we had this discussion already a few times, but i want to bump it a bit.

would there real problems when user renames would be disallowed in lobby?

it is/was mostly used for clan tags, but imo a clan tag is set once and then used forever. renames only lead to confusion to other players, also it would make trolls live much harder as they can't easily reuse their existing account.

maybe the feature, that moderators can rename users, can be added.
allowing the clan-tag in the name was a bad decission, it should be some optional parameter, similar to the country code.

why so hardcoded?

Would lead to an increase in smurfing, while not giving greater recognizability.

reason? why?

in zk imo its bad to loose player stats, registering a new user was always possible, so i wouldn't expect an increase in smurfing. also the normal lobby rank would be lost, too. with allowed renames trolls lose nothing.

Usually a player does not have a clan yet when he register. It is only after some time that he joins/creates a clan and then he must be able to change name. For zK planetwars players sometimes added their faction to name. For some time players liked have their played games in the name, like "playername[CA][NOTA]"
So changing name is somewhat popular, even "respected non-trolling" players (for example zK team) often have 5 or more variations of nick.

this doesn't mean renaming is required. a "tag" is then required, i still see no reason, why a user should be allowed to rename his account. renames are miss-used for storing data...

(but thanks for this info, this makes an alternative a requirement before renames can be disallowed.)

I agree with behe - trolls would just make new acc to 'rename'. And there is a lot of non-troublesome renaming too.

Making a new account takes no time at all & I'm worried that the change would encourage autohost owners back to bad old days of banning rank 1 accounts since these accounts would be more likely to be trolls (& goodbye newbies).

Atm we have SLDB + an active autohost admin network and between them for now they prevent trolling problems very effectively (@abma do you disagree? what's made you to want the change?). Thanks to SLDB it's become near impossible for someone to change name or account without host/lobby admins being able to identify - 99% of the time the automatic system links accounts for balancing/banning purposes too.

I think that just using one data field for a globally unique identifier, human displayable name and clan tags is wrong.

Ideally we would have a globally unique name that gets created when the user creates his account, and that should never be changed.

We would also have a human name which would get displayed and can get renamed.

Clan tags are a different concept altogether. Ideally one could be a part of multiple clans, but those should be specified elsewhere (not a part of his name). We also lack a concept of a clan (i.e. you can put a clan tag without actually being a part of any clan, which is wrong imo).

The display name may include the human name, unique name and clan tag(s) but that should be up to the application.

My suggestion is to create a new "human name" for each user and copy the users current "name" to it, disallow changes to the "name" field and allow changes to the "human name" fields. Add clan tags later, but allow them to be a part of the users "human name" for now. Allow moderators to change the users "name" during the transition process but lock it after a few months.

this exists already, but it has been introduced as an aftertought and as result nearly all commands return login name instead of user id, howrever the unchanging id exists, is in place and is advertised in the protocol

user id is a simple progressive number assigned by the server when you create the account, without that weird complicated system you suggested, if anything, the protocol should support using user id as args for commands instead of login name, but it's not strictly necessary since you receive user id upon logon and can still track

Any user can use the ZK site to create a clan and upload an icon. Members of the clan can be added by that user. Icon shows in zklobby and weblobby next to user names.

Using a name instead of a surrogate key as a unique identifier is weird?

I meant the transition process, however I agree that a single login name that doesn't change with displayed name would be nice, but I don't see that happening anytime soon unless someone steps up and extends the protocol with yet another optional flag since I suspect backwards compatibility will be required to accept the patch

If we allow 2 different names and login names I fear we get the same problem as in - for example - NovaRaider.

How do you want to invite or send message to a player called "¤5ŦA®¤ĦUŊŦ€®¤"?

Or what do you do if someone has a "human name" which is equivalent to another person's login name or vice versa?

I like how ID-numbers work, and I would like a name-prefix or sufix field.

I will +1 if you can only put a tag with these "][" brackets or 3+ upper case letters into your pre/suf-fix if you actually have the rights for this tag.

If we compare names with already registered names, the system should thread Zero and the letter 'O' equally, because they look so similar.
The same with lower case L and upper case i, etc.