Is it such a big problem, codewise, to let people just go out as they came in?

As regard to my experience:
I sparred like ten times before I was able to drawdown and I never have since, because I know I'll die within a couple of seconds and it just sucks to get everything back.
If I would keep the defenses I had before entering the spar, I would be more open to people asking me to spar. Currently I simply refuse.

I sympathize with those losing defenses and power through sparring and losing. It really does discourage sparring.

Deschain, you can def up faster (not cheaper, unfortunately) by using your power defs interspersed with the non-power defs. I've got mine worked out such that by the time I regenerate power from the first power def (stagform), I have enough for the next (aethersight), and so on.

Depending on how it's coded, it might be a big problem. Some things are saved, but to save the entire "state" of a character might be more complicated than you would think.

One of the admin (I think it was Roark) briefly addressed the arena code while I was pestering about burnout in the arena. Basically the response that I got was that just because they save weapon venoms doesn't mean they can or will save everything.

There was also something about how defs are saved. It's not just a text file in the same way it looks in DEF and it's not a bunch of boolean variables. I'm not entirely certain how they store them, but it's been said that it would be prohibitively intensive to save the entire state of a character.

So loser keeping defs is fine. You're welcome to lobby for same-state retrieval upon exit, but I'm pretty sure we've been told no in the past. Things've changed before, though.

Buy some drapes! They don't even cost that much.

Unless things have been changed (back), drapes don't work for drawdown. The night gem thing does, though.

I think the point, though, was that he either has to pay 10p to go to a manse with the night gem and drawdown between each spar, or he can only spar at night (so he can drawdown for free in between in the arena), or he has to spar without drawdown at all.

By the way, bards coming out of the arena lose all their illusions and songs, even when they win! (Or time out.) Probably no power loss, fortunately, unless you had up one of the few power illusions like IllusorySelf. I wonder why everything else survives but those things all get stripped.

Because there's no distinction between defensive and offensive illusions. That's my theory anyway. So in order to stop phantom and claws from carrying over, you have to kill blur and invisibility.

Well, if they were bugged, the bug's been fixed. That's all they actually do, things like drawdown, nightkiss, and lich.

Then why do arti night gems exist?

I think they were bugged to work for that, then changed to not work a long time ago, if I remember right.

Because arti gems 1) last forever, and 2) even work on new/full moon (I think). (Though drapes and a stasis gem are a near match to the gem.)

Drapes definitely work for this, and definitely are intended to. To put it in your words, why else would they exist?

Wrong.

It might require an admin answer, but I believe it is actually exactly the opposite. From my understanding, the drapes exist mostly for atmosphere. They are very cheap, and should not do the same thing as the drastically more expensive gem.

In fact, I remember a conversation about ho they did work for that, and they were changed not to. I might try issuing myself or something to find out which way was actually a bug, I know it was changed so that they did not work for drawdown/nightkiss before.

I wonder what "Further, if they are pulled closed during the day, the room will be cloaked in darkness as though it is nighttime." could possibly mean. Oh well, go ahead and issue yourself. Artisans really need a nerfing, after all.

Now you're just being facetious and not really contributing anything useful to the conversation anymore. Posts like this do not help with anything.

No, actually, I was serious. I'd love to hear what you think that sentence meant, if it's not what the code actually does.

It's true that pointing out that you're not listening, and you're going to do what you're going to do regardless of what's said, is unconstructive. But it's unconstructive precisely because it points out that you already moved us to where there's no room for constructive. So are you bothered that this conversation is futile, or that I pointed it out? Because both of these are well within your power to fix.

In any case, it's a hijack, and it would remain a hijack even if you were going to answer the question or listen to the countering viewpoint.

When first implemented, it worked for things like spiritbond moon and night, but not for Drawdown or Nightkiss, and it was not a bug. Estarra made a forum post about it.

Well, it doesn't show up on any searches, but that doesn't prove much. I wonder if the people who've bought drapes from me based on me saying it does what the AB file implies will demand a refund. Artisan is just a bucket of disappointment infused with extra lose, even before people start adding bummer-garnish.

You're not being incredibly reasonable. You're expecting very cheap drapes to serve as a perfect replacement for a very expensive artifact. The AB file implies that it will make it night, but it is not effective for the 10 power defenses. That makes perfect sense - if everyone could just buy cheap drapes, nobody would need the gem. In fact, this is the very reason Serenwilde bought a gem for the Dancer (or whichever of their manses it was), allowing everyone to drawdown. Drapes don't work for this, and were never meant to - if they do now, it's either a bug or the admin have changed their mind on things.

I'm trying to tell you that, regardless of what the AB file says, the admin have already made this decision clear to us before. It's not that I'm listening, it's that the text of the AB file doesn't matter, so repeating it doesn't get us anywhere. I'm telling you what the admin decision was last time this came up, and trying to explain why it makes sense.

I tried to move the rants to the Rants thread, and you're welcome to follow to there if you want to talk about whether Artisan is the worst tradeskill or not. So all there is to continue the hijack about here is the discussion itself.

Let me first say again that I have conceded that this use for the drapes is a bug. I took out my ads about drapes in-game hours ago. I was not convinced at first because I had nothing but the word of one person on the forums claiming something was said on the forums that searches did not turn up, weighed against the way the code actually behaves and the AB file. Nothing personal to you, but plenty of people say wrong things on the forum all the time, many of them entirely honest mistakes, so it takes a little more than that. I would have liked a more definitive statement, like finding Estarra's post, but the fact that others have corroborated what you said is enough for me to concede the point.

Incidentally, as a purely academic point, I reject the idea that the mere existence of an artifact is sufficient to prove that this function of drapes must be unintended. After all, the rocking chair duplicates the willpower gem, beds duplicate the endurance gem, chests duplicate manse safes, etc. But there's always some way the artifact is better: the willpower gem works on multiple people at once, the bed requires you to be asleep, chests don't slow decay, etc. The problem here is that the drapes don't have a disadvantage over the orbs (discounting the "never decays" factor of course). I am not sure if that's enough to prove that they must not be intended to have any overlap of use.

But for all you keep saying that you're listening, and that repeating the AB file doesn't matter, you keep missing that I am actually asking you an actual question and one that I hope you'll (or someone will) give an actual answer to. It's not a challenge, it's not an attempt to prove something, it's a question, and it's directed to you because you seem to know stuff I don't. I can understand how it sounded like it was a challenge because it grew out of one, but at this point, it is nothing but an honest question. So here it is:

The second sentence of the AB file is entirely unnecessary if drapes are just decor, so there is at least a possibility that drapes were intended to have some purpose at some point in history. We've established that drawdown/nightkiss is not that purpose. Is there some other purpose that it might serve, which has not also been specifically excluded? Some skill I don't know about that would make it useful to have night in one location in your manse, other than the ones that have already been ruled out? Because if there is one, I'd sure like to be advertising it. It'd be wonderful to recoup some tiny fraction of the value of one of the very few things in Artisan that actually had value in the first place.

I think this will be the last time I ask, because I already feel bad for how big a hijack I created, and because if you still don't want to answer after this, I've run out of different ways to ask.