Quit making alts, ppl!

[GG_Guru]

Originally Posted by nuclearsamurai

oh my god, +1 if this is even remotely possible

Why?

[TC_Halogen]

It does absolutely no harm to have multiple accounts. Stop playing for ranks to be better than everyone else and play for personal accomplishments through your PA on songs, etc.

[nuclearsamurai]

Originally Posted by GG_Guru

Why?

Because I, like many other people, would like to change my username.

[GG_Guru]

Originally Posted by TC_Halogen

It does absolutely no harm to have multiple accounts. Stop playing for ranks to be better than everyone else and play for personal accomplishments through your PA on songs, etc.

No. We have ranks so we can keep records of everyone's accomplishments.

We keep the ranks.
We find a way to get rid of hostless alts.
We add a new username change feature. (For limited use only)

That should just about sum everything up.

Originally Posted by nuclearsamurai

Because I, like many other people, would like to change my username.

nuclearsamurai is a badass name I don't see why you would want to change that lol but whatever..

[TC_Halogen]

I never said to get rid of the ranks. I said stop using the ranks as the form of improving your scores and play for personal accomplishments. That way, you won't have to complain about people creating alternate accounts to knock you down ever so slightly each time they get a better score than you.

[00Razor00]

Originally Posted by nuclearsamurai

Because I, like many other people, would like to change my username.

+1.

[GG_Guru]

Originally Posted by TC_Halogen

I never said to get rid of the ranks. I said stop using the ranks as the form of improving your scores and play for personal accomplishments. That way, you won't have to complain about people creating alternate accounts to knock you down ever so slightly each time they get a better score than you.

Right. I never complained about alternate accounts that are used to get sick scores on songs like Death Piano or Revolutionary Etude to raise the bar on the FFR ranks, and to be honest I hardly care because it only motivated me to do better so why do you think alts are being made to do that?

[LJRoX]

1 Name change every 6 months sounds good.. with the cost of credits >:3

[rushyrulz]

Originally Posted by TC_Halogen

It does absolutely no harm to have multiple accounts. Stop playing for ranks to be better than everyone else and play for personal accomplishments through your PA on songs, etc.

Improving ranks isn't a personal accomplishment? Competition through ranks is what drives me the most to get better. It's just unfair to see worse results than deserved because half of FFR decided to make an alt and sup whatever score I got.

[bmah]

All I have to say is that ranks have a purpose (look up the definition of "rank") and by creating alts for scoring, it defeats that purpose. For some, playing for personal accomplishment doesn't provide much solace - otherwise, why should ranks exist at all if they don't provide a true representation of its purpose?

Rather than suggest ways to comfort oneself into living with the issue, it's more sensible to have ranks that represent what they're supposed to represent: a measure of skill in contrast to another person. And this measure is highly distorted due to many alts who play for scoring. You are one person. Not two or three or ten persons.

Realistically, it's probably a difficult issue to tackle however...

[TC_Halogen]

Originally Posted by rushyrulz

Improving ranks isn't a personal accomplishment? Competition through ranks is what drives me the most to get better. It's just unfair to see worse results than deserved because half of FFR decided to make an alt and sup whatever score I got.

Maybe I'm being a little unclear with what I'm trying to get across (and I'm not trying to be rude or anything when I say that, so please don't take it that way).

Let me put it in this way -- while ranks do have a purpose in comparing skill between one another within a group, chances are, you'll be comparing yourselves within a group of people closer to your skill level. That is to say, you and everyone else will be affected in the same manner, but the interval between your smaller group won't be affected. If your rank on a song is x and your friends are x-1, x-2, x-3, and an alternate account scores above you, your ranks change in number, but not in interval.

I do agree with bmah in the fact that alternate accounts do rain on ranks, but there's really nothing to be done about it because while one person may be using multiple accounts on the same IP address, there are situations where multiple people are playing on the same IP address.

[Oni-Paranoia]

Everything that is being discussed in this thread requires some sort of work. Watching Alt accounts to make sure they don't clog the ranks is the easiest of the work by a long shot. So unless you can re-code the entire username situation, I don't see why there should be any complaining.

I still stand at the fact that re-coding should be done regardless.

[dore]

There used to be a list of alt-accounts where you could tell Tass that you had [altnamehere] and he could delete the ranks for that alt. I know I used alts a lot when I played lots of multiplayer because I would generally do more chatting and whatnot than actual playing when I logged in as dore. When I logged in under a different name, there was no name recognition so I could just play. Yeah, I had to beat some lower-level players to work up my MP level which isn't the best situation, but it made my higher-level playing more enjoyable. (Not to say I didn't enjoy chatting, it was just easier to have separate accounts.)

[Phlegmatism]

Originally Posted by nuclearsamurai

oh my god, +1 if this is even remotely possible

Yeah and merge my scores and posts (probably impossible)

[rushyrulz]

Originally Posted by TC_Halogen

Let me put it in this way -- while ranks do have a purpose in comparing skill between one another within a group, chances are, you'll be comparing yourselves within a group of people closer to your skill level. That is to say, you and everyone else will be affected in the same manner, but the interval between your smaller group won't be affected. If your rank on a song is x and your friends are x-1, x-2, x-3, and an alternate account scores above you, your ranks change in number, but not in interval.

This is true, but the rewards of getting better are countered when alts get superior scores to your group's, making the value of that group weaker by pushing the ranks up until a BF on a FGO is greater than rank 50 (oh wait, we're there already).

Anyone wanna guess what the rank for a booflag on CIA Rave is? Hint: It's over 500. Score inflation on some songs is just terrrible.

[NixXSkate]

i don't see the big problem here...

[kmay]

Originally Posted by NixXSkate

i don't see the big problem here...

play the game some more and you might.

[Shikari]

My alt is for pettanko/semi-pettanko scores, my other two accounts are old ones. There's nothing wrong about alts.

[nois-or-e]

Originally Posted by dore

There used to be a list of alt-accounts where you could tell Tass that you had [altnamehere] and he could delete the ranks for that alt. I know I used alts a lot when I played lots of multiplayer because I would generally do more chatting and whatnot than actual playing when I logged in as dore. When I logged in under a different name, there was no name recognition so I could just play. Yeah, I had to beat some lower-level players to work up my MP level which isn't the best situation, but it made my higher-level playing more enjoyable. (Not to say I didn't enjoy chatting, it was just easier to have separate accounts.)

I do this from time to time cos the red text can be a bit off-putting for some people in mp x:

[devonin]

I think it's ridiculous to suggest that any of the coders should spend the -huge- amount of time it would take to make it so username changes were possible. Without those changes, no amount of limiting the number, or charging credits or whatever is going to make it worthwhile to offer username changes.

It would be faster and easier to actually just have you make a new account and manually add in all of the scores, tokens, postcount, credits etc etc from the old account (And before you ask, no, 100% absolutely not)

As for alts. There's no way to "stop" people making alts and then playing FFR on those alts, and I'm not entirely sure we -should- be trying to stop it. There's no fix for that problem that I can think of that can't be a) ignored/worked around by people who want to or b) doesn't potentially screw over people who share a computer/house/university computer lab.

The presence of alts of highly-skilled players on the ranklists only effects a few hundred players on about 150 songs. Every AAA is rank 1, no matter how many there are. Any non-AAA score is still a very low rank in terms of its absolute effect on your avrank, and everyone suffers equally from extra AAAs pushing the rank on a non-AAA down. The only people impacted by alts in a way that is actually meaningful are the people who are close to, but not at AAA's on 11-13 songs that have many AAAs. And considering that the only way they -are- impacted by alts is to have alts with AAAs on the song over them, they are themselves the primary cause of their problems.

You want to stop having alts AAA'ing 12s to make your SDG be 2 whole ranks lower? Stop making alts and AAA'ing 12s then.