24 Hour Cool Down between Servers

[indio]

ALFA is currently the means by which I can sit in one place and rock my baby to sleep after I get home from work and give my wife a break.

ALFA conservatives, the old guard, helped protect what needed to be kept sacred in the face of a multitude of more mainstream alternatives (Avlis, BG etc). I don't want to see what they fought hard to keep safe discarded. But the fight is no longer against other NWN2 alternatives (although I am sure they still exist). It's against other ways of spending time, other platforms, other commitments. If it makes people happy to play here, and it doesn't kill the values of the game for the old guard, flexibility is warranted.

The thread is in the goldilocks zone...just enough heat.

[Khazar Stoneblood]

To back away from the other "foundational" stuff being addressed in this thread (which I have no desire to comment on)...

With 4 servers does it make sense to have any servers that aren't directly connected to the others? Back when we had more, I understand keeping the geographic consistency so you had to travel through the right server to get from A to B. But with 4 servers, it would seem reasonable that there would always be a pretty straight way to get from one server to another without going through any others. The ONLY one that might not make total sense would be MS to WHL... but that one already exists I think. I could say that one having to go through BG.

[orangetree]

I'd like to see the PC per server rule removed instead.

We can see exactly when people self-loot in the logger. So we can also see when PC1 drops loot and PC2 logs in ten seconds later and picks up the loot.

I trust the players not to loot their own corpses. I certainly trust them not to mule items to their second PC as much as I trust them not to twink out their friends low-level PCs or powerlevel them.

I tend to agree on this. The 24 hour rule makes sense when everyone is playing a single PC and time and distance is being enforced. If they are not being enforced, and players have two PCs.. things get tricky. The servers are so interconnected it becomes as one big server. If the time and distance involved in the passage of travelling from one place to the next is no longer enforced, what is the difference where a PC is? So long as it makes narrative sense that they are where they are, of course...

I suspect I'll be heading for a clash in a few weeks, with two PCs and good IC reasons for both to be in the same place despite being made in different places, and I'll have to come up with some reason why one PC can't be there on account of the other PC's presence. The two PCs have affected each other by the OOC circumstance that they are played by the same player, with potential IC consequences- (Though I hope other players will be kind to understand when these things happen.)

Anyway, truth is, I don't know what is best. We're talking about allowing a player to join in the fun, and make it as easy as circumstances permit... however, I could be on the same server, have a perfectly legitimate PC to play with... I could even be in the exact same area, but for whatever reason my character could still be shunned by whatever is going on at the time (though getting on the server in the first place certainly increases the chances of a little RP) Having a second char to choose for those particular circumstances, double the chances of interaction.

[Castano]

Orangetree, I have no idea what you are saying other than lobbying to undo a rule we all voted on. You can easily fix your narrative issues by remaining IC. It sounds as if people are out looking for reasons to create a clash to me, so that we'll feel sorry and change the rule.


The two PC rule is PA's call, but I will be booting anyone off MS and ecourage other HDMs to do so on their servers if it is modified to allow the meta disaster of having multiple accounts played in the same server plots.

[Mikayla]

Castano:

The two PC rule is PA's call, but I will be booting anyone off MS and ecourage other HDMs to do so on their servers if it is modified to allow the meta disaster of having multiple accounts played in the same server plots.

That sounds fair to me. And no, I am not being sarcastic - I think Castano is right on this.

[maxcell]

Castano:

The two PC rule is PA's call, but I will be booting anyone off MS and ecourage other HDMs to do so on their servers if it is modified to allow the meta disaster of having multiple accounts played in the same server plots.

That sounds fair to me. And no, I am not being sarcastic - I think Castano is right on this.

[dergon darkhelm]

No 2 PCs on same server! The primary arguement for allowing 2 PCs was so that you could have one on one server and be able to log the other on another server to facilitate game play because your one PC was "stuck".... remember?



The last f*cking thing I want to see is someone RPing in their tavern with their lvl 2 halfling bard and then, when the DM comes and starts talking about giants in the mountains seddenly decides to log off....... and then right back in with their level 10 fighter.


Or the all-too-cozy little circles that will invariably star popping up.... or the player who starts playing her 2 PCs like a little pseudofaction.

NO!

[Regas]

I can't support allowing two pcs on the same server though, and I do believe a 24 hour period between server ports has value to slow down dm farming and other abuses, allowing for DM validation where it is helpful for the dm teams. If a majority of admin and members feel strongly about changing the 24 hour rule we can certainly review it.

Regas

I think the idea of allowing a player to play two pcs on the same server is a non-starter. From the PA perspective this would be a disaster. Its not going to be allowed durring my term as PA.

[Wild Wombat]

With 4 servers does [...] it would seem reasonable that there would always be a pretty straight way to get from one server to another without going through any others....

Word (and what seems to be pretty clear compromise solution to OGR's dilema). Yes, I know that it will take work by the always over-burned tech staff to make it so, but it would seem to be a reasonable goal to have.

[Zelknolf]

This is why we need better information about what people do.

The fact that there are portals, as a thing that can be placed in modules to connect them to other modules, is tech.

The addition and placement of specific portals is the server build teams. You only really need enough knowledge to open the toolset and place a trigger to make a server portal, and doing so is pretty simple.

Current portal systems support up to 999 servers with 99 connections at each possible juncture between each of those servers. However, I'd expect the database to fail sooner than that.

[Swift]

Current portal systems support up to 999 servers with 99 connections at each possible juncture between each of those servers. However, I'd expect the database to fail sooner than that.

There's only one way to find out!

[Zelknolf]

Current portal systems support up to 999 servers with 99 connections at each possible juncture between each of those servers. However, I'd expect the database to fail sooner than that.

There's only one way to find out!

Fortunately, ManagedScripts! Which means we have all of that fancy modern language stuff like a String.Split method and collections.

So if it came down to it, we'd be able to upgrade and have as many servers and portals as memory and Internets will allow-- it's just work and risk to make that change and given that we're nowhere near the existing limits it'd be a pretty terribad idea to do that now, so I say officially that there are limits.

[Swift]

Booo.

I was thinking more a City of Doors type test with a gazillion doors set up with portals!

[oldgrayrogue]

Booo.

I was thinking more a City of Doors type test with a gazillion doors set up with portals!

That's ALFA, give em an inch and they ask for a mile . . . err . . .infinite doors

[Zelknolf]

In Swift's defense, tech has waxed poetic about the advantages of having servers be organized by having a lean "core" server consisting of shops, services, roads, and quest pickups/turnins, then portals to smaller/adjacent/loaded-on-demand servers to be dungeons and adventures more than once and a "triage" server that consists only of a start area that players can log into before being portaled to the (potentially-booted-on-demand) place they logged out in. As a rule, our servers would be better at running a couple small instances of nwn2server than one big one, and it'd also lower the technical requirements to getting more machines up and helping with our hosting stuff.

No one's done the build, though, and it's not exactly a small enough project where we can shout "Gosh, guys, why don't you just do it!?" -- so we're just hangin' out here being entirely functional with finite doors.