Wheels having a persistence issue

[emuthreat 2837]

I have spent the majority of .59 avidly searching for vehicle spawns, recovering found vehicles, and occasionally swiping a poorly hidden ride from a fellow survivor.  Vehicle wheels were persistent since a couple hotfixes into .59 stable, and I have a protocol-much as I have seen on other servers- of positioning any looted wheels next to the roadway, or in a common building for later collection.  I can't be exactly certain, but I figure somewhere around a week is their decay time for CLEanup.  About a week ago, I noticed that wheels left nearby a stranded vehicle (removed for safekeeping when the server restart re-orients the vehicle, so I wouldn't come back to find an un-stuck vehicle whit all ruined wheels) would disappear by the time I came to recover the vehicle.  This has not been the case in the past.  What has changed in the last week, and has anyone else found this to be an problem?

TLDR:  Wheels left on the ground next to vehicles, outside of tents, will despawn on server resets; while wheels in the middle of the streets, or on the ground in tents with a parked car nearby, do not appear not despawn.

[Funkmaster Rick 373]

If I had to guess, which I do because I'm bored, I'd say Mother Nature is actively trying to reclaim her wheels. Clearly, placing any man-made object between the wheel and her loamy grasp is enough to discourage her, so tent floors are a go. Maybe she needs new wheels inside the Earth to keep rotating it.

[pilgrim* 3513]

5 hours ago, emuthreat said:

..//..

Maybe the server maxed out on spawned wheels, so they get reclaimed if you turn your back on them ? Just a theory.

My problem is getting barrels to persist - ya know if you dump stuff out of the barrel to move it to reset the timer, half your stuff will despawn while you stand next to it ( in "a really short time! wow!" ) so you need another barrel to empty the first barrel into, so you can keep the first barrel with you bits of wire and rabbit steaks and cooking stuff and.. oops, ok .. they gone

I think winter is coming

 

[S3V3N 1402]

59 minutes ago, pilgrim* said:

Maybe the server maxed out on spawned wheels, so they get reclaimed if you turn your back on them ? Just a theory.

My problem is getting barrels to persist - ya know if you dump stuff out of the barrel to move it to reset the timer, half your stuff will despawn while you stand next to it ( in "a really short time! wow!" ) so you need another barrel to empty the first barrel into, so you can keep the first barrel with you bits of wire and rabbit steaks and cooking stuff and.. oops, ok .. they gone

I think winter is coming

 

What are you doing to the barrels :) ? I've never replaced them, you just have to interact with them. Even barrels I haven't interacted with stayed persistent for at least a week. In theory tents, etc. should persist for 45 days at the moment. Ammo boxes and yellow containers appear to be persistent, too. 

I've had wheels disappear that were only a few meters away from the car. And it wasn't after a restart, either. I don't think wheels were meant to be persistent anyway and this is the better solution. Because otherwise you can just always remove car wheels and hide them for later. Wheels should really despawn like they do know, even though that makes things more difficult. What I do think is that cars should spawn more complete and hopefully they will in the future. I'm also hoping for more colors or the ability to bring in our own designs; that sounds like a task for modding, though. 

[emuthreat 2837]

1 hour ago, pilgrim* said:

Maybe the server maxed out on spawned wheels, so they get reclaimed if you turn your back on them ? Just a theory.

My problem is getting barrels to persist - ya know if you dump stuff out of the barrel to move it to reset the timer, half your stuff will despawn while you stand next to it ( in "a really short time! wow!" ) so you need another barrel to empty the first barrel into, so you can keep the first barrel with you bits of wire and rabbit steaks and cooking stuff and.. oops, ok .. they gone

I think winter is coming

 

Yeah, it is just about time to call time-of-death on .59.  Nevertheless, I still believe that it is important to understand any anomalous happenings related to persistence.  For instance, I've still never known of a severely damaged vehicle to despawn in the vicinity of a barrel or tent; but I am sure that it would be unfortunate if such an event triggered an errant cleanup of someone's camp.  I like to kill time and unwind by just running around the map, reading the news on second monitor, and playing with my dog; any animals or vehicles I find are the gravy, but the meat of the matter is testing long-term persistence behavior of a complex supply network.  I wish the devs could make it a little bit more clear, when reporting bugs on a patch is completely pointless.

6 hours ago, Funkmaster Rick said:

If I had to guess, which I do because I'm bored, I'd say Mother Nature is actively trying to reclaim her wheels. Clearly, placing any man-made object between the wheel and her loamy grasp is enough to discourage her, so tent floors are a go. Maybe she needs new wheels inside the Earth to keep rotating it.

Somewhere, a high-school physics teacher just had a stroke because you typed that.  I hope you are happy...

1 minute ago, S3V3N said:

What are you doing to the barrels :) ? I've never replaced them, you just have to interact with them. Even barrels I haven't interacted with stayed persistent for at least a week. In theory tents, etc. should persist for 45 days at the moment. Ammo boxes and yellow containers appear to be persistent, too. 

I've had wheels disappear that were only a few meters away from the car. And it wasn't after a restart, either. I don't think wheels were meant to be persistent anyway and this is the better solution. Because otherwise you can just always remove car wheels and hide them for later. Wheels should really despawn like they do know, even though that makes things more difficult. What I do think is that cars should spawn more complete and hopefully they will in the future. I'm also hoping for more colors or the ability to bring in our own designs; that sounds like a task for modding, though. 

I have seen about two-dozen barrels and an unholy amount of tents disappear over the last few weeks from the 45-day CLEanup.  <<--I made a thread about it.  You absolutely must empty, pick-up, and reset any tents or barrels every 45 days to prevent their disappearance.  This will become one week once base building is applied.  So said Hicks.

I'll have to disagree with you about the persistent nature of wheels.  At the first few iterations of .59 on stable, there was only general item cleanup timers associated with wheels; and since a barrel would only fit one wheel, the hatchback required either three people, or three barrels to complete it without creating an unnecessary risk of facilitating someone else's taking of the vehicle that you were in the process of assembling.  They eventually granted wheels a sort of intermediate persistence of around a week.  I never took good notes on this issue, because I went through quite a few wheels each week, and was helping to supply a couple tire warehouses for a few weeks. I had access to so many cars at one time, that if one flipped, I would just remove the tires, set them a few meters away in appropriate cover, go pull another car out of a hat; and then after a few days I would usually remember and go recover the car using the wheels I had set aside in the bushes.  Tires were definitely very persistent, at least for five days, under any conditions.  The only problems I noticed were if you put more than a dozen in the same room (major visual crunchiness and impossible vehicle lag), or if two people managed to pick up the same tire at the same instant--which would crash the client for everyone in the vicinity when both players tried to remove the tires from their hands.

 

[pilgrim* 3513]

1 hour ago, S3V3N said:

What are you doing to the barrels :) ? I've never replaced them, you just have to interact with them. Even barrels I haven't interacted with stayed persistent for at least a week. In theory tents, etc. should persist for 45 days at the moment. Ammo boxes and yellow containers appear to be persistent, too. 
..//..

Honestly, I haven't seen my 2 barrels despawn on the server I play - but that's because the other <sane, serious> players on HELPY HELPERS had their storage start vanishing and warned me. So I emptied mine out, picked them up, put them down and filled them again. They are still in place (they WERE last time I looked) . Most of the stored gear vanished in about 1 minute as I was moving it = resetting a barrel is a serious logistics problem. But I don't store stuff very much- and now I keep what I need on my back same as I always did. Emuthreat has the lowdown on this.

Every time I have left a yellow container anywhere (in isolated places) it has NOT been there next time I came past, so I can't say anything about how long they persist.

"don't get attached to your gear," right?

[S3V3N 1402]

It's weird I haven't had any problems with stuff disappearing, except from raids to our camp and very rarely some items I dropped on top of each other. I could swear you just have to interact with the barrels (same as backpacks) to refresh their despawn timer. 

I do have things disappearing, but that usually involves that bug where weapons/items stick to your right hand. You can open a can or eat to remedy it, but whatever you carried gets teleported to got knows where; at least it does most of the time. 

The big problem with longer persistance for tires is that people clear them out and drop them on the road. I often found loads of tires near their spawn, but remote from any vehicle locations.And these tires don't respawn in more suitable places and you have to run your ass off for one. Why I think persistance isn't that good for them either is, because if you park a car, people can just hide your tires, find a battery or plug and re-assemble everything to steal your car. If they can't just stash tires, they have to be more subtle about car-theft.

[[DGN] Johnny 115]

I'm hoping persistence on tires hasn't changed much. They've become as good as bus roadblocks for shutting down chokepoints. ^.^

That said, I did notice that the raincoat got resized. I like the doom that spells for the horrors of incoming rain.

Edited March 15, 2016 by [DGN] Johnny

[emuthreat 2837]

14 hours ago, S3V3N said:

It's weird I haven't had any problems with stuff disappearing, except from raids to our camp and very rarely some items I dropped on top of each other. I could swear you just have to interact with the barrels (same as backpacks) to refresh their despawn timer. 

I do have things disappearing, but that usually involves that bug where weapons/items stick to your right hand. You can open a can or eat to remedy it, but whatever you carried gets teleported to got knows where; at least it does most of the time. 

The big problem with longer persistance for tires is that people clear them out and drop them on the road. I often found loads of tires near their spawn, but remote from any vehicle locations.And these tires don't respawn in more suitable places and you have to run your ass off for one. Why I think persistance isn't that good for them either is, because if you park a car, people can just hide your tires, find a battery or plug and re-assemble everything to steal your car. If they can't just stash tires, they have to be more subtle about car-theft.

Have any of your tents or barrels sat in the exact same position for more than 45 days?  I would be very interested if they had, yet were not affected by CLEanup.

I do understand the concern that you have with tires being persistent, but I strongly disagree.  As I have often seen, many players simultaneously and independently started placing spawned tires along the roads, so that when they needed them, they would know where to find one that they had previously seen.  Have you ever crashed a car, and gone looking for tires, only to find two of them in a town fifteen minutes away?  If your answer is yes, I'll be willing to bet that after you brought the first tire to your wrecked vehicle, and went to fetch the second one, it had despawned.  I find this to be a terrible experience in a persistent, open-world survival simulator, that you can locate a useful resource in passing, yet return to find that it had "despawned" for some magical reason.  It is worse that a helicrash vaporizing out from under you--because you had wasted the time running back to where you  *knew* that said resource was in a certain location just a few minutes ago.

I actually like the idea of having roughly one week persistence on tires, because if I am operating a base out of a certain region, then I can efficiently gather resources for pickup by a partner coordinating with a vehicle.  You arguments against it are fairly weak, in my opinion, as having found tires left in a certain area for a few days will force more player movement--which I consider to be a good thing.  Your concerns about car theft are pretty inconsequential.  If I don't have a vehicle, I will most likely be carrying one of each type of battery and plug, as well as a tire belonging to the sort of vehicle I most wish to find.  I have "stolen" many vehicles, and almost all of them were either fully operational and stuck, or had busted tires and a removed plug or battery.  By the time I can find the means to replace the wheels, I would also have found a battery and plug--hoarding makes this much more of a certainty.  By the time that I could return with another vehicle to knock-loose the stuck one, I will have made sure to bring any missing pieces--in fact, I usually bring an extra, because I have returned to recover a vehicle out of gas, only to find that someone had taken the battery sometime within the last hour that I had taken to return with fuel.

Not a very good argument when put against the frustration of having a wheel that you had touched a half-hour before, no longer be where you left it.  That's why I am definitely in favor of wheel persistence being at least 48 hours.

 

10 hours ago, [DGN] Johnny said:

I'm hoping persistence on tires hasn't changed much. They've become as good as bus roadblocks for shutting down chokepoints. ^.^

That said, I did notice that the raincoat got resized. I like the doom that spells for the horrors of incoming rain.

Persistence probably won't change much, but dynamic behavior of small-items in the environment will eventually be a thing.  If you can crash a car through fences and shove around picnic tables, it would probably follow that bus wheels would just become ballistic clobberin' balls if you hit them with another vehicle.

Edited March 16, 2016 by emuthreat

[S3V3N 1402]

4 hours ago, emuthreat said:

...

Your wheels won't despawn, if you put them on a car, where they belong ;) I honestly think my arguments favor gameplay. It's not right for tires to get stashed and I easily find all the car tires in the radius of the three nearest villages; yes, it is some running to do, but it's better than knowing where to run (for a dropped tire) when that is on the other end of the map. Cars are supposed to be coop goals anyway, so when you do this with a friend it should be no problem. 

Why would I have a camp and not touch it for 45 days? I'm sure we've had camps for over a month, perhaps even for two, which didn't vanish. Yet we interacted with them (barrels, tents) every couple of days. When something of mine vanishes, it is usually stolen. It's so easy to get rid of barrels. Poke a hole in them and leave.

[emuthreat 2837]

2 hours ago, S3V3N said:

...

I guess I have a fundamentally different playstyle.  My main focus has been on logistics; with vehicle control as a major focus.  Between myself and ColdAtrophy, before patch fatigue claimed him, we set up a number of major camps and outposts with loot collection and redistribution points.  At one point, I believe that slightly more than 60 percent of the vehicles on a server could be accounted for, and the ongoing maintenance was hard enough without the tires lacking persistence qualities as they have for much of this update.  Much fun was had intentionally trying to cause problems with vehicles. Keep in mind that a number of the vehicles we controlled were initially scouted for, swapped tires from working vehicle of same type and hidden new vehicle for safe assembly when convenient.  We would ferry wheels to new vehicles while starting a helicopter circuit, and part of the foot looting routine was to lay out wheels for future collection with vehicle space available.

Now that the patch has gone stale, I use the remaining vehicles to scout for player activity on my home server; and steal-and-ransom or despawn and recapture stranded or ruined vehicles. (People still don't read notes; we really need a new inventory model to distinguish paper from written notes).  

I don't see how wheel persistence negatively affects gameplay.  If someone finds a vehicle of mine, three questions come to mind:  Is it in one of my camps, or stashes, ready to go?  Is it stuck? Am I currently using it and will be soon to return?
In the first case, they have earned a vehicle by cunning exploration skills.  In the second, they have a race against time to recover the vehicle before I do, usually requiring either the expert use of a bow or another vehicle to right it; or a number of tires + plug and/or battery.  In the third they run a risk of being shot, as I will know exactly where I left my vehicle.

Regarding persistence in .59 in general, I have discovered that tents and barrels will get cleaned up after 45 days of daily use, unless at some time within that 45 days, that each storage item is completely emptied out and picked-up, then redeployed. 

In any case, the purpose of this thread was to share the information that I had recently learned, concerning the conditional despawn of tires, when laid near a vehicle.  In this specific case, it is a new vehicle full of canned food and a barrel, as a reward to someone who, in a roundabout way, responded to the care package that I left in place of their stolen sedan.  I parked the brand new replacement vehicle in a somewhat safe place, after destroying and reclaiming their damaged ride, but due to my having used borrowed wheels, it is now stuck in a place on the map where, at every server restart, the re-deploying of the vehicle oriented to the north, results in a ruined wheel and the vehicle sliding into a place which requires four pristine wheels to get back onto the roads.

[S3V3N 1402]

That part about the conditional respawn of the tires is interesting. I somehow didn't pay attention to it in my first read-through, though I remember thinking "this is good" back when I read it. Why this is good is, because people can't just go into the distance with your tires, if they decide to dissemble your car for themselves. As long as the car has to be in sight, I agree with this mechanic (though the xploit might become that people just park a car somewhere to have persistent tire stacks).

I make some supply stashes, but even though my camps have been online/live for pretty long, I don't think 45 days+ is normal for our group. Usually a few weeks into them, someone will stumble across the camp. I know some locations that are probably gonna last much longer, but they aren't attractive camping spots. Usually I keep the best stuff with me when I log off or place them inside barrels scattered over the map.The big camp for us is just a meeting point and to plan the session in play. Since the announcement of 0.60 for February, our group's playstyle changed quite a lot. With our last big camp found and looted, we are now just travelling lightly, not making camp any more and going on together. Surprisingly enough, two of us are still alive together and the third guy basically is a bullet-magnet, so no wonder we lost him. I've been on more airfields and in danger zones on a 50 player server (Swedish Empire) than in the months before. We sometimes find a car and repair it and the same applies to other people on the server. I park the car at logoff, hidden well enough - the next day it is gone and someeone else drives around with it. The game dynamics really come out better on crowded servers, but they are a bit tedious to loot and drive around in. Cars are come and go on a crowded server, which is probably much like what it's supposed to be. Hopefully though, we can hold on to them when we build bases. 

For now, I'm enjoying the roaming style, but in the future I hope for a lot more driving and camping! The one thing I've been looking forward to, probably more than helicopters, are dirtbikes and choppers. A gang of bikers in this game will be my favorite way of playing - even though bikes give you little storage and no protection; I hope we'll see bag-attachments for more storage, someday too. Until that day, I'll have wrestle with cars and their mechanics. I hope the bikes lean in the corners and don't drive like trains, too.  

Edited March 16, 2016 by S3V3N

[Buakaw 274]

Wait. Are tires not persistent anymore or what? Because I like that they are.

[sneakydude 480]

Sad part emu, your trying to debug a old patch :( without bug reports nothing is useful.

[emuthreat 2837]

4 hours ago, sneakydude said:

Sad part emu, your trying to debug a old patch :( without bug reports nothing is useful.

Hey man, I'm just doin what I do, and sharing what I learn.  Maybe occasionally looking for answers.  If they issued a small patch that they plan to incorporate into.60, and it borked wheel persistence, I'd say it is still a relevant bit of information.