Player characters are saved separetely from everything else, so if you use worldsave which has been created
before character file has been updated. As both worldsave and char files keep some time-related data, any mismatch results in total screwup.
Why would anyone use older worldsave then?
Server crash.
Characters are updated frequently (and devs cannot change that), worldsave are created as in server config.
Rollback.
Sometimes shit hits the fan (someone abusing big exploit, or scripts goes crazy) and devs decide to pull the plug and use older worldsave. In this case there's usually someone around to fix timeouts - most server have admin commands helping with that, designed exactly for such scenario.
Dirty shutdown.
While server automagically saves on exit, devs might just kill the process that way or another.
So yeah, fix is as follows: don't crash server
, don't rollback, always use "stop" to shutdown sever. There is few more scenarios when you'll see timeots go crazy, but it all goes to using
wrong worldsave.
