Ideas to prevent crash related deaths

[Harmless]

I hate crash related deaths such as in the wilderness or other areas with dangerous NPCs.

They occur because of monsters respawning and abruptly mobbing you in a place where you were originally safe before the crash because you had no idea things spawned there.

They occur because depending on where your hunting partner last saved and you last saved, you may end up logging in badly split up and losing the advantage of safety in numbers PLUS problem #1,

They occur because if you took a moment to step away from your mount it despawns and is gone forever,

Among other reasons.

Can we think of ideas to prevent this?

One idea: server reboot grace period. For the first minute or two after a reboot monsters are slow to aggro. To take advantage of this, you need to keep trying to reconnect quickly after a crash. A second option is a sanctuary like effect on a player who logs in for the first time after a crash is detected by the game.

Second idea: groupsave. Or save group. A leader can use this to make all people following them 'save' also. This locks in a campsite position that an experienced hunter knows is safe to come back to after a crash.

Third: some kind of token that can be used to call a mount back. Maybe when you take out a mount the stablehand gives you a whistle. Maybe the whistle is an optional fee. It has one function only: if your mount melted in a crash, you use the whistle and it respawns it for you because it somehow knows the animal didnt die. If the mount dies codedly then the whistle item becomes useless for this purpose. So maybe the mount actually dying changes the whistle to a useless item that wont summon it anymore. If it somehow finds the mount alive somewhere in the mud the whistle does nothing and you have to go find it.


Any other ideas to prevent lame crash deaths?

[Harmless]

Oh and before some troll posts a boohoo for you, sorry you died, uh, no. Don't. I didn't die and I don't need your sympathy. This is about constructive ideas and discussion.

[Narf]

Couple ideas:

Respawn after a crash auto-hidden (even if you don't have the skill). This will give you some time to figure out what's around and wish up if you need help. Ideally the hide would wear off as soon as you took entered any IC command.

Respawn in a special OOC room with an exit to your last save location. This works better than above but would require more coding.

[th3kaiser]

Best bet here is just to communicate with staff in these scenarios. I've had deaths from unrealistic area repops and gotten rez'd quite fast. Just put in the request, staff are pretty good about this.

[Brytta Léofa]

Anything that's done here should be transparent to players, IMO, because (1) it's less stuff for players to learn and (2) it's not wasted work: it's better to make crashes have no adverse affects than to add coping mechanisms that are obsolete once you...make crashes have no adverse affects.

Ideally, a game crash/restart just doesn't cause any changes in game state. Doing this well is really tough. Doing something half-assed that approximates it for certain portions of game state might be possible: for instance, saving populated zones every 5-30 seconds and fully decoupling NPC spawning from game start. (I'm sure the latter is a big project in itself, but, again, good for the game...it probably also helps the mob duping problem.)

[Brokkr]

Pretty sure I have never been able to log in to the game 30 seconds after it starts.  And I can see the game timer.

And sometimes folks log in days after a crash and log into a situation just as bad as they would have right after a crash.

[Kyviantre]

Pretty sure I have never been able to log in to the game 30 seconds after it starts.  And I can see the game timer.

I check the website after crashes.  I have worked out my connection takes hold and works after 60 seconds of uptime.  Because I'm exceedingly impatient!
And sometimes folks log in days after a crash and log into a situation just as bad as they would have right after a crash.

[Harmless]

Playerbase,

it is clear that staff do not recognize the frequency of crash related deaths. To quote one staffer " it is ridiculously rare."

Players, If you are tired of dying due to crashes, you need to submit requests about it. You don't have to request a rezz if you don't want it but you need to make them aware of the problem by submitting a complaint or question request with detail as to how the crash caused a PCs death so that they become aware of the problem and might actually do something about it.

[mansa]

I think the question could be widened to this:

How can the game prevent immediate/near immediate combat of characters once they enter the game world?
And we should probably define this out between player vs game rather than player vs player.



The few ideas I have are these:
a) prevent mobs from attacking characters within x number of seconds logging into the gameworld.
b) log into the game 'invisible' or 'hidden' from mobs until you move 1 room.
c) have a 'recall' function to be used to move to the nearest 'safe' location based on where you log in. [Usable only in the room you popped in.]

[X-D]

Not that this is all that helpful...But this thread is the first I have even heard of such a thing. I suppose I have always been lucky, crashes tend to take my PCs out of danger.

As it sits, I think this still likely a very rare thing and would just ask for res. Code or hardware issues mud side beyond your control is normally grounds.

[triste]

A crash was indirectly related in the death of a character I know of. It hasn't been a year so I can't talk specifics, but agreeing that this is rare and requests are adequate for these situations which we call "edge cases" in software development.