Save Times and Unused accounts

[Rammar]

Lots of people hoard MASSIVE items thinking CUB might possibly happen, even though it won't.

Since you are limited to 125 items in bank box, it should be easy to see the massive # of items are in houses correct?

Move to the next house phase where items decay, we are half way there as is.....the cut off date is wonky as is, but this is the ONE way to guarantee eliminating the massive hoarding that goes on......massive.......

There are a very large number of accounts, with a lot of items in total, even if only a small sum per account. Most of these will never be touched again, and would not need to be loaded except when those accounts are used. It might be a small gain, but it would be one with no disadvantages except the time to code it.

We are also no where near housing phase 3. Of phase 1, we only have a subset of the co-owner features. In any case, hoarding helped define the T2A era. IMO it's up there with pre-casting and insta-hit. Remove it, and you might as well make this a UOR shard.

[smart86]

Just my input. Any account not used for more than (x amount) hours in 6 months should just be removed. No matter if they are in a guild house 7xgm whatever. If you can't put (x amount) hours into the game in 6 months then you shouldn't be slowin us down. I work full time, go to school more than full time and I can get on for at least a couple hours a week. If we want to go and make some kinda rule for soldiers or whatever thats cool with me. Just fax Derrick yer orders If your in a mental institute you have bigger things to worry about, same if yer homeless or what not. So, moral of the story no (x amount) hours, no cookie for you!

[Aritmetica]

Longer save times mean little, more so if they are spaced with more time between them.

What is really important is the lag you achieve with your game client. I will tell you why. You get near certain houses or a very large amount of players, I mean over 50 on the same screen and the game will lag. This happens much less with a well placed client and the correct OSI patch, in fact, it never happens with a house and sometimes during large events.

Its always possible to upgrade the hardware. Its simply a question of bandwith,cpu's, rams and high velocity hard drives. Money as well, of course.

Fix the lag in the client and take a look at the osi patches out of Era though near it, you will get the fix there.

One house per account. Delete a lot of stuff that isnt used. All fixed and good.

[Godsend]

I have no problems with getting rid of old, undeveloped accounts.

I don't know if these suggestions have been made, as this post has already gone to 6 pages, but what about only saving house contents when the house is refreshed, either at that time or marked for save upon the next savetime. As you cannot recall into a house, it will be refreshed when you enter. Chances are the only time anything will change in your house without it being refreshed is if someone logs on just to organize, and then they will just have to remember to refresh it.

Perhaps this could also be done for unused areas of the map. A sector only refreshes or is marked for a save when a player comes within so many tiles of it, as I am sure there are areas that players do not frequent between every save.

Also, perhaps an option should be made available for players to delete their accounts if they were made by mistake or do not plan on ever returning.

[Pirul]

what about only saving house contents when the house is refreshed, either at that time or marked for save upon the next savetime. As you cannot recall into a house, it will be refreshed when you enter. Chances are the only time anything will change in your house without it being refreshed is if someone logs on just to organize, and then they will just have to remember to refresh it.

What about house looting?

[Ratliff-TG]

I would start with accounts that have been banned. They didn't deserve their items in the first place and for example BeatingU's name still shows up when searching my uosa characters.

[Flea]

I would start with accounts that have been banned. They didn't deserve their items in the first place and for example BeatingU's name still shows up when searching my uosa characters.

And then take BeatingU's rare red sandals and any other valuable items off of banned accounts and create a UOSA raffle. Where you throw items away and X amount of item gets you X amount of raffle points. Then pick a # and that person wins. BAM! two birds with one boulder.

[rwuser]

No one "deserves" things, they either have them or they don't, whatever "status" they have or not.

If the community wants to reduce server save times, they should do it themselves.

So, how about it, Ratliff-TG and Flea?

Care to go first?

[Faust]

Thanks for the thoughts.
We do have a condemned house rule, if the owners account hasn't logged in for a few months, the house becomes non refreshable.

The majority of the trouble is in the character items rather than world items I think, as the items in the world will tend to level off over time, but the growth of character items is unrestricted.

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 always prefer not to delete anything, so I think my efforts for now will concentrate on possible code optimizations, however this option should remain up for discussion as it may become necessary in the future.

The save frequency is a good point. We have been pretty stable since we did the chassis swap due to overheating a couple months ago, but prior to that we were seeing a crash or two a week. The loss of an hours time could be devastating to many players and something that we really want to avoid. Some consideration will be given to easing the frequency a bit.

ps: Ditto on Piruls CUB comments, the CUB system does not have a noticable effect on shard item count, and may even tend to increase it due to anticipation of another. It worked on OSI because of the house decay changes which we will not be implementing.

How viable would this solution be for optimization?

We know RunUO saves/loads data in a text document data style structure. The system could be restructured a little based on specific character inactivity instead of the entire account itself since this would include those characters that are rarely/never played on active accounts too. This new system would not DELETE anything and would actually store inactive characters/items/etc... on a secondary file system using the exact same methods RunUO uses with just some tweaked methodologies. The secondary file system would store inactive characters/items and would serve as a type of retrieval system that the server does not look at unless someone tries to log onto the inactive character. When someone attempts to log into one of the characters stored in the secondary system it would simply extract all the information during the login process and pull it into the actual saved data files.

This should solve the majority of the problems that are due to inactivity while sticking to the original shard idea that your account information will always remain intact no matter the inactivity associated with it. The only concern on my part is the server load when someone attempts to log into a character with a lot of data during regular shard hours but it may not even be noticable in reality though.

[Derrick]

That would be nice; but it adds quite a level of complexity to many systems. I don't dislike the concept, only the idea of implementing it.

The last patch brought our save times down from about 20 seconds to about 15, which is pretty substantial. This is the second time that we've been able to find this magnitude of savings in optimization alone; but I think it is also the last. We've profiled saves to the point where thread sync and integer math are now the limiting factors.

I've begun negotiations to upgrade our server and double the processing cores. I'm hoping to be able to do this for not much more expense, and hopeful that it may improve save times somewhat. Doubling the cores doesn't necessarily halve the save times due to a large percentage of the CPU time during saves being consumed by synchronizing what all the different cores are working on, but it may be our most realistic and efficient hope of making some significant improvement.

[Faust]

Definitely agree with you on the complexity and the effort it would take for such an implementation.

Sounds like to me something has to be done eventually based on the current situation though. This is one of those problems that resembles debt in a way. Continues to grow fully knowing it's unsustainable to a point where it will finally be too late. The only way to mitigate the problem is through hardware upgrades, removal of the items itself, or restructuring of the way it works. Hardware seems to be an option which is no longer feasibly possible and account/character/item deletion will eventually only go so far as well. However, always have faith that you will find someway to mitigate the problem eventually Derrick.

[rwuser]

Faust, its best not to limit the optons to those alone.

Like debt, people can learn to reduce their expenditures based on their own behavioural choices.

The only way we can do this is to act and not talk, those of us who feel like we can help, should do so. The solution lies in a more internal experience.

We can't only rely on Derrick to fix these issues, we have to find ways to co-exist with the limitations around us.

[jekkis]

My NEA suggestion is we introduce a new kind of CUB: for every x amount of items trashed, a player can increase the lockdowns of his house per one (up to a certain limit, which would of course be dependant on house size). This would also stimulate the housing market in a new fashion, since you'd have the option of selling your house with upgraded lockdowns.

So we lose 20k items and a castle gets another two lockdowns. No one will notice if it has 577 or 579 lockdowns, but it will be a welcome addition to those who actually dedicate some time to decorating. However, when we lose a million items it should be noticeable, but a hundred extra lockdowns spread around the world will have minimal impact in terms of era accuracy.

[Light Shade]

what about only saving house contents when the house is refreshed, either at that time or marked for save upon the next savetime. As you cannot recall into a house, it will be refreshed when you enter. Chances are the only time anything will change in your house without it being refreshed is if someone logs on just to organize, and then they will just have to remember to refresh it.

What about house looting?

I noticed Pirul got a -4 Post Rep on this comment alone. Instances revolving around server crashes could allow for the duping of items under a system like this. I would assume Pirul was talking about that possibility. That would be a very bad thing...and would serve to do the opposite of decreasing item count...

[Derrick]

My NEA suggestion is we introduce a new kind of CUB: for every x amount of items trashed, a player can increase the lockdowns of his house per one (up to a certain limit, which would of course be dependant on house size). This would also stimulate the housing market in a new fashion, since you'd have the option of selling your house with upgraded lockdowns.

So we lose 20k items and a castle gets another two lockdowns. No one will notice if it has 577 or 579 lockdowns, but it will be a welcome addition to those who actually dedicate some time to decorating. However, when we lose a million items it should be noticeable, but a hundred extra lockdowns spread around the world will have minimal impact in terms of era accuracy.

It's a neat suggestion, but the trouble is that there I don't know if there are a million items to be found in the world to throw away. I stated this a few pages ago but threads get long and details get missed.

There are only 3 million out items in houses etc, including all the static decoration in the world. I don't know if the greatest push could eliminate a third of them. However if if we did get rid of a million items, and those items didn't quickly come back in hording, in anticipation of another even like this; it's only 1 out of 8 million items on the shard: 12.5%: less than 2 seconds of save time.

Hording really isn't the problem; it seems like it when you see all these items in houses; it's hard to conceptualize how many items are in a million.

Again, I think we are resolved to handle this with hardware and software; hording is part of the game.