Help with implementing a Progression Server

[blackdragonsdg]

I am trying to implement a progression style server. Problem is I can not seem to get it to work.
I started out setting zone flags but everytime I tried to enter a flagged zone it crashed that zone. Then I tried writing to the database itself with this

sub EVENT_Death {
my $dsn = 'dbi:mysql:peq:localhost:3306';
my $user = 'YYYYY';
my $pass = 'XXXXX';
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn, $user, $pass)
or die "Can’t connect to the DB: $DBI::errstr\n";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare('update variables set value = 32767 where value = 16384');
$sth->execute();
}

but that did not work either. I think I may have missed some information when trying that one. A direct db write changing the allowed expansions seemed like the quickest method for achieving this task but my method didn't work.

How should I go about setting this up?