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

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu 
> [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> William Katzell
> Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 1:03 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Pfile Wiping: was Re: [MUD-Dev] The Player Wimping Guidebook
> 
> 
> 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:

This is just standard database maintenance discarding old records. Not quite
the same thing. I think what Tenarius is referring to is zapping ALL
players.

Your rules actually seem fairly conservative in some ways. Ex:

> 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.

Legend has changed playerfile formats several times, and via the expedient
of tracking version numbers, as well as a tag-based format (easy to add to),
has managed to avoid ever losing characters to a format change.

> 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.

Legend uses an inactive period judged by an automatic process run monthly.
It does not care about length of time played. This is backed up with an
"archive" command that players can use themselves if they are going to be
absent a lot. Archived characters must be unarchived to be played, but do
not suffer through the monthly purge. 

There are also backups to go to, even with purges, of course.

> 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.

You SHOULD scrag retired staff who haven't been on in a year, IMHO. At
least, make them not staff anymore!

-Raph



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