Suggestion on avoid losing the portal when you disconnect on loading screen of an area

Well, that happens a lot to me: when I enter in a new area, I got an unexpected disconnection and get back to the login screen of the game.

That happens regardless the network mode (lockstep or predictive). On Brazil server, where I play with latency of 30~40ms, I have MORE of this kind of issue than on Texas or Washington (latency of 150~200ms), but on US servers I still have like 1 disconnection per 10 portals on average.

I only got disconnected when loading the zone. After I enter on it, everything is fine.

But this post is not to discuss what causes the disconnection and what to do to prevent them - there's a lot of discussion on this topic already, and I believe GGG is working hard to solve or minimize that problems on each patch.

This post is about how to minimize the "damage" when the player is disconnected before entering in a zone.

By damage I refer to: losing portals on map device, losing Zana missions due to lost portals, losing a portal in the middle of a large map, such as Kaom's path or Belly of the Beast.

Losing portals to maps is specially painful when the map in question is a hard obtainable one, like a high tier map or Atziri/Uber areas.

My suggestion is the following:

Instead of closing the portal as soon as the player clicks on it, reserve the portal to that player. No other player would be able to enter in a reserved portal. After the loading of the map, when the server receives the first input from the client (which maybe or maybe not related to the grace period), the server finally closes the portal.

If a player gets disconnected during the loading of the area, the portal is still alive, and reserved to him. He can enter again, and as many times as needed till he actually gets into the map without disconnections.

Reserved portals should be invisible to players who doesn't own the portal, to avoid confusion.

An example:

Player A and Player B are mapping together. Player A creates a new map on a map device, and the 6 portals are opened.

Player A then enters on portal 1. On player B screen, the portal is closed and not available anymore (like what happens today). Player B then enters on portal 2.

Player A gets disconnected on loading the zone, while Player B successfully loads the map.

Player A relogs, enters again on the party (invited by B), and his portal (the portal 1) is still available. He then enters on it, and successfully loads the area. On his first input, the portal is finally closed, and he can not reuse it if it gets disconnected.

In other words: a portal would be more than "open" or "closed" states: it would have a "reserved" state as well.

Opinions?

Thanks.

I upvote this.

As long as the player leaves the area while he/she is still invulnerable, I think the game should realize that it was a dc. If you manually go back in a portal, it breaks invulnerability anyway.

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Kroughfire wrote:

I upvote this.

As long as the player leaves the area while he/she is still invulnerable, I think the game should realize that it was a dc. If you manually go back in a portal, it breaks invulnerability anyway.

I'm trying to making this thread heard by the developers - sending it to the support e-mail doesn't help =(

I guess it would be a really nice QOL improvement for those with unstable connections.