#@Iain few more questions 🙂
leaden notch
I think that for now, the only way to retrieve a player by a linked identifier (like steam) is by using the admin API. You could look it up in the dashboard afterwards
strange imp
On the formatting of data in the Dashboard, I actually just posted a couple of times in a thread on a forum that should clear things up! https://forum.unity.com/threads/config-jsonserializersettings-for-iplayerdataservice-saveasync.1581909/#post-9834120
I'm working on turning that into a Workflow in our documentation for docs.unity.com as understanding a good workflow for working with objects it's the number one issue we see folks running into with Cloud Save.
There is an example in the "Samples" but it's not super obvious and probably the Sample needs to be multiple samples at this point, there is a lot going on there.
TL;DR That's happening because the data is being turned into a string when it's getting passed to Cloud Save, but you can just pass a native object to Cloud Save (including ones with lists of complex types!).
If passing a raw object isn't easy for some reason -e.g. because of the seralisation approach you are using - then JObject.Parse(obj); on the object when saving should solve the issue and result in it being saved as an object, and so appear correctly (and be easily editable) in the Dashboard.
On the Player ID, yeah that's the Unity Player ID and there isn't a way to look up from Steam ID easily in the Dashboard, as @leaden notch was saying.
We had a discussion about this just this morning (in two meetings actually!) and someone else raised it internally as we've had other folks as about it.
I think we are going to address this in a few ways, one probably by surfacing Player Names more in the UI - it's a lot easier than working with Player ID's all the time - and we can explicitly label the ID as "Unity Player ID" in the UI.
We want to look again at the Player Management UI, but I think in the shorter term we might see if we can address specifically making it easier to put something like a Steam ID (or Apple ID, or Google ID, or Username, etc) and look up players from there.