Alts aren't disallowed. It's simply how lucid built the system. He told me he physically couldn't build a way to make a separate point requirement for competition and the lobby. In the old system, you simply needed lobby access, meaning one account with over 1500 points to enter competition. Now the barrier is on the competition itself instead of the lobby, and thus the requirements change and end up as more stringent.

Yes, you're right that it may feel like a separate lobby in one - that's the worst case scenario of this move. However, I believe with exposure that this will ultimately help new players attempt competitive mafia and learn to enjoy it.

There's nothing stopping you from hosting red hearts of other setups. Maybe they'll actually fill if the entire ranked community is now located in one spot. I've hosted setups of many comp caliber setups and had them fill easily in Training. When SOTW is in place, there will certainly be a culture change and people will definitely try out new setups. When they are comped, people will be more inclined to join.

Culture change takes time, but ultimately this move will likely lead to better mafia players and a more unified site.

As far as your original point, it is unfortunate that there are limitations. I'm saying getting to 1500 points isn't going to be that difficult moving forward and that you'll more likely than not be able to play competitive quality setups in red hearts now.

This also doesn't really solve the gap b/t training and comp that you wanted to get rid of because new players are just going to get used to the typical pointfarming games before they can even get a chance to play competitively (which can take players that are new to mafia around 60 games to complete considering they're mostly arbitrary coinflips in which no one actually plays the game for what it's supposed to be) and are going to have to re-step out of their comfort zone twice, which is what joining comp already was.

The only difference between this and having two lobbies is that there aren't two tabs for them. Why force players to play classic tons of times instead of letting them learn from playing with actual experienced players?

If we're just going to disallow all alts from the comp to discourage trolling (which hasn't really worked), what are the mods for?

This isn't really about running on more than one account, either; it's about being able to actually play games on your alt slots (whether you have 3 extra ones that you /paid for/ or not) without grinding 25ish games on them beforehand.

But Epicmafia competitions don't need anal restrictions, considering we have moderators? They didn't even have them when we DIDN'T have mods. Altho this would still be more strict if there was no point limit because you cannot use new account.

Hey, I've always thought people should run on one account per round anyway :)

Not that this will be anything but an annoyance though

so just run on your main and stop whining.

but what if i dont want to win 25 main games so i can run on a new alt? playing 25 games is too much effort for someone as lazy as me

Because there's no barrier to entry in the Main Lobby, we have made a barrier to the competition instead. The way it's programmed means you cannot join the competition unless that specific account is at or above the threshold.

I've asked lucid about it and he says he cannot change it to be how it was before, which makes sense considering all you needed was access to comp lobby to join the competition previously.

I do think this is a decent security measure to take though moving forward. It'll be a bit sucky for now, but I'm talking to lucid about merging comp stats with Main Lobby.

Stay tuned.