Probably not a bad idea to tie your account stats to your registration code. Even if you change your name and avatar, the rest will still be there.

Meanwhile, yes, I find that it can be a pain in the butt. Aside from some treating newcomers like crap, there are also others that constantly berate single players for doing what they like. Since single players make up the bulk of the game owners, they really should have more say in any changes that occur within the game. It's not a case of majority rules, but bloody 90% rules.

So yeah, the MP crowd needs to get a bit more friendly.

I meant something for the devs to have automatically done

Perhaps. I used to play day of defeat and they did similar picking schemes. Though if that were the case one would think they would be chatting in the game's lobby about who was going to be who, not pointing fingers about smurfing. But, I digress.

Yes, the lack of a campaign does make it appear more geared toward MP. But since the majority of players do SP, I think they need to be given their due for their patronage.

Sadly, there's a group of fanatical anti-smurfers who will boot players with either new records or who look like smurfs.  Often the games are named "Skilled/No Smurfs" or some such.  In that case, even if they peg you as being a smurf, if you're not you wouldn't meet the skilled qualification.  You could just join the chat channel and explain that you're new and see if they'll let you fill a spot (and you'll end up being last pick).

Anyway, welcome to the Sins community.  It's an awesome game once you get up to speed and learn how to play human opponents.  It'll probably take you about 50-100 games to be able to hold your own and to figure out how to make a contribution to your team.  Hang in there, it's worth it.

^^

That. Can't say it better if you hired an English professor.

For the most part i enjoy playing games with my friends and not online with random people and i don't have that many friends who play this game  so i play against the ai mostly.

I don't mind changes to help the online player vs player community as long as they are just minor tweaks i used to play command and conquer 3 till one patch when the did a major change to the economy specificly for the player vs player games and it ruined the game for me because me and my friends prefer comp stomp we quit the game not long after and after buy the expac and trying it for a while uninstalled both and never looked back.

I guess my point is don't ruin the game just for pvp or any one game type it is hard to balance both i know but as long as they are careful to not ruin the game for one type of player just to help another as i have seen done in other games like command and conquer 3 the i am all for it.

Smurfing is bad.

Got booted from a game for "smurfing" with my forum username: KrdaxDrkrun

????

It's possible that you (and your friends) will get to the point where playing against the AI just becomes boring and that you'll then crave a greater and more interesting challenge.  The problem with playing against the AI forever is that the AI is pretty much a retarded opponent.  If you get to the point that you cringe when the AI suicides itself on a starbase or wastes money building a starbase in a gravity well full of your ships or fails to manage its capital ships properly so that you can easily focus fire them to death, etc., then you might consider playing PvP against <gasp> strangers on Ironclad Online.  (Your parents may have taught you about "stranger danger" when you were young, but no one can actually physically touch or kidnap you over the Internet, at least not yet.)

The fact is that in the past year before the launch of sins on steam ~85% of the new accounts where smurfs, of which about half to a third claimed to be noobs (or claim to be less skilled then they actually where). Because of this the majority of the non-smurfers would rather play with recognized accounts, in a way they win either way, either the smurf unmasks or you aren't forced to play with a lousy player.

You might think I'm being a little harsh on the noobs, perhaps I am, but stomping down noobs doesn't satisfy me (in the same way beating a easy ai doesn't give me satisfaction) and watching your team fail miserably is frustrating.

Ideally players would play most of their games vs players of about the same skill level; unfortunately sins never really had the player base for that, which left the noobs to play vs hardened veterans where they wait 30 minuets for the game to fill then get kicked from 3/4 of the games when a *non-smurf* comes, then when they do get to play a game they get crushed and their allies complain about how bad they are; Finally (if you made it this far, few do) after you play 10-20 games you start to become recognized and other players will start to vouch for you.

I'm hoping that with the influx of players from steam there will be enough players for *noob matches* where the new players aren't thrown into the meat grinder in their first online game. This doesnt fix the smurf problem but it should give noobs an easier time.

I was more troubled by the fact that it seems he was kicked for being suspected of being a smurf, given the number of Steam sales and recent ICO newbies. The more that newer players are accused of being smurfs and kicked out of games, the less likely they'll be to log on again.

It's not that I'm against differentiation by skill or that true smurfs should be tolerated.

Well, I think that's why the pro players have to be an active part of the forum as much as anyone and, hopefully, run across most people here, getting to know them by their forum names as well as ICO names. And maybe a little, friendly approach before booting might get to the heart of it too.

And here I always thought it was a Hellenistic empire.