I had kind of brought this up with last night, and he said I should post about it here.

Yesterday had some pretty insane lag all around the site because the Recycle Beast was asking for 1 Point Wizard Tokens as one of the items. Now I'm not against the idea of having him occasionally ask for Wizard Tokens, because those are pretty easy to get if you do quests every day while Recycle Points are more difficult to obtain. But I think it would be nicer if we could have a way to exchange our tokens for RB points without nearly killing the site.

This wouldn't be an every day thing, but maybe a couple times a year at staff members' discretion (it's already pretty rare whenever the RB even asks for the tokens). Instead of having it be one of the regular items in the rotation, maybe have a link near the top of the page saying that the Recycle Beast has a special deal for that day where you can exchange Wizard Tokens for points. And then have a page where we can enter an amount of tokens that we want to trade in, so we don't have to cash them out one by one and then turn them in a few at a time.

I'm not a programmer, so I can't really get into specifics of how it would be done. But if something like this could be implemented for the future in a way that would reduce strain on the servers while still allowing us to recycle our tokens, I think it would be much better than the current method.

TL;DR - I'm not asking for anything to change in terms of how frequently it asks for tokens or anything like that. It would be basically the same as it is now, the only difference is the method in which we trade our tokens for RB points. Hopefully come up with a way to do it without making the site almost unusable for a day.

I support this. All the lag and errors were doubly annoying in the middle of a limited time event.

That's what caused the lag? O.O

I love this idea. Taking Wiz Token's out of RB's rotation entirely would be a shame, but something needs to change to prevent this kind of lag happening again. Having him run a "Token Smelter" kind of thing once in a while sounds good. c:

BUT... I remember one time when he asked for some denomination of sP voucher, and that was fun. So, I like the idea of doing a rare event where staff decides that he'll take one type of currency for the day. Maybe cap how many you can turn in, like 25~50 or something too?

Or, instead of staff deciding a day and having everyone turn in money crap, what if it were a buff? (we need more buffs) Then, everyone wouldn't be trying to do the same thing, only a few people who happened to get it, for whatever amount of time the buff runs (15 mins or so). Perhaps a RE could trigger it, like the extra wizard quest? Or, you get a chance of it activating when you check out the Acceptable Items page (once a day), or just add a button where you ask if the Beast needs any extra help today (once a day) so it's a little more apparent that something special can happen for getting rid of stuff.

No worries, at least the site didn't go down completely. And it still would be nice to have him ask for the currencies sometimes, but yeah just without causing so much lag if possible.

And IDK exactly when the last time he asked for them was, but it does feel like about 6 months to a year or so ago. Maybe before that, or I just didn't notice, but I can remember at least one other time. Definitely not often at all though.

I suppose that's an excuse to start hoarding all my currency as items again, instead of putting them in the bank, on the off chance you guys let us turn them into recycle points. ;D

Personally I'd like to see a different way of cashing out tokens... As it stands there is no way to get smaller denominations without the repeated reloading of the entire Token Removal page. I'd like to see it set up with drop-down or input boxes (like in the shops and galleries) for each possible denomination... Or you know, some other way to minimize page loads.

I don't know how much it would help but the current method of cashing them out is definitely not the most efficient.

It was possible when the token bank was introduced. There were denominations and you just had to enter numbers in each box to cash them out.

However, I believe the reason why they switch to auto is because of the potential to overload the server for obvious reasons. Every time an item gets created it makes an entry to the DB, and that's a slow operation especially when there's a mass amount of them.