Wolfseye, on 21 December 2012 - 04:29 PM, said:
I guess its a matter of opinion. ;)
No, it's a matter of enjoying a game.
Frankie V, on 21 December 2012 - 05:18 PM, said:
The way I read this you seem to indicate that there are currently disputes taking place between players who are using the Authentication system to track players yet there does not seem to be any indication that stalking is actually occurring.
I never implied that this happened... On 4.2.
It does happen on 4.1 though, and that is without the "help" of Auth. Of course, on 4.1 a simple rename will allow you to fly under the radar of the troll/agressor and avoid it next time, whereas with Auth you're just giving him another tool, and the victim has no way to stop this from happening unless there's an admin on the server he is (which on most servers it's a rare occurrance), which can provide help (which tends to be rarer still).
Frankie V, on 21 December 2012 - 05:18 PM, said:
At the top of the list of things the Auth system is designed to do is to is to establish a means to prevent cheating from occurring and to allow the community as a whole to become involved in keeping the servers clean from individuals of intent who can't hide behind a screen name.
If caught their account is suspended or out right banned and the ability to ban cheaters can just as easily be applied to players who misbehave by bullying other players in an unacceptable manner.
That’s to say players who's intention is to misbehave in an unacceptable manner can no more hide behind a screen name than the person being attacked and can be removed from all of the servers that have opted into the Auth system.
No one has ever disputed that point. That's why Auth should show the account name to the server admins.
The point is :
No player without any power on a server can do anything with the Auth info of another guy apart from malicious stuff.
Frankie V, on 21 December 2012 - 05:18 PM, said:
In the past if banned at the server level one only needed to preform a few work arounds, that I'm sure server operators are aware of, and change their screen names and they are back in business. With the Auth system they now have to go through the effort of obtaining a new account which progressively gets more difficult.
Overall and by far transparency is a valuable deterrent that not only assists the server operators who opt in but as a means to assist the players themselves to be able to quickly identify trouble makers where the system could be expanded to excluded such players from the field.
What good can it do to identify trouble makers if it also makes it easier tenfold to identify targets and victims?
It's a system for player management (control and punishment mostly), so you need to give that power to people who can manage players (server admins).
There's no point in giving such powerful tools to regular players, they can be easily exploited.
Frankie V, on 21 December 2012 - 05:18 PM, said:
That being said is harassment, bullying, occurring, or is this just something that might happen based on foresight? As it stands the only players at the moment who have objections to the Authentication system seems to be those with malicious intent as they do understand the full impact such a system would have on their ability to continue bad behavior where under 4.1 there is no way to manage them at the server level.
It has happened, it happens, and it will happen, because it's in the human nature of the weak to harass other people to feel superior.
I know of several cases on some communities, and while sometimes the problem ends up being dealt with, it usually takes at least days or weeks, at which point some people has already moved on to other games.
Let's say I've witnessed this happen a few times already.
On the other side, NO ONE in this discussion is opposed to auth. We're only giving good reasons to not to show auth names on the scoreboard for everyone, but rather only server administrators.
ButterdBread, on 21 December 2012 - 08:47 PM, said:
imo this whole discussion is a waste of time. The aim of the authname is to provide a simple solution for remembering and categorizing players.
Other games have an authname as well and you can't change it, it's most of the times a display name as well. If you complain about that you should never play a steam-based game anymore or any other game requiring a registration, because you can't change your name.
There's a few huge differences :
- On Steam, you can set your profile to private, and random people can't follow you around on the servers you play.
- On Steam, your in-game name and the one used trough the system is the same, but for security reasons it can be changed from the login name, plus you can change the in-game/system name on most games.
- On Steam, your game's GUID is available for everyone to see, but not your account name.
ButterdBread, on 21 December 2012 - 08:47 PM, said:
Unchangeable authnames are standard today. Thank all the people who are exploiting the game code by using hacks or cheats or who are simply idiots. They are responsible for these measures. Not the game developpers.
Auth names are perfectly fine.
What isn't fine is that everyone can see them and use them to do harm, thanks to a set of tools handed by the developers.
Auth should be aimed to make the game more enjoyable for legit, respective players, not to make their life even more difficult.
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