Comment by Iv
6 years ago
In the Starcraft 2 community it is called barcoding. Basically, I 1 | l are all accepted characters for a name and I think some do look actually identical on most fonts used in the game. So yeah, one person doing that you call "barcode", 2 persons doing that, you already have deniability. Be more than 10, and that's a crowd.
There was a time where call of duty ghosts was exploitable, and people could wipe/delete the accounts of anyone whose username/gamertag they knew. Streamers and pro players had to use barcode usernames to avoid getting their accounts deleted.
Google's AlphaStar StarCraft bot did just this under different accounts. Along with some other fingerprinting, many of the accounts and replays were found by the SC2 community.
To my knowledge, it played with only one account. It played exactly 50 games with every race. It was outed mainly because of two things: A very high win rate (above 80% IIRC) and the fact that as a zerg it produced units by selecting larvas directly, which no one ever does (someone explains that it uses control groups but they are hidden and dont show up in replays, I dont know how accurate it is)
Back when I used to play Ingress, that was really common. The Enlightened in Dallas had a ton of barcode names.
The new client makes it much easier to distinguish the characters, but there are still plenty of barcodes in the game.
You can reuse names in SCII, so it’s more a convention than anything else. The important bit is to have many accounts with similar names.
this goes back at least as far as the original Unreal Tournament, I even saw a player using it in the fairly obscure Shogo: MAD multiplayer community. Never knew why it was done back then, I assumed it was just to be cute, but it did make it troublesome to mention them in ingame chats.