At around 2:00 in the morning PST today, as several of us were discussing on ooc how we couldn't get into GD because of it being in its fairly common bugged state, we came up with a fairly interesting idea. When zones get bugged and GMs are on, there's no real problem because staff is usually very quick and efficient with zone reboots. There are times, however, when no staff is on to check petitions and whatnot for several hours, and during these times corpses rot, people get locked out of the game, and general bad stuff happens.
Here's a possible solution: add a command that would allow a player to appeal for a zone reboot, taking a sort of "poll" of the server for rebooting a zone. Rebooting obviously carries a lot of exploit potential with it, so a good number of people/a decent amount of time would need to elapse before the reboot went through. So, if sseru were to get bugged/crash (not terribly uncommon, nowadays), a player could #appeal sseru, which would send a global message to all players notifying them that the appealer has requested a zone reboot in Sanctus Seru along with the number of votes/requests needed to carry it though. Then, other players could 'vote' for the reboot by similarly #appeal'ing sseru until the requisite number of votes were reached--that number could be either a solid figure or a percentage of those online. After the number's reached, players would be notified that sseru was going to be rebooted in, say, five minutes, and then after that amount of time passed sseru would reboot like it would if a staff member were on to answer petitions.
With a minimum number of people needed to reboot and a delay on the actual reboot, the exploit potential would be kept to a minimum while also providing people who are on when staff members aren't with the ability to fix broken zones, particularly the big offenders like GD, sseru, and mistwoods. If it needed to be restricted further, a player could be only allowed to #appeal once every hour or so, #appeal could be restricted to only a few zones, or whatever--there's a ton of ways to secure the idea even further.
Anyhow, does anyone like this idea? It'd be nice if players had the power to FAIRLY reboot a bugged zone when staff isn't on or <gasp> if staff didn't always have to do it manually when it happened.
Here's a possible solution: add a command that would allow a player to appeal for a zone reboot, taking a sort of "poll" of the server for rebooting a zone. Rebooting obviously carries a lot of exploit potential with it, so a good number of people/a decent amount of time would need to elapse before the reboot went through. So, if sseru were to get bugged/crash (not terribly uncommon, nowadays), a player could #appeal sseru, which would send a global message to all players notifying them that the appealer has requested a zone reboot in Sanctus Seru along with the number of votes/requests needed to carry it though. Then, other players could 'vote' for the reboot by similarly #appeal'ing sseru until the requisite number of votes were reached--that number could be either a solid figure or a percentage of those online. After the number's reached, players would be notified that sseru was going to be rebooted in, say, five minutes, and then after that amount of time passed sseru would reboot like it would if a staff member were on to answer petitions.
With a minimum number of people needed to reboot and a delay on the actual reboot, the exploit potential would be kept to a minimum while also providing people who are on when staff members aren't with the ability to fix broken zones, particularly the big offenders like GD, sseru, and mistwoods. If it needed to be restricted further, a player could be only allowed to #appeal once every hour or so, #appeal could be restricted to only a few zones, or whatever--there's a ton of ways to secure the idea even further.
Anyhow, does anyone like this idea? It'd be nice if players had the power to FAIRLY reboot a bugged zone when staff isn't on or <gasp> if staff didn't always have to do it manually when it happened.
