Why doesn't LinkedAccounts return all links?!?
Dear PlayFab community,
I am trying to place multiple CustomIDs on a player, but it turns out that LinkedAccounts doesn't return all instances of the CustomIDs -- only the most recently added.
Further, when trying to delete the CustomID from Game Manager (of which it only shows the most recent instance), it will actually delete the *oldest* instance, leaving the most recent on the display.
The bottom line is, if you intend to do anything with LinkedAccounts where you might have multiple instances of the same type, be aware that it is currently unusable.
I hope that this can be fixed some day.
In the meantime, I'm going to use GameCenter in lieu of CustomID. Please don't make breaking updates to the GameCenter functionality any time soon.
Best Answer
To date, there hasn't been a breaking change to any functionality in PlayFab, as we have a high priority commitment to prevent that. So you don't have anything to worry about on that account. However, I'd recommend waiting for our secure GameCenter authentication system, which we'll be rolling out later this quarter. The existing one only uses the GameCenter ID of the user (it was provided by demand back before Apple introduced a secure auth system external services could use).
In answer to your question, both the device ID and Custom ID auth systems were originally designed to only allow for one of each type of ID to be linked. By popular demand, we updated those systems to allow for multiple IDs of each type to be used, but as that was back when we had very few resources available, it was a fairly simplistic implementation in which only the last-used ID is returned in the profile data. That's something we plan to address in an upcoming sprint.
However, I'm not clear on what you're describing with the deletion example. If you use the Unlink option on the Custom ID on the player account in the Game Manager, the one shown (where you click Unlink) is indeed the one removed.
Thanks for the assurances, Brendan! I'm going to proceed with using the LinkGameCenterAccount to provide an alternate key, just to move forward.
I tested *very* carefully when I had dual CustomIDs on my account. Unfortunately, the CustomID shown in Game Manager was *not* the CustomID that was deleted. Further, I couldn't Unlink the one that was being shown, no matter how many times I clicked Unlink, it would persist in Game Manager.
I *still* can't delete the CustomID from Game Manager for PlayerID 7FCA1F1E8157A6D5 in Title 44B1.
Can you clarify what you mean by "deleted"? What specifically are you doing that you're calling deletion? In my testing, removing the Custom ID from the Game Manager (clicking the "unlink" option on the ID shown) removes that specific ID 100% of the time, if it is actually linked. The caveat there is that we've discovered that there are some corner cases where you can unlink the ID from an API call, and the Game Manager will still think it's linked. So the one exception is the case you describe where you click the link and it isn't removed - in that case, the ID actually isn't linked to the account. That's a known issue we'll fix as soon as we can.
Yes...I'm removing the CustomID from Game Manager (clicking on the "Unlink" button for the CustomID shown). What happened is that it deleted my *other* CustomID (not the CustomID that was being shown. And the shown CustomID continues to persist. I can click "Unlink" multiple times and the shown CustomID never goes away from Game Manager. I did not use the API to unlink, only Game Manager. I can make a video to show you the "aftermath", if that would be helpful?
