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I personally would find it fun if I could get my things back from a mob without him telling me that my pack is too powerful to be returned to me.

It's a pack not rocket science.

Since the game has been maintaining a good up time, it would be better to question once alerting the player council of the handover and they can contact an available admin to recover the pack for you later.

No offense to the power that be..
however, lately the paperwork cycle between requests and even acknowledgement of arrival of said paperwork has been less than stellar.

Everyone is busy and this is relatively minor. It would be more useful if the mobs could hand things back across the board or at least have the players council be able to push things back out of mobs.

I am not comfortable with leaving a message about getting something simple as a pack back. If I can't recover it, it's not worth the effort of the paperwork and all the notes and having six people ask me about it over the matter of six months. Especially when there are more worthwile applications and updates that need to be done.

What if you set a timer on anything handed to a mob? Basically, you hand a mob something, doing so sets a flag of some sort on that item and starts a timer of a minute or so. In that time the flagged item would be returned if requested 100% of the time. I think nearly all quests auto-junk any items that are specifically meant to be given to a mob so that already covers itself (you can't request something they no longer have). Maybe I'm missing a glaring flaw in that but everyone seems to win. Players don't lose stuff to mobs and the staff doesn't lose time to getting those things back.

Tavik wrote:In that time the flagged item would be returned if requested 100% of the time.

I'm not sure about having it requested 100% of the time. Sometimes it just isn't in-character to have violent evil character request for items.

If I mustunderstood you, I'm sorry, cause I don't exactly understand completely what the 100% meant.

But all in all, I think it is pretty useful to have a command that is only for such a purpose. The timer idea is good, though. To prevent abuse, perhaps log it?

-gissy

I'm grouping request and demand together. So, once it is flagged you can request OR demand it and have it returned to you 100% of the time. I want to say both are already logged, but I'm not sure that's right. That would be the staff's call as to whether or not they wanted it logged (if it isn't already). However, I don't really see how such a system would be abused with the exception of any quests that don't auto-junk items that aren't supposed to be returned.

Another idea would be to code mobiles to instantly hand back anything that is not a quest item.

Loving Oghma's idea. I once accidently turned over an express hat to a mob, and there was no powers that be online to recover it, but there WAS a recovery, so it was lost. Luckily for me, though, that character had already completed all the Express quests, so I saw no point in complaining about it. Unless they add 5 feathered jobs or something, but that would be scary. If 4 feathers is any sign, 5 feathers would be, like, planeshifting to make deliveries, lol.

Yes, that idea sounds good to me as well. I have mistakenly given a character asking for a token, a similar token, but not the one he needed. Doing this, if an IMM isn't on, dead ends a quest. Thankfully one was around and had the guard return the token to me.

Also there was another instance where I saw a newbie mistakenly hand a corpse they found to a priest for raising rather than setting it on the ground. The priest then refused to give the corpse back claiming "the corpse of a halfelf is too powerful for you." Again an IMM had to step in.

If mobs returned things they don't need it would be nice.

Though, isnt it a method used for disposing of items gained through "request/demand?" It is according to the help file, though I've never successfully requested anything, I cant say if others have. But there are feats that help demand and request, so I assume it must work.

But for that perhaps a junker NPC could be added, who disposes of things given to him. With ample warning to never give him anything you ever want back ^^.

I have yet to be able to request anything. The feature, to me, seems broken as everything is too powerful for me.

I stopped using it after being told that a few too many times.

I personally feel this is false advertising. I believe that if the MOB tells you that the pack is too powerful for you then it truly should be and if you manage to obtain it through less than 'ordinary' means, it should be a powerful backpack indeed!

*ducks, runs, hides*

I personaly like the mobs that drop things that do not belong to them.
Maybe we could flag certain things like coins to let them accept coins always. I dunno. Something. It's fine when you lose things through destruction, but awful when you lose things to your own rampant stupidity or inability to type or even mistaking the keyword on something you are trying to give them.

A guard confiscates your +1 sword of cuteness.. because you were caught steeling. Why would he hand it over with a request/demand?

Perhaps the trigger for one being able to request/demand something back would be their having given it to the MOB in the first place, Cret. Then there's no problem with confiscated items.

Sometimes good RP can ensue from "taking it ICly" when you screw up, but this happens often enough, with things that you just wouldn't give to a random mob, that I think code to deal with it would be a grand idea. To consolidate suggestions made above:

When you GIVE anything to an NPC, it is flagged with your name. You can successfully request/demand back anything with that flag matching your name. (Such items could auto-junk after 24 hours to ensure that they didn't accumulate too much.) Provided that quest stuff does actually junk on being given, there should be no problem with people giving, say, some flour to a merchant for coin, then asking for it back, then giving it to them again, etc.

Cret wrote:A guard confiscates your +1 sword of cuteness.. because you were caught steeling. Why would he hand it over with a request/demand?

Conversely...

Why wouldn't he if you gave him the wrong thing, simply often for the OOC consideration that keywords overlap, your inventory can't distinguish between order as to which one the keyword targets, and if it were actually your character handing over something, he would know he was handing over his platinum and chartreuse token, not his leather backpack with platinum buckles?

Technically, it's a bit difficult.

The broad solution that would consist in making mob automatically drop all items that are given to them (when the item is not used in a program) leads to other problems. It also makes sense, from time to time, to give items to some mobs who do not have any program. For example, during a roleplay, or even when preparing a roleplay, or when we are stocking a special one-time shop.

Allowing "request" to work on all objects does not work either (as pointed out above in Cret's example).

It would thus require special code to flag items that have just been given as requestable, and it would require a change to the "request" code.

I believe that it's coder time that might be better used. The best solution might be to just ask for an imm to have the mob drop the item you gave them. All imms can do it, and soon some more people might be able to do so too. Since the mud is very stable, even if an imm is not online right at that time, you can still send a mail to the applications address and you have a good chance that the mail will be seen before the next copyover.