Editing Item Decay (section)

=== 2002 ===
In [[The Iron Coast]]:<br>

"Currently when a monster dies, its corpse lies there for 90 seconds and then decays, leaving behind any loot that hasn't yet been claimed. This loot remains on the ground until it is either picked up by a player, or cleaned up by the housekeeping system. Unfortunately, as long as the loot sits on the ground it eats server resources, resources related to keeping track of each item and telling all the players in the area about it. In addition, a large number of items on the ground contribute to client lag, both by increasing the amount of messaging between server and client, and by straining the graphics capabilities of the client.

So in order to reduce these performance hits, we are changing the behavior of monster corpses slightly. In November, monster corpses will remain on the ground for five minutes--a much longer period than they currently do--but when they decay, any unclaimed loot that remains on the corpse will also decay. This will reduce the number of items on the ground and thus reduce the load on the game servers. Note that this change does not affect player corpses in any way. Also note that this does not change the period of time in which a monster corpse is "protected" (i.e., the period of time in which only the monster's killer--or the killer's fellowship, if the killer is sharing kill loot rights--can access it)."