Pfile Wiping: was Re: [MUD-Dev] The Player Wimping Guidebook

[William Katzell]

On Tue, 01 Aug 2000, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, J C Lawrence wrote:
> 
> >       Wiping: is the act of doing a player file wipe. This destroys
> >       all player information, including hours played, gold
> >       collected, equipment earned, and all other facets of the
> >       character. It may or may not include the player's name.
> 
> People actually DO this?? I always thought player wipes were just a
> joke threat, like the boogie man is to children. My lord, I have an 
> extremely different sense of "responsibility" than most of you, but 
> for crying out loud, wiping out your players has got to be the lamest, 
> most asinine solution to a problem I've ever heard of. If you have to 
> wipe your player base out to correct a problem in your design, you 
> suck.

People do actually do this.  The MUD I am staff on does a regular one
every 3 months, but with the following rules in place for it:

1.  We never do a full pwipe.  We've been up for 6 years and unless we
    convert over to a new pfile format a full pwipe will never occur.

2.  The pfiles are manually wiped.  If a level one logged in for ten 
    minutes, two months ago, it's not likely that they're coming back.  
    With level 10s it's a 6 month time limit.  Level 20s is a year 
    limit.  Level 30s and above tend to never be wiped.

3.  Pfiles are backed up daily and archived weekly, with the archives
    kept for a minimum of a year (yes, that does mean that we tend to 
    have over a half gigabyte of old pfiles on hand), and quite often 
    for longer than that.

4.  Only the implementor has the authority to wipe pfiles.  We tried an
    "autowipe" code some years back, and quickly restored from backup 
    when it started scragging "retired" staff who hadn't been on in over 
    a year.

Admittedly, we are planning a pwipe for some nebulous time in the
future, but that has more to do with a lot of the other changes we're
making to the code than a want or a desire to pwipe.  In fact, if we can
figure a way to migrate the pfiles to the new format without wiping
them, we will.  Even if it means more work for us, we'd prefer doing it
that way because we like our players.

William
--------------
Chantillary on castle.perilous.com:1440



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