The Tavern

Quick poll re offline ghost names: is it good or bad when they are real usernames? There are really two questions here, one about other players, and one about your own usernames. Multiple selection is enabled.

I'd seriously object to that.
It's one thing to have my data freely accessible on the webtiles servers I play on for morgue + leaderboard purposes, but quite another to have it distributed with every copy of the game and its source code.

edit: nm, everything is fine

I'm not convinced these are materially different in the context of a fictional username. If I know your username I can look up your stats/previously played games/etc online right now.

If someone bumps into a ghost that happens to have your username offline this does not appear to change access to information at all.

The whole reason we pick fake names for forums/gaming is because these are practical for being widely available/seen/etc.

Not to mention the very real possibility that an arbitrarily selected/generated name could match an actual username by accident, and given the generic nature of many names + # players in crawl this is likely to happen.

Wait, does crawl gather and send some data from my computer right now?

I should say not. Maybe, the information on the web version goes into the download version.

I hope so. It is weird that there are "(online)" remarks in 3rd and 4th options of the poll but not in the first 2.

It means that ghost names are gathered from online usernames and included in downloadable offline versions. Nothing is gathered from offline versions.