Posted by Proud Blade(VIP) on April 26, 2000 at 16:35:08:
Of the scripts on the official page, the only one I miss having around is the Graveyard. There are a lot of situations where IC I want to talk to a specific person, and it would be good to know if they are going to be around anymore. Cabal applicants should know when cabal leaders will no longer be there. Cabal leaders need a good way to roughly determine how many are in their cabal at any one time, and who is available for promotions and special positions under them. The passing of an IMM should be widely known, especially if that IMM has a religion. (Vilhazarog?) A lot of quests that involve multiple characters can be sunk or altered radically if one of the members deletes for some reason.
The Graveyard is borderline OOC/IC knowledge. The IC explanation would be that a great adventurer's passing would be known through the lands, although it can't account for people who take their own life off in some dark cave. Personally, I feel that this is worth overlooking, the way we overlook how "tell" works, and why I can't take the gold jewelry that is mentioned in the description of a room or mob. There are certain suspensions of disbelief that we make to make the game more playable.
The Graveyard should be one of them, barring technical difficulties. However, I can't see how the Graveyard could cause much lag. The pseudocode should look something like:
- When a character of above level X dies (deletion, con-death, age death, or denial), add their name, title, and type of death to a file. At the end of the day, the web page is sent this file to add to the master list, and the game file is deleted or archived.
The file never gets huge (how many level 30+ characters delete in one day? 5?), and there is only information transfer happening once per day.
So why was the graveyard left broken? It hasn't been removed from the web pages, so I get the sense it's in limbo right now. Someone once cited equipment repops as a "cheat" method that is helped by knowing about deletions, but if the update is only done once per day, that limited sword might be gone long before you read about the death. I would have no problem with lowering the update frequency to once every few days, if this is a big concern.
Is there any harm in bringing it back? Is it something that just hasn't been gotten to, with all the other work that needs to be done? Or is it just forgotten?