Save Times and Unused accounts

[Casey]

I think Derrick should make a post stating that there will be no possibility of another CUB. That way people who are hoarding items with hopes of another will start to get rid of them. I know there are people doing this, and another CUB will result in the same thing...

[Kaivan]

We stated quite some time ago that we would not have another CUB:

I just finished speaking to Derrick about the situation regarding the CUB, and this can be considered an official response: We will not be having any more CUB events.

There are several reasons for our decision, but I'll let Derrick elaborate on those issues when he has some time.

[Light Shade]

I'm sad to report that I did a test, deleting all accounts over a year old who were not house owners or guild members, and whose skill total did not exceed 400, less than 5k in the bank, and less than 2 hours of game time. This deleted 32k accounts, but only about 500k items; a pittance.

I would be curious to see how many items it would be if you changed the requirements.

Perhaps:

• Have Not Logged In For a Year.
• No House Owners.
• Less than 50k in the Bank.
• Less than 40 Hours Game Time.

I'd remove the Guild requirement, as guilds foster new players all the time who don't stick around. Case in point, C^V sponsored a new player who worked up enough to buy a small house within a week and then was never seen or heard from again. After refreshing his house for months, i've decided to let it drop.

It is quite easy for a power-gamer that has played this game before to login for a week and make enough money for a house, and then decide he'd rather try something else. Therefore, i'd raise the gold threshold dramatically...perhaps even higher than 50k.

Skills are easily worked up to 700, and many players still skill cap themselves right off the bat thinking to "see-saw" skills for stats...even though its not necessary. Urban Legends still persist. Plus, macroing a starter character up past 400 skill points is pretty easy with razor and the guides...i'd just remove this requirement entirely.

The game time of 2 hours I believe should be increased dramatically. I don't know how many players i've seen log in and play for a week or two to relive their memories, and then carry on.

Just my thoughts on that aspect of the discussion.

-L/S

P.S. I'm also all for 1 hour save times. If there's a crash or a patch, i'd say bump them back down to a half-hour for a week following either. If its stable for a week, bump it back up to an hour.

[Derrick]

I haven't looked for the post, but I'm pretty sure I did elaborate on this somewhere. There will not be another CUB. It demonstrably increases item count. There are a lot of ideas floated about how to bastardize the CUB into something that would be effective, like only allowing items that are old to be turned in, but for the purpose of memory consumption and save times, item ages are non-existent so this does not work.

We stated quite some time ago that we would not have another CUB:

I just finished speaking to Derrick about the situation regarding the CUB, and this can be considered an official response: We will not be having any more CUB events.

There are several reasons for our decision, but I'll let Derrick elaborate on those issues when he has some time.

I could do some more experimenting with different parameters for a possible account purge. I'm doing some profiling of the world saves now, but it's pretty tight :/

[qbradq]

Perhaps your criteria was too restrictive on the account wipes? I can't imagine being cheesed off that my account that I sunk 5 hours into was no longer there when I went to log in a year later.

Try this purge plan and see what it nets you:

if timeSinceLogin < 6 months, pass
if (timeSinceLoginHours - 6 months) < hoursPlayed, pass
delete

This also means that the more hours someone has put into the account the more time they have before it gets purged.

Also, I would encourage you to look at what the server is doing during the save process. Is the CPU core for that process pegged, or is it I/O bound?

Either way the save times have not been an issue for me. I would appreciate a more visible warning, as I often miss the 15-second message. Maybe you could send a simple (small) GUMP to the upper-left corner of the screen saying "Server Save Pending..." or something?

[Soma]

We stated quite some time ago that we would not have another CUB:

I just finished speaking to Derrick about the situation regarding the CUB, and this can be considered an official response: We will not be having any more CUB events.

There are several reasons for our decision, but I'll let Derrick elaborate on those issues when he has some time.

Ah I see, I do recall several people mentioning there would 'definitely' be a second CUB on the forums and ingame, so I always thought no real stance on it, but it's great to have a clarification.

[Derrick]

would encourage you to look at what the server is doing during the save process. Is the CPU core for that process pegged, or is it I/O bound?

We're CPU bound. I'm currently doing some profiling, and I may have found some savings; possible 20%ish if I cache the current time, which both is and isn't a lot.

The shard save was optimized for a I/O bound state a few years ago, but that changed when we put SSD's in the server. There doesn't look to be enough of a difference that makes it worth switching things back though, as it was a pretty dramatic change in the way things are serialized.

PS: It's a highly paralellized producer/consumer save as well, in reviewing my earlier post about hardware, we probably could do better with more cores, although we may just end up back in an I/O bound situation. The save is about 650MB currently.

[Populus]

How about a penalty for hoarding?

[Blaise]

How about a penalty for hoarding?

NEA.


I suggested in in IRC, but I'll do it here before making a thread.

We need to coordinate a Player Run CUB. Something along the lines of silver for x amount of items destroyed or something.
Anyone in?

[Sir Trammelite]

Pirul's text.

I don’t want to deviate from the obvious topic. I just wanted to state that there are other issues that should be taken into a higher priority. I also don’t see the big deal with the world save times as of now or the reasonable foreseeing future. I don’t want to go in further discussion with this because we will probably get banned for derailing.



Derrick, if someone wants to come back and their account is deleted, it will probably discourage them from playing obviously. Therefore, if the community decides that accounts meet requirements in order to move forward with a deletion process. Is there a way to keep character data stored that requires less space so an individual quitting can come back and have a restoration option and at least have their characters? However, only leave that restoration option available for an account that has been inactive for something like 1 year, then move forward with a permanent deletion?

This would be fair for everyone including an individual who is interested in coming back. However, I don’t claim to be a techy, so I am not entirely sure if this is worth the effort you’re willing to put in.

[Loathed]

How about a penalty for hoarding?

NEA.


I suggested in in IRC, but I'll do it here before making a thread.

We need to coordinate a Player Run CUB. Something along the lines of silver for x amount of items destroyed or something.
Anyone in?

i'm in =)

[Sheer Luck]

I'm proposing that we move to hourly saves. (currently 30 minutes)

2nd. 3rd.

With a stable system, hourly is overkill, 2 hours seems so doable...

If the system become "Crashy" again, it would seem simple to revert the saves back to 30 mins, till the issue is found.

[Rammar]

How about a penalty for hoarding?

NEA.


I suggested in in IRC, but I'll do it here before making a thread.

We need to coordinate a Player Run CUB. Something along the lines of silver for x amount of items destroyed or something.
Anyone in?

This would reward the same behavior that a genuine CUB would, though to a lesser degree.

No reason to coordinate at any rate, just buy up crap items and trashbarrel them. Good start might be to offer a bit less than ingot cost for tinker items... I'm sure you'll get tens of thousands of heating stands that people hoard for no real purpose.

[Vhyx]

I'm for the account deletions, as well as increasing the time between saves to 1 hour.

[Tiwstacain]

Well, I have been away for I suppose 3 months or so, I had my patio collapse with 10k of each reg + thousands of weps, i for one have very little gold in my accts. Never seen any reason to have 400000000 gp in my posession. I however do agree with pretty much anything that Derrick desides on. He has never put the server integrity at risk. And I for one totally support Derrick.





TC