Proxy Encampment - Hideout

What would it be used for:

- To log off without losing all zone progress.

- To allow new kind of long quest, where you won’t be able to activate any way point to town for a chain of several zones. In that case the hideout will be used as a proxy encampment. As long as you or the party members are active along the road, you can open the usual portals to town. But when everybody log off, all the zones will have to be run across from the town to get to where you were… unless you have set up a hideout as a temporary encampment.

Current context and assumptions:

A zone is instantiated on PoE server before a player enter into it. Random number generator (RNG) roll the virtual dice and seeds the algorithms to generate the map outline, chests placement, a set of monsters, etc. The map is ready.
The player discover the place. Then, 8-15mn after he leaves or when he logs off, the resources are freed on the server and the map instance is lost. When the player is back online, the character will respawn in town, with the same inventory. Going back to the zone will instantiate a new one.

Main idea:

To be able to set up a proxy encampment in a zone, also seen as a hideout.
Maybe only in specific zone, or specific place (spot) of the map. Maybe consuming a new kind of orb to make it possible, for example it opens a dead-end portal that act like a temporary hideout on the zone.

When the player logs off and come back online, he respawn in the same zone, with almost the same alterations done (chests open, monsters killed). Items on ground are lost, non dead monsters recover health points.
The hideout exists as long as the player is using it (hidden inside, offline) or as long as the supporting zone is instantiated with the present rules.

How it can work for GGG servers:

The full zone state will not be saved.
What is saved is the seed of the RNG. Using the same seed and the same game version will give the same map outlines, etc. What is also saved is the index of the opened chests and killed monsters. For example the algorithm gives 10 chests with coordinates, and the player has opened chests no 2,5,6. He has killed the monsters 1 to 5 and 12,15, those indexes are saved also. This is very small data, it won’t be a burden for the servers. Also in game constraints limits the number of hideouts with the cost and spot availability.

What about party:

This is the same logic as the portals opened by a player.
If the party members gather into the hideout, the first player to go out will re-instantiate the map and others will be able to join in the same instance.
The hideout may be dismissed while other offline party members are still inside. In that case they will respawn in town as usual.

Related ideas:

The hideout may have some limited encampment facilities. It could be an access to the first tab of the shared stash.
Health points could be slowly regained, or fully if the player come back after log off.
Of course hideouts are not allowed right inside a boss’ lair.

Possible visuals:

A mix between a portal and a lair entrance, a tent with a spherical shield around, a trap door on a flat ground, whatever…
Going into the hideout brings an overlay over the usual zone display (now inactive), character is shown sitting on the ground or resting.

The description of some Event shows that GGG is already using the RNG seed to make the same map for different players.
This suggestion use that for the same player.

What is the motivation behind this idea?
What benefits are provided by allowing for "hiding-out"?

I know that some zones can be rather large, but are any of them large enough to demand that server resources be used to remember arguably trivial zone progress data points for potentially unlimited amounts of time?

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Perfect_Black wrote:

What is the motivation behind this idea?
What benefits are provided by allowing for "hiding-out"?

I know that some zones can be rather large, but are any of them large enough to demand that server resources be used to remember arguably trivial zone progress data points for potentially unlimited amounts of time?

I hope I've shown that no significant server resources are used, it would be less than 5% of the character data usually saved.

Maybe most of you see not point in saving such 'little' progress, ok. But there is more.

I've suggested another usage: not only for big areas, but for a path of several areas with no waypoint at all for quite a distance.

In the RPG this would count as a very long (maybe dangerous) journey, the beginning of a new quest, where a log off for every party member would mean a restart for town.

The hideout would allow this kind of quest, that is the main point.
Also with some new question: where to set up the proxy encampment ? Which area and what place on the area ? Various rules would apply here, risk, health recovery, etc, depending on the spot.