[Note first of all that this proposal probably requires a fair amount of coding, and I am more or less aware of the bottleneck there. Also, touching the boot cycle code is probably at least somewhat risky, which is likely to further delay implementation.]

I think offered item loss on boot should be eliminated, as it's a threat not merely to inexperienced players, but to everyone who puts down items in an auction house. However, the simple solution of saving and restoring all items to the AH floor on boot is very likely to result in vastly increased clutter, due to players leaving items around for days, weeks, or months.

Instead, I suggest removing all items from the auction houses and either returning them immediately to their owners' inventories, or returning them on next login. Presumably a message on login would be useful in either case.

Are there any potential problems with this that I haven't considered or don't know about?

A friend mentioned to me that they didn't think this was a sensible idea -- that smart players are able to avoid losing items to boot, and that therefore there is no need or reason to prevent item loss. I disagree, for the simple reason that there are no "smart players" in that sense -- no one is smart enough, or careful enough, to avoid this*. In fact, this same friend lost several items to boot not three days ago.
This is a common attitude, though, among people who are in fact smart -- they look at flaws and inconveniences as "just the way things should be" and argue that if you're "good enough" you won't mind them. Not so.

The fact that a detail of the server implementation (namely reboot) can affect whether you own an item or not is deeply unfortunate.


Now, I recognize, as I mentioned in my first post, that this may not be a high enough priority to be implemented any time in the foreseeable future, but I do think it should be done at some point.


*Except by never putting items down, which makes one wonder why auction houses exist in the first place.

You and 100 other people have put this in the ideas log for years, you didn't need to repost it here.

It's currently not possible and won't be unless rhialto totally recodes the game.