THE CHAIN (reconstructed from the night's logs, then REPRODUCED offline in
scratchpad/test_seat_identity.py before fixing):
1. At round end every pod relaunches and seat-requests again. SAURON's
request was walk-up-assigned the departed Draco's old seat, and his pref
(callsign/mech) was correctly written -- the assign line even printed
callsign='SAURON'.
2. His request conn then closed BY DESIGN (the pod re-dials to HELLO) --
and the beacon-death branch of _drop_game, added 2026-07-26 for the
departed-player roster fix, treated any beacon death on an unclaimed
seat as a LEAVE: it printed a false 'PLAYER n LEFT' and POPPED the pref
written milliseconds earlier.
3. The next egg release _reload_egg_file()'d the DISK egg -- where the GUI's
Start Session had saved the ADOPTED roster names, including 'Draco' on
that row -- and with no pref left to override it, Draco's callsign
shipped on SAURON's seat. His plasma (and that round's score
attribution) wore the wrong name. Per-seat HELLO-vs-close ordering
roulette explains why only one seat swapped.
THE FIX: a LEFT-grace window (SEAT_LEFT_GRACE_SECONDS=15). A beacon that
dies younger than the grace is the pod's designed post-assign re-dial: keep
the pref and the reservation, print nothing. A real join-menu leaver has
held the seat far longer, so the departed-player roster fix keeps working
(pop + LEFT exactly as before); claimed seats were already exempt.
REGRESSION SUITE (new, offline, drives the real Relay class -- no ports):
A. designed instant close: pref survives, seat stays protected [was FAIL]
B. real leave (aged beacon): pref popped + seat freed [unchanged]
C. claimed seat: pref survives an unrelated conn death [unchanged]
D. a different identity assigned onto a held seat overwrites
the held pref (the operator's original suspicion, locked in) [unchanged]
All four console suites pass (rearm 25, net 17, roster 22, identity 7).
Python-only: no client update needed; the running console picks it up on its
next Start Session. Awaiting live verification next games night.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
