Uptime

[*Splork*]

We have been up for 22 days which is probably the longest uptime I have ever seen on the game! However, we are at nearly 60% memory which means you guys will start experiencing lag and soon after that you will not be able to save.

I am going to leave the game up until you guys start experiencing the above. Please email me when we need to reboot or ping an Imm online and have them reboot us, preferably before you can't save. Once we get to that point, there is a good chance some of your characters will experience a loss of some kind!

Enjoy the uptime!

Nice job Teker, the KVP recode is definitely responsible for the added uptime! I will run a memory debugger soon and see what I can find.

[*juggleblood*]

You really do rock Teker. For improving game performance, flushing out mud language, eqset code, and all the other things you've done, thank you very much.

[Dragoth]

I agree, thanks for all the hard work you did Teker.

[*teker*]

Thanks for all the kind words. A lot of people have put a lot of effort into the current codebase and content and I feel fortunate to be able to be a part of that team!

[Gorka]

Given the game is up for longer, can shopkeepers be adjusted accordingly? They are running out of coins. In the past we never had to wait 3 weeks for a reset to sell ioun stones... items are one of many important ways players make coins... I think there needs to be some allowances made. In the past you could also make money selling tokens... but lack of newbie's and the coliseum have changed this... in fact, in general, it's more difficult to do coins these days with anything involving regular items than in the past. It's not uncommon for an avatar to use relocate to sell 9 hexes in every store within 1min after reboot... those tokens sit around for 3 weeks for us players without relocate.

Perhaps a change to shop keepers such as them junking shop items after 5 days or so could be a solution, I also note that some keepers seem to have a varying amount of coins, and pay different prices for items, but in a way that I don't think is "by design" but more by "accident."

[*juggleblood*]

Gorka are you back?

[Gorka]

I logged yesterday. Back to work next week, still sorting my life out a little.

[*teker*]

Given the game is up for longer, can shopkeepers be adjusted accordingly? They are running out of coins. In the past we never had to wait 3 weeks for a reset to sell ioun stones...

Is there some sort of preferred reboot interval? I was going to reboot after 2 weeks but it was an off-Lyme chop day so I let it go.

I also note that some keepers seem to have a varying amount of coins, and pay different prices for items, but in a way that I don't think is "by design" but more by "accident."

Those are all configuration options and some of it is definitely by design. I'm pretty sure the VK shopkeepers will pay more gold for items and generally sell items for less than other shops. I always figured part of the strategy to get players off BH was to have the BH shops pay less than stores on other continents.

[Gorka]

I'll let others who play more frequently comment on reboots, two weeks sounds fine to me, but other players will have better ideas.

The biggest shop frustrations for me are these...

* Island is so crap I don't even go. Potion seller for instance has coins for about 5 potions and that's it for reboot. (Not that I have problems selling potions - but still...)
* AH town should probably have a gem merchant or another mob that buys tokens.
* Items in shops that are sold under a certain price should disappear after a certain time frame.
* Day 1-3 after reboots it can be difficult to sell anything, until keepers build up coins from ripping players off. It's not really a problem after 3 days or so.
* Listing 10 hexes takes 10mins due to pointless lag. If I have 100 tokens to relist... it's takes 1.5 hours to relist them.

[Teron]

About the reboots.

1. Generally, it'd help to keep the game up as long as possible, because:
- shops get more unique items and cps
- there are more corpses stored in the nooks
- there are more epics available
- there are more choppers available.

You could make a 2-weekly reboot schedule, starting on a Monday, but if we can safely run 3 weeks - why not?

2. Then there are chop days.

An ideal scenario for a chop day would be to reboot on the 14th, so:
- it doesn't crash on 15-16th and poof our specs/pops
- we have time to pop specs
- we have time for epics to spawn for chop.
(I've discussed these lamentations with Ezekiel and Dr, so I'm speaking also for them.)

Now, with rebooting for a chop day, we can't reboot every 21 days, so the resulting reboot schedule looks like every 1st and 14th to me.

Of course, I understand that you might need to reboot urgently to get your code in, so I leave this opportunity for you, too.

About the shopkeepers.

I completely agree with Gorka.
I've also been suggested that improving the shopkeepers was in order.

Earlier, we had crashes every 3-5 days, a 7 day crash-free week was a miracle.
At that pace, the amount of gold shops had didn't make much difference.

Now, with regular 2 week regular uptimes, we do need:
- more gold on the shopkeepers, I see no point in limiting it, really - players do need gold
- no limit on items in shops, because the prices already scale
- if there's a short limit on total items in store, they should disappear much faster.

Currently, AH does have a jeweler - it's Five Hands, but he has only like 100k gold total. I suggest adding enough gold on him.
Also, doesn't Allie buy the tokens, so there's two buyers on AH and BH?


As a frequent seller, I'd also welcome the auctioneer improvement.
One reason cited not to redo it was spam, so here's a suggestion:
- accept all the items ASAP
- post the announcements out every minute

The alternative to anouncements is to make it more concise:
- anounce the same items in brief say, eg, Gorka posted 21 tokens, from 70 to 80k min, 90-100k buyout
- or combine 3-5 different items in a single announcement done every 30 seconds

You could count the time since the announcement and report the "auction is about to end" msgs in the same way you announce someone consigning them (ie, if you anounce 21 tokens in 1 msg, you say they are all going to end in 1 min in 1 msg).

[Gorka]

Allie doesn't buy token's last I checked, and Moran, or Moron as I call him, can only afford 1 or 2 because no one is buying his crap and building up his coins to buy more... this is a problem with the majority of most shop keepers besides the main ones on BH and SS...

There isn't a heck of a lot of buying that goes on at most sellers... so although one could say there are maybe 100 shop keepers in game, the reality is that only 10 of them ever have enough coins to buy your item. Even if the mud was up for 365 days, the amount of transactions with some of them is so small it wouldn't make a difference. The problem is less about the number of keepers, and more about there cash flow.

Taron's idea of making item sales unlimited, and scaling the price is a good solution...

Creating a sub economy to turn unwanted items into something useful also could be a good idea... BH dump could be improved for instance to give players some better coin, or perhaps unwanted items could be feed to some machine for some monetary reward. This should keep the mud a bit more clean for the 2-3 weeks and reduce memory usage.

[Teron]

So the problem isn't that there are two buyers of hexes on AH, it's that they have few coins to buy them.

Personally, I'd view ability to sell items to shops as another way to make gold. It'd add variety and inspire players to explore more.

[*juggleblood*]

Maybe there's just too many hexes. That'd be an easy fix. Or you can give them away to newbies like many folks do. Let's let this thread die since you've tainted it with irrelevant posts.