Reminder: Hiding items is NOT for storage

[Jirato]

Decided to take a stroll through Tarueka to check out the re-released Concord today and I'm finding hidden items in every single room. This causes unnecessary bloat. There are reasons why the "janitor" system doesn't take hidden items, but this system should not be used to circumvent the janitor. I'm going to write a script to go through and get rid of any hidden items older than a week.

[Edoras]

There's gonna be sooooo many items lost, people hide items all over the place

[Jirato]

Update, since I didnt post it after I spoke about it on chat


I just did a bit of manual cleanup instead of using a script, so I could minimize loss of valuable items. Will plan on writing up a system to dispose of hidden critter weapons, as it seems the most commonly hidden "trash" items are weapons from the critters in that hunting area for some reason (would prefer people just didn't hide them...). So I cleared all of those I could find along with several rooms that had stacks of arrows.

I also think we need to limit the number of items you can hide in a single spot, and the max size and weight of a hidden item, because rooms with 50 pieces of ore, 30 logs, etc, just seem too much to really efficiently hide.

Please be very very careful about hiding anything valuable. If someone stumbles across your cache, there's nothing preventing them from just taking your stuff. The town's justice systems wouldn't care.

[Marauder]

I personally would like to ask "what is it for" in this case. I use it, mainly, for storing small amounts of items in emergency caches in the wilderness and sometimes to store backpacks full of chests on characters that don't have the riln for an inn room for multiple days, a house or the money for constant vault storage.

I have, however, seen people use it to hide NPC weapons after disarming them and then completely ignore that they did so. This is my major concern as I've uncovered a lot of them by accident. Not everyone uses hidden caches to store junk items, some use it responsibly and for IC reasons of storing items that weigh the character down but the character would like opened or items for bad happenings such as losing a weapon or two.

[Hakon]

I search hunting grounds all the time and get rid of hidden junk weapons. Jirato's putting me out of a job!

But seriously, glad this is being looked into. All the hidden junk bothers me for some reason I can't put my finger on.

[Marauder]

Honestly, I'd prefer not to be punished for someone else's bad usage of hidden items. Maybe add in a deterioration system that damages items if they're left unattended outside of containers starting after a couple of days, until they basically just break down permanently (and thus are deleted)? That'd immediately cut down on all of the junk weapons and items left hidden in hunting grounds because I've never seen any in a proper container, and would be a permanent solution to the bloat from that.

Sadly melting down the copper shortswords people hide after disarming Tarueka guards does not put out enough riln for someone to carry them back. I know because I've tried. Other places, I've considered getting a wagon to steal the weapons from NPCs there and have Gileas melt them down to turn them into riln by way of selling bars of bronze and such. When you hate all professions, why not make your own?

[Dakhal]

It's not really a punishment, but I do feel that a week is perhaps a short period of time for a sweep of hidden items. This could perhaps be curbed if it targeted only specific things, which could very well be an extreme nuisance unless it's set up to delete everything minus what is on an exclusion list. Things such as traps, riln, containers (excluding the random mob lootboxes) and some few other things should likely be discluded.

I have spent literally hours scouring the map looking for things to reset and take out of hiding every two weeks or so, and I've found some.. interesting junk. Yeah, really cool stuff actually, and it would suck for such unique items to be gone forever.

In my experience, the biggest cause of random bloat is people disarming and hiding weapons so enemies can't pick them up. Followed by random junk that locksmiths find in world boxes and decide to drop in hiding rather than just drop on the ground so they may be janitored. That's always boggled my mind, because I feel like such people should have more responsibility. Third off, loot boxes from mobs.

I am an offender of this, I think I have somewhere near 100 or more boxes hidden in a place just waiting to be taken care of as I lack any means of storage, unfortunately. And I'm too cheap to solve that problem.

Also locksmiths like to hide their unlocked, open (I have noticed a recent trend where they're unlocked and closed, but empty) and empty boxes rather than just dropping them to be janitored. Again, irresponsible.

EDIT: Made the last sentence more.. clarifying as to my meaning.

[Marauder]

Also locksmiths like to hide their unlocked, open and empty boxes rather than just dropping them to be janitored. Again, irresponsible.

Wow, that's a dick move. I make it a point IC and OOC to clean up opened boxes in towns and shove them into a trash barrel if I've just had a locksmith open them all, and I've done this for like fifty boxes at some point. The transfer command is your friend.

[rock]

It's kind of easy to just dump a container out without thinking about it while you're in hiding. Maybe an idea would be to just disallow that?

[Marauder]

It's kind of easy to just dump a container out without thinking about it while you're in hiding. Maybe an idea would be to just disallow that?

Doesn't it give you the whole speil of "you've hidden this and can later recover it" or can you disable those messages somehow?

Also, and this is partially because I play an ex-pirate character and would like it as an RP tool, why not add a way to bury chests and trunks and such? Make it have two sets of round time and make it permanent until someone else finds it by digging there for whatever reason, and completely immune to certain abilities?

Obviously should not work in some rooms, could work in personal mines and public mines with a skill-based chance to reveal it per mining effort made in the room.

[rock]

Doesn't it give you the whole speil of "you've hidden this and can later recover it" or can you disable those messages somehow?

Sure does! But after you've done it, are you really going to bother cleaning up?

[Marauder]

Sure does! But after you've done it, are you really going to bother cleaning up?

Unless playing a character who is intentionally littering? Yes.

[Jirato]

I thought I was clear in my reply, but there are no plans to auto-janitor hidden items at this time, I did a manual cleanup. Rather than auto-janitoring, I am looking into the possibility of disabling the ability to hide certain types of items.

Also, you fight a ton of critters that drop bronze weapons? Put them all in a handcart or wagon, tote them back to town, sell them at pawnshop if you can, otherwise, smelt them into a massive bar of bronze and sell it at market.

Same goes for those 20 steel lockboxes you just opened. That can all be smelter down.

[Marauder]

Yeah. Bronze sells pretty damn well, I've noticed, and so will steel.

Time to invent a new profession, but what will the proper term be? Requisitioner? Metal Collector?

Thank you for the clarification, however.

[Akila]

We call them scrap merchants or scrappies over here. They travel from house to house collecting discarded metal things the bin men won’t take and sell it for scrap.

[Dorn]

Giving them the polite name I see.

[ironcross32]

This is actually a large gripe I have. The hiding of stupid things that are in fact, taking up space and bloating all to hell and back, but yet, if you drop something in a shop, or even out in the wilderness, with the intent to pick it back up again, and you're gone for a period of less than 5 minutes, its probably gone, of in the case that it be multiple items, some of it likely is. I've had this happen to me with a set of good quality armor that I custom ordered, and I was apoplectic with rage, because I think I was practicing climbing, and I stripped everything off to save encumbrance so I had the most chance, when I came back, three-quarters of it was gone and I was all red in the face, heart racing and wanting to throw something.

Now, you can hide things, and they're there for years. Yes, I've heard this before from other players that things they hide are there for years. So, you get slapped down for leaving something out in the open for 5 minutes, but that stuff isn't what the majority of the bloat is coming from I bet. Before the clean up you did, I bet there was at least a thousand, probably more, hidden things out there.

Now, I do see the value of hiding things, I don't personally do a lot of it myself, but I do do it, but with the intention of coming back for it.

I think the reason you find a lot of critter weapons out there is because if you're fighting them, and you use a disarm move, the weapon falls to the ground, If you then pick it up, and hide it, they can't get at it, so, if that was the only weapon in the room, they're then forced to fight with their fists, unarmed, while you wallop on them. Saves you a beating, possibly heavy damage. If you don't hide it, they will probably pick it back up again and proceed to try to run you through with it.

I do have a suggestion as to how you might find the middle ground between the two states. For something you've dropped, it should be a half an hour minimum before it starts chucking them, and maybe at 25 minutes, you get a message like, you recall that the items you left at xxxxx are vulnerable to being taken, and then if you don't go back and collect them within that 5 minutes, they're fair game. Also, for the things hidden, if this isn't the case already, you could take the differences between them and their archetype, so like whatever you have as a generic weapon, and then a generic sword, and then a broadsword, and then your sword, you could take the differences in data between those, and serialize and store that only, then when you recover it, you recreate the object based on the serialized data, plus a reference to the original generic up on the next highest level. I do see the value of things being hidden for a while, but maybe cap it to a year or something, that time renews itself if you visit the area, but it has to be you. Maybe you could have a command like check items, or something like that where you check if everything is there or not, or maybe just visiting the area would be sufficient.

Hiding could be a valuable asset if not misused, I do see that, which is why I'd like to see a way where a balance between still allowing it, plus cutting down on storage bloat at the same time could be found and maintained.

[Jirato]

Items dropped via the DROP command have a 60 tick janitor timer put on them. This gets decremented by 1 per 10 seconds (if no PCs are present in the AREA, not the room), and when it reaches 0, the item is deleted or taken to a special dumping ground if it's a registered item.

Items dropped by any means other than the DROP command have no 'janitortimer' ticker on them. When the janitor loop runs every 10 seconds, if it finds these it puts a 54 tick timer on non-corpse items, and a 17 tick timer on corpse items.

I've just made the following changes:
Set default values in the janitortimer for non-tracked items to 120 ticks for non-corpse items and left current 17 ticks for corpses.
DROP janitortimer changed from 60 ticks (10 minutes) to 120 ticks (20 minutes).
STRIP introduce/reset existing janitor timer to 120 ticks (20 minutes) (Previously did not modify or add a janitor timer)
GET from ground resets janitor timer to 120 ticks if a janitor timer exists.
TRANSFER to ground resets or sets a 120 tick janitor timer (Previously did not reset/add a janitor timer)

The above changes increase the maximum amount of time an item may exist before being janitored in vacant areas to 20 minutes, and also prevent some cases where an item could already have an existing janitortimer that is less than 20 minutes and winds up back on the ground in a manner other than a traditional DROP command.

[Jirato]

As always, never, ever, drop anything you care about and leave the room, even knowing how the janitor timer works. We will not be held responsible for anything that happens. There are a variety of storage options available. However, the above changes should make it a little more bearable.

[ironcross32]

ah, that should make things a little more fair, thanks

[xavier]

I have a question, well maybe it could be counted as more than one.
Does the tick decriment thing runs if someone is in the room?
If the answer to above is yes, then if you leave the room when something has reached zero does that mean you have ten seconds before it disappears?
Also , ok yes, multiple questions, when you say area do you mean room or area as described by the area command?

[ironcross32]

Yeah that's interesting. because unless my calculations are wrong, I should have had ten minutes. I lost a bunch of flitches today, and I wasn't gone even 5, just enough to check out one shop, get a barrel and realize they weren't in the wagon. When I went into the mill, they were gone.