[crossfire] account login thoughts/ideas

[Mark Wedel]

  So as noted someplace, my thoughts for login is this:
You log in with account name & password.
You then see list of characters associated with that account, and options to add 
new one.

  In that list of characters, what would useful information be?  My thoughts 
right now:

-name (obviously)
-class & race
-level
-face (not as much useful, but gives something nice for the client to show)

  Anyone have other thoughts?

  My thought also is that to gather that information by reading in the player 
files may be a bit time consuming (on one hand, we can stop reading once we get 
the desired data.  But the other is that if a player has 10 characters on an 
account, that is 10 files to open, look for that data, etc).  So my thought 
would be to store this someplace else - perhaps a flat file for each account 
that lists those attributes, and update that file whenever the player logs out 
with that character.  That way it is fairly fast.

  One other concern (unrelated to above) is account management/spamming.  Since 
one can easily create new accounts without human interaction, I could see some 
malicious person writing code that creates hundreds/thousands of accounts.

  My thought here is that an account with no characters associated just gets 
removed (or more precisely, just not saved out) - in this way, an account needs 
characters associated, and that takes more time (a new character would have to 
get created) - at that point, I think any malicious attack would take 
sufficiently long to not be worthwhile.  Especially if we don't consider a 
character valid until it gets some exp total (that is sort of done, but sort of 
not done right now.  If you try to use a savebed, it puts a minimum check there, 
but if you just disconnect, it will save you regardless of exp I believe)