i'm reading this thinking that the ways i did it in A6 was really cr&p, now it seems everyone does it this way...

what i did was to create a login screen, then the client would click login after inputing his name and password and session_connect... this then sent a message to the server including the player_name (clients username), and password and then checked with the details the server held,

if all was ok at this point, the server would send back a message to all clients, but specifying it was for this certain client, so all other clients would ignore it... the recipient would update it's player_name with this requested username and giving it a unique ID,

any forthcoming messages would then reference this player_name so there is no chance of duplicaiton of username, and all updates would be done like this... unfortunately using this method all clients have to receive the string to realise if it's intended for them or not, and then act accordingly

this did have it's advantages however... if i was sending a string to a guild_name everyone in that guild would receive the string and act accordingly, and similarly to a team, raid or a private message. as long as i put enough information in that string for the client to determine what to do with it

hopefully this isn't the way everyone is thinking of doing things, but atm the way i'm reading it, it seems to be the only possible answer...