If I wipe all of the characters again? I wanted to refactor some code for memory efficiency, but it would require a minor rewrite of the equipment section.

To be honest, I personally would not mind. Until Items are in the game, getting to 20 is going to be slow, and single pulls. I was planning on deleting my characters when the new inventory, and loot drop system was implemented. Do what you have to do.

Good to know. I was feeling bad about it, but it is going to save a lot of memory and pain and anguish later, so I thought it was really worth it.

This is must me talking. But I think it won't bother me at least if you have to delete characters everytime you bring out an update as far as item drops go, plane, rare, epic. But once all the inventory is done, I think people might have a problem.

Was thinking, maybe you let us store our characters on our own computers at some point, but that would cause people editing the code, and giving items to their character probably. Don't want cheating, or someone to mess up the game for the rest of us.

It's a client-side javascript game, so if people really wanted to cheat, they're going to cheat. People cheat in Diablo 2 and Angry Birds and every other game, so I doubt I'll be able to secure a web-based game. I wish I could. I've looked into it. It's really difficult to secure, if not impossible. People that want to cheat are going to find a way to cheat, so maybe that's how those people have fun. But, in my opinion, games are more enjoyable when played legitimately (i.e., without cheating).

As for the inventory, I don't plan to wipe very often. But I found a way to optimize the code in a very significant way, so I found it hard to resist.

sounds good. I would wipe the characters if it means longevity for later patches.

Easy to cheat if you want, he's storing a DB and all values are plain text. You could hash them and store the hash in there too with a seed that only the server knows. When it loads up it will check and wipe the DB if the hash doesnt match