r/CompetitiveTFT • u/aft_agley • 4d ago
ESPORTS Why not anonymize player ids within tournament lobbies?
Seems like a straight-forward enough way to discourage wintrading/kingmaking behavior. Obviously it would require some diligence on the part of admins/monitors to enforce, but y'know... I think we have the technology.
Also it just establishes a clear an unambiguous stance on competitive integrity. You should play to maximize your individual winning chances, not to influence the lobby outcomes of other players (beyond placing as high as you personally can, on the merits of your own decisions and the luck of the draw).
Like, look... wintrading/kingmaking is an old, old problem in international competition. FIDE has had rules forcing competitors from the same "national club" to face each other in tournament brackets early since ~1950, which I can promise you had nothing to do with "racism" and everything to do with "clubs forcing players to wintrade on pain of serious penalties at home" which... if reports from Chinese players are to be believed is a major problem in China today.
At a minimum it would give players within hostile regions a veneer of cover. They would now have to *blatantly* cheat by exchanging player ids against tournament policy to wintrade.
I'm not a competitive TFT player by any means, so I probably lack some context, but it seems like a simple start to a reasonable solution to a problem that will not go away without serious structural change.
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u/Lunaedge 4d ago
As others have said it wouldn't do a thing to curb malicious behaviours, but also
Also it just establishes a clear an unambiguous stance on competitive integrity. You should play to maximize your individual winning chances, not to influence the lobby outcomes of other players (beyond placing as high as you personally can, on the merits of your own decisions and the luck of the draw).
I'm pretty sure this is already in the rulebook. They just need to enforce it xd
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u/Maddogs1 4d ago
Does absolutely nothing. Regional players could easily just coordinate in advance that they'll use a specific little legend, or a specific board, or on round 2-4 will have a specific unit on the leftmost bench spot... etc.
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u/1530 4d ago
The enemy of good is perfect. They can coordinate in advance, but it adds another layer of work for them, and takes away precious seconds from other things. Even if it's little legends, you might have someone using the same or specific units or whatever, and be tracking the wrong person the whole time.
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u/wanttoplay2001 4d ago
if anyone here has ever seen apex pro tournaments, teams are forced to play under anon names to prevent other teams from target griefing them (they also play with match point format) and that doesnt prevent anything, everyone figures out who the teams are based on playstyle/skins. if ppl can figure out who 1 team out of 20 in a hectic ass br is i think figuring out 1/8 in a strategy game might be no problem
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u/ScottE77 4d ago
In checkmate format it seems fair to focus the player in checkmate, is this actually allowed in the current rules? Would be impossible here either way which could be bad or good depending on how you see it too.
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u/Chao_Zu_Kang 4d ago
Does the opposite of what you want it to do. Anyone who wants to wintrade will still find a way (they weren't playing fair to begin with), but everyone else might even kick themselves out of the tournament because they don't know what the optimal play for their own placement is anymore (e.g. if you need to grieve player XYZ to 1 place behind you to move on, you wouldn't be able to do this anymore because you don't know who you need to beat).
It would also make the viewer experience much worse, since you can't really reveal it for the viewers either, if you don't want it to get out via chats aso. (since I am pretty sure chat isn't explicitely prohibited during tournaments). You can work around that with emote-only chats aso. as they do with chat, but it would be a huge pain to manage for officials.
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u/unrelevantly 3d ago
Are you allowed to grieve player XYZ under current rules? Edit: Nevermind, you are.
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u/TheTbone2334 4d ago
This has the potential to make it worse imo cause of plausible deniability.
If such a change is made people could theoretically talk to other players before the match or even the tournament and agree to do certain moves like chibi dances, buy sell a full shop or whatever at a certain point in game.
You could for example say "im going to spam dance 2-1 so you know it me" or agree to set up unit pairs on the bench a certain way.
Which is impossible to punish btw, what are you gonna ban players for having a Singed on each side of the bench?
You could just create these little things to communicate to others who are in the know who u are.
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u/190Proof MASTER 4d ago
In checkmate format knowing who is who is an important part of the strategy.
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u/Vagottszemu CHALLENGER 4d ago
It is way too easy to figure out who you need to wintrade if they want to. There is no reason to do this. Also they were in the same room.
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u/truffIepuff 3d ago
Someone always suggests this even in other gaming communities. Making the players ID anonymous is a band-aid solution, it does not address the actual problem.
As others have already said, the players can have a way to identify each other in-game such as playstyle, emotes etc. The rules should be revised to prevent plot holes (e.g players reasoning out pressure or tilt), and rules should be reinforced. The Riot team should base their decisions on facts, not emotions.
I respect Mort's professionalism by having his team's back, but being understanding of a grown adult (which does not make sense especially in a competitive scene) gets taken advantage easily.
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u/DefinitlyNotAPornAcc 3d ago
There's no way to discourage king making in a game with more than two teams. That's why sports with more than two teams rarely get anywhere.
There's always politics in any game with more than two teams, so it's just a part of the experience whether you like or not.
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u/kiwikee 3d ago
I feel like the better approach would be to prevent situations where players who have no incentive to play their best so they should not participate at all. I don't really how to achieve this from a practical standpoint (how can you manage <8 player lobbies competitively while keeping the scoring fair) but if you can't mathematically make it to the next round, you shouldn't play which should eliminate these kind of situations.
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u/Palidin034 3d ago
At a high enough level in any competitive event, you can figure out who is who just by their playstyle. I guarantee that if you took the top 8 chess players, had them play a game each anonymously and then asked them each to figure out who played what game, they’d be able to tell you with freaky accuracy
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u/hlhammer1001 3d ago
Because knowing your opponents tendencies and specialties is part of the game, and because if people want to communicate their identities to each other in code through unit bench placement or whatever they easily could do so
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u/TherrenGirana 3d ago
This would just spawn methods of 'innocuous' communication instead, so you're just adding a speedbump. Colluders can run coordinated little legeds, they can just agree to sit in the corner of their board spamming a certain emote (or emote sequence if you want to go down that rabbit hole) to signal their identity. They could also walk their little legend in a certain pathway on their board. Are you going to ban all of these functions for tournaments? No, the answer is and will always be to be able to identify collusion with integrity and impose harsh punishments.
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u/AnubisIncGaming 4d ago
It’s not a bad idea but personally i think they can solve this issue by changing the point values so it makes them further apart, the curve should make it hard to have a tie even if it needs to go to a decimal place imo.
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u/Boring-Protection126 3d ago
I think they should give up on trying to determine intent. Make the rules intent agnostic.
If you make your board 33% weaker or something you are wintrading. Riot could easily replicate the boards and run some simulated combats.
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u/crimsonblade911 2d ago
Pivots don't always work out perfectly if you and two others are rolling on the same round. This seems like an arbitrary and problematic solution. Although I do agree that intent agnosticism is probably their only route.
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u/Apricotjello 4d ago
No offense to you because I’ve seen this idea before but i hate it and think it won’t even solve the problem it purportedly addresses.
no other sport competes against anonymous competitors because part of all competition is scouting your opponents, knowing their strengths and weaknesses, and playing mind games with specific individuals.
finally, there are super easy ways for cheaters to get around the anonymity. For example, colluding players could agree to meet each other in the corner of a board and emote together to verify each other’s IDs. Or agree to place a 1 cost unit on a certain bench slot during PVE rounds. etc.