Nice "Feature": Mine in river

[g1real]

I don't get it, how can people die by death due lag?

As far as I know you stand on one side, click the other side, and even if it lags it doesn't drain any extra stamina.

[loftar]

But obviously I don't know how the resurrection process works. Or how much J&L value their players' time.

I do feel kind of sorry for those who lost their characters due to lag (though, as g1real says, I don't quite understand how that's possible, either -- there isn't any extra stamina drained due to lag or anything anyway, but I digress), but character revival is quite a time-consuming and error-prone process. If I committed to revive players outside of the most exceptional circumstances like this or the lifting bug mentioned in the other thread, I'd have no time over to, say, fix bugs or add features, not to mention schoolwork, housework and other parts of my life.

[Ai_Shizuka]

I don't understand it completely, myself.
I'm sure my pg was fit to cross that river (already crossed it a couple times, con 48). Right in the middle it froze in the swimming animation, like the moonwalking it does when the server is about to crash. After some 5-10 seconds it teleported on the last deep water tile and insta-drowned.

Kinda shocking when it happens. I mean, I spent the last days pre-ragnarok drinking beer to raise my str and training melee to settle away from the central slums.
Oh well, it's an alpha.

[jorb]

Agreeing with loftar, I feel we can't reasonably have a policy of reviving characters left and right. The process is manual, and loftar has better things to do with his time than spending it maintaining user data that isn't even technically corrupt. I can safely say that I invest at least four hours a day in this project -- reading forums, drawing, playing, building, dreaming and brain-storming. I give H&H the fullest attention possible, and I know loftar does the same. All work that can be avoided, should be avoided. I don't want to wash my hands completely, I accept some level of responsibility for reasonable outcomes of ingame events, but, frankly, we can't afford to be generous. I feel sorry for those who lost characters, but we've been warning about swimming ever since the concept was first confirmed as being in the game. This case is obviously a particular exception in that a game mechanic that should not be lethal at all turned out to be very much so under a specific set of circumstances.

When swimming: Click once on the final destination where you want your character to end up. If the lag spikes, don't panic, and don't click again anywhere. My guess is that a lot of the lag deaths are actually caused by players inadvertently telling their characters to stop in the middle of the river, by panicking and clicking like madmen when the lag kicks in. It's, really, the only possible explanation I can think of.

Arguably there should be a swimming toggle, and perhaps some other safety nets as well, but in general I'm happy about our implementation of swimming. When I've been playing my alt my heart has skipped a few beats every time I've crossed a river, even when I knew I could make it across. It felt like what I did mattered, and had potential, acceptable, consequences. I think that's a good thing. I've played and enjoyed quite a few rouge-likes in my day, and the high-risk environments those games usually offer appeals strongly to me. My sandbox won't feel complete without a Shai-hulud or two. Saying that a game offers a high risk environment is basically the same as saying that you can die on a fluke -- because accidents do happen -- and that will always, I think, be the case here. Haven will always be played for high stakes.

On a completely unrelated note, there should really be some bog iron for household needs.

Oh, and I passed my exams.

[Xarx]

Saying that a game offers a high risk environment is basically the same as saying that you can die on a fluke -- because accidents do happen -- and that will always, I think, be the case here. Haven will always be played for high stakes.

Awesome! Good to know you arent caving in too much.

Also congrats on your exams.

[Brosephine]

Panicking and clicking like madmen when the lag kicks in.

That's exactly what I did - oddly enough.

[Vanigo]

...character revival is quite a time-consuming and error-prone process.

Would it be simpler to retroactively bump the character to full tradition? Just a suggestion...

[Peter]

As I understand it, all the character data is actually destroyed and deleted. They're actually rebuilding the character from scratch.

[Vanigo]

Well, it must at least save the values passed on to descendents - stat values, skill values, and LP. I think most people would be satisfied if they just went in and raised these values to what they would be if they had been at full tradition when they died.