I mentioned this on Oriette's thread but I thought it needed its own thread so here we are. I'm not as good at fancy layouts so please bear with me?
Basically, we had an announcement about regular name clearing of inactive accounts. It happened once, exactly once, and then never again (as far as I'm aware. If I'm wrong please correct me). It was done by hand and from what I understand people were rather upset that it was just a bunch of good names and that they kept getting moved to different accounts, etc. I have no idea personally, it's just what I heard. But I think it was a good idea to do it and it needs to happen MORE, so here's my thoughts:
Name Clearing
It needs to happen MORE. Automate it. It's not hard to make a nightly sc
ript for stuff like this, but I think it needs some tweaks.
1. We need a shorter timeframe. If you're inactive for say... 1 year, that should be plenty before the sc
ript kicks in. It's not having to keep your pets fed, it's not having to buy a lot of items. You literally have to log in (basically remember this site exists, come to it, and enter your username and password) one time. That's ONE page you have to visit ONCE a year. I think we can safely say that even if life goes crazy you should be able to manage that much. People were right when they said that we need to cater more to new users rather than old users that literally don't log in anymore, but this system doesn't punish the ones that DO log in and maybe don't have as much time to play the game for long spurts, only the ones that don't log in at all.
2. This shouldn't be a "delete the pets" sc
ript. This sc
ript should simply move all pets in the ranch/showroom/auctions/everything onto the user's profile (preferably unpricing them in the process so we don't have priced pets floating around profiles). Then it does nothing. It allows the food pen to empty naturally (if it has something in it) and the pets to die and lose their names naturally. It allows for the same grave watching that everyone is excited about and no one has an advantage over anyone else (we can even update the Creatu Search to make this a part of the game, allow ignoring of nameless pets in our searches, include a little guide on how to watch names). Remember, this means that users can come back and still revive their pets, it's only names that would be lost and depending on how full the pets are and how much food is in the food pen it's still possible that it'd take over a month AFTER this 1 year period to die.
2a. Keep the emails that go out to these inactive users. Heck, automate them, it's just another sc
ript. We aren't trying to punish people, just clear out people's names that don't sign in anymore at all. If you only had a year, maybe that email would bring people back faster. Better than getting a reminder about the site once every, what was it? 5 years? Whatever the timeframe is for manual clearing now.
3. The timeframe for PERMANENTLY banned accounts should be smaller. Notice the emphasis. There should be a way in the DB to differentiate between temp bans, bans still up for investigation, and permanent bans. All other bans would function in the same way as the inactive accounts. If you're banned for over a year then maybe you deserve to lose a few names? I don't know, maybe temp bans can be excluded if that's not the case, up for debate, I'm not support so I don't know. However, if there is exactly 0 chance of the account coming back, make the timeframe more like 3 months. Maybe 6 if you need that long to ensure that it's actually permanent, but I'd say 3 is more than enough. The sc
ript could pick those up faster, names (which may have been obtained unfairly to begin with) get cleared faster, everyone wins.
More on PERMANENTLY banned accounts
So, banned accounts, and I'm talking PERMANENTLY banned and I want to make this ABUNDANTLY clear. Not temp bans, permanent only. Many have obtained their items/pets unfairly and they are never going to get back in circulation even if they didn't. So before everyone gets mad, I reiterate, PERMANENTLY banned accounts, not inactive, not temp bans, not pending investigation/appeal, PERMANENT.
1. Delete their pets. Relax, not suddenly and giving the one doing the deleting an "advantage" for the names. Include it in the nightly clearing sc
ript (or a separate sc
ript that runs after it). Once a PERMANENTLY banned account has its names naturally cleared (put on profile, die, lose name) all those pets in the graveyard (this should happen only after no other pets except dead and unnamed exist on the account) are just hard wiped. Gone from the game forever.
2. The same should happen to the items. The items should be cleared at the same time as the pets. All of them. Inventory, closet, gallery, merchant. Poof, gone. Heck, clear out their TU for posterity, although that won't really do much for anyone else.
3. We should NOT be able to send items to ANY banned account. If we try, there should be an error that comes up saying "You have attempted to send items to a banned account, please check the username and try again." and it should just not send your items. This would actually help take some load off of staff as well I think. Less having to fix typo mistakes.
Why do I think the things above, especially 1 and 2, are important? Part of this response is for users and part is for the devs.
1. Let's talk about the dev reasoning first. Any user that isn't interested can skip over it. As a dev myself who works with extremely large databases (100s of GB in a single table sometimes, let alone the entire DB) I know how important it is to not leave stale, useless data in the DB. There are places that are particularly slow (like the Item Database and sometimes the Creatu Search) on this site. Part of that may be other things, but part may be just the sheer volume of data sitting around. Now, it's important to note that because these pets will never be in circulation, they're basically wasted data space and more of a nuisance to have to include in the search than anything else. Users will get very little out of them existing (especially if name clearing is implemented again) so why clog up the DB with them?
2. Now for the user reasoning. Items/pets on permanently banned accounts are something no one will ever have access to. It's sometimes annoying to see these dead (I'm assuming they're dead because of the name clearing here) pets hanging around in our searches. They also create a false sense of abundance for certain species/colors. I think it's important to more accurately reflect how many are in a state where they could potentially, some day, be on an account that someone logs into. If they're on a permanently banned account, they're just there. Same with items. I'll use the same example I did in the other thread. There are currently 385 Regression Rays out there. I am willing to bet that over half of those are on banned accounts. If we want the economy to be better, I think one step for that is to have a proper idea of supply/demand. As it stands, the "supply" is being bulked out by banned accounts that don't ACTUALLY contribute to the supply. Making it clear again, I'm only suggesting that PERMANENTLY banned accounts have their items/pets cleared, so even users that are inactive for 4+ years and lose their names will still have ALL their items/TU/pets, just not the names. It is only items that, let's be fair, may have been obtained unfairly to begin with, that would be cleared up.
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