Module package thingy - continuity question.

[friedpiggy]

I have been loving my time since coming back, however, I have had one thought. End of lifeness(?) Let me explain a bit.

Over my many years of playing NWN online, I have played on many servers and they have all pretty much shut down over recent years. What I would like to propose is that a package is put together, say during January every year that contains the mod, resman folder, database, etc and is zipped up. It is NOT published anywhere. That way if the absolute worst-case scenario arrives it could be made available to people to download. The fact that very few people could get it up and running again is beside the point.

Not sure what the long term plans of the server are or if there are continuity plans in place etc. Just something I thought of one day. I would frikken HATE for all of the thousands of hours of work done on the server to just vanish because something unforeseen happens and it gets taken down. I know talking about other servers is frowned on, but I am thinking in terms of something like Legends of Chance that was pretty much up there in second place in terms of the development of NWN when Shine took ill and it just one day vanished.

[dopplegang]

Yeah I feel ya Piggy, there are several servers I could list that I have searched for years only to have never seen them again and no download online to personally host them myself or even just to play them with my family in local multiplay is of great concern to me. Although it would be tragic to see HG disappear, I am reasonably sure that the server hosting has several backup systems already in place to ensure it cannot be lost in a catastrophic hardware failure situation, I could be easily convinced that there are multiple backup instances of the mod itself safely stored away with some sort of inheritance rank implemented to ensure that the system does not just crumble upon the first sign of Funky catching pneumonia(may he live(and host HG)forever-ish), generally speaking people don't work this hard on something without developing an end of (server)life plan for the inevitable. There are also more aspects to this problem than just losing the module, host, the server databases, or the hardware, or worst of all the person paying the bill for it, although if I am not mistaken a couple of friends of HG offer free NWN host services, but I don't know if that is the current configuration.

More to the point, as I mentioned there are other problems with publishing a mod, for instance if the server module were available to download or access, then players could(will) freely investigate the code and find exploits in it quite easily, along with a complete and total dissection of mob weaknesses and strengths, spawn points, puzzle solution hints, etc that would greatly diminish the challenge aspect of the mod, whether that is a blessing or a curse is debatable but would be a massive impact to the community at the very least. So yeah, I have always wanted access to the HG mod, eventually. Or hopefully I(we) will never need it.