Jump to content

Rant: randomly banned from the lobby


Yekaterina
 Share

Recommended Posts

This morning, I tried to log into the lobby and enjoy a weekend of 0ad in my school, but as soon as I logged on I was banned with a message 'You have been banned for 48 hours'. That ruined my weekend...

I haven't played 0ad in a week and I just came back to have some fun but clearly @user1 won't let me. Well, I will stick to studying and playing PUBG then (I have been doing that for the past week). I might as well switch to War Selection, Megaglest, Widelands, and AoE4 

Now, I understand there may have been some misunderstandings:

1. Other kids in my school also play 0ad and we all use eduroam wifi -> same IP address -> so the system detects 3 or 4 accounts from the same IP - thinks we are all smurfs and bans us. 

2. Some people (smurf speculators) mix me up with other real players just because we coincidentally had similar playstyle in a game or talked in a similar manner, so they think that 1 person is controlling 3 accounts although that is not the case and I can show you evidence to prove that I am indeed Yekaterina and no-one else. 

3. As most of you know, I make YouTube videos and the 0AD guide - many people improve very fast and learn to play similarly to me after reading these materials - so a new player may become very close to my level after only a few matches - people think they are me smurfing, report them to user1 and I get banned even though I was asleep. 

4. I move around a lot and use VPNs, so I may appear at new locations suddenly. There is no regulation against using VPNs so I don't see why I should get a stream error when playing over VPN. 

 

So I am asking you to not just ban people automatically but actually investigate the case before you take actions. Some people have created more accounts than me and they have not been banned, strangely. 

Furthermore, I have also seen people being muted randomly without saying anything bad. It seems that if a swear word is included in a string they type then the player is muted automatically. For example, 'mishit projectile'. Also I think one does not deserve to be muted for saying 'bullshit'

  • Like 1
  • Sad 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

there are women who could take that very badly. Lol.

It's ok Dizaka I am not offended

This has gone slightly off topic, but the point is we need to get rid of the bots which automatically ban people. 

Also smurf speculation needs to stop. Innocent people and new players are getting banned for no reason. 

Frankly, I don't understand why this game bans people for creating another account... In the world of 0ad no one knows each others' real names, so it doesn't matter what we call ourselves. I can easily claim to be MarcAurel and you will never know whether I am Marc or not... I experimented with VERGIFTUNGSGEFAHR and claimed to be BoredRusher and everyone believed me. Similarly, when I logged in as trinitrophenol, everyone thought that I was metafondations or feldfeld... Even my dad was somehow recognised to be borg... The game exists for us to have fun, not to put more and more limitations or stress onto our lives. Now, I understand that some players have concerns about smurfs messing up balance, and there are better solutions than just an automatic IP ban:

  • The TG host asks them for rating or maybe previous name. If they are honest about skill level and didn't mess up balance then fine, let them play. It doesn't matter whether their real identity is hamdich or kate or feldfeld (all 3 could be the same person ;) ), as long as they bring fun to your TG, we are all chill. 
  • If the player lies about rating then trolls or smurfs with malicious intent of messing up TGs, then we can report them to User1 and give them an IP ban
  • Hosts can decide who to let into their game. If an 'unknown' persuades them well enough then why not?
  • Thanks 1
  • Confused 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you didn't understand what I was saying, let me give you a more vivid example:

I could be the Queen of England, playing 0ad as hobby and pretending to be 18 years old instead of 90. I just creatively named myself Yekaterina, and you can't find any flaws. 

I could be Angela Merkel playing the game in her spare time, remember I praised her policies often and both of us know physics and maths! 

I could be Recep Tayyip Erdogan, waking up at 3am for TGs then start dealing with politics and 9am. Middle aged people don't need that much sleep. 

I could be an alien spy scouting out the little blue planet we found near our vast interstellar empire. 

I could be a 19 years old boy called berhudar creating accounts named similar to 'Catherine' (who is actually him and not me, and Catherine came before me)

No matter who I am in real life, it doesn't matter in the 0ad lobby. What matters is skill level and maybe playstyle (changes over time though). 

 

So, there is no evil in changing your 0ad username. Other games do allow it. As long as we don't mess stuff up it's fine. What do you think, @user1 @Stan`?

  • Confused 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm gonna pass on the breakage of all lobby ToU because it's @user1's job for now.

45 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

As long as we don't mess stuff up it's fine.

Lobby has proven countless times that it likes to mess stuff up. It started with toxicity, harassement, smurfing and now it's DDOS on top of all the rest. Can you really tell me that I can trust anyone on the lobby to behave respectfully?

  • Thanks 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Stan` said:

Lobby has proven countless times that it likes to mess stuff up. It started with toxicity, harassement, smurfing and now it's DDOS on top of all the rest. Can you really tell me that I can trust anyone on the lobby to behave respectfully?

In my honest opinion these 4 things are not really the same:

Toxicity and harassment are social misconducts, which do deserve a perma ban, even if done on main account.

DDOS is a malicious technical attack that is possibly illegal, so it's not as simple as a ban can solve...

Smurfing with the intention of destroying balance is also annoying and deserve a caution then a ban.

 

Someone just turning up with a different name, then talks politely and is honest about their skills and never messed up anyone's TG shouldn't be treated the same as the 4 listed above. My point being, being respectful has absolutely no relationship with the number of accounts someone has. A rude person will be rude on their main account, and a nice person will still be nice on their 20th account...  People don't automatically become disrespectful because they clicked on the 'create new account' button twice! 

Toxicity, harassment and DDOS is not caused by second account; JC harassed you on his main account... there are some people who are more toxic on their main account than someone on his 20th account...

The DDOSer might have never been in the lobby and just attacks by monitoring traffic xD

So you need to get rid of the individuals who are causing problems instead of wasting time trying to ban everyone who you suspect is making more than 1 account...

Note that some lobby freshers could outperform many 1500s if they had a lot of experience fighting 1vs6 petra bots or modifying AIs. These shouldn't be banned neither. 

 

Changing your 0ad username is like changing your appearance, which means nothing to everyone else. Do you really care about the DNA of the dude behind the screen? What's important to everyone is their gameplay and not their DNA sequence... Would you divorce your wife just because she changed her make up? I don't think so, but maybe you would. Even though she is still the same person that you love, you just can't stand a slight change in her appearance because of your pedantic anti-smurfing obsession. 

 

 

  • Confused 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Yekaterina said:

Someone just turning up with a different name, then talks politely and is honest about their skills and never messed up anyone's TG shouldn't be treated the same as the 4 listed above. My point being, being respectful has absolutely no relationship with the number of accounts someone has. A rude person will be rude on their main account, and a nice person will still be nice on their 20th account...  People don't automatically become disrespectful because they clicked on the 'create new account' button twice! 

Sure, but the game is not ruined by them but by the others, that can and will create any number of accounts just to troll. My point is that people have been proving that being trusting and nice doesn't work. So it's a minority ruining the game for everyone.

1 hour ago, Yekaterina said:

your pedantic anti-smurfing obsession. 

:) You means the terms that you agreed to abide by when you created an account? Questioning rules is good. What I see here is not a problem with the rule, but rather by how poorly it is enforced. From what I gather your issue right now is that your school IP is banned preventing people from playing, not a problem with banning abusive smurfs.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, Stan` said:

Questioning rules is good.

always is good. We do not want to become a closed system. One of the things the Western world is so brilliant about is not being closed to ideas. And freedom. The actions are the condemnable, but not the speech.

Debate and dialogue is better than censorship.

 

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-01-19-royal-society-cautions-against-online-censorship-scientific-misinformation?utm_source=pocket_mylist

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

First of all i think it is important to notice, that rn players who get banned are those, who have 10+ smurf accounts, so it is generally possible to smurf, there are just limits to it.

For the sake of the argument, lets assume smurfing is generally allowed. It would mean that all not so well behaved players would have to be banned manually, possibly for each new smurf account. As it has been described above, there are certain ways smurfing is beeing abused, for example by bad behaved players or players who like to surprise others in rated games which can lead to frustration etc. 

1) It is probably hard to distinguish between "good" and "bad" smurfs. 

2) Even it is going to be hard to agree on rules on that. Is it for example ok not to reveal real identity/strenght and mess up balance ?

3) Who has the time to investigate wether a smurf is a good or bad smurf in every case ? In comparison to a state, 0 AD has no professional law enforcement, and people who work on it are doing it in their free time and bots cant do it. 

4)As a result it implies the objective decision that having "bad smurfs" is the lesser evil compared to having reducing "troll" or "protection of identity" kind of smurfing. "Trolling" is just not such a vital or even intended part of having funn with the game, while "bad smurfs" can reduce the comfort for all players drastically by serious offense. Most legal systems, created through democratic processes, containing objective decisions on values would consider honesty, reliability, respect, offenses to peoples personal honour and dignity in the worst case of higher weight compared to very specific, non - life essential ways of having fun. 

Therefore it seems to be a better solution, to keep current second account policies, and allow exeptions, for example when the same IP is shared between two different persons. It would assumingly be less work to handle, as players first have to come up with arguments, whose validity or at least plausibility could be analyzed more easily. For example in Yekaterinas case, you could just see  replays, of them playing 1v1, or TGs ( one was uploaded to yt even) to have prove that two players are involved. Or if people want anonymity for maybe being molested with their original account people could explain their situation aswell. 

 

Edited by MarcusAureliu#s
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 25/01/2022 at 8:11 AM, Yekaterina said:

It's ok Dizaka I am not offended

Just to be clear that's not what was on my mind (Nor would have been).  It was more about not caging an innocent person.  In particular, caging you is the equivalent of caging someone who does substantial contributions to the health of the general ecosystem.

Edited by Dizaka
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The smurf rule is actually dumb, so I agree with you on that. Preventing new accounts is an overstep. There is no reason for forcing people players into the same identity. I literally quit the whole game after being banned several times even though the identity was not even a mystery. Which also resulted in me deleting a forum account and also causing irreparable damage with relations here. So, you know, pick your poison I guess. Either don't smurf or don't play.

  • Like 2
  • Confused 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...