Smurf tag.

[Yekaterina]

Upcoming smurf accounts: 

Brixton 

Stockwell

Vauxhall

Pimlico

Victoria

Green_Park

Oxford_Circus

Warren_Street

Kings_Cross

Highbury

Islington

Finsbury

Seven_Sisters

Tottenham-Hale

BlackHorse

???????????_???????

This is a joke, the last one has been left out for you to guess. It will be trivial for Londoners.

[Yekaterina]

@G.O.A.T try to guess the last one, i will use it first! Good luck!

I will reveal the answer below if you can't get it.

[Yekaterina]

Another such puzzle for you:

Abbey_Wood

Woolwich

Custom_House

??????_?????

Whitechapel 

Liverpool_St.

Tottenham_Ct._Rd.

??????????

Try to guess the names in question marks 

[Darkcity]

I remembered my password when checking next alpha updates on SVN xd. Folder name was the hint :p

[sarcoma]

5 hours ago, Sevda said:

List of account and their passwords: (feel free to use)

@Stan` @user1

[Stan`]

@rossenburg

[rossenburg]

20 hours ago, Sevda said:

Upcoming smurf accounts: 

Brixton 

Stockwell

Vauxhall

Pimlico

Victoria

Green_Park

Oxford_Circus

Warren_Street

Kings_Cross

Highbury

Islington

Finsbury

Seven_Sisters

Tottenham-Hale

BlackHorse

???????????_???????

This is a joke, the last one has been left out for you to guess. It will be trivial for Londoners.

the smurf community is evolving. A lot of second accounts are roaming around freely @user1

[Yekaterina]

1 hour ago, rossenburg said:

the smurf community is evolving. A lot of second accounts are roaming around freely @user1

I have no intention of creating these accounts, I'm just joking with G.O.A.T to see how gullible he is to such reports. 

And even if you ban people, there are ways to bypass.

[Yekaterina]

To reduce smurfs:

Tie lobby account with forum account

Tie lobby account with email 

Tie account with phone number 

Add a test before allowing players to register a lobby account, like what Megaglest is doing.

[Darkcity]

Phone number is too much to ask, I think email if more than enough. I think many data protection rules will kick in. We have a discussion on another thread with @Stan`. Where possibility of asking email as optional input while creating a account was suggested. Also, linking the account with an email. Email will mostly be used to recover password and not a hard requirement. Such cases smurfs has no excuse of creating a separate account, unless genuine reason. 

The effort for that according to stan is high. So, not sure of this will be implemented. 

[G.O.A.T]

1 hour ago, Sevda said:

I have no intention of creating these accounts, I'm just joking with G.O.A.T to see how gullible he is to such reports. 

And even if you ban people, there are ways to bypass.

Why do you play with me? I even don't play it your game

Anyway you play my game very well... Thank you

You contributed to some changes that will for sure come... I'm nobody and achieved nothing. So probably lost all games anyway.

[Freagarach]

14 hours ago, Sevda said:

Tie lobby account with forum account

Seems nice.

[KarissaX]

On 06/07/2022 at 5:13 PM, Sevda said:

???????????_???????

Walthamstow Central

 

On 06/07/2022 at 5:21 PM, Sevda said:

??????_?????

Canary Wharf

 

On 06/07/2022 at 5:21 PM, Sevda said:

??????????

Paddington

 

Elizabeth Line was in our Geography case study and the other one is obviously Victoria Line. I've been crowned the Queen of Geography in my school for a reason!

[KarissaX]

I was Britons, Nightingale, KarissaX and Rosaline. @G.O.A.T Please fix your list haha

[Alar1k]

So I caught up with this topic and found myself wondering where would people classify players that have on-again/off-again relationship with 0ad multiplayer? For example I started to play in a23 and I did my fair share of TG-s back then (I am, for all that don't see it as obvious, Alarik in lobby and don't use other names)

But here's my problem with "smurf" tag - see I take looong breaks from multiplayer and usually only have decent time to play consistently/good around winter when I have more free time. So thing is - I know a lot more about the rules/mechanics then the new player but when I do try to get back I am listed as "new/unknown/noob" and I cannot seem to explain to people that I am just rusty since I don't play regularly throughout the year and not be called a smurf if I do well since "the game was not balanced from the start"... (and yes getting back in 0ad isn't so easy when you forget basic commands and need to find your old mementos about strategies that worked for you before but might not work in current alpha... but that's another story...)

So I'm wondering - is there a way to flag your account name so people could see the year your account name logged in 0ad? Maybe that would help in some cases when smurfs play on their old accounts so people would know "aha so this account is not brand new, he might know a thing or two" and it would also flag brand new accounts as brand new so people don't mix up returning players with new ones?

[Darkcity]

On 07/07/2022 at 7:39 PM, Sevda said:

Tie lobby account with forum account

Tie lobby account with email 

I see these 2 as good solution to this whole smurf and new account problem. 

Second point I want to add is what stats to show for a player in 0ad lobby through which people can check whether or not he is smurf. At present we show following values

1. Ranks
2. Ratings
3. No of rated 1v1s
4. Win and lost games
5. Win %

I think here win and lost games are redundent if we are showing Win%. Instead of this we can show, Number of Team Games played or Total games played by the players. These stats will ensure that perticlular player has played many games and not a new account. So, we will see followinf stats.

1. Total games played
2. Total rated games played
3. Rank
4. Ratings (highest and current)
5. Win % in rated games

It will resolve following issues.

1. Unrated old players will not be marked as smurfs
2. New accounts can easily be identifiied. No one can be too good when he just played 2 total games and unrated, people will know.
3. Good to know who has more exprience in TGs, even newbies with low ratings at present with good amount of TGs played can say that he has experience to play matches with high rated players. They are often removed from the matches which I feel bad about.

@Stan` This should be small change, should be added in ticket in my opinion.

CC: @borg-, @rossenburg, @Sevda, @Alar1k

[borg-]

adds a minimum of 10 games until the rating count starts, that way some will be "lazy" to start new accounts

Edited July 18, 2022 by borg-

[alre]

6 hours ago, Alar1k said:

So I caught up with this topic and found myself wondering where would people classify players that have on-again/off-again relationship with 0ad multiplayer? For example I started to play in a23 and I did my fair share of TG-s back then (I am, for all that don't see it as obvious, Alarik in lobby and don't use other names)

But here's my problem with "smurf" tag - see I take looong breaks from multiplayer and usually only have decent time to play consistently/good around winter when I have more free time. So thing is - I know a lot more about the rules/mechanics then the new player but when I do try to get back I am listed as "new/unknown/noob" and I cannot seem to explain to people that I am just rusty since I don't play regularly throughout the year and not be called a smurf if I do well since "the game was not balanced from the start"... (and yes getting back in 0ad isn't so easy when you forget basic commands and need to find your old mementos about strategies that worked for you before but might not work in current alpha... but that's another story...)

So I'm wondering - is there a way to flag your account name so people could see the year your account name logged in 0ad? Maybe that would help in some cases when smurfs play on their old accounts so people would know "aha so this account is not brand new, he might know a thing or two" and it would also flag brand new accounts as brand new so people don't mix up returning players with new ones?

I don't think there's any problem here, have you been accused of anything? 

1 hour ago, Darkcity said:

I see these 2 as good solution to this whole smurf and new account problem. 

Second point I want to add is what stats to show for a player in 0ad lobby through which people can check whether or not he is smurf. At present we show following values

1. Ranks
2. Ratings
3. No of rated 1v1s
4. Win and lost games
5. Win %

I think here win and lost games are redundent if we are showing Win%. Instead of this we can show, Number of Team Games played or Total games played by the players. These stats will ensure that perticlular player has played many games and not a new account. So, we will see followinf stats.

1. Total games played
2. Total rated games played
3. Rank
4. Ratings (highest and current)
5. Win % in rated games

It will resolve following issues.

1. Unrated old players will not be marked as smurfs
2. New accounts can easily be identifiied. No one can be too good when he just played 2 total games and unrated, people will know.
3. Good to know who has more exprience in TGs, even newbies with low ratings at present with good amount of TGs played can say that he has experience to play matches with high rated players. They are often removed from the matches which I feel bad about.

@Stan` This should be small change, should be added in ticket in my opinion.

CC: @borg-, @rossenburg, @Sevda, @Alar1k

making more info avaiable is only good. also rated team games would be wonderful.

[Darkcity]

35 minutes ago, borg- said:

adds a minimum of 10 games until the rating count starts, that way some will be "lazy" to start new accounts

It won't be good player experience for new players. It might stop some smurfs but it will impact all newbies. So, not sure if this will be a good solution. Also, most smurf don't care about ratings except few, so this will only go in their favour, where no ratings is shown untill he can ruin 10 games for other players. 

It can go as overall suggestion to 0ad on how to calculate initial rating based on first 10 (or x) rated games and there after normal rating system that is currently present, but for smurf i'm not sure about it.

[rossenburg]

9 minutes ago, Darkcity said:

It won't be good player experience for new players. It might stop some smurfs but it will impact all newbies. So, not sure if this will be a good solution. Also, most smurf don't care about ratings except few, so this will only go in their favour, where no ratings is shown untill he can ruin 10 games for other players. 

It can go as overall suggestion to 0ad on how to calculate initial rating based on first 10 (or x) rated games and there after normal rating system that is currently present, but for smurf i'm not sure about it.

@Darkcity, how about this. I just integrated this where users can select a player, press report button and get the player reported for review by moderators. Could be smurf accounts or other offense. Once the player is verified as a smurf, we can add something to indicate that its a smurf player in this cause i used a (!) symbol. 

I'm not sure this will permanently stop players for making another account when their old account is flagged as smurf, well maybe paneities like banning could hurt them but not for so long, they will still go ahead and make more new account. So i think @borg- idea could work but as you said that will be a disadvantage for certain players too. If 0ad had in-game accepts like skins and all that , would have been very different because nobody would want their old account banned or flagged as smurf. Maybe someone may come out with a great idea to handle mutliple account creation and the penalty should hurt so badly that they wont think of making multiple accounts. Maybe ban an entire ip ? (that wont work when vpn is available these days), or maybe ban entire pc? that's also a LOL. I will integerate "Mark as smurf" feature in Godseye mod just so you can mark smurf accounts account smurfs so that you will know which account is smurf or not. This will only work locally , you are the only one who should see it. 

[Darkcity]

@rossenburg I like your solution, as it is simple and might be effective. I have some questions, comments ,and improvements about your feature.

Questions.........

• How would you finally verify a player as smurf? based on number of reporting for the player?
• How would you handle collective abuse of the feature? Where certain group of players mark certain player as smurf (for fun or some other reason) even though he is not? Will smurf will have his say in deciding his account as smurf?
• What is the exact role of lobby modeartor in your solution? He is just a tagger or he will also have his say tagging the player as smurf?

Comments..........

• Try to add more functionalities than just smurf reporting. More use case a feature covers most likely to be added. Example use cases are
  1. Report for leaving a game
  2. Report for DDOS
  3. Report for in game abuse etc...
• Penalties suggestions are
  1. Muting in lobby
  2. Banning for certain days. This will be more effective, as player would want to play 0ad and he will login with account to play. After a while he wil be tired of making acounts and will return to original. 
  3. If player finds out the original player, tag original account as smurf. This will scare most of smurfs as they don't want to loose their orginal account. (Although player concent should be taken before banning as warning)

Improvements.........

• Creating a level of messaging and penalties for smurfs based on number of reportings. lets say x number of players has reported player as smurf then.
  • 3<=x<=5 , kick/disconnect from lobby with notification "Your account has been reported as smurf account, please login with your original account".
  • 5<x<=8. Ban for 1 day
  • 8<x<=10, ban for 3 days
  • 10<x<=15, ban for a week.
  • x>=15 permanent ban. 
    The decision to ban should be with moderator while kick and disconnet should be automatically.
• Change the color of your ! as these reporting are done. for example from a color grade yellow to red.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0AD_BOSS case is kind of questionable. @Stan` is this becasue he is using certain mod? Else how come someone has such stats? Example -ve matches?

 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

3 hours ago, rossenburg said:

or maybe ban entire pc?

i think this would be a little excessive. Requiring accounts to have a unique email address is good for a few reasons I think. This way only one account can be operated at one time, no juggling accounts. I think you should still be able to change your name freely, perhaps even in-lobby, but gameplay statistics should remain the same across accounts (games played, rating, win rate, etc).

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

Perhaps an account creation date would be a good way to help players make their own judgments about smurfs. I was thinking the account info sheet could be expanded to help this.

[Stan`]

2 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

5 hours ago, rossenburg said:

 

i think this would be a little excessive. Requiring accounts to have a unique email address is good for a few reasons I think. This way only one account can be operated at one time, no juggling accounts. I think you should still be able to change your name freely, perhaps even in-lobby, but gameplay statistics should remain the same across accounts (games played, rating, win rate, etc).

I have 7 email accounts. Makes it harder not impossible. Also lots of legalese.

3 hours ago, Darkcity said:

0AD_BOSS case is kind of questionable. @Stan` is this becasue he is using certain mod? Else how come someone has such stats? Example -ve matches?

I'm not sure I understand you.

 

[rossenburg]

4 hours ago, Darkcity said:

@rossenburg I like your solution, as it is simple and might be effective. I have some questions, comments ,and improvements about your feature.

Questions.........

• How would you finally verify a player as smurf? based on number of reporting for the player?
• How would you handle collective abuse of the feature? Where certain group of players mark certain player as smurf (for fun or some other reason) even though he is not? Will smurf will have his say in deciding his account as smurf?
• What is the exact role of lobby modeartor in your solution? He is just a tagger or he will also have his say tagging the player as smurf?

Comments..........

• Try to add more functionalities than just smurf reporting. More use case a feature covers most likely to be added. Example use cases are
  1. Report for leaving a game
  2. Report for DDOS
  3. Report for in game abuse etc...
• Penalties suggestions are
  1. Muting in lobby
  2. Banning for certain days. This will be more effective, as player would want to play 0ad and he will login with account to play. After a while he wil be tired of making acounts and will return to original. 
  3. If player finds out the original player, tag original account as smurf. This will scare most of smurfs as they don't want to loose their orginal account. (Although player concent should be taken before banning as warning)

Improvements.........

• Creating a level of messaging and penalties for smurfs based on number of reportings. lets say x number of players has reported player as smurf then.
  • 3<=x<=5 , kick/disconnect from lobby with notification "Your account has been reported as smurf account, please login with your original account".
  • 5<x<=8. Ban for 1 day
  • 8<x<=10, ban for 3 days
  • 10<x<=15, ban for a week.
  • x>=15 permanent ban. 
    The decision to ban should be with moderator while kick and disconnet should be automatically.
• Change the color of your ! as these reporting are done. for example from a color grade yellow to red.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0AD_BOSS case is kind of questionable. @Stan` is this becasue he is using certain mod? Else how come someone has such stats? Example -ve matches?

 

I think these will need a manual review because as you said, some people can just report anyone for fun and if we are to decide which penalty to give a player due to the number of reports received about his account, that will be unfair in someway. And again, thanks for the suggestions. The Ddos issue i dont think people intentionally do it. Maybe the known lag issue, could also be their hardware or their internet connection. Sometime someone might be lagging in the background but netstats doesnt show ( Bad connection to playername )