So now that I've gotten that post out of the way. If anyone is interested in trying CLOK, I am going to be on for most of the day, and am always more than happy to assist any new player in getting starttted, and helping to figure out if CLOK is the right MUD for you.

If you log out while riding a horse, the horse despawns with you.  I always log out on a horse.  This way I don't get charged when it gets brought back to a stable.

I'd say iron is worth selling, even a little riln adds up quickly, if you're looking for one big find that will pay for your house, you're not going to find it, my advice is mine out anything you find, sell it and go mine more. you'll get better at mining this way, while earning the riln you'll eventually need. keep in mind you will find more valuable things as you get better and that will make things go quicker, but even now I don't leave anything behind, because hey that's quick easy riln.

as to the house, trust me, the bank is cheaper but if you really want something, consider renting an inn room, cheaper than a house and you probably have the riln to do that now, especially if you keep mining out the iron and stuff.
also keep in mind, some markets pay more for some things than others, and players might pay more still.

edited to add,
a horse despawns with you when you log out, but any wagons it might be pulling do not so you'll want to find a safe place for that, or return it.

a night is a night. they are on U.S mountain  time, your character doesn't need sleep though, and most players never actually bother with houses. it is mostly a combination of an RP thing, and storage. though as i said earlier, for most things the bank is cheaper, and honestly safer storage

So I'd just like to say that the last few days, player count has been up a bit, if you are one of the new players, or returning ones, welcome, and if you're still wondering if CLOK is worth it, there really is no better time than now to drop by.

Far as I know, a lot of that lag problem was cleaned up more than a year ago.

it doesn't lag. that's the command timing. and it's usually not 3 seconds either. it's rather 1 or 2 seconds at best unless you're really really laggy at your end yourself

May be it's just there to keep things realistic as its playability. When you look, you actually spend a brief second to notice your surroundings, though. But well, may be I should talk to a gm about it.

maybe he can uninfest the spaghetti so it runs like a MUD should.

He won't. Ironcross stop being a troll.

Another update from Jirato here, the original post can be checked at
http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.p … 27#p332327

Greetings! Jirato here. Lead (and sole) developer for CLOK.

I just wanted to share that I take the negative feedback and complaints regarding CLOKs playability very seriously. I've noticed a theme in some of the
replies here and in the other CLOK thread on AudioGames, suggesting"Nothing is being done about the lag," "Jirato isn't willing to fix it," "CLOK is a
lost cause," And so on. I’d like to apologize if I’ve explained this poorly over the in-game chat, but I -am- indeed actively working to resolve the problem.
These types of complaints aren’t being ignored, and it’s not an issue that is impossible to fix.

It might help if I explained a little bit about what's going on. The slowness and delays you are experiencing in CLOK isn’t the traditional type of “network
lag" caused by a poor internet connection with the server. Rather we're dealing with what we would call a CPU bottleneck. CLOK is a single-threaded, single-process
application, and it is constantly utilizing 100% of a logical CPU core. You can think of this as the entry lanes to a theme park. Some major theme parks
have multiple lanes for cars to split into, and multiple ticket booths with personnel to process incoming traffic and allow them entry into the park, while
some smaller theme parks may just have a single lane of traffic and a single ticket booth. This is what CLOK is like -- a single lane of traffic -- and
due to the network engine that CLOK uses, we cannot simply just add new lanes of traffic and new ticket booths. You can think of it as an issue with the
zoning permit initially issued when the park was first built, prohibiting additional and further road construction. A newly built theme park could use
a different zoning permit and have additional lanes, but the CLOK park is, and likely always will, be limited to one lane.

But the issue isn't hopeless. To ensure the smoothest possible operation, we can reduce the amount of traffic being sent through the ticket booth by optimizing
our code to use less CPU operations. Every time I work on the code, my priority in writing new systems or modifying existing systems is to make them more
efficient. CLOK has gone through a very rapid stage of development over the last several years, during a long period of “alpha testing”. What alpha testing
implies is a feature push – work to get as many features in the game as quickly as possible, not worrying about how optimized they may be. There are hundreds,
if not thousands, of inefficiencies in the code that are causing significantly more stress on the CPU – more traffic entering and leaving the theme park.
Every operation in the code is required to go through that entry booth. So are your commands, as well as the server’s responses. Often times, there's a
logjam while everything waits to go through a very small opening. Thus: bottlenecking.

A more technical example: I recently performed a major overhaul of the mining system, ripping out hundreds of lines of code which had long complex nested
loops that performed thousands of operations every time someone used the DIG or MINE commands. Imagine looping through each of the MUDs 7500+ rooms, multiple
times, and checking the properties on every room, simply to see if it was a mine owned by the person doing the digging. Just having one player auto-digging
or auto-mining would easily create considerable usage for the CPU. I gutted this all out and re-wrote it from scratch, removing all the loops and replacing
it with a system that used already in-place and referenceable data so that any informational look-ups were quick and involved less operations. The finalized
code for the mining system is only about 20% of what the original code was, and utilizes significantly less CPU time.

The other solution to solving our CPU bottleneck issue is to make the workers at the theme park better at their jobs so they can let more cars in and out
of the park per second. To further improve the game performance, I am also in the process of transitioning to a new dedicated server. I pay for the CLOK
server out of my own pocket, $170 a month, as a hobby. The current server has been leased for 5 years and was priced as a bargain bin server with an economy
processor. It's great as a simple web and database server, but not sufficient for a large-scale application like CLOK. We will soon be transitioning to
a brand-new server with significantly upgraded hardware. This will be costing me an additional $29 a month (Total price for the server is $2,388 a year).
But CLOK is something that I love dearly and am more than willing to financially support as long as possible.

For the curious, here are the comparisons of the old and new server:

Current CPU:
Intel Xeon x3440
2.53Ghz quad core processor
CPU Mark Score: 4558

New CPU:
Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5
3.4Ghz (up to 3.8Ghz) quad core processor
CPU Mark Score: 9670

Current Memory: 8GB DDR2
New Memory: 16GB DDR4

Current Storage: 1TB Hard Disk Drive
New Storage: 256MB Business-class Solid State Drive

Current Bandwidth: 100MB dedicated connection in enterprise datacenter with multiple fully redundant 10Gbps fiber lines to major internet backbones.
New Bandwidth: 1GB dedicated connection in enterprise datacenter with multiple fully redundant 10Gbps fiber lines to major internet backbones.

For the non-technical people, the bottom line is the new hardware is over twice as powerful as the old hardware. I can't make any guarantee that this will
instantly resolve all of CLOKs problems, as we still have those hundreds of inefficiencies that I will continue to resolve every day, but I do expect to
see a marked performance increase under the new hardware. We are testing this new server now, will be conducting a public stress test this weekend, and
should be ready to move it into production shortly after that.

In addition to all the above, we’ve also recently doubled the size of our GM team to better provide events, merchants, plot developments, and player support.
I hope this shows that I am dedicated to continuing to improve your experiences in CLOK because, I promise to you that, like a theme park, CLOK is worth
the wait.

Well, it seems like he is passionate about working on it. But you can't blame people for wondering. I don't know, but I couldn't deal with it being that way. That's just too much of a lag, and too constant. I do know a bit about he's going through trying to work with a non multithread capable and single core only MUD on a multi core multi proc system.

I'll check in from time to time and if the the lag becomes manageable, I'll probably play more since I do acknowledge that the content is great, I just can't wait 3 seconds just to look, or just to check my pack, or to be told you can't go that way. It would be different if it had a lot of operations like you just chill out, but its very active. Anyway, best of luck to the dude in trying to fix that, I know I found it annoying, and quit playing because of it, and then didn't think he really cared all that much.