Disconnection anxiety in abyssals

Council Of Stellar Management Assembly Hall
1

Greetings. I’m bringing this rather popular topic to discussion once again. Up until recently, running abyssals has been my main source of income. I had a close call in T1 exotic with a Worm due to disconnection for the first time. Managed to escape but it really made me think if abyssals are really worth doing at all.

I’ve progressed to T3s with a Gila but it really would hurt to lose a 500 mil ship plus cargo. Takes a long time to replace a ship like that. I do know that the ship and cargo will be reimbursed if the disconnection happens because of a server related issue but not if the disconnection happened because of player’s internet. During that disconnection I experienced my internet seemed to work fine. I have a rather new pc and optic fiber net, connected with a cable of course. If that doesn’t work well enough, I’m really sorry for large number of players around New Eden.

I haven’t been around EVE that long yet but I’ve come to notice disconnection anxiety being a real phenomena. Wouldn’t it make sense to DC proof abyssals? There’s already all sorts of player induced troubles around and problems keeping new players around. Having that kind of technical issue isn’t helping at all. Besides, effectively blocking out players from abyssals due to seemingly solvable issue… not cool. Please do correct me if I’m wrong with that!

Possible solution:

"I believe I have a theoretical solution to eliminate any concerns over unfair advantages which could be gained from having DC protection in abyssal sites.

Upon a player disconnect, the state of the site would be frozen until the player reconnects. The player would then receive a short countdown (maybe 10 seconds) before the site resumes to make sure there are no issues with black screen or anything like that.

A limit on the maximum time for a single disconnection should be 10 minutes, after which, the site will be automatically unfrozen. This would prevent a player from disconnecting indefinitely upon seeing his trace camped by other players.

Each player is granted a disconnect time bank which resets daily, say 20 minutes. Disconnected time depletes the time bank. After the time bank is depleted, the player no longer receives DC protection for the rest of the day. This would prevent abuse of the previous bullet point by disconnecting and reconnecting in order to try to avoid trace camps. The maximum amount of time a camp would need to wait in theory is 40 minutes rather than 20 minutes.

For multiplayer sites, the players which are not disconnected can either choose to wait, or manually resume the site and continue without the disconnected player. The players in the site would use a shared time bank.

I believe this would provide a safety net for the vast majority of genuine disconnections and reduce the potential for abuse to an absolute minimum. As mentioned, the small downside is that PVP camps would have to wait slightly longer on average for their kill. But having DC protection would result in more players running sites, and so there are more players to kill for the hunters. Also, many players do not bother with scout alts. Therefore, it is less significant as a downside than some people may believe.

Whatever peoples opinions of safety nets may be, I think it is completely reasonable to expect that no player should lose assets due to a disconnect whenever possible, provided it is not open to abuse."

Credit goes to Kadia Kakki Sotken. Here’s a link to the original post: Abyssal timeouts because of disconnection - #9 by Kadia_Kakki_Sotken

On top of that I suggest adding a notification of some unexpected event that prolongs the time the portal is open to the signature info to even the playground in case of gank attempt. The ganker could inform their girlfriend that the trip to Ikea will be delayed by max 10 mins (if that should be the case) :slight_smile:

Best Regards
Jesse Royal

1 Like
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Any additional time a player can get by (intentionally) disconnecting from the game to postpone return to the trace is open to abuse.

10 minutes is a lot of time, not even Rorquals can be invulnerable for such an amount of time and those ships are designed to stall a fight until backup arrives.

3

The best solution would be to remove all instanced content from EvE and bring the former Abyssal content to Pochven as normal combat sites spread over adjacent systems. Keep the timer, but remove the fear of destruction by NPCs or environment. If you can’t make the three rooms (in three systems) in time, you just lose the payout/loot. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
4

Hmm, I have no experience of those kind of ships so I don’t have a comment to that matter. Nevertheless, from a ganker’s point of view, if the abyssal runner gets a DC and loses their ship, the ganker ends up putting their ship in a vulnerable place for nothing. Wouldn’t it be the best intrest of a ganker too to DC proof abyssals? I’d be happy with 2 mins extra time too, doesn’t take that long to log in again. Or if extra time is out of the question, at least the situation inside abyss should freeze until the player gets back online. That would be fair to both sides.

5

Intresting idea. But then again it would probably make Pochven perma gate camped :thinking: I believe that the biggest reason for people to run abyssals is that it’s a way to earn isk in highsec. Changing that would be a massive change.

6

I think we’d all like to see a way for abyssal disconnects to not cost somebody a ship. The problem is “provided it is not open to abuse.”

I just don’t see a scenario where they can create an easy to implement fix to this that doesn’t have the potential of being gamed by somebody, and the most likely use of this would be to avoid a gank.

Not sure if the amount of work it would take to implement something like this is worth it, in the long run.

1 Like
7

I see that point and I must agree. Freezing the situation inside abyss in case of disconnection wouldn’t create opportunity for abuse though. Time keeps running and the player still loses the ship when timer runs out. Would that kind of change be difficult to implement? So far the disconnections I’ve experienced have been very short and I’ve been able to log in as soon as I get the game back up and running.

1 Like
8

I’ll put this on my list to ask about - no idea how hard it would be to do something like this.

2 Likes
9

Thank you :slight_smile:

10

Can I ask you to remove that from your list? And add a point instead where instanced gameplay is removed from EvE?

11

That would be a waste of time. They won’t remove it.

12

But you want to help making it better? They may not remove it, but you still can help making it as miserable as possible.

13

whats bad about that? You can still gank abyss runners

14

Only the stupid ones. There are now a dozen systems where ganking you is impossible, if you are not a moron. In case you don’t know, in order to prevent the escape to a new instance from within exit invulnerability you have to drop a mobile. CCP banned mobiles from Jita and all starter systems.

Also CCP made the Arena instance beacons unscannable and declares it an exploit to interfere with arena runners. This is not EvE.

Abyss instances are just perfectly safe ISK printers outside of the sandbox.

15

This is an issue.

It should not be that easy to completely avoid interaction with other players by just chaining (low tier) filaments whenever people are waiting at your trace.

It is not hard to fix this though: CCP could make it take a few seconds before you enter a filament (instead of instantly), during which time you are vulnerable.

16

Let’s not avoid the elephant in the room. CCP does not want to have their instanced gameplay more unsafe, because players and CCP managers like it. They are a new generation, alien to competitive play styles in MMOs. I think EvE is anyway the last one standing on the market which allows non-consensual PvP in a meaningful amount. They did everything to make it as safe as possible. Player retention and acquisition at all costs.

17

To be fair, the way the abyssal filaments are designed with a trace that’s left in space shows that CCP want the abyssal runners to have interaction with the rest of the universe when they leave the instance.

The fact that there is a flaw in the design by allowing players to chain instances to avoid interaction does not seem to be the intention of CCP. And hopefully CCP realises this flaw exists and fixes it.

18

They know it, they just decided to not act on it (“we are observing” kind of statement I read). They also removed the suspect flag before (“for testing”), and still could move higher level sites to lowsec easily. What we now have is barely the minimum of interaction to not lose face when claiming “there are interaction options”.

19

Solution:

  • Death timer is entirely removed from Abyssal sites and the sites do not despawn until cleared (or the owner leaves it one way or another = dead or alive)
  • When a player disconnects his ship stays at the same place (no emergency warp if in abyssal space) and can be attacked by hostiles but also keeps its modules running as if the player is present (and ofc player drones aggro as usual as well)
  • 15 minutes after an abyssal site is created it will create a public entrance 1000 km from Jita 4-4 that anyone can enter regardless where the original abyssal entrance was created
  • The original character who created the site if reaches the end gate will return to the place of origin while other characters return to the entry point at Jita 4-4
  • The entry point in Jita 4-4 is closed when the creator of the site leaves the site (either through the exit gate or by being killed)
  • The site despawns when the owner leaves it and anyone still in the site are moved back to the Jita 4-4 entry point
20

Can’t tell if joking or trolling…

at lest nice way to return overview spam back to jita