Persistence defined as of now? (0.51)

[StonedProphet 16]

So I have been playing a long while now, took break, and came back for 0.51. Before anyone tells at me for searching the forums first, I did that, thought if I missed a post explaining this please let me know. As far as I can tell, persistence on severs with that active will spawn loot ONE single time on Wednesday at restart and that loot will exist thee for a week. This loot can be moved, taken off the server by players, stockpiled by multiple players in ANY location. Loot can be brought in from other servers, persistent or not, as long as they are transported by a player and dropped somewhere on a persistent server. Said loot will remain where it is THROUGHOUT any regular server restart intervals and no new loot will spawn until the week is up and everything is reset that you don't have on your character. You can revisit multiple severs with persistence enabled and have multiple sites through these servers where you can store loot and return to it for that entire week where it will remain unless it is found by another player and taken.

Is this accurate? This is what I have seen.

[The Riddler (DayZ) 410]

I'd say that's fairly accurate on "how its supposed to work" but from my own experience running a server with Persistence enabled, the loot doesn't always seem to stay like it should. We've had to restore our persistence file that our GSP (Fragnet) does a backup of each day when we've logged in and found our gear piles gone. It wasn't due to the Wednesday wipe that BEC mentions happening and our GSP mentioned that a server crash could cause issues with the persistence file. For the most part I have not seen any server crashes in 0.51 but we never could put our finger on how persistence behaves and if our gear will stay or not. Also there is the issue of loot "water falling" at certain locations. Just search the forums or even youtube these days for examples where you'll go into a building and find tons and tons of loot stacked up so much that it starts to drop your Frame rate. <<< That right there is the main reason on my server we turned it off. Too many server hoppers camping those loot "water falls" and overall dropping the server population b/c people simply can't find loot.  

 

With that in mind, we decided to just turn it off for the time being until its further developed and there is commentary from the dev's on exactly what they've done to "improve" persistence.