Valuable lesson learned

[Dragonsoul]

Firstly, I'm not a noob. I've been playing this great game for over 3 years and this is the first time I've encountered this issue. I placed 10 or so full sik keyrings on my villa floor, logged out and immediately logged in my main to pick them up and they were not there. the lag in time from the last drop to the relog was NO MORE than 30 seconds. I've been doing this for over 3 years with no mishaps.
I send a message to an envoy and get answered as tho this is my first day in-game. "I'm sorry to say that if the landblock cleared, there is no way to retrieve the items." I say, "I understand that, but is there a known issue with dropping items and having them disappear?" He says, "no, things are working as they should be." I say, "I've been dropping items on my villa floor for over 3 years, at times as many as 50 scrolls and relogged in and they were always there." He says, "I'm sorry, the landblocks are clearing as they should be."
Do envoys just refuse to see when there is an issue? Normally items clear after 5 minutes, not 30 seconds.
Am I the issue? Have I just been lucky for over 3 years, or does it sound to the experienced player like there may be an issue here. Do landblocks clear at a given interval, and in the past 3 years I have not dropped anything close to the clearing interval so never lost anything? Or do items clear as I've always thought they did? After 5 mins.
Do envoys treat everyone as if they're clueless? Who knows, maybe I am and I've just been lucky for the past 3 years.
Can someone in the know explain just how this clearing works?

[ShaunaEyebright]

To be honest, I don't know for a fact exactly what algorithm the servers use to determine when to clear a landblock from memory. It is my understanding that a given landblock will generally stay loaded for at least 5 minutes after the last player has left (or logged out). However, ISTR reading somewhere that if, due to server load elsewhere within the game world (remember that each game world is not actually one single machine, but a group of machines that work together to balance the work of maintaining Dereth for us), the server decides that it needs to drop an unused landblock early to free up resources, it will do so.

Another factor to take into account is item degrade, i.e. the housekeeping routine that makes unattended items on the landscape dissappear after a short while. They have played with the duration on item degrade so many times that I can't even begin to tell you how this plays into your situation, however I will mention that there are some items ingame that are set to degrade pretty quickly.

So, taking that all into account, my inexpert opinion is that you've today been unlucky enough to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that the landblock your villa (or its dungeon) resides in chose that moment to go on vacation, leaving the maid behind to straighten up. :(

[Yula_the_Mighty]

When a housing land block unloads, all items on the grounds are automatically destroyed during the unload. It is not always possible to swap characters before the unload. My daughter encountered this situation when she tried to drop mule her GSC and was very unhappy when the Turbine house cleaning service sent her GSC to the dump.

You have my deepest sympathy. It is never fun to lose stuff.

Yula the Mighty - HG

[Dragonsoul]

Thanks for the reply guys. As the name implies, valuable lesson learned. Never drop anything you don't want to lose. I guess I should be thankful it wasn't something like GSC.

[CrazyPoster]

You can avoid dropping stuff on your own choise, but it is always exciting too see if 1) you actually receive an item you should when handing something to a NPC 2) another player actually receives the suff you hand over, either through direct trade or though trade window. But this is ofcource another technical issue because the server dont decide to clear memory and stuff just as they are handed over ... do they?!

(I cant understand where the stuff is going. If you "take an item" from a field in the database you could atleast check that it for sure is stored in the receiving field. But guess Turbine's servers aren't very redudant in this case.)

[Hazmat]

This porblem has been around since the start of the game. You where probably just lucky to not encounter it before. One of the things that makes it more noticable now is the lack of people and bots. There is a greater chance that no one is in your landblock. I can remember havine issues at our mansion before we started running bots there. Once the bots went online there was someone (the bot) logged on in the landblock almost all the time. The landblock seldom reset so drop mueling was relatively safe.