I'm not saying it is 100% not needed, but it is not needed at the moment. Due to all the hub and developer main focuses, it would be a better idea to raise awareness about using chests and not simply passing. Like Jamie said, minecraft automatically has this butcher feature and it is will take time to figure out a way to remove it. While working on a fix for something, you raise awareness for that something so that it doesn't happen, and then when the fix is implemented you do not need to worry. As for brainstorming, you wouldn't be the first; Jamie knows well of the problem with butchers, and I'm sure if he knew of a way to fix it, he would work on it right away. Yes, other servers have the butcher feature removed, but the bigger servers generally have multiple well-paid developers to make features and keep it running; we only have one main (extremely smart) developer, but he isn't a dev god (and while I'm not sure, I doubt he is paid enough to make a living or even work at jobs less). Honestly, if you truly wish to help fix this problem as soon as possible, raising awareness for chest use would probably be the best way to go. I would, but I don't have the time nor do I play enough.
Dropped items being wiped isn't from the butcher. They butcher only clears mobs. Items are wiped either due to them being on the ground in a loaded chunk for 5 minutes, or a minecraft bug which we have no control over. A butcher warning would do nothing to stop tools being lost.
-1 I am confused how this suggestion is supposed to help. We don't have /butcher activated in the main worlds. What exactly is the countdown timer counting towards? Each item that is on the ground? That doesn't seem feasible. This is not something that we are causing. On those servers that you see a countdown timer, it is because they have the butcher on. I understand the frustration and the concern, but I don't think this is a feasible solution.
As was said before, there's a bug in minecraft where items sometimes disappear upon being dropped. This is NOT an entity wipe. You can say what you want, but it's not some conspiracy where the items are being wiped on purpose. That would be dumb. So I'll repeat what has been said. This isn't possible, because it's not an entity wipe, but a bug in minecraft.
Yes, bugs can be fixed. But this bug can't be fixed by ECC. Besides, I was going against your suggestion, I never said it was an unfixable bug. Your suggestion is still impossible, whether the bug can be fixed or not is irrelevant.
I could be wrong here...but I don't believe we have a "dropped item time wipe" function running. Therefore, things are not getting cleared every "x" minutes, but rather clearing according to basic Minecraft rules or some sort of "entities greater than x" function. In that case, it shouldn't be possible to give a warning...
If it is truly a mc bug why is there no other records cases Anywhere else ? It wouldn't make much sense for a mc bug to be exclusive to ecc
There are likely other factors that contribute to the rarity of the bug. I know it has happened to me in vanilla minecraft, but not as often as on ECC. (or rather, as often as people say it does on ECC. I only had it happen to me once on ECC. but logically more players = bugs occur more often)
Replicated by me in both vanilla 1.8 MP and spigot 1.8. Managed to have items despawn in a local MP world within seconds of dropping multiple times. (That was done a few weeks ago, if I remember correctly.)
-1 use a chest instead of dropping items on the ground during trades. These suggestions about butcher are going to end up like the suggestions for /clear FYI.
