Purge

From Toadwater Guide

The great purge - there have now been two of these.

As a result of many players signing up to try out the game and quitting, or simply creating characters for a short term purpose (posting a message in the, raiding a player anonymously etc.), the game can have a large portion of memory devoted to unused players, this causes a slight increase in the loading time for actions - creating a small bit of lag, and obviously, takes up hard drive space.

To solve this problem there is a purge, where inactive players are deleted from the server. Inactivity is determined by the number of days since last log in compared to the level - if the level is lower then the number of days since the last log in the character is removed - this is not a constant thing, it only happens during a purge (so don't panic if you're going on holiday for a bit.)

So if you have a level 10 character it needs to log in 10 days before the purge to survive, otherwise it is deleted. If a character is a Centivelian though, it can log in at least 100 days before the purge and survive.

The upshot of having a purge is a large release of resources on the server, dramatically cutting down on lag. The downside is that some new players may miss it and have their character deleted, some more experienced players may have a mule holding their most precious posessions, which could also be deleted. This is why advanced notice is given of a purge.

Also, there is another kind of purge, that is done before the main purge that deletes all the players with less than 10 XP. That will include all the accounts created only for posting, and people that ran the game only once and then deleted it. In the preliminary purge of 26. 11. 2005. around 3000 players (about half of total number) were purged.