OpenRA

A quick run down of some other accounts that I had some games from and which looked like they might be smurfs to me. For each account I've gone up to 0.75. WhatEverMan has played 21 games 0.63: WhatEverMan (21) maceman (812) 0.67: WhatEverMan (21) Gargamel (31) 0.67: WhatEverMan (21) Duke Bones (172...

Another regular player who doesn't seem to have a Discord presence is Mav. Mav has played 200 games on Ladder and has taken games off anjew, DerE, Orb, Kav and most recently Fazzz. Listing accounts up to a distance of 0.75 we get just two matches: 0.62: Mav (125) Azure Anemone (31) 0.70: Mav (125) P...

Another account that doesn't seem to be linked to an active Discord account is Gargamel. According to Wikipedia "Gargamel is ...the main antagonist of the Smurfs" (I had never heard of this - I found out from Blackened). However the Gargamel account seems to be close to a whole bunch of other accoun...

So as promised we'll look at peep next. They played a set of twelve ladder matches near the end of 2022 and haven't played again since then. Here's the list of nearby accounts up to a distance of 0.8: 0.55: peep (12) sloppyy (12) 0.56: peep (12) creo (111) 0.62: peep (12) Pinkthoth (226) 0.69: peep ...

More recently a new account sloppyy appeared and very quickly shot near the top of the rankings and so it was assumed to be a smurf account. To date they have played 14 games and not dropped any. Putting this into the matcher we get: 0.55: sloppyy (12) peep (12) 0.63: sloppyy (12) Pinkthoth (226) 0....

To put these conjectures into perspective I thought it would be useful to run the same analysis against myself. I know that I haven't been using smurf accounts and that I don't share my account with anyone else. Looking up to a distance of 0.8 we get: 0.68: TTTPPP (215) Jur (122) 0.71: TTTPPP (215) ...

Another known smurf account is damn_shot. The real player dang_shot has 152 games in my data set and shows up as having a similar play style to several other well known players: 0.65: dang_shot (152) creo (111) 0.67: dang_shot (152) spetsnaz84 (173) 0.70: dang_shot (152) Yara (30) Meanwhile damn_sho...

Continuing from the previous post I wanted to have a look at some example games where missile silos were built. From Discord it seems clear that most people either want no change, or want a small reduction in the nuke timer. Additionally there were comments asking for both increased and decreased da...

Recently Unano suggested that the nuke timer could be shorter, as there aren't many nukes fired in recent games. 43_MissileSiloUsage.png We can see that while 1/5 players get a tech centre, only about a tenth of those get a nuke silo, and then only a tenth of those get to use it. It's not completely...

Another claimed smurf account is Death-Sentence. This account popped up in 2021 and achieved a Master's level rating within a couple of weeks. Since then Moods (ROCKhardFISTnips) has claimed the account, and it played another batch of games in 2022 which significantly lowered its rating. 0.59: Death...

One of the cool things about this system is that it isn't based on skill level. We saw above that it was happy to claim happy and Private Leaf were similar (0.65 distance), but they certainly don't feel similar to play against. Consequently I thought about seeing if anyone plays similar to goat who ...

There are two players in my dataset where I know they have played under two different names. The first is Fazzar (Fazzz and Fazzar) and the second is happy (Clockwork and then not happy). I already gave some details about Fazzar above, but let's have a look at the closest accounts using the method w...

The next part of my investigation was to try measuring the distance between different accounts. To do this I didn't split the data (train/test) as I was doing above, but rather lumped it all together to produce a tuple of values for each account. Another change from above was that I didn't filter ou...

The first results I wanted to discuss were what happened when making a train/test split. I randomly partitioned off two thirds of the games as "training" data and the other third of the games as "test" data.* I removed all games from players who had fewer than ten games in the "test" set. This resul...

I thought it would be interesting to see whether it was possible to identify players from replay files by the in-game actions they took. One obvious use of this is to associate smurf accounts with the original player. I hacked something together using a combination of bμg's replay parser and the sta...