When someone gets disconnected for some reason, their ship should either instantly despawn or be Invincible from taking damage.

I've died to disconnects soooooooo many times it's hard to explain how many. I don't know why I randomly keep disconnecting. I either have a terrible connection (I'm quite sure it's not my connection) or game just hates me.

But it's just Not OK that you suddenly get disconnected and die. And there is no way of knowing I got disconnected unless I type in chat or the message "disconnected from the server" pops up (the message pops up like 2 minutes after being disconnected with a button that says reconnect)

It's very very very annoying & just not acceptable.

If a player gets disconnected just right away give the message - disconnected from the server please restart the game to reconnect.(or something like this)
And make their ships instantly despawn (including capital ships) or Invincible from taking damage. (instant despawn is better)

A "ghost" of a ship sticks around because people were disconnecting to get out of combat (if i remember correctly); perhaps it could be conditionally applied based on that weapon fire being near the player thing that is related to how strictly you are tracked by the server in pvp?

Of course, there could be other reasons for the ghosting system to exist that i'm not aware of...

That's great, then I'll be just one disconnect away from being invincible in this game... /s

-1, sry, this is not the way in a pvp game

edit since Luxen beat me to it:
> perhaps it could be conditionally applied based on that weapon fire being near the player thing that is related to how strictly you are tracked by the server in pvp?

Still would allow you an instant disconnect when enemies come near/jump in, before they fire a shot. instant disconnects are just no good in an open pvp game. 10 seconds are already not terrible, I've gotten XCs out of dodge with those several times.

I'd rather not bring back combat logging due to one guys bad internet connection.

Alternatively solution on this? Maybe only npc's can't damage the player?

The whole annoying point is dying to bots because of a random disconnect so feel free to add in better ideas for this.

Also the suggestion is mainly against dying to bots so what if we take out the instant despawn & instead make so player becomes Invincible to fire from npc's how about that? Any player passing by can still pop them. But not an npc.

I'm out of ideas now so if anyone else has better ideas put em here.

It's just terrible when you suddenly disconnect while doing unrats or hive skirmishes or whatever

I'm not a coder, but perhaps and addon with an active connection to server status i.e. active latency indicator.
Mind you I say this without knowing what data is accessibe to our Lua coder players, but Ive seen versions of this in other combat games where you see your latency spike/disconnect when you have probs.
But I agree this could definitely be turned into an exploit.

-1

If it were a pure PvE game, sure. Maybe improve your connection?

TJ then people would just combat log if they run into a dangerous situation like unrats.

Combat logging was lame. This would cause people to combat log all the time.

"And make their ships instantly despawn (including capital ships)"

Capital ships already stay logged in when being shot. There is no instant despawn on disconnect for cap ships when a player logs normally. This suggestion would be abused.

"(I'm quite sure it's not my connection)"

Unless you have a direct Ethernet connection to the server, it is your connection.

-1

Also, regarding your ping issues, since I know you live in Europe, this post is probably relevant, especially as a hurricane rages across the east coast of the USA, and might be FURTHER affecting your connection from what it usually is (and its not usually as amazing as you think it is, historically)

It takes a lengthy, significant dropout to get disconnected by the server. Keep in mind, we have people playing in the Philippines in the high mountain jungle, on cell connections that are over 500ms with tons of dropouts, not to mention geo-sync satellite users (over 1s avg).

I can also tell you that we monitor player disconnects, and graph it, and I don't see any recent increase or uptick. The net average has been pretty steady-state, similar with latency.

So, if there's something going on with a route that impacts the OP particularly, it isn't "everyone" (or a statistically meaningful subset, which would move the average), nor does it look like some unusual weather-inflicted issue.

If you're playing on wifi, that would be my first suspicion. Wifi frequency bands can be pretty dense these days, and not every access-point or client device is good at navigating the "chaos". Some wifi APs are just not very good at being wifi APs either, it's probably the most notorious consumer device to have crappy firmware and need rebooting.

Still, I don't know what's impacting you, that just might be worth a look, as opposed to changing the game in a way that clearly creates a lot of other problems.

I didn't think of these problems while writing the suggestion so a mistake on my part.

These disconnects aren't happening very frequently. Sometimes they don't happen for weeks & sometimes it's 3-5 disconnects in 1 day & it's the same connection, same playing time. And it also mainly happens when fighting bots. It mainly happens against bots too (very very very very rare during pvp or anything where other players are in same sector)

Well thanks everyone for pointing out that the suggestion is rather destructive & it's a problem on my side probably & not how I originally thought "(I'm quite sure it's not my connection)" >.<

> Alternatively solution on this? Maybe only npc's can't damage the player?

It's exploitable as well. Either to make bots stop shooting you and reset their position, or if you make them keep shooting you, just not dealing damage, then draw aggro with all, log off alt, be safe to do what you want to do on your main.

it's a problem on my side probably & not how I originally thought "(I'm quite sure it's not my connection)" >.<

You aren't the first person to think this, and you definitely won't be the last, it's pretty common and understandable.

The reality is that a real-time networked game (particularly a single-universe played off of a server in a single global location) is going to be the worst-case scenario for showing any kind of network problems.

People are so used to internet services "working", they don't realize that almost all of them are asynchronous and have all kinds of locational fail-over built in, so that the internet can "suddenly suck" and you're transparently unaware (your Netflix stream-server becomes inaccessible, and the Netflix app picks one up in another datacenter and rebuffers before your client even skips a frame of video).

Unfortunately, real-time games aren't like that, they're practically synchronous and data-awareness is almost instantaneous (no "buffering").. so you're going to be viscerally aware of any problem in real-time. Thus, while you might not ever notice a local wifi dropout on other types of apps, but you will in VO.