[POLICY] Accessing Alt Characters

We have had a rather long internal discussion around the accessibility of other characters on a particular account.

In the past, we had privacy policies that allow one to hide their "alts" to be able to play other characters without much notice.  The (current) player's site allows you to set this policy.  However, this requires that you login to identify that you have the authority to set this privacy policy.

Argument in Favor

• Some guilds expressly require that one not hide their alts.
• If you can list the other characters on an account, it makes it very easy to look at all of "your" characters.
• With Free to Play, there is very little friction to creating another account for your alts - thus giving one a much better opportunity for insulation of characters.

Argument Against

• If alt characters are easily discoverable, one may be open to harassment on them.

The ability to make a character private - excluding it from the API, searches, leaderboards, etc. - will still remain in place independent of any change to this particular policy.

Any thoughts or further arguments for or against?

-dan

 

I'm all for having alts linked. 

However, given that the player can choose to not link alts brings up a point.  I'm taking a guess that the api would just come back with no characters linked.  However, I feel it should come back stating that alt characters are marked as private, not a blank list, otherwise folks could and would just mark alts private and pretend they had no alts.  Having no alts and hiding your alts are indeed two seperate states that are independant of each other.

 

It doesn't quite work that way.  The character record is independent and doesn't have any knowledge of the other characters on the same account.  However, we could include the account ID so that a subsequent search could be used to find all of the other characters.  We currently block this to prevent this from happening.  

The implementation of this policy would be to make that available.  It would allow one to search for characters using an account ID instead of a character ID (or field value).

The filtering used for blocking information makes them effectively invisible.  We don't (currently) have a way of them being "redacted".  That does have some benefits, but it could also be quite frustrating.  I'm not in favor of teasing people of information that they are being excluded from.

-dan

 

Just for completeness, I want to make sure everyone is aware that the ability to hide characters from EQ2Players (and thus the REST API) is also available from within EQ2.  It's a simple checkbox for any character and poof, nobody can see them anymore.

I REALLY want the ability to see alts for the site Feldon and I are working on.  It's going to make things a lot easier and nicer than if we don't have this ability.  Privacy settings are already in place for those that don't want their info to be seen.

 

As with most privacy decisions, I am also of two minds on this.  After all, there is the "can't put the genie back in the bottle" problem.  Sure, you can mark your alts as private after the fact, but the knowledge is already out there.  With the old hard-to-machine-parse eq2players site as the only way to find this information, really only humans learned the linkage before the alts were hidden.

But today, it is quite possible that a developer may choose to provide this information on their site -- I sure would -- and once it's set, they may choose to not un-set it.  I would track what Sony produces in favor of player choice.  However, this is opt-in privacy, not that means there must be action on the player's side.

So, I would say that shaing the account ID would be fine (so long as that ID can't be used to log into the game of course!) but that the rules of accessing the SoE data feed requires that a developer respect this and un-set linkages they may set upon discovery.

 

We are going to be adding a new setting within the in-game UI that will enable this feature.  The availability of this feature is still TBD as it needs time from the game team to enable it.  

By default, the alts will NOT be visible until a customer changes the setting. They will have to set each character to make it visible.

The character data currently includes the following information:

"account": {    "age": 360, }

Once enabled by the customer, the character data would include a new field, link_id, as follows:

"account": {    "age": 360,     "link_id": 10348384}

If the character is not enabled for alts, the link_id field will not be present. The value in this field can be used in queries to find all of the characters from the same account.

For example...

/jml/get/eq2/character/?account.link_id=10348384

This query will return all characters with the same link_id.

 

That sounds like a good way to do it.  That way, the players will be in control, just like it was with the former EQ2Players website.  Thanks!

 

That is the plan.

We will probably need to do some communication to educate customers on how to enable this.  The functionality will be *much* better with this enabled.

-dan

 

I was hoping it would be Opt-Out instead of Opt-In, but I'll take what I can get.

The instructions to Opt-Out of the Data Feeds API are the #1 question on our FAQ page. Instructions on how to Opt-Out of the Data Feeds, and Opt-In to Alts lookups will be the first thing I mention in the first official article about our site.

Thanks Dan.

 

Yeah...making it opt-in makes it easier to avoid pitchforks (as Dethdlr might say).

Thanks for the support on your site.

-dan

 

And torches.  Don't forget the torches. 

 

Expect "Wait, you didn't keep the EQ2Players privacy settings?" rage. Oh wait, people will rage about anything.

 

But as others have said, opt-out was the way before.

Perhaps a middle ground?  A character count could always be presented for those guilds which require "all alts to be visible" and can confirm they are?

--Quicktiger

 

Understood.  This issue is going to be contentious for a while, but we will eventually get "there" (wherever that is).

The SOE players site *will* be able to show your alts and even your characters marked as private because they are wrapping their site with authentication.  Because we know it is "you", it is okay to provide more detail.  At some point, I want to allow the notion of identity to be usable in the data feeds so that you (a site that is consuming the feed) can access this information.

As the various sites get out there and expose this information - and more customers get a chance to chime in on the issue - it is fairly academic.  We've taken a conservative approach as a first step.

It is my personal opinion that we should allow folks to see all characters at any time (as the feed from Blizzard does).  However, my perspective may be different from others.

-dan

 

The currently planned system will allow someone to say "I'm showing all my alts" when they're not. A character count would help.

 

This is a difficult problem to truly solve.  I get what the intent is for guilds, but the world is a bit different now.

If I am going to step out on my guild, I am unlikely to do it an alt anymore.  With the advent of FreeToPlay, I can simply create an entirely new account and I can easily escape scrutiny.

The only way to truly solve this is to have a way to have a way to associate characters across multiple accounts.

-dan

 

Would it be possible to add an option giving the guild leader the ability to be able to see any/all of your toons on the same account, or for the player to add a name to a list like friends/trustees of houses and that person can see their alts?

That way the players that for whatever reasons have issues with people knowing their alts, would still have the protection they desire and at the same time allow them to be in guilds that require alts to be visible, the leadership doesn't care whether or not the rest of the world can see alts they want to know who they are getting and if there have been issues with them in the past.

 

We are working on something that would be similar to this - however, it is lower priority than the efforts to scale the service even more.

Here is a scenario that I'm concerned about:

My guild leader wants to see all my characters so that I can know that I'm loyal to the guild.  However, since the game is free to play, I have created another account and play characters on there to cheat on my guild. 

How does the option of giving the guild leader the ability to see all the toons on Account A prevent me from cheating from Account B?

-dan

 

Well there are always ways around things but on a *different* account things like heirloom items can not be passed along which is one concern, using one raid guild to feed itmes to a toon in another.

Even before the game went F2P people were boxing multiple accounts so this was NEVER possible to prevent, although account linking would be cool, a list of unlocked War runes would be WAY COOLER!.  (had to give that a plug)

 

There is no solution to "cheating" but in general, most people who submit to a raiding guild aren't the F2P type.  I think understanding the reasons why a guild may require information about all alts is better than trying to solve all problems.

I feel the main reason is to confirm that the alts a player has are not "jerks" or otherwise not wanted, as well as ensuring that they are not also in another raiding guild.  Also, if I claim "my alt is in uber guild Foo" but there is no tie between the character you're on and the alt in question, it's hard to confirm they are the same player.

Sure, multiple accounts are always an issue, but I don't feel most F2P people will be raiders, so those toons are laregely ignored.  Not being able to wear the gear helps.