Player Names: Questions, Concerns

SyrusRayne

First off, I'd like to say that I'm quite excited about this project! Already picked up the deluxe edition, and I'm eager to see how things progress! NWN has a fantastic community, and with any luck this will only improve it with new blood.

That all said, I have questions regarding how Player Names work for multiplayer. As described, it seems to be little more than a display name than a username by default, which can be changed whenever someone logs into a given server without impacting which characters you can play. If a server likes, they can toggle an option which will "... bind a unique player and dungeon master name to a specific CD key..."

It seems to me like that's a one-time thing, with one player name to one CD key. No more changing, no alternate accounts, just one name permanently linked to your CD Key. If so, this seems like a major step back from NWN's GSIDs. Having an alternate GSID was incredibly useful, for instance for a DM on a PW that wants to play privately

However, letting someone change their player name freely, with no restrictions and no ties to their characters, has its own problems. As it's stood for years, most people have been using the same one for a long time now. This more static nature meant that it was easier to identify who was playing an unknown character, which helps players avoid other players they might have a problem with or find friends they haven't seen in years. And if player name isn't linked to anything, it makes it possible for people to impersonate others by using the other person's player name on servers the impersonator knows they play on.

How would these issues be handled under the new system?


Thanks for your time! If I'm mistaken about anything here, please let me know.

SyrusRayne

Haven't the faintest idea how I managed to post this three times. Sorry!

Jimbobslimbob

SyrusRayne said:

However, letting someone change their player name freely, with no restrictions and no ties to their characters, has its own problems. As it's stood for years, most people have been using the same one for a long time now. This more static nature meant that it was easier to identify who was playing an unknown character, which helps players avoid other players they might have a problem with or find friends they haven't seen in years. And if player name isn't linked to anything, it makes it possible for people to impersonate others by using the other person's player name on servers the impersonator knows they play on.

I seem to recall that the previous system (when it worked), you could create as many additional accounts as you wanted and bypass the account-naming ban system. So, it's really no different.

As for the "impersonating" thing - they have fixed that one by introducing a new way to store characters on the servervault. They are no longer in a folder with the character name/account. I am not too sure exactly HOW it's done, but apparently it does get around the impersonating issue.

sippelmc

The public CDKEY is linked to the character name, not the playername. On a servervault characters are all stored under the CDKEY. Really the playername means nothing anymore and they probably kept it so they didn't have to refactor all the underlying engine code from when it assumed it would always be there and be unique.

They will have the servervault setting that disallows characters of the same character name so you cannot impersonate a character, although I woudln't be surprised if griefers choose to something like impersonating with very similar spellings. I've tried and it and seems buggy still and can crash servers, but probably will be fixed. Still trying to reproduce it reliably. But when it is off I never have problems.

SyrusRayne

I'm really not concerned with impersonating characters, coming from an RP-server background that's something that could mostly be dealt with in-character. Far more concerning is the old-fashioned sort of impersonation, for instance taking someone's name and claiming to be a new alt.

If Beamdog's not interested in addressing this for whatever reason, maybe someone with more experience could tell me: is there some way to fix that server-side, by tying used playernames to the public CDKey or something? There were jury-rigged solutions when the master server went down, right?

If there's no way to solve this... Well, it kinda seems like this is the worst of both worlds.

sippelmc

I see your concern. I think it would be a pretty trivial fix to write an on cliententer script that records/ties playername to cdkey and persist that. On enter, check if there is a CDKEY value assoociated with playername. If not, assign playername the CDKEY. On future enters, if the playername and key match, let them in, if you have a playername and key that do not match, boot. So it would be a first name claimed thing. I would think something like this would work (syntax not checked):

object oPC = GetEnteringObject();
string sPlayerName = GetPlayerName(oPC);
string sPublicCDKey = GetPublicCDKey(oPC);
string sPlayerNameCDKey = GetCampaignString("PLAYERSANDKEYS", sPlayerName);

/* If no name+key not yet in the db, affiliate name with key */
if (sPlayerNameCDKey == "")
{
SetCampaignString("PLAYERSANDKEYS", sPlayerName, sPublicCDKey);
}
else
{
/* Check if using a name that was already saved with a key but doesn't match */
if (sPlayerNameCDKey != sPublicCDKey)
{
BootPC(oPC);
}
}