The only way I can think of that is an easy way to move from account to community name, and it'd have to work clientside as well to avoid further headaches.

I can't think of a way to fix it that isn't impractical.

I doubt this would be the reason as you can still simply create a Graal##### account and never come back to it. I have a Graal##### account that I'll probably A) Never upgrade, and B) Having decided not to upgrade it: Never use it again. Pretty much exactly the same thing as creating a trial account just to "try" Graal.

I figure it should be the old system, but with a very simple solution to people just trying and never coming back: If the account created meets set conditions (Such as never upgraded, and has been inactive for more than X amount of days/weeks/months), the service and attachment to e-mail are severed and the account name back up for grabs for another person to make use of.

Old system was working fine, could always revert back so there's no more of these silly account names being created and then support renaming of accounts or something. Would give the globals something useful to do for once. :p

but would it lose CJ money? they won't go for it if it does ):?

I don't see how they'd lose money... I don't think anyone upgrades just to get a community name.

Don't see how they'd lose money from it.

ditch Graal#s and community names, make account names changeable with Gelat purchases.

<3

Are you serious? That is a technical nightmare, account names are the ultimate method for identification, changing that would just introduce so many problems for so little benefit. A person is better if making a new account.

We have nicknames for a reason.

The whole reason we can't just use community name for identification is because it changes. Account name changes cause many, many problems with many servers. You'll be reset on just about any server using any sort of file-based item storage (GK, Zodiac, new Era, and many others). You'd lose many random variables as well (for example, on Era, bank accounts are stored in a database by account).

Account name changing would be a disaster.

Step one would be to go back to the old registration when you picked your account name and disable this graal######################## garbage.

Please report bugs with community name on RC or similar (may be someone could assemble all problems with it so that I can fix it one batch).

I don't see the problem with handling community names for scripters except when converting very old scripts. If you want to show someones name it's usually not identical to the account name (most of the time it's the nick name). So it's your choice if you display the nick name or community name.
You should identify people with their account name, but never show the account name. You should show the nick name of the player, or in rare cases the community name if you don't want that they modify it all the time.

A lot of systems are based on using a different identification than the current player name. The original idea was to directly use the computer id (like for guests) but that can change so it's better to use some other number.

Like I said in the original post, the problem is that you have to keep track of multiple identifiers: one that is displayed to the public, and one that is used behind the scenes to keep track of the player.

Before, we didn't have to worry about this because players were perfectly happy with using their account name as an identifier.

There are also problems with RC (problems that you could easily fix) such as when you try to open the attributes of a community name, they appear blank. The same thing happens for comments, rights, etc. Besides that, there's no way to find someone's account name via profiles unless the server has opted to add it to profilevars=, like a few servers (including Era) have. This is especially a problem since there is an existing glitch which causes players to have no community name (shows as '0' in profile), which can also mess with a lot of scripts.

There are also other reasons why community names are disliked, which are outlined in this thread (which is based less on the developer's experience and more on the players, which should be especially important to you), as well as the one we're in now.

The thing is that you don't need to display the account name, I don't see problems with this on Zone. Why do players need to know the account name of someone else via profile?
Like I've said before, if there are really problems with community names that make administration harder then please let me know.

Apperentially some people have scripting problems, even thought FindPlayerByCommunityName() exists, Chris said it doesn't solve all problems tho.

I even once heard people complaining about the function being too long, z_Z.