Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

Fairer character expiration
Admin CavemanJoe – 2015-11-03 06:30:41 [Permalink]
Hey, folks. To keep the game running fast, we've always had a system in place whereby characters that don't have any logins for a while are erased. Right now it's at a hundred and eighty days - so six months, basically. Up until now, the way it's worked has been a holdover from Old, Old Code, and I've never really been happy with the way it works - previously, we had different timeouts for people who'd gotten to a certain level, and these days we have a lot of players who don't really level up so much as build things and roleplay, so it's time we redesigned the system.

Now, character expiration is based on time and pageviews, rather than time and level, so roleplay alts who do lots of chatting but little fighting have the same timeout as everyone else. The timeout is still six months for anyone who's remotely into the game. For people just stopping by to kick the tyres and see if they like the game or not, the timeout remains at seven days - these are people who sign up and then go "Oh, so it really IS all text" and then leave without getting past their tenth pageview.

Furthermore, HyperRings - an item available in the Hunter's Lodge to exempt your character from expiration - are no longer necessary. If there has ever been a PayPal donation made in your character's name, your character will never expire. Existing HyperRings will continue to work for the purposes of preserving characters who've never made a PayPal donation.

Have fun!

-CMJ

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