[Iv]

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.

[knd775]

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.

[perspective1]

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.

[Iv]

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)

[amyjess]

Back when I used to play Ingress, that was really common. The Enlightened in Dallas had a ton of barcode names.

[BryantD]

The new client makes it much easier to distinguish the characters, but there are still plenty of barcodes in the game.

[Retric]

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.

[ChainOfFools]

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.