Okay

17k

15k

Using /whois on a player displays the Nickname first then the actual username.

For example, it currently displays the first line as:
"myskillzownu is myskillzownu"

With a nickname, it would read:
"Dave is myskillzownu"

However, not every single player will be using /whois all the time.

And I would agree with everyone else -- Nicknames would not only make things confusing, but it's also not actually necessary here. Every server is different. If we don't see a beneficial use for a certain feature, why use it?

How often do you truly need a persons real name?
And the ~ at the front would let you know they have a nickname set before you type in your command.

The point isn't that it's beneficial, it's just, in my opinion, nice.

I'll stop arguing though; the consensus is against it and I see no reason to carry on a lost cause.

Thanks for all of the tips & advice; definitely taking it all into consideration.

Wow, lucky.

I've barely left my home state, let alone this the US as a whole. (Though I think I would prefer to move to California than a different Country.)

My answer to question 3 would be to not have the client tell the server what to do. The examples that you provided can be done server side. The drop system could easily be done server side in which the server knows what to drop or if you kill something and it is supposed to be a random drop, you could use math.random() and assign a int value to different items, blah blah blah. The answer to the damage hack would be to simply have the server know how much damage each weapon deals and not have the client tell the server how much damage it would like to do.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the advice -.^
That, however, still leaves open some big gaps.
The main one that comes to mind being the fact that the amount of damage done is one thing (and can easily be done server-side), but determining if there is supposed to be damage done in the first place is a whole new ball game. I.E. User1 says he attacked User2. There are times when both players may be in a pvp area, in which a server check would be useless here. Who's to say User1 didn't actually attack User2?

I can think of checks for a lot of scenarios, but I'm sure there will always be some genius that finds a way to cheat some how. That and if the server ran a check for every single action that took place for every user, it would get pretty laggy.
I really hope people decided to support this game on kickstarter, as I would absolutely love to be able to hire a professional for this aspect, if nothing else.
Writing any code is one thing. Fixing bugs and make something truly secure is something else entirely.