[crossfire] account login thoughts/ideas

[Nicolas Weeger]

>   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.

Seems fine :)


>   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?

That seems fine too, that's the bare minimum.
Other things to think about: currently equipped weapons/armors/rings ; money 
on character ; party the player was in.



>   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.

Yes, having a flat file would be ok.
Related option is to have player files as subdirectories of the account 
directory. But then you have issues checking character names are globally 
unique :)



>   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)

Seems as a good way, yes - no character, no account saved.
In this case, better warn players enough - so they don't create an account, 
play a few minutes, disconnect without saving, and lose everything!



Nicolas
-- 
http://nicolas.weeger.org [Mon p'tit coin du web]
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