Permanent Character Storage

[Karl G.]

What if characters, once created, could be removed from an account but never completely deleted. I was thinking maybe characters should go live in the city or something once they are made but no longer in use. Characters could be "re-activated" by us (if we want this), but this way I wouldn't have to deal with the actual deletion of memory on the server, which causes holes in the database. That would be pretty neat, eh?

Karl

[Joe M.]

yeah. here's my objection to this:
<img src="http://www.bornunseen.com/temp/chars.GIF" alt="Lots of characters!">


two months of playing xenimus.

that seems like a hell of a lot, over time and many players.

[Karl G.]

Yeah volume may be a problem, but we'll see how it goes.

[Keats]

Yeah, the only problem I could see with that would be the large volume of dead accounts.
I'm not too sure about what you meant by holes in the database, but would they pose a problem if you were to do dumps of accounts that had been inactive for x number of days? x being a large enough number to allow character re-activation if something happens clientside and that people wouldn't have their accounts deleted before they could reactivate them but small enough that server space wouldn't be at a premium.
Maybe also those characters and their names/equipment could be converted to NPC's when they get deactivated. Perhaps travelling merchants that sell whatever equipment that they had on them when their account deactivated? Then, when the dump happens, the merchant "moves on," in other words gets deleted off the server. Assuming you're even using NPC's haha