Zedit

[Kvetch]

I want to touch on zedit briefly as I know I don't know everything about it, but as I'm going through Dragon Forest which was built years ago, but also taken out years ago, I am noticing one small error in zedit that I want to make sure everyone is aware of.

Zedit is something we really don't cover, but it's how you load your mobs and objects into various rooms of the zone.  The thing I want to touch on is the "how many" that is asked when you do this.  That question isn't referring to "how many in this room" it's "how many in the whole mud"  And when you're talking objects, you're also talking the pfiles of players that haven't played for years.

For mobs, you want to make sure you cover how many copies of that mob you're going to have throughout your whole zone.  Currently, I've found at least one instance where the zedit calls for a total of 2 mobs, but I have at least 3 places that they can load - this doesn't work as it will never load in the 3rd place.

For objects, you want to cover how rare you want that particular object to be.
5 seems to be extremely rare (and realize once people have those 5, it will never load on your mob/ in your room again).
10 is still rare
50 is starting to be quite common
100 - everyone probably has one and a spare.
I've gotten to the point where I use 1000 for keys - just to make sure they'll always load (and now I'm going to have someone go and grab 1000 copies of the same key, just so it won't.  )  Anything that I think is needed for a quest and I want to make sure will load, get's 1000 on it.

Molly may not agree with my statements above with rarity, I'm just taking a stab in the dark with what I see (which, if it's dark isn't much). 

Kvetch

[Molly]

I most certainly agree.
Many of the oldest zones have a much too low maxload, and I increase those whenever I come acroos them, because objects not loading as they should is really annoying.
Nowadays I usually set a max of at least 500 on everything.

I'd like to add something about zedit, however.
If you reset something directly in a room, (i.e not on a mob or in a container), you need to remove the same vnum directly before. Otherwise more and more objects will collect in the room, until the max number is reached.  The same goes for a too high max number on a mob reset, although there is no way to limit mobs in a room in a room by removing them first.

Sometimes in the past this has  lead to the Port crashing, because the code cannot handle the spam that occurs when someone enters the room and looks at the mob pile up.

   

[Kvetch]

Yeah, I think I'm going to up my counts.  These days even 50 seems to be rare and depending on the use of the item (parchment anyone?) 100 would still be considered rare (if you don't agree with me then do a search on parchment and see what I'm talking about).   So probably, if you want an item to be common you want to have it at 500.  I'm even considering upping my 1000 to a higher number.  At the current player base it probably isn't needed, but if we get more players and other players quit with a copy... you can manage to have quite a few out there doing nothing.

I do wonder, though, how rare arti's really should be.  Without timers they won't load once the max-load is reached and people are starting to say they haven't seen such and such arti for years....  Should we up the max-load every so often or just say "that's what you get when you don't have timers on artis  which is what you all wanted"?