Privacy options to battle metagaming
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I would love to see couple options that will allow people to anonymise their-screeps self from other players. There are many reasons to do that, from some people who can't handle losses and then send out threats to avoiding plain-good-old meta gaming.
So the options I would love to see in to combat that:
1. Option to hide my steam profile. Many people have open steam profiles that show their country, names, websites etc, lets give them an option if they want that link to be visible publicly.
2. Option to not my in-game messages as "read/unread". Nuff said really, if you send someone what looks like a geniuine message and he doesn't open it for an hour, good bet he is not around. Let me opt out of the big brother :).
3. Respawn as anonymous.
This is a bit bigger of the lot. In essence it could be a checkbox when respawning that, when ticket, will change your name and picture to a random one. This would go a great mile to people who have in-game stalkers and just... don't want to be stalked anymore, beside the people who just like anonymity in general.
That is all I can think off, let me know what you think!
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+1 for hiding the steam profile, and the other things. I made my steam profile private for now, just to avert any unpleasantness, and to hide my online status.
As any competitive game, even with a great community like this, some people will get overly emotional about their losses, and your ideas will minimize the negative effect of that.
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For #3 you'd also need to drop your control points to 0 for your monthly ranking, otherwise when Puciek dies with 49 million control points, and Newciek suddenly appears with 49 million control points, it's not too hard to figure out it's you.
It's also a double edged sword. Your rivals can also respawn near you incognito in order to take you by surprise after they've built up. I mean, you need to prioritize the threats around you, so you want to know if the newly spawn player is someone hostile toward you as soon as possible (which is preferably before they start sending attackers).
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Oh there are probably also other chinks regaring random names and emblems, no doubt about it as getting that system right in way that will give anonymity is essential and not trivial at all. But then what is wrong with someone respawning near you incognito? The incognito part is exactly for that, a fresh start and maybe this time he just wants to play along with you and not screw up the way he did before? You won't know until the cards unfold.
And if that new, unkown to you, player managed to take you by surprise and take you over, well, that is the point of not relying on meta, but on in-game actions instead and try to figure out what are their plans, not know them instantly just because you recognise the name.
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+1
I agree that noone should be able to connect screep-me with outside-world-me unless I explicitly allowed that by giving email or making steam profile public.
As for incognito, I'd like to have a fresh start even if my GCL restarts. For newbies it won't make a huge difference anyway, and that's a great way to change icons, e.g. after coming back to screeps after a extended pause.