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I watched the video on Game Center Player Identifiers and saw that GKPlayer's playerId is deprecated in iOS 13, to be replaced with gamePlayerId and teamPlayerId. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/615/Our games allow players to login with Game Center to join and play games hosted on our servers. We use playerId to identify players so that they can play and earn rating points under their own account. The video says to transition to using teamPlayerId to identify players, which by itself isn't too complicated, but I'm concerned that this hasn't been fully thought through and some players may lose access to their accounts in systems like ours.1. As player's login during the transition period, we will need to read both playerId and teamPlayerId in order to change their account on our servers to the new id. After the transition, when playerId is removed from iOS, it seems that any player who hasn't logged in, perhaps returning to the app after a long break, will no longer be able to access their previous account. They will appear to us as a completely new player. It seems we need some proactive way, like a server API, to convert playerId values to the new teamPlayerId.2. In the video, the presenter says that there is a "very rare case" when teamPlayerId and gamePlayerId will not be available to uniquely identify the player. In this case, we will have no method of identifying the player and allowing them to access an account on our servers. Nothing is explained about what this "very rare case" is or how to help users correct this. Slide 13 shows how to check for the error case, but does not provide any example error message or error handling.3. We use GKLocalPlayer's generateIdentityVerificationSignatureWithCompletionHandler API to authenticate players on our servers. This API has not been updated, and it's documentation still says to use playerId. It seems a new API will be needed to deal with players having multiple, different ids.I'm interested to hear from other developers who use Game Center as a login method for their own servers and are facing these kinds of issues. I'm hoping this post might get the attention of someone at Apple, but I'll also try to engage them in other ways and report anything I find out.
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by RajDoshi.
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