[Molly]

Scrapping an area totally is not a very easy thing to do.

Rewriting it, to raise the quality level, is one thing, but lifting it out totally, and getting rid of the vnums can lead to serious problems, unless you take care to get rid of all the objects from it in the game. A player logging on with a non-existing object is enough to keep the Port from rebooting, and since players use alts as storing characters, you have to go through every single pfile and remove the objects from them.

Also, if you are generally taking care to make your world a 'seamless' entity, where the players don't perceive when they leave one zone to enter another, there are bound to be several references to it in other zones, so you'll have to go through all the adjoining zones to get rid of those too. We've only done this once, when a builder got into conflict with the Admin, and insisted that his zone be taken out when he left. Normally we don't agree to this; once a zone is implemented in the Gameport it becomes the property of the Mud. But since the zone was a rather crappy one, and the Builder was very emotional about it, we decided to make an exception. I remember it to be a big hassle, and I spent about a week going through the other zones, removing extra descs and changing quests that used items from the scrapped zone. I vowed at the time to never do it again.

Typically enough the Builder returned half a year later, having thought better of it, and begged to have his zone put back in. This time I absolutely refused however, and the zone stayed out.