Hey, guys! I think it would be really useful to make hired merchants survive server restarts, if at all possible. It's quite annoying when you set up all your stores and hope they would stay the next 24 hours, but they close after an hour due to a server restart/ check. I have 4 stores that I have to fill up with items, while checking the price for most of the items in my txt file. This takes quite a bit of time. And having the server shut down almost every day doubles that time. Could something like this be implemented: 1. Before a planned server shutdown, store locations and items in them are saved. 2. Time to live on the stores is saved as well. 3. When the server is back up, stores are in the same place, with the same items and the same time to live. Thanks for reading. I hope something like this can be done.
I don't think it can be done. Also, this would further decrease the chances of people getting good FM spots, because it will be even easier for shopholders to maintain their door spots.
I believe a more intelligent solution would be to make the time to live a random time between 23 and 25 hours, rather than a fixed 24-hour-period. That's a 2 hour period - who's going to spend 2 hours checking if their store has closed so that they could reopen it? Also, currently it's very easy for people who refresh the site during a server shutdown to get the best spots once the server is up and running.
So the only solution is to have all the stores reset at random periods of time? In the end, we are discussing how to let the more casual players get a good spot. I'm all for that, but hardcore players are either going to reopen their stores after a server shutdown, or after their TTL reaches 0. Only in the former case, though, people have to waste their time talking to Fredrick and filling their stores with items twice.
I think he meant not being able to close it until after the undetermined 23rd~25th hour. But still, not being able to close one's store will cause another whole slew of problems.
As far as I know, it is not possible to save the states of hired merchants during server restarts since the data is stored within the server execution process which "tosses away" the hired merchant data upon being shutdown.
I've got an idea, but it's pretty crazy and I'm not even sure if it's possible. So say my shop is closed and my items are in fredrick, my idea is that when i'll reopen the shop my items from my previous shop including the prices, exactly like it was before, it closed, will be in the new shop. For example: 1)I put x2 Gloves for att 60% for 10m each in my shop in fm4 2)24h's later the shop is closed and one GFA 60% is sold (My remaining x1 GFA 60% is now in fredrick) 3)Now that my scroll is STILL in fredrick I reopen my shop in fm8 and the scroll that was in fredrick (x1 GFA 60%) is instantly in my shop for 10m just like it was before. 4)Now imagine that many people always open 2 full shops at any given time have to remember the prices every single time and put the items in the shop one after the other. I think this is a good sulotion if it's even possible to be implented because it saves people the burden of setting up a shop every single time with the same stuff (especially people that open 2-3 FULL shops at the same time). And also give other people the chance of getting better fm spot after a server check. In additon, it will also help the economy because alot of people lazy (like me) with alot of items but not much patient will actually open thier shops for once!
I would just be happy if we could have our stores slightly closer together without overlapping, and if people who took up two spots with one store would be made to re-open with a spot empty near them. But that's me, I hate when I see one store taking up 2 spots at once when two stores could fit into that spot.
I absolutely love this idea - it saves us from the controversy that arose above, while still making shop opening an easy and painless process!
This indeed would be a good solution, but I don't think it's possible since John already said that the data (what items are inside and their price) about shops gets tossed out each server reset.
I'm willing to donate so such a feature could be implemented, because I find the game unplayable otherwise. Just name your price. The status of shops could easily be saved several minutes before a shutdown with a bot that goes through the FM and saves the state (like maple.fm and maplefm.com do).
Of course this can be done. They just have to re-write their code a little bit, add a few more DB entries for each character (using a script of course), and decide which global variable they want to use for determining the time when a shop must be closed. Should it be a Real Server Time that the server itself has a counter for, in other words, once the server is down this time stops. Or should it depend on Real World Time to take down shops. If you want your shop to really last 24H of play time, you would want the first method of keeping time implemented. Of course it's possible. Virtually anything is possible when you're a programmer. But there will be certain limitations with MapleStory because they do not have the source of the Game Client to edit easily and fiddle with. The Game Client can be hard to work with at times. For your idea, they would also have to add some additional DB (database) entries to store that information in OR if they already implement the first Feature Requested by Unix, they can Re-Use the already stored contents of the shop at the time of deletion. (two possible ways, re-store or just flick a switch) The only reason why they may not decide to implement this would be if they are currently struggling with fixing the server instability issues and don't have time for features, or if they find that the source of the server is too hard to work with, and such a feature would be too time consuming and not worth it since they could be using the time to fix stuff. Sincerely, -Oldie
Yes, it's possible, but not a very great idea. You can store the fh, x, and y of each merchant, and then load them when the server starts, but this would require two runnables to be ran. One to save the merchants position (either every hour or so or when the !shutdown command is run), and then another to re-place them, upon server launch. While that doesn't seem TOO bad, it's still an unneeded waste of server resources. Plus this would be accessing the database on a wide scale pretty often. Implementing something like this is viable to cause deadlocks and that's just no bueno! Fight for your position in the FM, don't fight for getting rolled back.
I'd like to hear if any of the developers will address this issue and implement some of the suggested workarounds.
Interesting, but this will not solve your root problem. You can't expect for a casual player to have more chance on a good FM spot. The best suggestion for this is making the gab betwee, stores smaller. Making stores close in a 23~25hour time delay is not an option, because you can simply reset the store anytime you want. Removing the option to close the storage will also cause some spots to render useless. I do however like the idea of making your store setup with the items stored in Fredrick, and if this is OK with the admins I can look into this. However, we're having some bad uptime problems lately which require more attention than some luxuary problems (yes, they are). I like the input on this thread. So if anyone has more ideas, please keep the rolling!
