Best solution imo, would be, that if the server does not hear from your client for maybe a second, then it pauses and saves the game server-side.
So when you log back in, you end up exactly where you left.
The above only works solo of course. But in groups I guess people could get a vote on whether to pause or not (Starcraft 2 style).
It also means that if you have a lot of lag, the game might mistakenly believe you DCed and pause the game. But that is probably not a bad thing.
Sorry for necro’ing an old thread but this just became relevant to me.
I’ve had disconnects on hardcore, I haven’t suffered a death due to disconnect. I know that it happens. I wanted to chime in on a few things, I have a game development background (aka, my job…) and a few things I’m thinking.
Disconnect detection - What’s to stop someone from simply having a custom made app running that just disables their network card? Assuming that you would have some sort of monitoring of player activity and some sort of keepalive sent back and forth, it’s not impossible but it’s going to get tricky to separate legitimate disconnects from something like that.
One thing that is clear is that Diablo 3 does rollback - not sure if this is going to be the same in Diablo 4, I’m not sure at all how the networking side of things will be but the best suggestion I’ve seen so far is pausing on disconnect for solo play only. Reverting to the last known good snapshot when a player disconnects and then locking them in to resuming that session from that exact state (maybe with a 5 second countdown to unpause like SC2’s replay resume) would completely solve the problem.
Ultimately though, the game does tell you when you sign up for hardcore what you’re getting yourself in to - so long as the warning is present it’s fine. I’m okay with admitting that all my HC deaths have come from my own stupidity or making a bad decision - never had one due to disconnect (and I have had a lot of disconnects!). I’m sure it will happen to me too one day…
If people log in right where they left, then DC protection would not actually save them, and thus would not be exploitable.
You could fake DCs as much as you wanted, and it would never help you.
There should be no rollback, because that would be exploitable.Then you could fake DC at the moment of death, or a split second before, and rollback to a better chance of survival.
Well the problem with that - when I say rollback I’m really talking just a couple of frames. The same kinda rollback that you see already implemented in the game when it corrects itself due to lag. It’s not really exploitable - on a technical level we’re basically saying “Go back to the last good known packet” - which might be 0.5 seconds ago.
We’re effectively saying the same thing tho… I’m basically talking about resuming from the point at which the player disconnected / stopped communicating with the server. See, if I disconnect - the game might continue for 10-15 seconds after where I may die… but, when I said rollback - I meant going back to the point of disconnect and no further… The last known good state
No you’re not hardcore! (you’re not hardcore!) Unless you’re internet is hardcore! (internet hardcore)
That’s a great idea, so if you disconnect implement a save of where you’re at when you lost connection. This would require a complete overhaul of the d3 engine since it likely does not remember creature locations but might be something future diablo could totally implement.
It’s a lot of work but I would hope they’d implement something like this. With David Kim at the helm, coming from Starcraft he’s hopefully very familiar with making decisions around that games lockstep model and they did manage to implement a “resume from replay” feature in SC2. If this was all handled server side, that’d be pretty great but of course we know nothing about how D4 actually works under the hood.
Especially with the addition of open world stuff - I can see the world boss fights annihalating large numbers of people in the opening months…
This approach would only work for those instanced areas where it’s really just you (could be done for a party I guess)
Lost a main party member to a DC last night, proc went off after DC during a speed pylon and I didn’t make it back in time when I noticed it was happening 
Well then your not very good at critical thinking. When you look at GR clears in D3 you at least know people have done those clears and their character never dc or survived a dc or whatever. In PoE, D2 and other games you can never assume that. Actually you can guarantee that a lot of “high end players” or clears or whatever you are measuring have people who would have died but they abused the instant d/c function. I literally know of people who have a macro for it in PoE…
I hate dc deaths so not saying I am 100% opposed. But I also think people of your opinion are super gullible by not realizing this can and will be extremely exploited.
Every single second of lag, you would get disconnected. No thanks.
Have to chime in because I had 2 disconnect deaths yesterday. The first death was due to my own internet and the second death was some random error in D3. It’s one thing to die to game mechanics but nothing is more infuriating than dying to a disconnect. So I’ll be back in the next season because I guess I’m not hardcore enough.
“tons of other people screwed over.” Not tons of other people, you are the minority. Get a better router and stop pushing your problems on other people. I want a legitimate leaderboard. Thxs.
I was going to agree but…
Just a while ago my wiz died simply because I put him in a Grift level where it would take him a while to kill the RG. If insta-disconnect would happen, I’ll immediately leave game as soon as my 2nd life passive procs on RG then run the Grift again leeching off experience in trash mobs and elites then escape the RG when I don’t like it.
I got one shot by the mallet lord RG despite all my shields up and I immediately scuffled away but I was short by a few seconds going back the previous map (as of this point, I don’t know whether you can return to the previous map when RG arrives). I humbly take it being outplayed </3. If I have the insta-disconnect, my wiz would still be alive by now and I am definitely sure people will exploit this.