Unpopular Idea: Revive Hardcore Players

Teeburn is the newest addition to Standard.

I DC'd. That much is obvious. I'd never experienced lag like that before, and this whole thing was being streamed through Xsplit to Twitch, and the one person watching (I was doing an Atziri run for him) never saw a blip in the service. It's hard to tell where this particular DC came from, mostly because it's not a field I'm experienced in, but to me all signs are pointing to a server-side problem.

Let's look at how it played out. About one second prior to my death, you can see that I cast Immortal Call with 8 endurance charges up. That leaves me with 4+ seconds of physical damage immunity. It's an RF build, and all you can really do is trust my numbers (or watch previous parts of the video) to see that my regen was ~300hp/s while burning. Add onto it a life pool of 9k+ and 88% fire damage resistance. Physical rain boss is dead, and I'm headed away from her chaos goop on the ground. Oh, and CWDT enfeebles them right beofre it all plays out.

So the only forms of damage that can possibly come in are fire and chaos at this point (spinny-guy's chaos trail). Spinny-guy had just used his cyclone and wasn't likely to use it again for some time. Tentacle miscreations are firing rapidly, doing only fire damage for the next 4 seconds. Scissorhands boss as well is only doing fire damage with his attacks with a decent chance to ignite. Chances are likely that for the next 4 seconds, the only damage I was going to take was going to be fire, which would be minimal-to-negligible.

Screen freezes. It's about one second before I panic-pop my bleed ruby and Rumi's. By the end of the next second I had clicked log out (with 4 seconds of IC still up). According to GGG, all it takes is clicking that button to be disconnected from their servers and taken to safety. Fast forward about 20 seconds and you can probably feel my heart sink when I see that I'm now in hell--er, Standard.

According to GGG, that's 1 full second of being vulnerable during that lagtime that I might have died. Barring every single unit critting me with every single shot all at once (which I still don't think would have outright killed me thanks to IC) there is no reasonable explanation as to why I died. My only guess is that the desync was caused by an actual disconnect to their servers which caused them to believe I was still alive and playing.

tl;dr of rant: I was tanky as fuck. If there's a way I could have died in the 1 second it took to log out, I don't know it.

Remove (change) that disclaimer. I would really like to see GGG start to take some initiative into an issue like this. It's such a free and easy thing to just slap on a big warning label and let every single player enter at their own risk. And sure, that was likely the most efficient/effective way to do things when they were a young, burgeoning company with a really neat little toy to show to the world. Now? They're one of the best free games out there. With a title like that comes some assumption of responsibility for these kinds of issues, at least if they want to keep said title.

"You just said it yourself; free. Don't like it? Uninstall and go play another game." Good point. Path of Exile is not just free to play, it's not even pay to win. They do gaming right in so many aspects, it's astounding. That's why I do choose to spend money on them. Of course the cool MTX's I get are a wonderful bonus. But when I see that money drain from my account, it's one of the few red blips I enjoy. GGG rock. Path of Exile Rocks. I'm not the only one who thinks so either. I'm sure I'm not the only one here right now who's spent money on a supporter pack, or even just some points.

Which means they've got money. Granted, this is entirely an assumption on my part, but I'm willing to bet that GGG is in a very comfortable place. This issue right here can and should be something they divert some of those resources to.

It just hurts me so much that I want so bad to play this game, and challenge myself with hardcore, and I'm literally shown a big 'get-out-of-everything-free card' each time I click that 'Create' button because they just don't/can't find another way around a one-size-fits-all solution.

I'm not asking that they literally look at every whiny case of 'i lagd pls' and every raging teenager who swears up and down that getting mobbed by a pack of blue devourers isn't his/her fault. I'm asking that for high-level players who obviously show devotion of time and dedication to their character and this game that they actually do show a little effort in looking into a possible issue on their end. Use a ticket system. I've worked in the video game support system before, if it's a full-time dedication you can pump those tickets out by the dozens every hour (difficult cases not-withstanding). They do so, so much data-mining that there's bound to be heaps of information available regarding the circumstances around one particular death--or, in my own (and others') case, video evidence of the unlikeliness of an issue on the user's end.

They moved the character to Standard, they can move it back. Hell, I'll take the 10% EXP hit even though the death wasn't any fault of my own. I'm not asking for a rollback here.

For the record; I'm not asking that they move this particular character back over. He's dead. I get that. I'm asking for a change that allows me to enjoy hardcore without fear of being punished for something I can't control.