Curious but non critical error

Im gming a game and have a few characters including a "PC" directly attached to my name.

My GM account and all NPC attached to me shows last log in: 21:19, Today
But the one PC shows: 22:34, Yesterday

Even though that PCs most recent post shows: 20:55, Today

Yes, that's intentional.  Times are fudged slightly in the Cast List for all PCs being run by GMs.  It makes it harder for players to spot whicj player characters are actually being run by the GM simply by checking the list.

This message was deleted by the user at 13:54, Fri 31 Aug 2012.

Not in the Cast List.  There it would show log in and post times which match.  The only place it would show a different time would be on the post itself.  So if a player really wants to write down all the times on every post, then look for a pattern of variations between those post times and the Cast List times, then eventually, yes, they could work out that the post times don't match between the Cast List and the posts.

Note that this would be tricky, because the Cast list doesn't tell players the exact time of the posts, only the day.

In addition, if the GM is running a PC for a player who is sick, or on holiday, the Cast List still bases its log in times on that (missing) player, but the post dates are based on the character, so you will get cases where the player has not logged in for three days, but posted today.

Figured I'd add this issue to this thread since it involves cast times and all the proper explanations are already posted.  :)

I've noticed in one game where I am a player that one of the characters with a player tag has a "last login" time that has fluctuated three times today between "today" and "yesterday".  I'm pretty sure that the character in question is a GM's PC, and if that's so then the fluctuations kind of give it away.

It's also pretty obvious that one of the characters is a GM character tagged as a player when the character is posting as usual, even having OOC chats, but the last login is showing as "yesterday" while the corresponding GM login is "today".  In all my other active games I'm a GM so I don't know if the problem is occurring in other games than this particular one.  These are by no means big deals, but if the variability of login timestamps is going to really help keep the GM PC identities secret, these are little quirks that need to be tweaked.

ETA:  Also, if the stamp says "yesterday" at 11:59, then I come back at 12:15 and the stamp still says "yesterday", it's a pretty good bet the player didn't log in and that's a GM character.
This message was last edited by the user at 04:24, Sat 19 Apr 2014.

Last logins are only updated every couple of hours, and it's also rounded to the nearest day when a player views the cast list, so you can get some odd times.  The server's time zone change on Thursday (-ish.. depending on your own time zone) would also have caused some strange issues.

No amount of mucking around with the dates is going to hide GM characters if a player looks close enough.

Fair enough. I was mostly concerned by the back and forth I saw yesterday. I'd never seen that happen before.

A character's "last login" time isn't updated until a player clicks into a game, as I remember it.  So, you might have this scenario.

• Player A makes a post then clicks back to RPoL's main menu
• Player B posts.
• Player A posts in a completely different game, multiple times (and you happen to know Player A there)
• GM posts
• Player A goes back to RPoL's main menu
• Player A sees the post number in red on RPoL's main menu and clicks in to the game. At this point, Player A's last login time updates.