One one hand, I applaud that the game can go a week or so without a crash or needing to be rebooted. On the other hand, it is a real pain in the rear for a number of reasons I am sure will sound familiar... mainly:

1) The commerce system breaks down when so few of the shoppies will buy anything for 5+ days straight

2) Lots of mobs just aren't anywhere close to where they are supposed to be, including many ranking and quest mobs.

3) A lot of limited eq is either in unreachable locations like cabal pits, or obscure dump locations around Thera.

Any chance we could implement some sort of informal rebooting policy, where a 59+ would be allowed to do a reboot if the game has been up for 4+ days? I know my mudding time would feel just a little more productive, since the last couple of weeks have been especially harsh for us reboot-wanters.

since there are always other options for those. I think my main problems with long periods of uptime is the economy. I know this is sorta parroting/reinforcing what others say, but I think its an important point.

I class (thieves) rely on gold/copper if they want to go the guild angle. Likewise, Empire now totally relies on gold/copper. Sure, you can go out pking to take your enemies money, but not every empire role will want to/can do that.

I know there has been talk of merchants replenishing their money stocks more often...guess this whole post amounts to me saying "Yes, do that!"

rambling over.

Disagree. The game shouldn't have to restart in order for these "problems" to be solved. If constant uptime causes *legitimate* game-play issues, then something's wrong with the game-play. Weekly reboots would just be workaround.

This might not be worth the effort, but I'd like to see mobs track back to their home location (as if they were tracking a PC) after some period of time has elapsed if their current position (i.e. not at home) is due to having tracked a PC, and that PC has died or quit out so that the mob is no longer tracking them.

For mobs that have been summoned away, it's not realistic to expect CF to support the AI that would be necessary it to walk home from whatever arbitrary place it was summoned to. In this case, though, it's really a problem that can be solved IC. If you need a mob for whatever reason and it's not where you expect it to be, just ask (or pay) a high-level summoner to summon it back home.

My biggest problem with long up time is when playing a goodie I need to spend literally weeks trying to gear properly as there is no IC way to make gear repop on a goodie mob that a goodie can do. He can't just kill it every log in.

That's the down side to being good. Supposedly gear repops on the mob now when it's under limit. Maybe other people are just getting there first.

Which can be essential to regearing at most levels. Heroes not so much.

I can think of a lot of non-limited gear I like to request from mobs that aren't about to die any time soon.

And I think its okay to have rebooting as part of the worlds workings. The processing needs for all these tracking mobs could put a lot of weight on ticks and I've noticed that lag can build up over time anyway. After reboots, the mud is significantly less 'tied up' for a good day or so.

Yhorian.

Requested objects eventually reappear on their owners, limited or otherwise. It's intentionally a slow process, but they do.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

I'd like to see this apply to tracking mobs and stolen items. A kuo-toa monk shouldn't sit on the road for five days. He should lose interest and return to his home after a while. The stealing part hurts thieves, because they can't find new things to barter.

I remember after this change went in I had lost an item. I knew it was sacced because the guy did it in front of me. I summoned the mob that carried it into the cabal, and it wasn't for like 2 days of real life time that it repopped on the mob. Nobody else had requested it in the interim, since I was at the time the only cabal member who could make use of it, so I know it wasn't requested by anyone else.

<I summoned the mob that carried it into the cabal>

This could be how you screwed up. Summoning mobs out of the areas they are supposed to be in screws up all kinds of things both with mechanics/programming and for players, including how much exp you get for killing the mob. It's reasonable to assume that you can't create a Goodie Gear Farm (TM) by parking all of the good goodie regear mobs in the fortress with summon. So it probably wouldn't repop.

nt

>I remember after this change went in I had lost an item. I
>knew it was sacced because the guy did it in front of me. I
>summoned the mob that carried it into the cabal, and it wasn't
>for like 2 days of real life time that it repopped on the mob.
>Nobody else had requested it in the interim, since I was at
>the time the only cabal member who could make use of it, so I
>know it wasn't requested by anyone else.

I looked at it today while digging into some other questions about the process, and it looks like it's working like a champ. I did change the way the gear gets worn once it is returned. There were some people saying that it would get stuck in their inventory at times, perhaps this is what happened to you.

I noticed a similar problem with mobs in the Consortium who are able to be requested from.

Would you prefir that thousands upon thousands of hours of coding time be spent making it so a reboot is never needed, or would you prefir those hours going into finishing up areas, rewrites, Immteraction, writing new quests, skills, spells, classes, and races? It is as simple as that. While it might sound cool if the mud never needed a reboot, it is simply not worth the effort. A three minute downtime every week is not that bad, in my opinion.

"Thousands upon thousands of hours" sounds like a bit of an exagerration, no?

Reboots are inherently ooc and impost that element on the game. They erase game "state" that could otherwise be preserved, they mess up player interactions, etc. Maybe this is just aesthetic, but it seems like a well-designed online "world" shouldn't have to be periodically rebooted, just like any other long-running process (database, ftp server, mail server, opeating system, etc.) shouldn't require periodic reboots.

To answer your question, though, if it really would take thousands up on thousands of hours to implement something like this, then I'd happily put up with reboots.

>"Thousands upon thousands of hours" sounds like a bit of an
>exagerration, no?

I'd agree with that.

>Reboots are inherently ooc and impost that element on the
>game. They erase game "state" that could otherwise be
>preserved, they mess up player interactions, etc. Maybe this
>is just aesthetic, but it seems like a well-designed online
>"world" shouldn't have to be periodically rebooted, just like
>any other long-running process (database, ftp server, mail
>server, opeating system, etc.) shouldn't require periodic
>reboots.

Like...oh...any MMORPG (World of Warcraft)...which have weekly downtime/maintenance and yes...the worlds get reset. I understand what is being asked, and honestly, it happens so rarely that we are up for 7-10 days at at time without a reboot that it doesn't make my list. I personally don't care if someone wants to reboot the mud during that time. Part of what drives reboots is coding, and when there is more going on, reboots happen more often. When there is less going on, there are fewer and we end up with posts like this.

>Part of
>what drives reboots is coding, and when there is more going
>on, reboots happen more often. When there is less going on,
>there are fewer and we end up with posts like this.

It's not a big complaint of mine either, hence my not being the one who originated this post. You're talking about bringing the game down so changes can go in. That's perfectly reasonable, and I've got no complaints with that. My comment was more geared towards reboots as a solution to game-play issues that arise from long uptimes. Systems that exist inside the game (e.g. the economy) should (imho) be designed such that they're self-healing and function indefinitely without having to be reset.

n/t