For the sake of privacy?

[Thorbear]

Ace about "user names" in the player listing

Actually for the sake of privacy this should not be shown.... also imagine if some people have offensive accountnames.

Not happened yet, but it might be good to show the hostname only to administrators or not at all.

My first thought was this: "Naaaahhh, this has always been like it is, nobody has been harmed noticable by it yet"
But after some thinking, I've come to this:

Some people does desire some privacy, and in todays internet-world, who can blame them? But, showing the names of players computers has been a way for us to reognize our own, through all cryptic names.
Would it not be a good solution if one could create ONE account, and have multiple players on that account? That way, one could hide the computernames and we would still be able to tell one from another.

[Warrior]

I'll bump this since it's near the top of my personal list of preferred changes.

[schroeder]

How would this work?
Would it just work off of the forum-set characters? That could get a little bit tedious with the adding for some players who like to have lots of different characters.
It could also cause an issue with this feature not working on the non-main server, since that is the only one we can add characters for here.

Perhaps you should also be able to tell the forums that 'characters from this computer are mine'?
Would you bind your computer to your forum username, and then mangband would just see all people on that computer as, for example 'Schroeder' on the player list, instead of user@WindowsXP?

Should you be allowed to bind more than one computer to your account?
You don't always have access to your main computer.

What if two different players use the same computer?
Siblings would be a good example of this. But another would be if players who knew each other got together at one of their houses.

What if two players share a character?
I know that me and emulord sometimes share characters, since he doesn't enjoy endgame, and I don't enjoy early game.

Should you be able to set your new, shown name as something other than your server name?
A lot of people probably know me more as Domiano, or know Serina as Zal for various reasons (like the IRC name we want already being in use). We may prefer to have a different game name.

What about people who don't have a forum account?
Could their be a way to set your character's Name@place to a specific Username within the game?



Just some things that passed through my mind after you bumped this thread ;)
I also think its an amazing idea, and I want it to work as well as possible.

[Thorbear]

The way I see it, there would have to be a totally new account system with some way of starting a new account with several characters directly in the game.
I think it's important to keep the whole thing as simple as possible for new users, if it takes you 2 hours of filling out forms with names and passwords just to try the game you might decide it's not worth it.

How about something like this:
Instead of hostname we display account name.
Once you create a char, your account name is set to your charname by default and you can change this through the character screen in-game.
Alternatively there could also be an option to select account at birth (to save time for the experienced users).

There would also have to be some sort of change to the login itself, should you be able to log directly in to a char, or must all logins go through an account?
If you can log direcly in with any char, that would also mean that no chars can have the same name as an account (or vice versa).

[serina]

When you connect to a server you enter:
Accountname and password.

Then you're prompted with a list of all your characters:

a) "Create a new character"
b) ZalPri
c) ZalPriest
d) Zally
e) ZalDive
f) ZalDiveDiveDive
etc.

Pretty much the same as a standard in game MAngband store (press space to cycle through pages).

Pressing @ in game then displays your accountname and charactername.

Simple and easy to use and code probably sinde you can use some of the already existing shop-coding. Don't involve the forums or IRC or anything, because as soon as something becomes broken, everyone or some accounts would be totally unable to play, and we don't want that.

In the case of Schroeder and Emulord using each others characters, there could be a character transfer option, but that might be too easy to exploit and would take quite a while to code, so perhaps Schroeder and Emulord just needs to make 1 account each and have a shared account or just play like they do now when we still don't know which of them is online, hehe.

ZAL