Character Alts in the feed

As announced in this post, we now have the account.link_id field in the character feed if the player has enabled this in their EQII Share Tab (in game, type "c" and it is the bottom tab on the right).  This will allow a customer to make all of their flagged characters accessible from any of their other characters (essentially, their "alts").  Currently, there is no way to specify one character as being the "main".

The "alts" functionality is an OPT-IN process...the customer will have to enable it for any character they want to make visible.  This is in contrast to the basic functionality of a single character being accessible from the feeds, which is OPT-OUT - you must disable the character if you do not want it to be visible.

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-dan

 

This information is very important, so I have posted this message in both of our forums to get the widest coverage.

-dan

 

Initial mesaurement is that about 6 in 52,544 characters so far examined (aka updated from the database) have set this flag.

I know Drums at least has not exposed this in their alternate UI yet.

Is there a command-line option I wonder?

 

Someone on the EQ2 forums pointed out how he felt it was very tedious having to manually log on his alt one by one as he did it, and set the alt visibility flag.  I can feel the pain of people who have 5-6 different alts.  I think having some way to globally flag all your alts as visible (if need be through the command line) would probably help encourageing people to make their alts visible.

 

It is a pain, but it is necessary right now.  I had to flag 7 characters myself today.

I think we should be patient about this.  People are unlikely to explicitly go and enable this right away.  People will probably update their character as they normally play.  We should see how it looks in a week or so.  If it is still anemic, then we can see if there is a way to drive adoption.

-dan

 

This is a Dan question.  

Can I get a bit of information about account.age?  It's pretty clearly in days.  However, does it come across form the game to your database, or is it a timestamp and it is boiled down to days just prior to renedering it out to us?

I suspect the former, which means unless someone logs in or otherwise causes the update to occur on that character, there won't be a change.  That is, asking for not-logged-in characters 5 days in a row should have the same, fixed account age.

 

Interesting point. If it's stored internally as a timestamp, then we could calculate the account age correctly even if they haven't logged in for a few days. Otherwise we are showing account age "as of their last login".

 

I believe that is the age of the account and not the "time played".

I'll dig deeper, but that is my (sometimes flawed) memory.

-dan

 

From looking at my own account age on some of my characters, it looks as though this includes the bonuses for purchasing certain expansions in the past. 

I would have thought that account age would be in days and would be as of the last_update date.  Unfortunately, they seem to be out of sync. 

It looks like account age may have been there and been exported for a while but only externally exposed recently.  When the format update went through on the 10th (and probably any others that have happened), which went through and modified pretty much every character in the REST API, it set the last_update date (which it should) but didn't update the account age.  So for characters that haven't logged in for a while, their account age is out of sync with their last_update date.

If you guys could sync those up when the next sweep takes place through the character data and then make sure account age gets set for all future manual character updates then this data should be useable in it's current format.  We should be able to calculate how many days has elapsed since the last_update date, add that to account age, and have the actual account age in days as of right now. 

For that matter, the same method could be used in the manual updates of the character data if pulling the actual account age is an issue at that point.  When a manual update takes place, calculate the amount of days that has elapsed since the last_update date, add that to account age, and reset account age to the total.

Unless of course, I'm missing something.

Dethdlr

 

Right, and if it were exposed to us as a timestamp, then we have our Account ID, as it is rather unlikely that two accounts would be created at the exact same second except in rare cases.  There will be collisions, but I suspect there won't be many.

If it is stored once then rarely updated, it will always be out of date, so is at best a rough hint that us data presenters will get questioned about.  If it's a timestamp, you might as well expose all the alts 'cause that's what it would be doing.

The history here is that you can, in general, uniqely identify a person based on very little public information, such as their zip code and birth date.  This is actually used by some companies to narrow down searches, where they also add the first name (maybe).  It was also used to show that anonymous medical studies aren't really that anonymous.