Should You Keep Your OpenFront Profile Public in v34?

In v34 your games are readable by anyone who knows your account, so the question is no longer “how do I review my own match” but “do I want my whole history to be that reviewable.” The decision is one of three: keep your history fully visible, share a single copyable game link only when you want a specific decision reviewed, or delete the account to hide everything. Public history is a learning tool and an account choice at the same time. You control which of the three fits your use of the game, and the trade-off is between getting useful, specific feedback and how much of your play anyone can hold up to you.

What “profiles are public” actually means in v34

The v0.34.0 feature release, published 2026-09-14 and still in effect at the v0.34.22 current boundary, changed the default from “your match history is effectively private” to “another player can review the games attached to an account.” That is the single line that drives everything in this guide. The practical consequence is that a player can open the games that are linked to your account and read them, which the release frames as both a learning tool and an account choice. The release is explicit about two limits that matter for your decision. First, public history does not expose the private moderation tools, so a reviewer cannot see any behind-the-scenes enforcement state, report you from your history, or act on anything the normal UI does not show. Second, public history does not prove why a player made a move; it shows the sequence of actions and the outcome, and it does not show intent, so a reader has to infer the reasoning from the visible sequence.

The version boundary is worth pinning down because it determines what you can rely on. The capability was introduced in v0.34.0 and has been carried forward unchanged through the v0.34.18 to v0.34.22 patch series; none of those patch notes change the public-profile exposure rule itself. v0.34.18 is the patch that shipped the Detailed View lobby browser with one-way public-lobby listing, a host-selectable one-to-five minute start window, and a ten-to-hundred player cap, which is why the lobby side of the game became observable in the first place and which is documented on the list lobbies page; v0.34.19 is the patch that added account-link tokens for third-party stats sites, which is a separate, opt-in exposure channel we cover later in this guide. The point of the boundary is simple: the exposure you are deciding about today is the exposure that has been in place since v0.34.0, so your decision is made once against a stable rule, not against something that is likely to flip in the next patch. If you are coming from a version before v34, the change is that your history went from quiet to reviewable, and the three options in this guide are how you respond to that. The scope is the whole account, not a subset of it: once the capability is on, every game attached to the account is on the reviewable surface, and there is no per-game visibility toggle that lets you keep one match quiet while the rest stay public, which is why the exposure is a property of the account rather than of any individual match.

The three decisions your profile forces

Because the profile is public by default in v34, you have exactly three realistic stances to take, and they are not a spectrum so much as three distinct postures with different costs. The first posture is to keep your full history visible and let it be reviewed, which is the default and the posture that best serves players who use matches as a training record. The second posture is to keep the profile public but treat it as a selective instrument: you do not advertise your whole history, but when you want a specific call reviewed you share the single copyable game link that a history card exposes, so a reviewer opens the exact game instead of guessing from memory or a screenshot. The third posture is to remove the exposure entirely, and the only mechanism the release names for that is account deletion, which hides all games because there is no longer an account to attach them to.

The reason these are the only three options is that v34 gives you no partial-visibility dial. You cannot mark individual games private while leaving the rest public, and you cannot publish the profile but withhold the copyable link; the capability is on or off at the account level, and the off switch is deletion. That absence is the whole design decision the release is pushing you to make. If you treat your matches as a public record you are fine with anyone reading, you keep the history visible. If you want the review benefit but not the standing exposure, the copyable game link is the mechanism the release points at: “share the exact game when asking for advice.” If the standing exposure itself is the problem, the only lever is deletion, and that lever carries an account-level cost that none of the other two options have. The rest of this guide walks each of the three through what it shows, what it costs, and which player it fits, so you can pick the one that matches how you actually use the game rather than defaulting to whichever is easiest to set up. The three postures also do not compete with the token decision, which is orthogonal: you can hold any one of the three postures and still make the on-off call about whether a third-party stats site may read your stats, so the profile question and the token question are decided separately and can point in different directions at the same time. In practice that means you set your profile posture and your token posture independently, and the combination of the two is your actual visibility surface, so it is worth deciding both deliberately rather than by accident.

Reading a public history card: what you and others see

When another player reviews your games, the unit of review is the game link that a history card exposes. The release says history cards can expose a copyable game link, and that link is the difference between a vague “review my play” request and a request a reviewer can actually answer. Copying the link and opening it lands the reviewer on the exact game, where they can watch the sequence and, because the normal PlayerInfoPanel is available inside replays in v34, see the player information panel in the same view they would see in the live match. The practical effect is that a reviewer does not need to ask you to describe the situation; they open the link, scrub to the decision point, and comment on the specific move rather than the final result. This is why the release pairs the visibility with the instruction to “review decisions in sequence rather than judging only the result,” and it is the same instrument the replay review page uses when you are the one studying your own match.

There is a concrete shape to what is visible and what is not, and that shape is what makes the link a fair instrument instead of a gotcha. What a reviewer can see is the sequence of builds, troop movements, attacks, the scoreline, and the outcome, which is enough to evaluate whether a decision was sound given the board state at the time. What a reviewer cannot see is the reasoning behind the decision, because public history does not prove why a player made a move, and they also cannot see the private moderation state, because that is not part of the public surface. The combination matters when you are the one asking for review: you are handing over the evidence for a decision without handing over your intent, so a good review has to be made from the sequence alone. That is a fair ask of a reviewer, and it is also a constraint on you, because if you are going to defend a move after sharing the link you have to defend the visible sequence, not the private thought that was behind it. The link is a two-way instrument: it gives the reviewer a clear target and it pins you to the actions you actually took, which is exactly the right trade for getting specific, useful feedback rather than generic encouragement. The practical upshot for you is that before you share a link, the only honest question to ask is whether the reviewer can reach the conclusion they need from the sequence alone, because the link hands over everything that is visible and nothing that is not, and the gap between those two sets is exactly where the review gets either useful or unmoored.

When sharing the exact game link is the right move

The second posture, sharing a single copyable game link, is the correct default for the most common use of public history in v34, which is getting a specific call fixed. If your question is “did I handle that invasion right,” the honest answer is only in the specific game, so sharing the copyable link from the history card is the whole move. A reviewer with the link can open the exact match, pause at the moment the troops were committed, and tell you whether the ratio held, whether the timing was right, and what the alternative was, in a way that a screenshot or a paragraph of description cannot. This is the posture the release explicitly names with “share the exact game when asking for advice,” and it is the posture that produces the most useful feedback per unit of exposure, because you reveal one game rather than your whole history.

There are two situations where the single-link posture is clearly better than keeping everything visible. The first is when you are asking about a decision that you made in a specific, recent match and you want the reviewer to look at the actual sequence; the single link is the minimum exposure that answers the question. The second is when you are new to the game and want a reviewer to walk through one match with you, because a full history of early games is mostly noise and one representative match is the whole lesson. In both cases the single link does the job and keeps your other matches private, which is the posture that fits players who value the review benefit but are not comfortable with a standing, always-on record of everything they have played. The failure mode to avoid here is the opposite one: using the single link as a way to avoid the review, by sharing a link to a game that is not the one where the decision you are asking about was made. If the link points to a different match than the question is about, the reviewer is looking at the wrong sequence and the feedback is useless, so the discipline is to match the link to the exact decision you want reviewed before you send it. The posture also scales to how many games you share in a row: one link answers one question, and if you find yourself sending several links at once you are really asking for a full review, at which point the cost of the single-link posture quietly becomes the cost of the full-history posture, so the honest choice in that case is to keep the whole history visible rather than drip-feed links until the record is exposed anyway.

The privacy cost of public history, made concrete

The third posture is the one players underweight, because the cost of a public history is not a single event but a standing condition: anyone who can read your account can read your matches. The release is careful to bound what that exposure does, and those bounds are worth stating plainly because they define the worst case you are actually signing up for. Public history does not expose the private moderation tools, so a reader of your history cannot see enforcement state or trigger anything from your record that the normal interface does not already allow. Public history does not prove why you made a move, so a hostile or blame-happy reader cannot establish intent from your record, only assert it from the visible sequence. Those two bounds mean the exposure is bounded to your play, not to your standing with the system, which is the important thing to keep in mind before you decide deletion is necessary.

Even within that bound, there is a real asymmetry that you should price in. The player who reviews your history is looking at a record that you produced, and the reviewer is free to judge the sequence however they like, because the release’s own instruction is to “review decisions in sequence rather than judging only the result,” which means the default human response is to judge by the result and call the sequence that led to a loss a mistake. The asymmetry is that you can spend a match learning and the reviewer can spend a minute concluding you were wrong, and the record does not carry your learning. If you are the kind of player who reads a blunt review and improves, the standing exposure is net positive, because the cost is occasional harsh judgment and the benefit is a continuous supply of matches anyone can audit. If you are the kind of player who reads a blunt review and takes it personally, the standing exposure is net negative, because the same record that could be a training tool becomes a source of friction, and the single-link posture or deletion is the cheaper way to get what you need without that cost. The decision is about your response to feedback, not about the feature itself, which is why the release frames it as an account choice rather than a setting. A useful way to hold the cost in your head is to separate the one-time cost from the standing cost: the one-time cost of choosing a visible profile is essentially nothing, because the default is already on, while the standing cost is the small, recurring chance that a match you are proud of gets a blunt reading from someone who did not live the decision, and that standing cost is the only thing that ever tips the balance from “keep it visible” toward “close the record,” so you should weigh it as a recurring small charge rather than a single large one.

Account deletion: the only hide switch, and what it really costs

The only mechanism the v34 release names for hiding all of your games is account deletion, and it works the way the release describes because there is no longer an account to attach the games to. Deleting the account does not hide individual games or clear a selection; it removes the account, and with it the whole public surface that makes your history reviewable. That makes deletion the strongest of the three postures and the one with the highest cost, because it is the only one that is irreversible at the account level and the only one that removes things you may still want. The v34 release is explicit about the risk class this lives in: account actions sit in a different class from in-match decisions, so the decision to delete is made on the account’s standing, not on the outcome of any single match, and it should be weighed as a permanent account-level change rather than a reaction to a bad game.

The cost of deletion is the account itself, which is where the real trade-off sits. When you delete, you give up the progress, the cosmetics, the standing with your clan, and any purchases tied to the account, in exchange for the history no longer being reviewable. None of the other two postures cost you any of that, which is the entire reason deletion is the last resort rather than the default. The practical test is whether the standing exposure is bad enough to be worth giving up the account: if the problem is a few harsh reviews, deletion is the wrong tool because it destroys the account to solve a feedback problem that the single-link posture already solves; if the problem is that you do not want any of your play to be readable at all, then deletion is the tool, and you accept that you are closing the account, not just the profile. The one thing to hold onto from the release is that the deletion decision is yours to make once, against a stable rule, and that the alternative is always the two cheaper postures, which is why you should treat deletion as the option you reach for only after deciding that neither keeping the history visible nor sharing single links is acceptable to you. One more boundary is worth naming so the cost is fully priced: deletion closes the door on the two cheaper postures at the same time, because once the account is gone there is no account left to keep visible or to share a single link from, so the decision is not merely “hide the history” but “give up the account,” and those are different sentences even though they point at the same action.

The v0.34.19 token decision: a second, optional exposure channel

There is a second exposure channel that v34 added that most players miss because it is separate from the built-in public profile, and it is worth calling out because it is the one decision you can actually toggle on and off. The v0.34.19 patch introduced account-link tokens for third-party stats sites, which are tokens you authorize that let an external site read your stats. This is a different mechanism from the built-in public profile: the built-in profile exposes your games to any player in the game, while the token exposes your stats to a specific external site that you grant access to. The decision here is about which third-party site, if any, you trust with read access to your stats, and because it is a token you create and can revoke, it is the only part of the v34 exposure story that is a genuine on-off choice rather than a default you live with or delete to escape.

The token decision sits on top of the three-posture framework and does not replace it. Even if you keep your built-in profile fully visible, you can still decline to hand a stats site a read token, and even if you are leaning toward hiding, the token is the one channel you can close without deleting the account, which is useful if the concern is a specific third-party aggregator rather than in-game players. The risk of authorizing a token is the read access it grants: the site gets whatever the token exposes, and if you later decide you do not trust that site, you revoke the token, which is the cheap, reversible version of the hide decision. The cost of not authorizing is that you lose the third-party stat aggregation, which for most players is a convenience, not a necessity. The right posture is to treat the token as the default-off channel: do not grant read access to a stats site until you have a reason to, and revoke it if the reason stops holding, because the token is the one lever in the v34 exposure story that is cheap to move in either direction and the only one that does not touch the account itself. The reason the default-off posture is the right call rather than the cautious call is that the benefit of the token is narrow and the cost is broad: the token buys you one convenience, a stats site that aggregates your numbers, while the cost of an authorized token is that a third party holds read access to your record for as long as the token lives, and a convenience that can be re-granted later is not worth a standing grant that has to be revoked, so you grant the token only when the convenience is worth it in the moment and you revoke it when it stops being.

A decision procedure and the mode-by-mode adjustment

Putting the three postures and the token decision together gives a procedure you can run in under a minute, and the mode and the map are the two inputs that change the answer. The procedure is this. If you use matches as a training record and you are fine with anyone auditing your play, keep the built-in history visible, do not grant any third-party token by default, and share the single copyable game link only when you want a specific decision reviewed, matching the link to the exact decision you are asking about. If you want the review benefit but not the standing exposure, keep the profile public but use the single-link posture as your default, so you reveal one game at a time rather than the whole record. If the standing exposure itself is the problem and you do not want any of your play to be readable, the only lever is account deletion, and you take it only after deciding that neither of the two cheaper postures is acceptable, accepting that you are closing the account and giving up its progress, cosmetics, clan standing, and purchases.

The mode and the map adjust the answer in one direction. In a competitive or clan setting where your record is part of your standing and teammates and opponents review it, the visible-history posture is the default, because the exposure is the point and the single-link or deletion postures would cost you the collaboration. In a casual setting where you play for the game and not for the record, the single-link posture is the safer default, because you get the review you asked for without a standing record that strangers can judge. On maps where the scoreline and the build sequence are the whole story, the exposure is the most useful, because the reviewer can read the decision directly; on maps where a lot of the play is in the choices that do not show up cleanly in the sequence, the exposure is the least useful, because the record cannot prove the reasoning, and the single-link posture is the better match. The decision is made once per account against a stable v34 rule, and the mode and the map are the only inputs that move it, so you can decide it in a minute and not revisit it every match.