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Ilse Mul avatar image
Ilse Mul asked

Player's Characters with unique names?

I was wondering the following:

In my game I'd prefer it if characters have unique names. One example of why this would come in handy is players who have been given a quest to give a custom order in a shop to a certain player character. When there's a Unique Display Name system for characters (not the overall player's account), the player would be able to pick the correct character easily.

From GrantCharacterToUser I understand the CharacterName field ask for a Non-unique display name of the character being granted.

If there would be 2 or more characters with the same name working in the shop, how would the player know which character to choose? Player ID's are not displayed. Having the quest point out which player it would be, would go against the vision of quests NOT pointing out everything, letting players experience things for themselves and think about what they're doing :)

These all are characters made by players, so non-NPC :)

Thanks for the help!

Characters
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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

At the moment, Character names are not forced to be unique across all players, so you would need to use some form of specifier, such as putting the player's Display Name (assuming you kept the default of those being enforced as unique) or Username after the Character name. So, if a player's display name was "Grognar" and the Character name was "Warrior", you could display it as "Warrior (Grognar)". The other advantage to that is that it would provide the social link as well - players may prefer using Characters that belong to their friends, for example.

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Ilse Mul avatar image Ilse Mul commented ·

Thanks Brendan!

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Ilse Mul avatar image Ilse Mul commented ·

Brendan, in addition to the above, is there a way to find all character names on all users?

Thanks!

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brendan avatar image brendan Ilse Mul commented ·

Yes, you can get a full dump of all events for your game (including the display name changed event) via the PlayStream Event Archive. You could also create a Segment of "All Players" and query it via the Server API calls, though the S3 archive copy of all event is generally preferable, since that also gives you the ability to import all your events into Redshift for analysis.

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Ilse Mul avatar image Ilse Mul brendan commented ·

Hi @Brendan,

Thanks!

Does this mean I can use this to check if a character name is already in use before finalizing the character name? Or isn't that a preferred method because of balance, etc?

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Ilse Mul avatar image Ilse Mul commented ·

Thanks, @Brendan,

I'll build the external database then :) Purely for character names is doable :D

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Ilse Mul avatar image Ilse Mul commented ·

@Brendan

Finally coming back to game design.... Is there an update on this? Can we now force the use of Unique character names in the game without having to resort to an external database?

Thank you for your help!

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brendan avatar image brendan Ilse Mul commented ·

Any updates to the Character system would be announced in the News and/or blog pages. There have been no changes to the way character names work in the service.

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Ilse Mul avatar image Ilse Mul brendan commented ·

Thanks Brendan! It's been a long while since I checked the blog/news and since I've been coding, so I'm a bit behind.
Thanks for answering anyway!

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