Upcoming item count and storage limitations

[Serity]

If I cannot bring my fancy ornate chair into my inn room, what reason does my character (or the chair) even have to exist?

But really, thanks for listening to feedback on this. Iterative processes!

[artus]

Chairs can be considered furniture too though. If the inn allows it then why not?
Though for the sake of player containers still being relevent, I actually would like to suggest making containers allowable rather than making them part of inn rooms, and reduce room space and increase container space etc, or furniture that takes up space as well as containers. Making everything part of inn rooms pretty much makes construction almost pointless unless you have farmers screaming for fences or something. And then vault bloat. I probably contributed a ton for this now. Nvm, I can just turn some of my stuff into charcoals or something.

[Rias]

Chairs and non-huge furniture can be picked up, so as long as you have some floor space available you could put one in your room. You'll just have to be much pickier about what you choose to bring in, because the space will be very limited. (Hey, we're potentially a step up from inn rooms being janitored at least.)

A ton of the item bloat is just-in-case or why-not hoarding, from what I can see. Piles of random components (and non-components) just sitting there waiting for the day when they might possibly be useful. I curse the day I added woodsheds to farms - the number of random bits of wood people seem to think they need to have on hand and ready at any given time is mind-boggling. (To be fair, that's probably more a case of why-not hoarding because woodsheds can store so much at such a small space cost.) Point being: I think we can easily stand to make people think a little more carefully about what they consider worth spending limited storage space on, and what should just be tossed in a trash barrel or left to the janitor.

Handcarts are still a big problem with no easy solution in mind. They were meant for moving large amounts of items or too-heavy-to-carry items for specific purposes, but they're being used for expandable mass long-term storage.

[Maina]

If handcarts are intended only for moving items for specific purpose rather than storage, is it possible to just have the contents of handcarts be janitored? So the player has to be with the handcart if they want the stuff to stay in it. Easily RP-justified as theft or the like. Or they can leave it somewhere public where players are constantly passin through and... actual theft will probably happen.

Dunno if code currently allows for containers janitoring when the room they're in doesn't, but that might be worth adding.

[Serity]

Handcarts are still a big problem with no easy solution in mind. They were meant for moving large amounts of items or too-heavy-to-carry items for specific purposes, but they're being used for expandable mass long-term storage.

Make it so handcarts need to be stabled like horses. You can't store them in your vault. You can't bring them into buildings. You can't stable a handcart with items in it. If the handcart has to be auto-returned (and give it a hefty timer, at least twelve hours, in my opinion) then it just dumps everything on the floor (which then gets auto-janitored). You can probably reuse a lot of the horse/mount code for this.

[Jilliana]

No morale bonus for sleeping in a messy room with a bunch of non-furniture items all over the floor ...

I love this idea. I'd like this to be a thing. Maybe a little morale boost for keeping your room clean, too?

[Marcuson]

I'm doing my best to cut down on unnecessary items, but if you play the game -- and especially if you engage in crafting (because it *is* fun to make things) -- then characters will just naturally accumulate crap over time, even if they don't intentionally set out to do so.

I'm not technically-savvy, so I don't really understand why items affect server performance so drastically. Other players have mentioned that they've played MUDs where a janitor script isn't even a thing -- they can find items abandoned in the wilderness even real-life years afterwards.

One thing I do understand is that I don't like all the uncertainty surrounding the issue. Over the past year or so, we've lost farm grounds, instanced containers, and hidden items. Moths might eat all our cloth? Handcarts are going to be taken away? I don't recall CLOK having so many of these issues. Adventurers who bought into Wanderer's Eye and Treasure Hunter's Eye must surely feel a little cheated at the now-rarity of encountering hidden items.

The heart of the matter, I believe, is that the game's design is at cross-purposes with itself. Crafting requires a fair number of fiddly little components, and that is a major reason people have so many items squirreled away. The gameplay has taught players that it saves them time and money to have those components on hand. (As an example: not including tools, one handcart requires a total of 111 individual components to build, though granted some of those can be bundled.)

Another major reason PCs have so many objects is because the staff has created so many unique and wonderful objects -- of *course* we would want to collect them. This is, again, reinforced by the gameplay. Lockboxes contain interesting knickknacks. Merchant sell rare trinkets we might not ever see again. You wanted us to spend our riln, and we're spending it.

Honestly, I'm at the point where I want you to cut to the chase and implement a hard limit on the number of items a character can own. Dispense with the uncertainty and the increasingly elaborate solutions and simply put the onus of organization on us.

[artus]

Clok had, actually, and it had big time so severe to the point that Jirato had to do the same with houses. I remember it vividly given I was one of those with 56260 items which lagged the server massively. People said they lagged for at least two seconds each time they entered my house, and lag was actually noticeable. I remember someone trying to enter my house crashed his client once because of the items.

[Rias]

Good ideas for the handcarts!

Yeah, CLOK was pretty infamous for its laggy command input response time, and a huge part of that was the sheer number of items affecting server performance (which in turn was more than a little due to my bad coding, granted). I remember the laggy responsiveness being a fairly frequently-given reason for why people couldn't get into the game, and Jirato did some pretty hefty server upgrades to try and address the problem as the bloat increased. I'm trying to make sure we don't end up there again.

I know they're out there, but I'm having a difficult time thinking of many games, even single-player ones, that don't have some kind of "janitor" that poofs items left out in the world, or just outright forbid items existing anywhere other than player inventory and designated storage like homes/banks/etc. I can definitely recall running up against limitations on the number of items I could store and set out on display in my home, even. I think every MMO I've played (including a couple MUDs, but my MUDding experience is extremely limited) has had very strict limitations on inventory space and bank storage, and many don't let you drop items into the world at all, instead just instantly deleting items that are "dropped" from one's inventory. Performance aside, simple database storage limitations are a real thing too.

Thinking about it though ... while it's not something to expect to actually happen: Let's say I sat down and improved the code to be super efficient and upgraded the server storage space so item count was no longer an issue in any way. Would we want item persistence to then be unrestricted? Make the players be the manual "janitors?" Considering the drama that can come up just about what's worth putting in the community storage crates and what should go in the trash barrel, or branches and logs left out on commonly-travelled paths, I don't think that kind of approach would work out well. The people who don't care about "littering" will just leave their stuff wherever, and the people who do care will resent having to be the ones to clean up the messes. I know I don't miss coming across large piles of weapons disarmed from mobs or other gear looted from them, or those hidden piles of empty lockboxes or their junk loot that you'd often find in zones populated by humanoid mobs. It's neat finding long-persisting items in one of the limited janitorproof rooms or storage containers out in the world, as pointed out in a recent thread here on the BBS. I think it would be far less neat (pun not intended) if items were piling up everywhere.

Just like handcarts, instanced containers were never meant to serve as long-term storage. They were meant to prevent characters from accidentally mixing up (or deliberately stealing) items that belonged to others while they were working on crafting. Likewise, farms were meant for farming, not as economy-size communal bank vaults. I suspected potential issues might arise with both, but decided to leave them be unless they became problems - not just technically, but if they were being regularly used beyond their intended scope. So that's on me for allowing habits and expectations to form rather than just building in limitations from the very start.

Crafting is a big source of item bloat, for sure. Gaining experience/practice by crafting repetition is of course encouraging people to produce gobs of items that they don't actually need. I think another contributing factor is a mentality of "gather and store a massive amount once so I don't have to worry about gathering anymore." Which I can understand - we're naturally drawn toward efficiency. In any case, we're at least making some headway by making increasingly more items bundle-able.

I can understand the frustration with the storage limitations changing and having to learn and adapt to new restrictions, and I apologize for that. I think we're getting to a pretty good place, both from a technical standpoint and a reasonability standpoint. Implementing some kind of hard limit of "owned" possession count would be a pretty hefty undertaking itself. It'd be tricky just trying to determine when an item should be considered "owned" by a specific character as opposed to abandoned/made available to the community, or transferred to another character, etc. considering how many ways items can move around and the different states and spaces they can exist in beyond being in a character's held/worn items.

Again I apologize for the frustrations, and I thank everyone for their patience and understanding as all this is addressed. I think the item-room-space adjustments to both room max capacity and how much space items take up will go a long way toward addressing excess item bloat. I don't want people getting rid of their special and sentimental items, but I hope it's understandable that we still want (and in fact need) reasonable item storage limitations in place.

[Serity]

I know they're out there, but I'm having a difficult time thinking of many games, even single-player ones, that don't have some kind of "janitor" that poofs items left out in the world, or just outright forbid items existing anywhere other than player inventory and designated storage like homes/banks/etc. I can definitely recall running up against limitations on the number of items I could store and set out on display in my home, even. I think every MMO I've played (including a couple MUDs, but my MUDding experience is extremely limited) has had very strict limitations on inventory space and bank storage, and many don't let you drop items into the world at all, instead just instantly deleting items that are "dropped" from one's inventory. Performance aside, simple database storage limitations are a real thing too.

Nearly every MUD I have ever played has permitted dropping items on the ground, but those that keep items on the ground forever are rare. I think Diku MUDs are among the most proliferous sorts, and as far as I recall, they support dropping items everywhere, though I think they poof at reboot/crash, and (by default) you also tend to get paid a small amount of money when you sacrifice things of value there, so there's a little encouragement to the players to keep things tidy. In that case, the gods themselves pay you for your sacrifice based on the worth of the item, so-- not strictly appropriate for COGG. But it is done out there.

Thinking about it though ... while it's not something to expect to actually happen: Let's say I sat down and improved the code to be super efficient and upgraded the server storage space so item count was no longer an issue in any way. Would we want item persistence to then be unrestricted? Make the players be the manual "janitors?" Considering the drama that can come up just about what's worth putting in the community storage crates and what should go in the trash barrel, or branches and logs left out on commonly-travelled paths, I don't think that kind of approach would work out well. The people who don't care about "littering" will just leave their stuff wherever, and the people who do care will resent having to be the ones to clean up the messes. I know I don't miss coming across large piles of weapons disarmed from mobs or other gear looted from them, or those hidden piles of empty lockboxes or their junk loot that you'd often find in zones populated by humanoid mobs. It's neat finding long-persisting items in one of the limited janitorproof rooms or storage containers out in the world, as pointed out in a recent thread here on the BBS. I think it would be far less neat (pun not intended) if items were piling up everywhere.

A MUD I play does this and does this very well; you can set out items and then give them essentially poses, though it uses the one-line-per-item style that we don't and there's far more player-owned spaces than simply instanced un-enterable rooms ("An iron plate[ covered in cookies is set out for guests.]").

The trick here is that in other MUDs, other games, it's far easier for players to dispose of items - even if not through 'sacrifice', a 'junk' or 'destroy' command isn't uncommon (though ideally there should be some RP around it if you do it around other people). In MMOs, you (generally) simply drag it out of your inventory and poof it goes. Here, the only options we have are burying spoiled food or corpses (or specific other junk), lighting paper on fire, or traipsing all the way to a town with those hundred empty lockboxes or branches and tossing them all in the trash barrel, or leaving them out for the janitor. PCs can't easily get rid of items, which I've personally considered to be annoying and encouraging of the littering mentality - if I could just get rid of all those lockboxes, or pinecones, or dentures, without bringing them to town or leaving them out, I would be very happy to do so. Typically, players are responsible enough to not go destroying things people set out.

If something like this were to be implemented, I would suggest setting a timer of sorts, maybe half an hour, whereby someone other than the creator of the item is incapable of destroying it with a simple command, to avoid those "I just ran back to town to get my handcart to move the logs!" issue - and furthermore, if an item is stolen (with the steal command), that person can never manually destroy that item. 'Dispose' may be a more appropriate command for us, given we have the Twilight Eye - a generic "we got rid of this" command.

The above is not to say that such a thing, item permanency, is ideal for COGG - the item bloat issue is still a problem, obviously. I'm simply noting the above as a comparison to what I've seen elsewhere and caveats to consider in the hypothetical ideal (and you did ask).

The drama about branches or logs on common paths is overblown and unnecessary in my opinion, and shouldn't be done at all - a room on the map tends to be a large space - a league, isn't it? Many of the paths lead directly through forests, and we can safely assume that the logs are not directly in the center of the road but off to the side among the trees where it would've actually been cut down (who plants a tree directly in the middle of a road...?). The same can be said for corpses, kills and bodies in the wild wouldn't be unnatural - predators have to eat, too, but some people act ICly as if every little thing has been set directly in the path for their horses to trip and stumble over. It simply makes no sense.