Reducing Lag Bags

[Flatted Fifth]

I know the best way to reduce lag bags is for everyone to be responsible and courteous and wait a few seconds after a kill to see if it spawns loot, and then dispose of the loot one way or another. However, we all know not everyone is going to do this. Some people are just inconsiderate, and some others are in a big hurry because their spells might wear off any moment! Perfectly understandable. I have a suggestion though: remove useless garbage from the dropped loot tables.

Empty ale steins, ranged ammo with no properties, empty wine bottles, boots and gloves with no properties (or with "only usuable by" properties and nothing else), anything that has a re-sale price of 0 could just be removed from the dropped loot. It doesn't need to be there. If dropped loot never contains anything of zero value it will reduce the number of lag bags left laying around. I know it won't eliminate them, but it would reduce the problem.

I know that it's random, but what I mean is alter the script so that nothing has no properties and remove the "only usable by" property. Also remove steins, wine bottles, broken bottles, and rags. I know it's meant to add a bit of colour to the encounter (hey, this bugbear has been drinking!) but I think the server doesn't really need it. It's a great server with lots of depth and colour, we don't really need to discover that the phase spider has been collecting shoes.

[Snarfy]

I like this idea, cleaning up loot bags is a big pet peeve of mine, and I used to do it religiously. Now though, I find I will often just leave a bunch of junk on the ground because I'm on a low STR character. Unless there's a chest nearby, then I will usually pick the junk up and drop it in there.

In some ways I wish that the only monsters who dropped treasure were yellow named monsters, but then again... this would probably deprive me of finding all those random goodies that runners leave behind(like the +3 AC dodge boots I found just now. Thanks, whoever was just in the Sharpteeth!). That being said:

It's a great server with lots of depth and colour, we don't really need to discover that the phase spider has been collecting shoes.

... yep, all those critters without arms who are carrying weapons or armor does seem silly. What is even more annoying are the types that auto-drop crap into your inventory(beetle shells, troll hides, mandibles). Once again, when someone is on a low STR toon, these are probably getting dumped on the ground(even by me and my pet peeve).

So, yes please, a +1 from me on removing generic crap from drops.

[Steve]

Loot Bags do not cause lag. It is however INCREDIBLY ANNOYING to enter an Area that some Player was just grinding and seeing Litter Loots all over the f’in place.

I’d vote that Loot Drops are assigned a Timer for 5 minutes, then if not picked up, they auto-disappear.

You snooze you lose.

[MrSmith]

All are brilliant ideas. I would like to recommend too that developers consider how NPC vendor interactions influence or condition players to interact with their environment.

As a relatively new player with three months on the server... I opine new players are conditioned to leave loot behind based on their initial experiences with NPC stores. As a new player to the server, I quickly learned Blunt refuses to purchase traps. Because this is/was my first experience with the BG economy, I threw traps away. I quickly learned traps held value once I moved through the Ruins and landed in FAI. Nevertheless, the fact the Dwarven Merchant in FAI pays good coin for traps is "too little, too late" because I opine players are already conditioned to leave traps where they spawn. I make this assertion based on the fact that I routinely find deadly or epic traps discarded in the Cloakwood and Saw Tooth Woods areas, and then well into other double-digit CR areas. Some, albeit few, merchants pay good coin for traps, especially deadly and epic varieties... so leaving them behind doesn't make that much sense given their relatively low weight.

Cheers!

[Xorena]

Why not just implement a cleanup script?

Also loot bags do not cause lag. Spawning tons of monsters causes lag.

[c2k]

I'm not against a clean up script, But I can tell you opening your inventory and opening a loot bag strains the server more than a loot bag on the ground.

[Snarfy]

While we're on this subject, I just remembered something: animals that can be skinned. The corpses of these take 2 or 3 times as long to disappear and reveal if they've dropped any loot, unless you skin them(and I would genuinely like to know if a single, solitary player bothers to skin animals at all).

Then there's bats. Their propensity for being a PITA to target notwithstanding, trying to click on the lootable corpse, and not the skinnable one makes me want to headbutt my keyboard, and you have to be quick to click it before it turns into that glowing loot animation(and the loot is still there, it's just not clickable).

[qwertyuiop]

Also loot bags do not cause lag.

They are still a created object that adds to the overall amount of objects residing in the application memory that the PW is already strained for. Any computation occurring for no benefit of the person is queued calculations that caused something else to wait its turn, thus lag but not by a large amount.

[Tanlaus]

+1 for removing the valueless loot.

I agree, it really adds nothing to the game.

[c2k]

I don't think there is anything wrong with valueless loot. sometimes you roll snake eyes.

[ajcolt]

After first visiting the ruins with kobolds I wondered why there isn't a decay timer on loot bags. I'm with Steve in the opinion that multiple loot bags on the ground is aesthetically displeasing and is kind of an immersion breaker. I've heard that the game code is encrypted as to not be able to easily reverse engineer the code so it may not be ?possible?. From what I've saw on discord I get the very strong impression that they are running nwn2 at about it's ?limits?. A decay timer may put more stress on the server. I'm not tech savy enough to know one way or the other.

[c2k]

The cons of a loot clean up script are that it can fire when its not supposed to fire. it might eat the loot you are trying to get to, or it might eat an item you accidentally dropped. It might even have an adverse effect on campfires, which people use to transfer. This server did have a loot bag clean up script once many years ago, and these were sort of the problems it caused.

its true that the limits of the game are being tested, but a loot bag script is not something that would fit the criteria of that.

I personally don't know how I feel about what I am going to suggest, but perhaps someone who is good with GUI programming can edit the loot GUI and add a button that deletes all the contents in the bag. It would be as if the character made a campfire to toss all of the stuff inside and then remove it. It cuts down on opportunism however, because sometimes people just leave gold, but it might help clean up the loot bags if a player only has to click a button, rather than do the campfire dance.

[Zanniej]

... unless you skin them(and I would genuinely like to know if a single, solitary player bothers to skin animals at all).

I always skin every skin-able animal

I don't want them to die in vain!

[zhazz]

The cons of a loot clean up script are that it can fire when its not supposed to fire. it might eat the loot you are trying to get to, or it might eat an item you accidentally dropped. It might even have an adverse effect on campfires, which people use to transfer. This server did have a loot bag clean up script once many years ago, and these were sort of the problems it caused.

I played on Sigil for a few years in the past. They had a clean up script that would only eat items given if the area had remained empty of PCs for 5 minutes or more.

In the more crowded areas, such as the Sigil City centre there was a NPC, who would travel around the area to collect dropped items, which would then be put in a garbage bin. Placeables wasn't counted among these obviously.

Never encountered any issues with losing items this way.

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As for loot bags that are left behind, I can understand someone accidently forgetting the drop from a monster. The time from death to loot spawn is horrendous, even more so for orange/purple monsters. Can this not be changed?

What really baffles me, and actually annoys me, is finding a bunch of dropped items near a vendor, when there is a garbage bin right next to said vendor. Use the garbage bin, you savages! .... This issue could of course be fixed by ensuring that every item in the game is worth at least 1 gold piece, even a stack of shurikens that holds only one shuriken.

[chad878262]

I used to worry about loot bags and even at one point pinged a DM in game because another player over several days straight was running around Cloudpeak foothills killing Hill Giants, ignoring me and any other players, leaving dozens of loot bags laying around, stealing kills (literally engaged with enemies and the player would shoot them to get the kill shot). Now to be honest I was more annoyed by the lack of RP, willingness to either join up or in any way interact in character, but it also was somewhat a pita to go around cleaning up the trash. Although it also did land me a couple of nice items, but even that felt pretty cheap since I didn't 'earn' anything IC.

The above said, most of the time I usually only see an occasional lootbag left behind and that's not such a horrible issue. Rather than a cleanup script for individual loot bags, there might be other options to consider from a technical standpoint. Perhaps resetting a map if no player has been there for 5 minutes (or 10 or whatever). Or maybe when a loot bag populates the PC doesn't get XP for the kill until all items have been taken from it (j/k, I highly doubt that is technically possible and would not be a serious consideration even if it were). I would say if this is something someone wants to look in to, the fix should be something that is simple, even if the solution is less ideal than another. As much fun as it would be to make a loot bag spawn the White Dragon if they aren't picked up within 18 seconds (that'd learn players to pick them up and quick!) it's probably overall not a great solution.