To what extent is this a persistent world?

[Phiedrus 64]

I guess in my (future) home, I can leave my stuff around and I'll find that stuff in the same place I left it.

But what about the public areas?
Let's say some public furniture is broken (a bank in the park, a traffic sign...), does it remain broken until fixed?
Does my car need an overhaul overtime?
Can I leave some object somewhere for someone else to take it? How long would it remain in place?
Will there be whipes/how often/what do whipes mean?

I know the questions are vague, becase so is the status at this point ,but I hope you get the idea. As per the description, this is somehow a life simulator. All of the above questions mean really only one: is this a persistent world and what does such persistence mean?

[Capped 146]

7 hours ago, Phiedrus said:

Can I leave some object somewhere for someone else to take it? How long would it remain in place?

I sure hope so for this one, could be very useful for us criminals.

[facade 124]

It would be neat if we could drop our trash on the ground. Give people a reason to hate us.

[Phiedrus 64]

Right after I put my question in words, which was useful for myself to tackle my own concern, I started thinking of it, and found some answers/comments to my own question that I list here for the sake of the topic.

You can paint a canvas or write a book and submit them to the appropiate gallery. That is meant to persist and, if good enough, have a value, both in money and in meaning for both the author and the potential owner who buys it.

There will be politics, so an elected governor should remain for a certain time, and that should mean something along the history of events. 

I don't really think we'll be allowed to leave our stuff on the floor while in the street, just like that. Not at least without some control. Imagine the mess that could be? But I think it's one of the most interesting elements of players interaction. As facade and Capped say, it could be very useful for criminals. But for police too in case whatever object dropped in the crime scene can serve as an evidence. I imagine the clutter being cleared by the corresponding cleaning service every once in a while. 

These are the things that will make each day consistent with the previous, and set the basis of the next one. These are the things I mean when talking about persistence.

[Ricardoo669 1]

Same goes for bodies of people itself. If there is a thief in your appartment. You come home, and catch the thief and shoot him. Does the dead body also stay in the house? Is it going to rot?

[Autus 2]

I shudder to think of the entity count if everything was infinitely persistent (bodies, trash, etc). I haven't looked into how private servers will be hosted, but the server load will increase exponentially as more items are placed in the world. If I were to host my own server, I'd definitely want items to despawn from the world on a variable timer that increases with the value of the item dropped. Bodies would ideally stay in the game long enough to pull items from it or use it however the player wants. If the body lies untouched for, 30 minutes I guess, the body would despawn.

 

The developers could choose to go a completely different route, but most games try to reduce the entity count as much as they can without affecting immersion.