Why does it take so long for 'maintinence'

[Anonymous]

You are most definitely flaming, if you were not flaming, why post anonymously?

im sorry, i didn't know not having a registered handle made me a troll
grow up

[Xygax]

I searched briefly for an adequate answer to this question on the boards, and I didn't really find one, so I think I'll take a stab at it, and then lock this thread.  Other staff can, of course, feel free to unlock it and contribute as they see fit.

But before I begin:
Anonymous Kank:  You'll find that your questions will recieve more effective answers when you ask them in a less aggressive tone.  Almost every post you've made on this thread is either a flame or a troll.

That said, the question is a valid one, and one that players have asked for ages.

Here's the answer:  There are both technical and philosophical reasons for making the game open only to staff during a particular period.  The technical reasons have to do with how the online-creation tools work, and in particular how those workings are interfered with by the activities of players.  The online-creation tools currently do not allow a fine enough granularity for a staff member to make certain types of changes to a particular room's contents (the objects and inhabitants of the room), without potentially affecting the default state of the zone that room is in (the default state of the zone being the state that zone always finds itself in at start-up, and that some types of zones will try to maintain by repopulating NPCs and so on).  This means that when changing the default contents of a room in a particular way, a staff member may actually be updating/altering the default state of the entire zone.  This is fine, if the staff-member can reliably know that nothing else is happening in that zone, but that's very difficult to do with players running around, especially in heavily-populated zones.  Players drop things on the ground, and kill stuff, and generally change that "default state" all the time with their actions.  If we accidentally saved the zone in these untrusted states, eventually major things would go wrong (like, the zone would have no NPCs in it, since each time a save occurred with one NPC dead -- or moved by chasing that PC into another zone, that one NPC would be unable to ever reload until it were manually replaced).  And if you dropped your favorite sword on the ground during the brief interval that a staff member were making an update, your favorite sword would load and reload on that spot forever until it were manually removed.

So, that's the technical reason.  Call it "bad code", if you like.  I'd like to see the granularity of "room updates" like this made much smaller (say, just the room itself, or maybe even just the one new thing), and it's not even a terribly difficult extension to implement, though the implementation would have to be well-tested before I'd trust it.  If it's done wrong, then suddenly people are losing items mysteriously, or things get added in masses of duplicates, also mysteriously, or the zone files grow unbounded, or are corrupted.  All of these are Bad Things, which means any temerity one might have had in approaching this problem is diminished by the potential risk to the game's stability and persistence.

The philosophical reason for the downtime, and the reason it happens on Saturday, is because (as mansa mentioned), it is a long-standing tradtition for the staff that we all (as many as can make it) get together for a virtual "meeting" on Saturdays (yes, it's easier for US to get time on Saturdays, too.  Funny, that.), and discuss and implement the changes that we want/need to make to further the story of our little world.  This is a -good- tradition, because it means that most of the unsafe work mentioned above happens in a controlled environment, and it means that there is a lot of positive team-work going on that shapes the world, we feed on each others' energy, and conversely keep our excitement in-check.  If someone gets a wild hair to fill Allanak with elf-hungry mekillots, someone else is liable to gently discourage them, and so we generally all stay on the same page, and the mekillots stay where they belong.

Even if the initial technical problem were overcome, I think many of the staff would still prefer to have this "quiet time" in which to work without the distractions and difficulties players present as they rampage across the world.  When you (the players) are in the game, we try to focus our attentions on bringing the world to life for you.  And when you're not, we try to focus our attentions on things that let you run the world for yourselves.

So, there you have it,
 Xygax


ps - Nearly everyone in this thread has exhibited a rather pronounced lack of good judgement in dealing with it.  If you don't like a particular question, simply don't respond to it.  The questioner will either get the hint and rephrase, or lurk long enough to get a better sense of the environment we expect here.  If you simply flame them, then their impression of that environment will result in propogating the same style of flaming.  Each flame (really, every "noisy" post) erodes this board and makes it a less useful place for the community as a whole to interact.  Try to censor yourselves.