Testing Persistence

[emuthreat 2837]

So, I've read a lot of conflicting accounts of how and whether or nor persistence is working currently.  Some servers are using backups, some not. People report their bases are fine, while others seem plagued by wipes.

One very significant thing I became aware of, was that ruined tents will now despawn at the next regularly scheduled restart.  I noticed this by coming back to base just minutes after leaving, and hearing a gunshot back home.  I came back to find my friend dead, and a stranger looting the tent.
I shot the stranger, and put two more in him for good measure.  By the time I was done looting my friend's body, the server restarted (crashed, 3 hrs 52 minutes after regular restart...), taking away the bandit's body, as well as the tent he was in when i shot him.

So my question is this: How TF are we supposed to test persistence when 3 bullets will ruin a tent to the point that it despawns?     Is it even possible for most players to make this connection during casual play?  Will overfire from killing wolves or zombies ruin and despawn tents without most players ever connecting the two?

Please remove all ballistic and melee damage from interacting with tents, barrels, and other base elements until we are all sure that persistence is working properly.

And if it somehow is already known to be working properly, for the love of all that is good, increase the amount of damage needed to ruin these things by at least an order of magnitude.  This is utterly uncalled-for.

[tandwan 250]

I can 'technically see how this makes sense considering bullet holes will ruin a tent so rain leaks in, air leaks in, etc. I don't agree with the damage model though, but please remember this is early days and the DEVs are actively working to fix a lot of the current bugs.

[McWendy 675]

There was a moment in dayz where loot degraded if it wasnt touched and eventually was wiped from the server. 

World containers shouldnt  (at least that was the goal) 

So what we have now is an inconsistent persistence system (3× pointer scrabble ;) )

They need to sort this out asap. Together with the infected behaviour/density, the most important features in a game like this. 

[tandwan 250]

28 minutes ago, McWendy said:

There was a moment in dayz where loot degraded if it wasnt touched and eventually was wiped from the server. 

World containers shouldnt  (at least that was the goal) 

So what we have now is an inconsistent persistence system (3× pointer scrabble ;) )

They need to sort this out asap. Together with the infected behaviour/density, the most important features in a game like this. 

I just tested zombies aggroing and they seem to work right now. Fired a shot at Tisy tents, every single one of them ran into a tent to get me.

[Parazight 1594]

I’m not sure if lasting persistence applies to ruined items. Cars, tents, or otherwise. 

A couple of friends and I were in a LADA. I ran into a tree (it was dark, okay!) north of Grishino, under the bridge. Luckily we saw a car spawn just down the road, to the south, by that red house. So we gathered most of the stuff that we could, (everything else was still pristine) fixed up our new ride, and drove back north again.  Not even 15 minutes had passed since crashing the car when we drove past the crash site. The car had already despawned. All without a server interruption. 

So anyway, I bet ruined items still cycle into the nether, regardless of what they are, as long as there are no players within a given vicinity. 

Perhaps this is what happened with your tent. Server restart, or crash, vacated the vicinity, and natural despawning occurred. Hard for me to be sure, of course. 

I’ve had zero issues with car persistence since .63 went to stable, so I assumed everything worked as intended. No issues even when stashes and tents were getting nuked. 

Interesting(?) note was that the car seemed to respawn exactly where we had originally found it, after the next server restart. 

Hopefully this helps in some way.  *shrug*

[emuthreat 2837]

This is absolutely what happened to the tent.  I fired no less than 3 and no more than 5 shots into a tent, climbed down and confirmed the kill, looted my buddy's body, then the server crashed and the tent was cleaned up by persistence functions; presumably to having been ruined.
This same tent, and one other, I witnessed and interacted with before and after the previous scheduled restart.  The only thing that changed, is that I killed a bandit from an elevated position with my M4, who was inside the tent that despawned after the nearly immediate server crash.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that this is happening in many cases, but barring a real test of lining up 6 pristine tents and shooting every other one just a minute before scheduled restart and confirming that only the fired upon tents remain, it is still a bit uncertain.

What I do know, is that less than 50 rounds of small arms fire should not ruin a tent to the point of being cleaned up by CLE, and that until these values are adjusted, we will continue to get false positives of errant persistence behavior.
The devs should be able to access these values in their documentation and confirm this with much greater ease than an average player wasting time in live servers trying to confirm it with so many other confounding factors in play.

[Survivor-Kyle 148]

I've started to bury a backpack every time I log out, as a way of testing persistence. The odds of a player finding it are slim, so barring a server issue, it should be there when I log back in. Maybe we need more data collection like this?

[Sqeezorz 839]

That is to say: the persistence works properly. Intact items are retained, ruined items are removed.

Reason: The items now respond to "damage", which is set so that everything is made of thin glass ?

[emuthreat 2837]

51 minutes ago, Sqeezorz said:

That is to say: the persistence works properly. Intact items are retained, ruined items are removed.

Reason: The items now respond to "damage", which is set so that everything is made of thin glass ?

Not entirely correct.  There still are persistence errors that delete barrels and fences which have not been damaged at all.

It is just that the ruined item cleanup may be giving quite a lot of false positives; and besides that, it is waaaaaayyyyyy unbalanced for normal play in the first place.

They could safely turn off the damage states entirely for tents and barrels, for at least a month, to help clear up which cases of disappeared items are actually from persistence issues.

I know it's the holidays and all, but nobody here asked them to release an unbalanced, buggy mess of persistence failures in December, and call it 1.0.  In fact,  I can remember many people screaming at them to please not do this.  Yet here we are.

Tents should not be ruined to the point of CLEanup by 3 measly bullets, and they should be able to adjust this value with little effort.
It's. Literally. The. Least. They. Could. Do...

[amadieus 313]

It is pretty worry-some that tents become destroyed by a few bullets. Imagine the griefing done by other players! It is pretty easy to hit the tent from a higher angle as the walls are not that super high, so people can just shoot a few bullets and poof! Gone is your tent with all the loot in the next hour. 

I would actually say, make tents invincible against bullets/melee weapons.

Edited December 21, 2018 by amadieus