The Bukkit / Spigot API makes NO guarantees regarding the integrity of references to Entities (such as Player). Thus, it is advised to only ever store the UUIDs of players and convert them into real players using Bukkit.getPlayer. There are virtually no performance penalties involved because Bukkit.getPlayer internally uses a HashMap to store map UUIDs to Player objects.
MinusKube
commented
3 years ago
The Bukkit / Spigot API makes NO guarantees regarding the integrity of references to Entities (such as Player). Thus, it is advised to only ever store the UUIDs of players and convert them into real players using Bukkit.getPlayer. There are virtually no performance penalties involved because Bukkit.getPlayer internally uses a HashMap to store map UUIDs to Player objects.