UO Second Age

This blew me away....

From - http://web.archive.org/web/199910130013 ... index.html

Last modified: 08/02/1999 13:58:26 wrote:Once a house starts collapsing its impossible to stop it, after the roof goes the walls just start disappearing tile by tile, then door and sign, and finally the foundation goes. The overall time from "like new" to the actual collapsing is 11 days. Refreshing a house or ship once a week is sufficient to keep it from falling apart. It's best to refresh a long time before the server starts saving (at 5 AM local time), more than once has a house decayed because the refresh of the house was not saved.

So once a house starts decaying from a certain point (I would guess from Greatly Worn given the times) It becomes un-refreshable and has a decay animation over time!!.

Outstanding. Anyone remember houses looking to be in a state of decay? Statics apparently does.

That paragraph refers to the actual collapse of the house itself, not the fact that it reaches a certain decay status and becomes un-refreshable. Beyond that, any visual appearance of a house actually disappearing tile by tile is probably due to the nature of slower systems. Since houses were actually multi-objects that consisted of different tiles, it stands to reason that its creation and deletion would also break down tile by tile. This would display as a process of tiles being created and deleted on slower computers, while a faster computer would handle the entire process near instantaneously.