Unseen Studios

figgles wrote:As for the poll: Waste of code, development time, bandwidth, server processing time, and database entries.

How does one really justify the minor benefits? Let's think about the code for a while:

When you trade with NPC, the game must save your character into a list of customers. If you have already purchased, then the server must load this information into RAM, recalculate the prices, and send them to the client. It is more likely that the server would just load all of the entries for all of the NPCs on startup. Whenever you make a purchase, you must then recalculate the prices once more just in case the price drops after the person purchases. This must be done for each player, for each item, for each purchase. Now, when you leave, these values must be saved, first to a database, then to a persistant medium, such as a hard drive. Every time you talk to a different NPC, you use more disk space (and initially RAM). When a character is deleted, all of the entries for that character must be purged, for each NPC that s/he has ever talked to. This means that you either must keep track of every NPC the character has ever talked to, or manually search through every NPC in the world's database to see if the person has ever talked to that NPC (= slow). If you decide to do time-based deletion, i.e. don't talk to the NPC for a few months and the benefit is gone or lesser, then you must record for each player the level of benefit and the last time they talked. At some point in time, the server would have to still purge entries for people who have zero benefit due to time, either because they do not talk to that NPC often enough, or their character has been deleted. Or, you could keep the entries for each NPC, for every player, and waste disk space and RAM, as well as make new searches slower because there is an increasing number of entries.

And why would we do all of this? So a player can save a few virtual coins.

Yeah, right.


As for the armies: Whoever suggests training NPCs for an army has obviously never programmed. Especially in an MMORPG. I'm not even going to begin to describe how to do such a feat. That idea is enough programming for an entire game in itself, much less a small facet of a game.

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The development team will suffer from extreme feature creep if they take every person's "Wouldn't it be cool if...!" idea. Stick to needs to be done: cloning Xenimus, not creating another lame player-versus-player focus online game.

Admins: Perhaps you should incorporate a real RFE (request for enhancement) with rigorous questions to examine any proposal. It would probably filter out some of the riff-raff that gets posted.

Patrick