Chris: ALT-F4 LEGIT STRAT

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syrioforel wrote:

Though this whole argument is predicated on power outages or internet outages at home being relatively common.

They are relative to the lifetime of a high level hardcore character.

In the last year, I've had my ISP randomly go down for maintenance probably a half dozen times. Due to storms, I've lost internet or power briefly a few more times as well.

If I did nothing but play a single high level hardcore character and took months to a year to play it up to level 100, any one of those failures has a decent probability of destroying all my work by killing the character.

When you put GGG server hiccups on top of this (which are about as rare as local issues), the end result is that a character cannot expect live past a few months of play time, which is pretty bad.

And of course, this is coming from someone who lives in a metropolitan area in the United States. If I had worse internet or lived in an area with more storms or worse power, the result would be an even smaller "expected time to live".

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Implementation-wise, missing N heartbeats functions as a perfectly workable failure detector.

alt + f4 or any other way to escape death is lame shit...

my main dude is lvl 80 .. died 1512 times, and i like it... (i play super risky... my dude is a badass, i lead the pack, all those noobs behind me hehe)

xp loss is kinda bullshit ... especially since you noobs are alt+f4ing

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pneuma wrote:

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syrioforel wrote:

Though this whole argument is predicated on power outages or internet outages at home being relatively common.

They are relative to the lifetime of a high level hardcore character.

In the last year, I've had my ISP randomly go down for maintenance probably a half dozen times. Due to storms, I've lost internet or power briefly a few more times as well.

If I did nothing but play a single high level hardcore character and took months to a year to play it up to level 100, any one of those failures has a decent probability of destroying all my work by killing the character.

When you put GGG server hiccups on top of this (which are about as rare as local issues), the end result is that a character cannot expect live past a few months of play time, which is pretty bad.

And of course, this is coming from someone who lives in a metropolitan area in the United States. If I had worse internet or lived in an area with more storms or worse power, the result would be an even smaller "expected time to live".

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Implementation-wise, missing N heartbeats functions as a perfectly workable failure detector.

Oddly part of my point was that GGG should even be lenient on their own causes for service interruption (desyncs due to latency spikes, etc.)

Lag/Power outages/etc. ---> "alt-f4" needs to be allowed ---> game gets easier when this is abused.

It would be nice if the above weren't necessary, but honestly it is. You can't be killing off characters because of weather or anything beyond player control.

The possibility for abuse presents two choices:

1) Make the game harder, expecting this abuse, to bring the difficulty back up.
2) Accept the drop in difficulty -- if people want to abuse to cheat the system, so be it.

To me, 2) is fine, especially if GGG openly discourages alt-f4 abuse. They don't. GGG could mitigate the effect of 2) by flagging accounts that have an abnormal amount of sudden disconnects, though that would be predatory to people with really garbage internet connections, so I'm not sure how I feel about that. At the very least, alt-f4-for-profit could be discouraged.

It would appear they did 1), but we've had somewhat conflicting statements about that. I'm really not okay with 1) in principle.

[Removed by Admin]

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syrioforel wrote:

GGG could mitigate the effect of 2) by flagging accounts that have an abnormal amount of sudden disconnects

Are you seriously suggesting that someone who frequently uses Alt+F4 to quit the game outside of town could be flagged and punished? You can't be assuming that the only use of the command is death-dodging, can you?

Come on now. No joke suggestions.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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syrioforel wrote:

GGG could mitigate the effect of 2) by flagging accounts that have an abnormal amount of sudden disconnects

Are you seriously suggesting that someone who frequently uses Alt+F4 to quit the game outside of town could be flagged and punished?

Come on now. No joke suggestions.

"

They don't. GGG could mitigate the effect of 2) by flagging accounts that have an abnormal amount of sudden disconnects, though that would be predatory to people with really garbage internet connections, so I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Are you seriously not quoting the entirety of a sentence, wherein the second half I say I don't like the idea?

Come on now. That is a dishonest tactic.

EDIT: I was floating the idea to deliberately shoot it down. Naively, it's one way they could handle abuse. The point is that they're forced to accept it.

It's beyond that. I honestly use Alt+F4 every single time I close Path of Exile. I've death-dodged exactly one time; I've Alt+F4'd outside of town (no monsters around) hundreds of times. Hundreds! We're talking over a 100:1 innocence-to-guilt ratio here!

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

It's beyond that. I honestly use Alt+F4 every single time I close Path of Exile. I've death-dodged exactly one time; I've Alt+F4'd outside of town (no monsters around) hundreds of times. Hundreds! We're talking over a 100:1 innocence-to-guilt ratio here!

He does have a point. Alt+f4 is so much faster!

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

It's beyond that. I honestly use Alt+F4 every single time I close Path of Exile. I've death-dodged exactly one time; I've Alt+F4'd outside of town (no monsters around) hundreds of times. Hundreds! We're talking over a 100:1 innocence-to-guilt ratio here!

Firstly, I agree it's probably not a good idea.

However, for the sake of debate, you could keep track of frequency of alt-f4s that occur in cases that would have resulted in player death within 5 seconds (or less) if the player were to idle. If the frequency of this is high, you could flag the account.

Do you have a problem with that?

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syrioforel wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

It's beyond that. I honestly use Alt+F4 every single time I close Path of Exile. I've death-dodged exactly one time; I've Alt+F4'd outside of town (no monsters around) hundreds of times. Hundreds! We're talking over a 100:1 innocence-to-guilt ratio here!

Firstly, I agree it's probably not a good idea.

However, for the sake of debate, you could keep track of frequency of alt-f4s that occur in cases that would have resulted in player death within 5 seconds (or less) if the player were to idle. If the frequency of this is high, you could flag the account.

Do you have a problem with that?

I'm sure whoever gets tasked with that over at GGG is going to be thrilled.