saving time of non-combat items

[Laurel]

20 Sep. 2010 I wrote a post about saving time of herbs/packs/etc. - turned down
3 months later I tested it as well - lost all the herbs and fancy containers I liked so much and spent hours of dull travel/herbing/etc. getting; hours of actually LOST time (not that "gaming" wasn't "lost time", but I guess all of you grasp the difference)

what is the exact reason to NOT keep such things for months or even years on a char's file? surely not space vs. file-size?

in any other game I played so far such things ARE stored - I can even login to my 1-2years-frozen accounts in mmorpg's and actually USE the herbs, ore, monkey-anuses I spent geek-hours grinding ... is a Gen-player-file that much bigger now?

or is it some sort of a fight - wizards vs. scripters? we delete all your hours spent herbing so you can spend them herbing again ... entertaining, isn't it?

[Sharn]

20 Sep. 2010 I wrote a post about saving time of herbs/packs/etc. - turned down
3 months later I tested it as well - lost all the herbs and fancy containers I liked so much and spent hours of dull travel/herbing/etc. getting; hours of actually LOST time (not that "gaming" wasn't "lost time", but I guess all of you grasp the difference)

what is the exact reason to NOT keep such things for months or even years on a char's file? surely not space vs. file-size?

in any other game I played so far such things ARE stored - I can even login to my 1-2years-frozen accounts in mmorpg's and actually USE the herbs, ore, monkey-anuses I spent geek-hours grinding ... is a Gen-player-file that much bigger now?

or is it some sort of a fight - wizards vs. scripters? we delete all your hours spent herbing so you can spent them herbing again ... entertaining, isn't it?

Yeah, tested it a few times as well
Lately I just run without potions, herbs and packs...Why bother when I am going to lose them anyway?
I guess a ranger cant really do that. I also lost some unique items - those I do not think I will be able to recover.

Logging on to see that you lost your herbs and potions AGAIN and will have to spend a LOT of time to get them back, really makes me want to quit right away.

Sure, I could probably log on each weak to avoid loosing my stuff...But why cant the game save my stuff for me?
If it is hard to implement...let the game log in for me once a week

[Cherek]

For once I completely agree with Laurel.

Is there any reason for this? As Sharn mentioned when losing all your stuff for the x'th time you'll just feel like quitting right after you login. There's been alot of talk about how to make the game more playable for casual players, making herbs, potions and stuff last forerver would be a good start!

Purging our pockets when we dont login enough just makes us not wanna login even more.

[gorboth]

Is logging in every 12-14 days really a hardship?

G.

[Trutblemma]

Actually, this is another way to make Gen more player friendly. Lets say
a true newbie shows up, plays for a bit and end up in Sparkle. There he
meet a few people that help him with stuff. He gets a backpack from someone,
he herbs a bit. He spend precious money on food.
Then, for some reason he doesn't log in for a while. When he do log in, his stuff
is gone. That is very discouraging and for the newbie, hard (where to find that
awesome backpack?) and costly. That was one thing that annoyed me very much when I started playing, hard work going to waste.

More....I thought Mim was joking when he said armours and weapons disappear at arma. Very hard to get used to. Every game I played, _I_ choose when I want to get rid of my stuff, unless it wears out or someone takes it from my corpse.

Please change this, let us keep what we worked for, packs, trinkets, herbs and food. I understand armours and weapons has to disappear, of course. But the other stuff. Let us keep it!

[Cherek]

Gorboth: I think so. Sometimes I dont play for a few weeks, sometimes for a couple of months. Somtimes RL takes up alot of time, sometimes I just dont feel like playing, etc, etc. I know for a fact many others do the same. When you do return, it would be nice to still have the stuff you collected your last "session".

Also lots of people also have multiple chars and while I never really been one for playing many chars at the same time I am guessing if you do, you probably play one at a time and then dont bother to log in the others every week?

Its not a huge deal perhaps, but an annoyance, and if there is no reason for it, technically or otherwise, why not let us keep our stuff indefinitely?

Trutblemma: Good points!

[Laurel]

Is logging in every 12-14 days really a hardship?

G.

Please bring back the "no problem"-Gorboth, whereever you have hid him/her/it.

[Sharn]

Is logging in every 12-14 days really a hardship?

G.

Not, not really. But...I had lots of stuff to do RL and time started to move very fast.
I realized that its been over two weeks since I last logged when I got that hearty
"Welcome back to genesis! Now, just for you our special: recovery in no time!"

[gorboth]

Please bring back the "no problem"-Gorboth, whereever you have hid him/her/it.

Curse my sloppy inflection and poor diction! The origin of the legend you speak to actually requires some explanation. In the wizard community, we actually have a term for the fact that things disappear if you don't log in for a while - the "Robe Limit." I suppose this originated from the idea that a person's inventory has to sit somewhere, and we assumed people would (thematically) be tucking things in their robe. So, if someone doesn't log in for a while, and we want the stuff to disappear, we will blame it on the robe. This was strictly a wiz-info term, of course, and so it never trickled down to the playerbase. But among wizards, we'd often say stuff about a player reaching their Robe Limit ... which eventually came to be truncated to a quick and easy phrase - Robe-Lim. If you'd reached Robe-lim, you'd obviously not been playing enough to maintain your inventory.

So ... you can probably see where this ends up. I'm semi-famous for my "loose lips sink ships" model of Administration. All too often I'll let slip an otherwise closely guarded wizard term or understanding. This obviously has happened here! I can only imagine how many times a player must have logged in, found their inventory gone poof, and communed me about it. Being somewhat old-school, and appreciating a mail much more than a commune, I suppose there were plenty of times where I would pop down, see what was going on, realize the player hadn't logged in within the Robe Limit timeframe, and the exchange would probably go something like this:

Distraught Player: WTF!!?! All my stuff! Gone! Can I get it back?
Gorboth: Nope, Robe-Lim.

It is only natural that over time, having said this so many times, that the phrase must have somehow come to sound like the phrase Laurel has mistakenly tagged me with.

Ah well ... language is a dangerous thing!
G.

[Greywolf]

If there is something that can be done that might make the game more fun for a substantial number of players, and it isn't being done, I hope there is a very good reason for it. So far I haven't seen anyone give a good reason why permanently saving items cannot be recovered over multiple reboots. Given the immediate importance of having active players available and playing, it seems ridiculous to discourage people from playing if there is an easy fix that would allow items to be recoverable after long absences.