RTS Games Should Add Native Support For Barcodes

Carrots, sticks, and reality

Over the years, I’ve created my fair share of alternate accounts to play 1v1 ranked ladder. Sometimes, this is out of a desire for anonymity; sometimes, it’s because I want to experiment with a new style; and sometimes, I just want to try something new or warm up after a break, and I really don’t want to lose points on my main account.

Like anyone else, I did this by creating brand new accounts - a new email address, a new account registration, all that good stuff. These sorts of “side” accounts are sometimes called barcodes due to a community culture of naming them using a combination of I’s, l’s, and 1’s. This helps preserve anonymity by creating a barcode-like generic name such as I1I1I1I1I1I. When lots of people choose a name like this for their alts, they really do start to look interchangeable.

Now, don’t get me wrong - alternate accounts have a lot of potential downsides. But they have legitimate uses, too. And today I’ll argue that natively supporting the barcode use case would actually be beneficial to everyone, if implemented well - not just in terms of making it convenient to play on an alt, but also by reducing smurfing, lowering the cost of taking breaks, and meaningfully increasing overall engagement with the ladder.

A Concrete Proposal

There’s different ways of going about this, and different implementations have different pros and cons. I’m definitely open to alternative ways of thinking here. But for me personally, I envision natively supported barcodes as little more than an on/off toggle on the matchmaking screen - labeled “play anonymously”, or something like that. The barcode would start off at the same rating as the named account, but after each game it would diverge and maintain its own ELO, similar to the ranked/unranked MMR split offered by StarCraft II.

An important thing I would add here is an ELO floor on the barcode, to prevent it from being used for smurfing. (A ceiling is probably not a bad idea either). I would also add a fairly aggressive rubber band mechanism, in which the barcode resets to the ELO of the named account after a week or two of inactivity, ensuring the account feels properly “ephemeral” to anxious ladder players.

What kind of problems does this solve? Well, for one thing, players would no longer need to rank up their alts to their normal ELO. This avoids a lot of the “unintentional smurfing” associated with alternate accounts. More generally, keeping the barcode attached to the named account helps remove some of the rating inaccuracy that comes from players hopping on and off multiple alt accounts over the course of months or years.

I also think this feature would help reduce the toxicity associated with anonymous accounts. Even well-meaning players can be enticed to behave rudely when they know their behavior will never be tied back to them. But with native barcodes, there’s still an underlying psychological sense of playing on your main account - heck, at the very least, the developer knows what you’re up to - and thus you should to keep it on the straight and narrow. I’d even be open to making barcodes de-anonymizable after-the-fact via the ladder APIs, ensuring that people are eventually able to figure out who they played against.

I think the biggest potential opportunity, though, is around engagement. When points feel truly ephemeral - resetting after a while, unable to go beyond certain limits - I think that players will be more likely to ladder. The anonymity could help players feel less embarrassed about poor play after a long break, or when trying out a new strategy, and generally feel like there’s “no downside” to queuing up and playing a few games.

I feel that this is a major opportunity to improve engagement - making players feel like they can take long breaks and come back after a long break without paying a steep penalty in points. I know how crazy it might sound to care about ladder points, but I genuinely feel that they sometimes stop players from engaging with the ranked ladder. If we can leverage the upsides of points - matchmaking accuracy, a sense of progression, fair games, etc - but find ways to prune their downsides, I think that’ll meaningfully improve the ladder experience for everyone.

I’d also add that by natively supporting barcodes with reasonable guardrails, developers will create social pressure on public figures like streamers and content creators to stop smurfing for their own benefit. It’s too easy nowadays to hide behind the legitimate use cases of alternative accounts to justify genuinely bad behavior. But if a streamer can barcode-out-of-the-box? People will pressure them to do that instead of rolling new accounts all the time. That’ll be one less excuse for smurfing.

The Trade-Offs

Crucially, nothing about this system prevents malicious actors from abusing secondary accounts. I’d argue that’s not really the point; the point is to smooth out an existing, legitimate use case, and leverage it as a spring board to meaningfully increase engagement. I think developers need to employ different mechanisms to deal with genuinely bad actors.

I do think one reasonable concern here is that by making barcodes more accessible, it’ll make them more common on the ladder. Wouldn’t it be less fun - even downright depressing - to play only against barcode players? And I get that, and I actually think this is something that we need to try and see how it pans out. My gut feeling is that most players will still prefer to play on their named accounts most of the time; but if it turns out that native barcodes turn everyone into a barcode, then maybe the mechanic needs to be tweaked a bit to make the ladder feel less dystopian.

Generally, though, I feel like this is a net win. The ranked/unranked MMR split in StarCraft II gives some credence to the idea that allowing players to maintain multiple ratings on a single account is an idea with legs: but the way it’s implemented has a bunch of downsides, and it doesn’t go far enough to disincentivize creating alts. I think we can improve on that to both curb smurfing and meaningfully improve engagement.

Until next time!
brownbear

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