3 for a while and even though you could change your name whenever you wanted (unless there was a server set limit of the number of name changes in a certain time period) there was always a unique code associated with each player. That way you could identify them even if they changed their name.

I think the solution that would help would be to have unique codes associated with each player that could be accessed through the command line. In Quake 3 you had to ask the program to list the codes and it would just spit out a list of everyone currently in game. Second, I like the idea of the game not allowing two of the same name at any point. So if someone takes the name player123, then no one else can take that name at that point. If player123 then changes his name to player456, then someone else could then take player123. That way people could change their name whenever they wanted, but just not be able to change it to the same thing as someone else.

As far as any self policing systems to manage the community, I am not familiar with any and it would seem to me that if you tried to implement anything like that (where other users had an impact on your game based reputation) that it would be open to abuse. I am not sure how much you want to deal with being contacted by paying customers about how they were "unfairly banned" or whatever the case may be. I like the idea that there be a different kick and ban command. Sometimes it's nice to just be able to kick someone as in the situation where the server is full but people are merely AFK. You want to get them out of the game to let other people in who are actually going to join the game. However, there is the case where someone is blatantly doing something that they need to be removed from the game and not allowed to return for a certain amount of time (even if it's only 5 minutes).

[Vi*]

I like the idea of having a unique registered unchangeable full name which can be accessed by anyone easily, but also a nickname which is the name that shows up everywhere. Full name would be the ugly ones like "lampster_the_hampster," still easier to recognize than a code.

[DiogenesDog]

btw, if the current system is kept, one feature that would be nice is a little pop up notifier telling you when someone in your friends list changed their name.