Proposal Remove the alt rule in OLT

clean

clean

is a Tiering Contributor
OUPL Champion
This post is in response to the admin decision posted this morning. The alt rule should not be applied to OLT. I am aware this has technically been a rule for years without actually being enforced, but I don't believe starting to enforce it is solving any problem.

I think rules should be created to serve the player base - and people laddering during the qualifying phase want the ability to use whatever name they want. I would also like to dispel the myth that the top of a ladder is a complete mystery because no one can identify people behind their alts. This is untrue. Anyone who pays a minimal amount of attention or watches a few games will know who is playing. This is a process that takes a minute or two at most.

While I don't agree with this decision, I do see the intent behind it, so I will propose a solution to an actual problem on the ladder. Whenever you pull up the leaderboard in the OLT room, you can click the placement number next to the name of each player to link to their signup post, making it extremely easy to figure out who is who. Some people choose to circumvent this by changing the spacing on their account name or adding random characters to make sure the bot cannot pull their post. Simply enforce a rule that forces players to not circumvent the bot and there is no longer any problem. This solution will serve the players and people watching who genuinely can't figure out who someone is because they tinkered with their name.

When I spoke to UT in stours - he said the change was made due to "frequent complaints from streamers and competitors". I don't know exactly how many people this is, but I can assure you that a pretty significant portion of the people actually playing in the tour would like the option to use whatever name they want. Do we just not care about their opinions? What are we even doing here if that's the case?

I get that making a change to "improve the viewing experience" sounds like a win-win, but I genuinely believe there was never a problem with the old system. Not everything needs to be standardized. Let people be creative.
 
As myself, not as a TD or whatever: I support the change, and would like to post in defense of it.

This idea that "a minute or two" is all that needs to be spent to decode a dozen or more of actively playing aliases, some of which are incomprehensible one letter alts, I cannot understand. Perhaps someone who has played these people dozens of time, talked to them in a team tour setting, and has shared teams or a friendcord with them can decode who is running these incomprehensible alts, but the average player or user will not. We have a rule, that every player must acknowledge when signing up, that their username needs to resemble their forum name. Instead, we have folks using single letter alts, completely different names or words, or whatever. This actively decreases the accessibility of this tour significantly, even for folks who are invested - I spent literal hours this week updating 17 pages of usernames to make them readable for a SmogonU broadcast and even still I can't recognize most usernames nowadays.

Creativity exists in spades in Pokemon, but I don't believe it should come with the negative side effect of making the tour harder to track. We have spent many OLTs working to make this tour more accessible and viewable, and enforcing the already-existing rule about identity is something that should've happened already. In the top 10 right now, there are 3, maybe 4, usernames who actually are identifiable at a glance. I think "oh of course uud times is Nat" or "everyone knows xxx is Vert lol" are dramatically misrepresenting the average person playing or interested in OLT, and that wanting to enable people to avoid being identifiable for a tiny touch more of creativity is detrimental to the tour. If creativity is the goal, there are many outlets for this. I just loaded up a game with someone using a completely opaque username, none of their Pokemon had nicknames. I'm not really buying that this one textbox of creativity is worth making the most accessible tour in the circuit harder to get involved in/spectate/participate.
 
clean said:
I don't believe starting to enforce it is solving any problem
Click to expand...
clean said:
Anyone who pays a minimal amount of attention or watches a few games will know who is playing. This is a process that takes a minute or two at most.
Click to expand...
A minute or two per player multiplied by however many players are relevant is not an insignificant amount of time, especially for casters that are trying to promote the tour and need to knew 100+ users. Making the tour accessible is good for the growth of the tour and the section, and this change should help people not chronically in stours cord know who is playing and how they are doing.

If the average ladder tour participant opposes this change, then it is a fair question of how do we balance player wishes with the accessibility of the tour. Getting feedback in this thread is a good litmus test for that; is this actually a majority or a vocal minority? But pretending that there is no issue at all to be fixed here is disingenuous, the question is the benefit worth the loss of creativity?

Speaking for myself, not as a tour director: I mostly care that we have a consistent set of rules that enforced evenly. I am personally unborthered with the outcome of removing the alt rule entirely (and just keeping the anti-impersonation rule, which I think is wholly uncontroversial) and agree with the potential midground of "making sure the alt links from the leaderboard to the signup post" as a workable alternative if the majority of the playerbase is dissatisfied.

However, if this is not an issue with the majority of the tour playerbase, then I find the need for making people click to find out names to be an unnecessary extra step and standardization of names to be the best option.
 
clean said:
While I don't agree with this decision, I do see the intent behind it, so I will propose a solution to an actual problem on the ladder. Whenever you pull up the leaderboard in the OLT room, you can click the placement number next to the name of each player to link to their signup post, making it extremely easy to figure out who is who. Some people choose to circumvent this by changing the spacing on their account name or adding random characters to make sure the bot cannot pull their post. Simply enforce a rule that forces players to not circumvent the bot and there is no longer any problem. This solution will serve the players and people watching who genuinely can't figure out who someone is because they tinkered with their name.
Click to expand...

I'm fully in support of this, and a related change I want to propose is that alts without a signup should be removed from the leaderboard, as they are unable to qual and can mess with what the cutoff looks like unless you check every alt you dont know in the top 8 to make sure its a real olt alt.
 
gonna echo sentiment from both clean/ut:

there feels like potential for a nice middle ground here. get rid of the spacing on alts that differ from signups. nobody likes these. make it extremely easy to track on the leaderboards via the identifying clickable number, it's what they're there for after all. if someone messes this up in earnest, their signup can be edited. UT mentioned if there is support for a middle ground it'd be considered, and i feel like 50 likes in mere hours on a post that seems like a relatively niche concept is a very solid medium of support.

so many changes pass through tournaments that are strictly for the viewing experience. yes, you can constantly make these and argue they make the tournament more "accessible" but they're always at the cost of individuality & frankly looseness in some ways this site has long offered. we are not an eSport & will never be one, but anyone reasonable understands & respects the balance of some standardization while not stripping the players of every creative luxury afforded. with this balance in mind, i'd imagine many are happy enough to see truly wrong things be fixed, ones that can be communally agreed upon (for example, the aforementioned middle ground.)
 
I don't usually super tryhard olt but I do enjoy sometimes signing up for a few cycles and seeing how it goes, and as a player the alt thing has felt like a massive non issue. A lot of people use something similar to their smogon name already, and you really don't need to know exactly everyone you play or have to check every time, you can check once if you want for the higher elo people competing for poffs and that's usually enough if you don't already know. I know smogon is trying to stream stuff more but ultimately if you're trying to make things more accessible it would be to a newer smogon user who probably would see little difference between just having the alt name and the smogon name. A newer player would probably be unfamiliar with both while someone in the tournaments scene would either know people's account names or know where to search for it easily.

I think this whole thing is fairly unimportant as far as policy goes though, so if people want names to be corresponding to smogon accounts then it's fine, not much is lost. I just think adding more rules for the sake of keeping things more strict and uniform isn't that fun, and smth as simple as the name you use while laddering isn't something that really needs policeing. Ultimately the goal of this stuff is to have fun, so I've never minded seeing random account names either when watching or playing olt since it's a very minor inconvenience if I do ever need to look stuff up. If people are intentionally signing up incorrectly to make their names hard to search then call them cringe and ask them to edit their post with a warning, since that was brought up in this thread.

I'm also not sure if this is a viable option since I'm not a tech person, but as a middle ground could the new /linksmogon command be useful in any way? Since you only get 1 account per cycle if you link smogon then maybe there could be an easier way to check who's who on PS with commands, but again I'm not familiar with any of the technical stuff on this site so this could be unviable but just an idea since we already do it for suspects. This could also maybe help the issue veti mentioned, where people who didn't sign up appear on the leaderboard which does also make it a bit worse when spectating since you're unsure who might be in or not.
 
mostly reiterating what's already been stated by others

as someone who primarily engages with OLT as a spectator it already feels incredibly easy to keep track of who's who thanks to the leaderboard linking to posts. it takes you like 15-30 seconds to find the name, click the number, and see who it is. by the time you're back to the game it's probably still team preview. when I played a cycle last year it felt similarly easy to keep track and so the type of person who would truly benefit most from this is a casual stream viewer. frankly they're only likely to know a handful of players anyway and if they care to learn about more then they can watch the playoffs. i don't see the alt rule's minor time saves as worthwhile when a notable portion of players clearly appreciate the extra bit of self expression, and it'll inevitably create more nonsense for staff to deal with as people who log in once a week sign up next cycle as shit like LT214TG Liberator.

would like to add at the end here that while on paper this should be a pretty whatever change, some of the pushback definitely stems from the feeling that TDs are taking away from the players to cater to spectators/casuals. while growth is important the playerbase should always come first in small disputes like these, especially seeing as the Smogon YT looks mostly abandoned since the end of SPL. ofc im sure this rule was intended to benefit players as well, but judging from the ratios in this thread people would like to keep their silly alt names.
 
I welcome the admin decision, and like others stated, having it in the first place and not enforcing it didn't make any sense.

Being able to immediately identify who's playing against who should be an integral part of OLT's experience. I do not agree with OP about being able to identify anyone in a matter of a minute or two, as I can't see how a spectator would do that (heck even a player), besides having access to the info from someone or spending an unhealthy amount of time tracking every game.

If a majority is not happy with this change, then enforce the sign up rule (don't use spaces or special symbols in your signup post, that's uncool and rude), so atleast it takes one click to figure out who's who. Current decision or this are both fine.
 
I've drafted an idea I believe can satisfy all sides as long as we're able to invest into the logistics. Piggy-backing off the /linksmogon command FC mentioned, since there's already a backend to connect registered PS accounts directly to Smogon profiles, we should extend that integration into the bot and its battle broadcasts in the OLT room. In the example I've linked, I've chosen a neutral gray that blends well into the UI to be clear, informative, and minimally intrusive.

The concerns this addresses:

Remove the alt rule, ban evasive signups, and click the leaderboard hyperlink to see who it is: Doing that in real time is a hassle especially in the final hours when the leaderboard is constantly upadting and users spam refresh, by adjusting the battle broadcasts you probably won't need to click the leaderboard hyperlinks at all. But for extra convenience, we can also tack on forum username hover text to the broadcasted leaderboard ELOs instead of aiming for the small hyperlinked ladder ranks to the left side.

Standardize OLT alts to be immediately recognizable: This solution marks OLT alts as even more recognizable to spectators than what the original admin post had asked for. The light-gray forum usernames also makes it faster for casters to follow along in the olt room, instead of tracking across randomly coloured muted usernames that could still also be subjectively named according to the admin post and whoever was to enforce that. Battle broadcast adjustments preserve 100% user creativity and freedom while pursuing maximum spectator transparency at the same time.

Pain points to consider:
* signup flow so that we continue to have visible signup posts in olt threads for engagement/hype while remaining new user friendly.
* cap on forum name character-length in broadcasts to keep things succinct and prevent overflow.
* light mode approrpiate forum name colour if the light-gray isnt functional there.
 
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