Rant: randomly banned from the lobby

[Yekaterina]

37 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:

The custom rating mod already covers this

Not good enough though; custom rating mod sometimes run into bugs and people still see your username in front of the customrating. I would like it such that you have to search my player profile to see my real name. Or, we can have a token as lion said. 

[Yekaterina]

10 hours ago, smiley said:

Engine.LobbySetNick("new_name")

Absolutely OP! This is exactly what I wanted! Thank you!!

But, I can't join games now.

Error: please join via the lobby

Edited January 27, 2022 by Yekaterina

[smiley]

On 27/01/2022 at 10:23 PM, Yekaterina said:

Error: please join via the lobby

Yes, when I played, the lobby authentication stuff for games was not there. That feature also killed the ability to replace players who dropped. It goes against the XMPP standard by trying to identify accounts with the nickname. Also, its extremely overkill to have XMPP be the lobby chat server when almost all of the standard is unused. There is an extension that could be used to list games, but that is of course unused. https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html

Edited January 28, 2022 by smiley

[Yekaterina]

1 minute ago, smiley said:

Yes, when I played, the lobby authentication stuff for games was not there. That feature also killed the ability to replace players who dropped. It goes against the XMPP standard by trying to identify accounts with the nickname. Also, its extremely overkill to have XMPP be the lobby chat server when almost all of the standard is unused. There is an extension that could be used to list games, but that is of course unused. https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html

So how do I fix it?

[smiley]

Don't think its fixable. You cannot join games if the nick is not the "canonical". But I recall there being an option to disable authentication with the STUN thing on game host. But I also recall that being removed because not having it was deemed bad.

[sarcoma]

5 hours ago, smiley said:

Yes, when I played

Come back and play some more, noob sad face.

[Yekaterina]

5 minutes ago, sarcoma said:

Come back and play some more, noob sad face.

That's up to him. Today I came back to the lobby and now I understand why people quit permanently. 

[Yekaterina]

Why are we allowed to create 2 forum accounts and not 2 game accounts?

Surely someone who wants trouble will create another forum account after first one is banned and there is 0 way of telling who is who

[Stan`]

16 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Why are we allowed to create 2 forum accounts and not 2 game accounts?

Surely someone who wants trouble will create another forum account after first one is banned and there is 0 way of telling who is who

Don't think you are actually.

As for identifying people, we have a bit more tools on the forums I believe.

[Lion.Kanzen]

1 hour ago, Stan` said:

Don't think you are actually.

As for identifying people, we have a bit more tools on the forums I believe.

I've been caught a couple of times.

[smiley]

8 hours ago, sarcoma said:

Come back and play some more, noob sad face.

Unfortunately sad face is no more. Literally none of the characters in sad face is allowed anymore. elexis deleted the account because I forgot the password to recreate it and the name was no longer valid. I used not so sad smiley account and got banned for multiple accounts IIRC. Who knows...

I visited the lobby once in 2020 or something, and most people I played with were also gone. Even that nub barca is no where to be seen. ggs from sad face.

[Yekaterina]

...

Edited January 29, 2022 by Yekaterina

[Yekaterina]

15 hours ago, Stan` said:

As for identifying people, we have a bit more tools on the forums I believe.

How? What tools?

So far I have not been banned for making more than 1 forum accounts, and I don't want to be banned of course. I haven't done anything bad with the additional accounts. I just gave them to different people. 

It is even easier to make smurf forum accounts than smurf accounts in game: VPN, privacy browser (e.g. duckduckgo, TOR), tempmail. You can't even ban by hardware ID or IP address. Also, reading the forum doesn't need good connection so using a VPN is perfectly ok. 

Similarly, you can spam smurf accounts in discord, instagram, gmail, outlook... 

 

 

[smiley]

6 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

discord, instagram, gmail, outlook

None of these platforms try to force one account per one physical person and their terms of service doesn't prohibit it either. In fact, its extremely rare for even games to have an actual restriction of the sort. Even for games that actively prohibit smurfing, its not under a one account per legal person clause, but a more specific "boosting" clause. Usually its just one account per license in commercial games.

There is also an incentive to not limit the accounts.

Ironically, the registration terms of this very forum doesn't prohibit multiple accounts.

[sarcoma]

9 hours ago, smiley said:

and most people I played with were also gone

Many are still there. Most of them under new names. Smurfing really got out of hand, sadly.

[alre]

over that period of time, one could also have lost the password of the older account. an e-mail confirmation could be useful not only to avoid smurfing, but also to retrieve a lost password.

[Silier]

I remember there being ticket where it was discussed to merge lobby accounts with forum ones but it was turned down as a lot of work for little benefit

[Stan`]

@Dunedan, @user1

[user1]

I can restore Christoffel-Symbol's access back into the original account if he lost access..

It's definitely allowed multiple players from the same IP. There are thousands of players who play while sharing an IP with other players. There's no reason to warn players that they'd better not get their friends into the game if they share an IP.

It's meant for there to be only one account for each person and there are at least several reasons for that.

 

 

[KKaslana]

13 hours ago, user1 said:

I can restore Christoffel-Symbol's access back into the original account if he lost access..

Please do, much appreciated! 

As stated in the discussions above, I cannot access the lobby through my own account while I am inside my university's network, which is not necessarily a problem as the ban does allow me to concentrate on my work. Sometimes I borrow Yekaterina's laptop to play, which might not be permitted neither. 

However, when I go home during a weekend, I change my IP address from my router, then delete all system cache and create a new account. In order to ensure that I am recognisable in the lobby, I have made a list of accounts in the form:

Christoffel-Symboln

where n is an integer equal to the number of accounts I have made; I will be Christoffel-Symbol8 this weekend.  This systematic process is working quite well but constraining me to just 1 account and allowing access at all IPs would be much more convenient for me. 

 

13 hours ago, user1 said:

It's definitely allowed multiple players from the same IP. There are thousands of players who play while sharing an IP with other players. There's no reason to warn players that they'd better not get their friends into the game if they share an IP.

Understood. Perhaps it is a bug specific to Eduroam and the fact that both of us have created more than 2 accounts and often share laptops or accounts. Sometimes I borrow her laptop simply because it has a superior GPU and a 144Hz screen... I will avoid that in the future. 

I am curious about whether the lobby checks our hardware. If I log into my account on her laptop and play, then she logs into her account after I leave, will both of us be banned?

 

13 hours ago, user1 said:

It's meant for there to be only one account for each person and there are at least several reasons for that.

My apologies, I had created approximately 5 accounts in winter 2020 as I wasn't aware of the regulations. Fortunately, I have forgotten the names and passwords to all of these accounts so they will never cause you anymore trouble, hopefully. I can see some reasons to this rule, but it is often the case that our accounts get deleted after a few weeks (error: account does not exist) for no apparent reason and we have to return with a new one. Christoffel-Symbol3 and Christoffel-Symbol5 came into existence because of this. 

 If the single account you award me with (be it Christoffel-Symbol0 or Christoffel-Symbol9) does not get deleted, then I will not make any more accounts. If it does get deleted, I will report the bug on the forum. 

 

Thank you for your understanding, @user1

[Lion.Kanzen]

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1188