Stendhal 0.87.2: When equal is not equal

The quick fix of the issue was possible because of attentive players reporting the duplicated login to /support and our item logging detecting that the item with id 14970409 (a fire sword) existed twice.

We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused. Especially to the players who were isolated in jail during the investigation. In order to mitigate the consequences we quickly isolated everyone who traded with the account in question. The in detail investigation concluded that those trades were okay (with only one exception). Every one has been released by now. We feel sorry for a sheep that vanished during the server update.

The issue was caused by the MySQL database and the game server not agreeing on what is equal: For MySQL the characters i and í are equal in the username field. So it was possible to login with an í although your username has an i.

After a successful login and selection of a character, the game server checks if that character is already online. In this case the old client is disconnected and ownership of the character object is transfered to the new client. This did not work because the game server did not recognize those usernames as equal. Therefore it was possible to have one character online twice at the same time.