exciting. ill be keeping tabs because i think they would all look neat in the 0ad engine

The concern about "protecting privacy and security" doesn't feel entirely convincing, given that the current hot-seat setup already leaves privacy and security largely in the hands of the players. For instance, anyone hosting a game can see connecting IP addresses and can already run the game on a modified host anyway. As for the second account, it didn't seem like uff was trying to hide anything, especially since the username was so similar to his main one. It looks like he only did it to work around current system limitations so he could actually host and play at the same time. I actually had similar ideas about setting up my own hosts, but I didn't want to pay for a GPU-enabled hosting service, and I haven't yet found the time to modify the engine. Specifically, it requires decoupling XMPP from the GUI in C++, exposing the Lobby API to headless mode, and writing an autostart JS script to manage the server without rendering. IMHO, volunteer-run hosts significantly improve matchmaking queue times, ultimately making the game much more accessible to everyone.

Also, nothing is more discouraging to me when I sign in to the forums then to see 50+ bot spam posts in Russian.

Yeah, no problem. I don't use GitHub, I prefer GitLab.

LOL I literally just added this to Hyrule Conquest the other day, what a coincidence