Automate and Moderate: User Impersonation in Your Game Servers using LootLocker

Modern games are more than just real-time action, or late night explorations. They are complete, sprawling, living worlds. As such, building and maintaining these experiences is a bigger and bigger undertaking. Bringing your world alive often requires things like daily rewards, asynchronous events, and timed tasks that keep players coming back and experiencing new things every day. But how do you make all of this happen?

Enter User Impersonation, a new feature in the LootLocker Server API and Unreal Server SDK that lets your server act on behalf of any player, at any time, using just their player ID.

What is User Impersonation?

User Impersonation allows your server to generate an active token for any player using their unique player ULID. This means you can perform actions through the Game Api on behalf of players even when they’re offline or not actively playing.

When Should You Use User Impersonation?

• Moderation: Need to remove an item from a player’s inventory after a report? No problem.
• Daily Rewards: Want to grant daily login bonuses, even if the player isn’t online? Easy.
• Async Events: Running a tournament and need to distribute prizes after the fact? Done.

Think of games like Clash Royale or Genshin Impact, where daily rewards, moderation, and scheduled events are crucial. With User Impersonation, you can automate all of this from your game servers.

Example: Moderation Actions

Games like Minecraft or Fortnite often rely on heavily curated online experiences making sure that players have a fun but safe time playing. With impersonation you can now greatly improve the tools you make available for moderation. If a player is reported for inappropriate behavior, your moderation tool can impersonate the player and remove offending content or items, change the player name, or undo other actions that the player has taken. All without needing the player to be logged in.

Example: Game Masters

In games like World of Warcraft players buy, sell, and earn items which are stored in their inventory. Sometimes, however players make mistakes that cannot be easily undone on their own and need to contact a Game Master for help. With impersonation, the moderator (in this case a Game Master) can use the tools avaialble to them to fix the issue even if the player isn't online.

Step by step: Implementing impersonation with LootLocker

1. Server Setup: Your game server runs both the LootLocker Server SDK and the LootLocker SDK.
2. Identify the Player: You have the player’s ULID (unique player ID). Either from say storing a list of players that have played that day, or fetching a list of players from LootLocker, or from a leaderboard.
3. Impersonate: Use the User Impersonation method to get an active game api token for that player.
4. Perform Actions: Use the token to make any call to the LootLocker Game API on behalf of the player.

For more detailed instructions, refer to our user documentation.

Getting Started

To get started, check out our Unreal Server SDK documentation and see how User Impersonation can power up your server automation.

User Impersonation gives you the power to automate, moderate, and enhance your game like never before. Whether you’re running daily events, handling moderation, or building new backend features, this tool is here to help.

For more details, visit our documentation or join the conversation on Discord.