suggestion: mainenance does a LITTLE too much.

reading the documentation, i misunderstood HOW MUCH maintenance was actually going to do.

my plan:

use one of the challenge modes to slow my levelling down, create four other characters to support my tank-y character and have them pick up professions and such as necessary.

when i encountered maintenance in the documentation, i figured it'd do the most important thing for those other four characters: fix their gear. but it does a raft of other things that i wasn't banking on:

it gave them professions [on this server, that means all the professions.]
it gave them gear for those professions.
it gave them bags.
it taught them spells.

in other words: for me, personally, it bricked what i was trying to do: go slowly and be mindful of what my other characters picked up as professions and worked on. the idea was to keep the situation as close to the game as possible where they only ever have two professions and i grant those professions to them through regular gameplay.

my suggestion:

maintenance isn't really a thing i think you can fix. that seems to be standard in the playerbots documentation. i would LIKE a roll-back button. [some way to unlearn professions, perhaps. or a way through the adventure assistant to undo issues like this.]

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not entirely related [because this is a bug and i should post it there, but it's tied to what happened here] - i accidentally, then, compounded my error by having the adventure assistant call in the professions assistant on one of my alternate characters. i didn't realize that clicking on "alchemy" in that menu would just teach them all the recipes. imagine my suprise :)

[i was hoping that would lead to a menu that asked about unlearning the profession, and also asking which bits of alchemy to learn.]

this had a secondary consequence of giving the character a whole string of achievements. and this, here, is the buggy part: logging in the NEXT character gave THEM the achievements, also. and so on, for the character i logged in after that.

a very strange experience. :)

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anyhow, i want to thank you for a largely thoughtful design on this server. it is very well put together and i especially appreciate your change logs a great deal.

after a sleep, i had a thought.

i'm still not sure you want to go messing with the internals of the maintenance command, but it occurred to me that:

many of the robot commands take arguments. .playerbots bot add n is just a string of arguments all in a line.

so one possible way to slice this if you were to tackle it would be to break out what maintenance does.

so the player could issue:

maintenance repair and it JUST does repairs.
or
maintenance bags and it JUST issues bags to the relevant parties.

if you wanted the "all" behaviour [for it to do everything], then:
maintenance all [and/or the current behaviour, where "maintenance" without arguments just does everything so that you don't break the original module.]

etc.

this coupled with a rollback button would help and go a long way to being able to shape what happened when you got back to town and needed to sort out your alternate characters.

belatedly, i've realized a couple of things as i was playing tonight:

the reason i got all those achievements on all those characters is down to the fact that achievements are account wide. i had a look at the realm modules page and finally figured that out. so that's not a bug. pardon me.

i also solved most of my own problems by logging into each alternate character.

for those in my bucket who did a maintenance and ended up with stuff they didn't want, here's what you do:

log into each alternate character.

the maintenance command will have given you a handful of things which you need to undo:

take every profession item and sell it [if you want the money, or delete it if you don't.]

take every bag and - again - sell it [if you want the money] or delete it if you don't. this MIGHT be a problem because i don't know what successive maintenance commands do, and the game gives you rather large bags that sell for 25 gold a piece. if the server gets much more populated, this MIGHT lead to a bad economy. so mind what you do here.

once your bags are gone and assuming you haven't unbound it, hit k. [k lets you look at a summary of your character's known skills and the like.]

from here, find the professions you don't want: click on them. a description will show up BENEATH the panel. this has a "cancel" button in that frame. hit this. the game will ask if you're sure. say yes. profession gone.

problem solved.

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if you DON'T WANT TO use maintenance, you're going to have to make a little ritual out of logging into your characters at the end of every session and then repairing their gear, because i think that's the only way to do it.

the playerbots wiki doesn't list a separate method of JUST repairing weapons.

so my suggestion still mostly stands:

"maintenance repair" as a command would be nice to have for folks who are playing the game the way i am.

thank you for these changes, they are exactly in line with what i was thinking.

and of course. you are taking wonderful care of this server. i appreciate it immensely.