On SmogTours challenging

[dice]

Over the past few months, we have had a few instances of banned users and trolls (read: Sogeking) posing as players with similar alts and challenging their opponents. While there are ways to double-check, this is still hugely annoying and really shouldn't be a worry before a tournament game. While it may be funny in the moment, the fact that this way of trolling/attention-garnering exists is hugely problematic and only serves as an upset to future players.

I suggest that we only allow for SmogTours challenges from voiced users.

This does bring up the issue of tournament players not having voice on SmogTours and the inability to use alt names in tournament games. For the former, we can implement a "verified" feature separate of Voice that allows for non-voiced users to challenge if this proves to be an issue. As for the latter, I don't think it's much of a loss and streamlines games. Personally, I find it to take away from the game if I don't immediately know who is playing.

Thoughts?

 

[z0mOG]

Why can't people just L2Read

You should be at your sharpest before a tournament game to begin with. If it's still too hard, then confirm with your opponent on discord or smogon?

 

[Finchinator]

I was planning on making a thread about only allowing people to play on their main, voiced alt for official games.

This would solve the Sogeking problem and also avoid any confusion surrounding who is who when people play each other on alts (which has been a pain this WCoP). I feel this is the best solution and it does not have the collateral of ruining friendlies between non-voiced users. However, the OP's suggestion is a fine alternative if this is not something viewed as favorable.

 

[dice]

Why can't people just L2Read

You should be at your sharpest before a tournament game to begin with. If it's still too hard, then confirm with your opponent on discord or smogon?

Because human error exists. And that's okay. In my view, what's not okay is allowing a possibly exploitative measure or annoyance pervade for little to no reason.

 

[z0mOG]

Because human error exists. And that's okay. In my view, what's not okay is allowing a possibly exploitative measure or annoyance pervade for little to no reason.

In my eyes, the only logical rule addition would be requiring spl/wcop etc. games to be played on one's main (verified?) alt as a part of that tournament's rules. Otherwise we would just be making a pointless hassle for the TDs to have to come intervene every time a new/devoiced/locked player needs to play a game (on top of eliminating alts for those who prefer to play smaller tournament games on a pseudonymous account).

 

[Wigglytuff]

I'm mildly opposed to taking away the ability for players to alt solely because of some trolls, because players are required to switch to their verified account on request. That should be a surefire way to make sure you're playing who you're supposed to play. I can understand the drive to find a less awkward system, but I don't think this proposed change is a good idea:

This does bring up the issue of tournament players not having voice on SmogTours and the inability to use alt names in tournament games. For the former, we can implement a "verified" feature separate of Voice that allows for non-voiced users to challenge if this proves to be an issue.

As a Smogon Tour host, this would be seriously annoying to deal with in the chaos of Round 1. It makes things generally annoying for new players that just joined to play in stour, but would certainly cause delays on the hosting end in R1 matchups of new player vs new player, because at least one of them needs to get verified before they can play. There's already enough confusion for hosts to deal with in R1 without adding onto it.

 

[Leo]

I was planning on making a thread about only allowing people to play on their main, voiced alt for official games.

This would solve the Sogeking problem and also avoid any confusion surrounding who is who when people play each other on alts (which has been a pain this WCoP). I feel this is the best solution and it does not have the collateral of ruining friendlies between non-voiced users. However, the OP's suggestion is a fine alternative if this is not something viewed as favorable.

I dont mean to throw shade at anyone but if people are already not checking whether theyre about to take a challenge from starmaster or starmanster I doubt theyll check if the opponent is voiced or not, unless challenges are disabled for non voiced alts like dice suggested (which results in stour chaos among other things) I dont think this would change anything

 

[Finchinator]

I dont mean to throw shade at anyone but if people are already not checking whether theyre about to take a challenge from starmaster or starmanster I doubt theyll check if the opponent is voiced or not, unless challenges are disabled for non voiced alts like dice suggested (which results in stour chaos among other things) I dont think this would change anything

You are going to be sending or receiving a PM to just about everyone you play prior to the game starting; it’s not hard to make sure there is a little “+” next to someone’s name. Sogeking challenged me before 2 of my 3 WCoP matches and 1 of my SPL games, but it was clear that my real opponent was voiced on their main alt and it was easy to decipher the two from PMs, so it was never an issue.

This was discussed on discord last night, but the real issues would be with people who do not have a voiced main alt due to disciplinary reasons or being newer, which pops up in WCoP on occasion. That probably makes the OP’s suggestion more of a catch-all, but still makes this one pretty drawback free as it eliminates the 90 seconds where a dozen different people have to ask “yo, who is playing” until someone on their team finally answers correctly.

 

[Triangles]

I personally support a policy where a tour player who accepts a challenge from an impostor should be forced to forfeit their game because they are stupid.

 

[Eternal Spirit]

I simply always force all my opps to log on their main and voiced accounts, and i dont think theres a better solution than just paying more attention to it and/or doing what i just mentioned LOL. Like the "voiced challenge" idea is fine, you could do it, but i never really got how people always simply fall for Yan nowdays... Its very absurd.

Obs. Keep in mind that we always have nice and handsome users getting devoiced/locked on their main accs when you implement it

 

[FNH]

Hi, I back to this proposal of having players play on their main accounts always. As a member of the casual spectator club of Smogon’s official tournament games, it is a little bit irritating/confusing not know who is playing.

Personally, I would like to see this taken one step further and have team tour players required to use to the team’s avatar for their games. Like I said, I am a casual spectator of WCOP and even SPL. If I am on and there are games on, I’ll watch the game, but most of the time I have no clue who is on what team, even if they are on their main account. It’s just to many names for someone like myself to associate with teams. Team avatars are on the other hand pretty easy to associate with the team i.e. Empoleon/Dragoniar is associable with France, Wolf in the avatar is Wifi-Wolfpack, Mewtwo is US West and so on. The custom avatar functions as a team jersey, and helps people loosely following the team tours recognize who is playing for what team. It would also help validate that the account challenging is actually a player on that team, I assume. Personally, it’s more useful in the World Cup, as I tend root for teams based on nationality, so If I see a player with Landorus vs a player with a Charizard avatar, I’m going to be rooting for Landorus, cause Murica. Just my two cents on the matter. Also what’s the point of having the avatars if people don’t even use them?

 

[Hogg]

I've been a fan of a policy like Finch proposed where all official tour games need to be on your stours-approved alt for ages. It solves a lot of issues - the Sogeking trolling, the meme alt names where you can't tell who the hell is playing, the extra difficulty in tracking down replays if the replay thread isn't instantly updated when you don't know what names to search under, etc.

I know we instituted the "you can force your opponent to switch to their official smogtours alt" rule after the first prominent Sogeking incident but really, just make it a rule across the board.

I also dream about Smogon one day having an integrated tournament system where all tour games are tracked automatically and people have a "tournaments" section on their profile, etc., and if we ever went that way we'd probably once again want consistency in names. Would be pretty cool to be able to click on someone's Smogon profile, see their official smogtours alt, go straight to their tour results, etc. Might be pie in the sky but a person can dream...

 

[Iguana]

I am VERY happy to see dice bring this up and start a thread. Players using alts for tour matches is something that's bothered me a lot during my relatively short time in the Smogtours community. While I have not had an unfortunate incident like the Sogeking one referenced in here, it's definitely concerning that such things have happened before, and I do find it annoying to have to track down a tour game because players are using alts.

I think the advantage of dice's suggestion is that it takes some of the burden off of tour hosts and TDs having to check to ensure each player is using their voiced account and not some alt. The point about "tournament players not having voice on SmogTours" does not concern me, personally; there are ample opportunities to get voiced on Smogtours by Mods or TDs. For new users wishing to play in Smogon Tour who haven't been voiced on Smogtours, providing guidance prior to each Tour that users must be voiced on Smogtours to participate would remedy this. There are always mods and TDs available for each Smogon Tour, so coming online a few minutes early to get this done would probably be best.

As for the concern about tour players who are devoiced due to disciplinary issues, abide by the rules and don't get devoiced in the first place I again agree with the suggestion in the OP. Whitelisting users who need to challenge for tour matches should solve this. Another idea would be for Smogtours Mods/TDs to temporarily grant back Voice to a user who needs it for a tour match and then remove it afterwards. This would put a bit of pressure on them, though. Question here regarding our technological capabilities: Is it possible to whitelist a user to be able to challenge even if they are locked? Or maybe because a user is Voiced even though they're locked, they would still be able to challenge? I don't think rule-breaking users should derail what is a really good idea, but this is worth considering as a potential drawback.

Overall, I'm very in favor of this.

 

[Excal]

I like the idea of only allowing smogtours challenges from voiced users but not necessarily preventing people from using alt accounts in their tour games. The caveat of having to be the one to accept the challenge as an alt is a bit inconvenient but it's not like the status quo is super convenient overall given the difficulties in finding replays, identifying who is playing, etc.

The argument of "learn to read" or people "not checking" super carefully re: the issue of sogeking or whomever challenging with an impersonating alt is quite poor. Most of the time you're not going to fall for it but the last thing I want to worry about when preparing to play a tour game/set is having to potentially deal with nonsense like this. Making it so only voiced users can issue the challenge protects players from being the unlucky one to be a trolling victim with not much of a cost. This also solves the issue of banned users using inflammatory and inappropriate alt names and challenging themselves to games on tours, broadcasting it to the whole lobby.

 

[Quantum Tesseract]

As a Smogon Tour host, this would be seriously annoying to deal with in the chaos of Round 1. It makes things generally annoying for new players that just joined to play in stour, but would certainly cause delays on the hosting end in R1 matchups of new player vs new player, because at least one of them needs to get verified before they can play. There's already enough confusion for hosts to deal with in R1 without adding onto it.

As someone who also hosts a lot of Smogon tour, I feel I should chime in, as I don’t really agree with this assessment. Not only is there usually other mods on at the time that can voice, when there isn’t, the voicing will almost always take place in the early parts of round one, which is much less busy. Having people on their alts is way more work, especially when most of them don’t remember to PM you who they are when they win. After a while you learn to recognize most of them, but it’s a serious pain and I would happily take on voicing users in exchange for not having to deal with it.

Of course, this does bring up the issue that the requirements to sign up for Smogon Tour (and other official tours) and the requirements for Global voice are not identical, so we would have to change one of those or find some way to work in an exception, which may end up being more work than it saves. This leads me to feel that voice only challenges isn’t neccesarily the best option, perhaps simply forcing people to play on their mains is enough:

 

[FU SHUN HA]

this suggestion is pretty short sighted in my opinion and I don't really agree with it mostly bc this would likely negatively impact anonymity and moderator workload

there's already no /ionext or the ability to hide game links on smogtours so being able to play on alts whilst on the smogtours, which is officially the default server to play on for tour games, allows players to use whatever teams they want without an opponent in the future being able to just simply search their main alt for replays that are uploaded automatically. I don't really think this is fair for those of us who don't want our games from live tours, ssnls etc. to just be so easily accessible and used against us when we have a right to not publicise our replays that aren't required to be.

more importantly we get around 2000 signups for ost each year, this means each user that signs up must be voiced since they're expected to play on smogtours. In a scenario that we don't, what stops people from forcing their opponents to play on the default server and if they're not voiced with no available authed people to voice them at the time do we just grant act to the player who will only play on the default server. This seems pretty hectic and unconsciously pushing new users away from easily accessing tours especially when admins/mods will be required in time sensitive situations, never mind the fact you'll need to voice and revoice punished users who may need to play for tours.

tldr:

Why can't people just L2Read

You should be at your sharpest before a tournament game to begin with. If it's still too hard, then confirm with your opponent on discord or smogon?

 

[dice]

this suggestion is pretty short sighted in my opinion and I don't really agree with it mostly bc this would likely negatively impact anonymity and moderator workload

How?

there's already no /ionext or the ability to hide game links on smogtours so being able to play on alts whilst on the smogtours, which is officially the default server to play on for tour games, allows players to use whatever teams they want without an opponent in the future being able to just simply search their main alt for replays that are uploaded automatically. I don't really think this is fair for those of us who don't want our games from live tours, ssnls etc. to just be so easily accessible and used against us when we have a right to not publicise our replays that aren't required to be.

Yes, there is. /unlistreplay.

more importantly we get around 2000 signups for ost each year, this means each user that signs up must be voiced since they're expected to play on smogtours. In a scenario that we don't, what stops people from forcing their opponents to play on the default server and if they're not voiced with no available authed people to voice them at the time do we just grant act to the player who will only play on the default server. This seems pretty hectic and unconsciously pushing new users away from easily accessing tours especially when admins/mods will be required in time sensitive situations, never mind the fact you'll need to voice and revoice punished users who may need to play for tours.

Most people play early rounds of tournaments on main for just that reason? You know you only have to play on SmogTours when replays are required, right? Could you further explain how this is 'unconsciously pushing users away from tours'? If there is an OST Quarterfinalist who forfeits the win as a new user because they cannot get a moderator to give them challenging powers on SmogTours, let me know.

While I do agree this suggestion does have some downsides, your post is absolutely asinine. Please contend with the arguments posted in the OP.

 

[FU SHUN HA]

How?

uh idk how to really respond to this cuz i thought i already explained the how in my first post idk

im not sure if ur aware but theres this pretty based replay scouter tool made by this eo ut mortus fella where from my experience of using, it doesn't really matter if you /unlistreplay since a scouter like this can still access the replay it seems. for example if i was to scout eternal spirit for oras i could simply use the eo bot and input the right data to get unlisted replays from a livetour he participated in, then can plan and prep knowing exactly what teams hes used previously and could potentially reuse.

eo replay scouter with correct data for scout

example of one of many unlisted replays still accessible

for visualising tryhards

this is just an example and can probably be redone for other players who play tournaments, though i assume that a lot of people know about this already due to the fact the thread was created nearly 4 years ago



(from the rules and guidelines thread) I don't think I need to go into further detail here probably

 

[SparksBlade]

For the former, we can implement a "verified" feature separate of Voice that allows for non-voiced users to challenge

So will this be a new rank of sorts? Currently the only thing that might be similar to "verified" is the autoconfirmed status which you get after 1 week of registering an account. Are all voiced accounts auto-verified? Will I have to "verify" everyone that gets temporarily demoted and remove the verified status of everyone that gets a namechange? I would like more elaboration on this and how much work it actually adds on the moderators please, it can't be left as a "Devs can figure out how to do it" without a proper suggestion of what exactly to do.

Personally I think checking your opponent is very easy at the moment already and people can choose to just pay a little more attention before accepting challenges. Clicking on a username shows whether they are voiced or not already, and it's not so much effort to ask your opponent on smogon/discord what alt they'll play on and just copy it (if you're too lazy to type the name out yourself).

As for the smogon tour hosting issues, in my experience most people that play on alts do mention their account when they message me or when they move to another alt. If not, it's not that big a deal for me to pm "what's your smogon name?". While ideally I would prefer everyone just played on their main account as it's so much better as a spectator, I'm not bothered so much by it while hosting or spectating a live tour.

Personally, I find it to take away from the game if I don't immediately know who is playing.

Same but it's not to such a degree, so I just ask who the player is and after a quick response from the helpful smogtours lobby, I can get back to enjoying the game without any issues.

I dont mean to throw shade at anyone but if people are already not checking whether theyre about to take a challenge from starmaster or starmanster I doubt theyll check if the opponent is voiced or not, unless challenges are disabled for non voiced alts like dice suggested (which results in stour chaos among other things) I dont think this would change anything

But they can! I think many people are only just recognising sogeking's antics and realising "oh maybe I shouldn't just accept any challenge from a username that looks similar to my opponent's but I didn't read".


While I would ideally support this because of all the convenience it provides to spectators, I don't think the problem is that big at the moment and would be hesitant before we get an idea of the scale and effort of the change. However, I'll readily support any rule to force players to play on their main account for official team tours, individual tour playoffs, and at whatever stage replays become mandatory in OST etc.