In view of the recent and repeated crashes which I hope will be temporary, would it be possible to set up a system which holds a number of versions ( i can't find a better word) of the same character, to help prevent accidents. If ever something happens out of some ooc accident, it would then be possible to revert back to one of the older copies of a character.

There would be problems involved with the conflicting items available on your character from version to version. From the non-dm-administrative side, I don't think this could be done in any graceful way simply due to logistic purposes.

That's not to mention that it's easily exploitable if PC's can choose to go backwards. We do keep backups periodically that we can revert to in the case of losing everything. We need to get better about them, but they do exist.

The issue I think this persons referring to is that she was killed in a quest and had managed to make it back to her pack and was retreiving her items. Halfway through the retreival, the server dropped connection (because of a storm last night apparently where it's located) and she lost literally everything she had, including some very rare items that she had collected.

it would be nice to have some sort of repreive from such unavoidable and unpredictable events, though at this juncture I'm not sure what the best way to do this would be.

Yes I suffered a losing everything crash as well during a hoar quest. While trying to figure a way to sneak past the shadow the server crashed and it would be very helpful if there was a way to have a back up plan to prevent this.

There's nothing that really works easily except actually trying to keep dropped packs and the information in them stored as a database.

That is a feasible solution to losing things in a crash, essentially making corpses and dropped bags persistantly stored. Albeit, its not 'easy' to accomplish this and still open to a number of exploits.

Having multiple 'save' versions of your characters is pure and simple, a very easily exploitable situation that will cause all kinds of confusion and trouble regardless of how it was implemented.

Sending items to a database is an interesting idea, however, where they finally "go" once you want to retrieve them, especially after the crash, would have to be something to think about. Already, your corpse 'appearing' in the mausoleum is a little quirky, IC wise. All your items being there would be just as quirky, if not more. I think the death system works fantastically...in terms of recovering the corpse and items dropping into a sack on the ground.

But these server resets....

:(

If you lost something hard or impossible to replace due to a server crash let a DM know the details. I'll stop short of promising that you will get back what you lost, but the DMs here really try to curb the frustration of these sorts of losses.

Server stability is something that the builders and scripters are very conscientious about. We constantly expirement to find ways to improve the performance of the server from a techincal standpoint. We work with what we have though; the truth is that the server from Bioware is not crash proof.

Multiple versions of the same character will not be implemented in the forseeable future because of some of the concerns already mentioned.

ExileStrife Sending items to a database is an interesting idea, however, where they finally "go" once you want to retrieve them, especially after the crash, would have to be something to think about. Already, your corpse 'appearing' in the mausoleum is a little quirky, IC wise. All your items being there would be just as quirky, if not more. I think the death system works fantastically...in terms of recovering the corpse and items dropping into a sack on the ground.

But these server resets....

:(

You missed my point.

You can make the location of these items persistant with a database. Whether its something a server can handle or not is the real question. When I was with Arabel, we realized we couldn't handle it--too many problems with how we used databases or something as I recall.

Corpses and items both could be left where they fell in that situation using a database.

Oh my Oro, I -did- miss your point. Keeping these persistant could be very doable with some of the functions nwnx has. Hmm!

One possible issue that comes to mind is that when people are dying, that is roughly one of the worst times possible to begin doing a lot of expensive database reads/writes. Definitely worth consideration though.

I'm sorry if I didn't mention it, but players WONT be allowed to revert back by themselves to a previous version of their character.