its interesting to me that when I brought up bullying in IC , people said it didnt happen, yet this thread points out numerous occurences of bullying, and that should be the reason that people dont want to be open with who they are.
If we know who people are it does these things in my eyes
lets us know how they did last round and the rounds before
we can make sure they are not impersonating anyone
lets us see if they have violated any rules in the past or been banned
gives us the option to choose who we play with
Yes there are drawbacks, but i think these outweigh them
Pretty much everyone there confirms it happens, albeit not to them in particular. I think LG and I both make a number of suggestions of players that have been, or are being bullied.
On the points you raise:
If we know who people are it does these things in my eyes
1. lets us know how they did last round and the rounds before Doesn’t this also tell the bullies where their target is? 2. we can make sure they are not impersonating anyone This is not really an issue, as the mod team can confirm this now as well 3. lets us see if they have violated any rules in the past or been banned So you could see I have been blocked and deleted, doesn’t serving my time is already enough? Or should a mistake in the past hunt me forever? 4. gives us the option to choose who we play with So apart from anonimizing, we should also play full draft going forward? Else this is not really the case.
The idea of whether anonymity should be disallowed gets brought up every once in a while. I am greatly in favor of adding identifying information to ingame empires. The greater community of players is what makes the game fun and not knowing who other players are detracts from that aspect of the game. Granted, you know everyone in your own family so it’s not total darkness out there. With a tag in the empire page or another column after race with account name it would add lots of good drama to the round. You can see who is playing with who, you can speculate as to what intra-fam ego conflicts will blow up the biggest, and you can have a revitalization of forum topics with pre-round predictions and PvCs with all fam information.
With the whole Mag7 debacle and resulting fallout with IAs everywhere it might be hard to do this though. And bullying definitely happens. Maybe not to the most well-liked players but it also might not be a great idea to force someone at risk of being targeted for bullying to play without anonymity.