Someone on GH had an alt (registered to Ares Central) that they wound up donating to the roster. He unlinked the alt from his handle, but he’s still getting all that character’s new notification info now that the character got picked up by someone else.
Could we have it so unlinked handles no longer see notifications? He’s also still showing as being that Player’s alt on the Player page.
Additionally, could we get players who no longer have character bits on the game removed from the list of players? There are a few people who picked up rosters, linked them, then never played them, but they still show as playing that roster, even if someone else has since picked up the character. Same with people who had a toon nuked: they still show on the list of Players, just with no characters.
Adding a character to the roster (or any other idle action) should clear their handle info. It’s part of the idle cleanup process in Idle::idle_cleanup.
That will also disconnect them on the Players page unless the player put a player:soandso tag on their character page (which isn’t really necessary if you have a handle).
I tested it on my game and it seems to work OK. Are there any errors in your log that would indicate that the idle cleanup failed?
Unlinking a character from AresCentral is a little different, though. AresCentral has no way to talk to the game directly to say “this character was unlinked”. The link won’t get cleared until the next time that character logs in and tries/fails to sync up with AresCentral.
Forgot to reply to this part. No, sorry, that’s as designed. The point of AresCentral is to keep track of who you’ve played. Even if you only played for a while, got rostered, quit, whatever – that’s still part of your character history.
It does allow a character to show up under multiple players if they get re-rostered, but that assumes the new player also has a handle and linked the character.
No errors. It’s also listed under his “former characters” on Ares Central. The character in question has no handle linked to it right now, but his old player is seeing the notices for his unread mail, etc.
And 10/4 on the “showing people who previously played someone.” I get that, though it’s a little confusing to see a character under multiple players on the players listing, since it doesn’t tag it as (former) or anything.
In the case of this roster - his new player hasn’t linked him to a handle, so he’s only on the Players page under his former player, which makes it look like that’s his current player.
Check to see if the former character page has a tag of player:soandso. If there’s no handle, that’s the only reason it should still be showing up on the players page.
I don’t understand the notifications thing though. What specifically are they seeing?
I might be able to make AresC tag players as “former”, but that’ll only help if they manually unlink their character or if the character gets re-assigned to somebody else. Otherwise there’s no event to notify AresC that they quit.
Tangentially-related and didn’t want to create a new topic for it…
Just wanted to say that I really like the new look of the individual game pages on AresCentral, with the way the handles and characters are laid out now. \o/
I thought I’d bump this thread rather than make a new one, as it’s a similar topic! Basically I very much understand that AresCentral handles are opt in, and I actually like the value of having my old PCs show up as former characters when I retire them. But is there a world in which an old character can be removed entirely? Sometimes someone might rethink having a character connected to their handle for plenty of legitimate reasons, while still liking to utilize the handle functionality in general.
That is not currently supported. I have seen known abusers attempt to remove characters from their handle to hide their bad behavior, so that is the main reason why you can’t erase your connection to a past character.
I can understand why you might not want a char you played for 5 minutes persisting on your account, but apart from that, I’m struggling to envision “plenty of legitimate reasons” for erasing a character history.
For the record - although I don’t see it as something likely to come up often, if there is some kind of special circumstance, feel free to reach out to me directly. It will have to be handled on a case by case basis, though, and not as a general coded feature.