Option for Customizing Disconnect Timeout

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/218148819?t=07h51m44s
Topic: DC Timer
Ziz: We're opening with the six-second DC Timer, which we talked about earlier. Can it be adjustable?

Chris: There are two aspects to this.
The first is that, yes, it could be made to be adjustable. All it involves doing is communicating a new number to the server which remembers that's your setting and we have a slider for it. It's not too hard. That's a few days of work and testing. If we had to have it in by next Friday it could be done. It's just that the second problem is larger.
The second problem is that people aggressively set their settings to whatever they feel like will help them the most even if it hurts them. An example is the potato graphics quality stuff. Did you know that once you set that past like three it's really not having very much impact. All it does is reduce RAM use. It doesn't actually do framerate stuff. It just causes it to sample different MIP levels from the textures, making your game more brown, and setting it to five saves like half a meg of RAM or whatever. But people will do so! And happily stream the game worse than 2007 RuneScape. The same thing is true for this thing here. Let's say you can set it as low as a one second disconnection time. That means if there's no data from you for one second, you're going to get bumped. Now, if you have a rock solid fiber connection to the servers, you will still have one second of latency just due to internet dumbness every few hours. Maybe that's okay, "Well I'll accept that. I can barely die in Hardcore because of the one second disconnections, but in return I'll get randomly kicked occasionally."
But when you get randomly kicked, who's getting blamed but GGG? It's like, "What? I just disconnected, OMG, did the server crash, what happened?", when you're in the middle of a map that you paid a lot of currency for and you can't get back in or whatever. It's going to be super annoying. But on average, people have much worse connections than single one-second lag spikes. There are people out there who are getting hit by the six-second thing just due to the internet being crappy where they are. And this happens. Like, people in California when they have bad ISPs. People in Europe. A lot of German users are having -- Not to mention Brazil recently, where there were problems with ISPs, trying to solve them, and these huge lag spikes.
We feel that if we set this to lower, it would cause the game to be almost unplayable for people who blindly turned the setting down, if you see what I mean. Maybe there's a solution where we learn what the appropriate setting is for the user's conditions, like we sample their latency and determine eventually that it's safe for it to be reduced, or do some fancy solution like that, where the user can't set it, we just drift it downwards for the people who have good internet connections. That might work okay. But realistically, having it be lower means a lot more disconnections for people, and almost unplayable for people who actually do get these long lag spikes without realizing it.

07:54:20
Ziz: Obviously, this is something that frustrates me a lot as well, especially as a Hardcore player, and then you see a couple of streamers like RaizQT who has two to five deaths per league because of the six-second DC timer. If I were to put it in, it would be something in the config file, where someone who doesn't know what they're doing isn't going to accidentally find it and set it to one or two seconds. It's strictly going to be someone who actually knows what they're doing and experiment with it. You're not going to have that problem of someone accidentally setting it to one and emailing support asking why am I dc'ing all the time.

Chris: I agree that that rules out the people who just blind-look in the settings, but there are still going to be people who read a guide online about how the correct way to fix this problem is to set this. People apply the weirdest stuff when they don't know what they're doing, because someone on Reddit said it will help them. Like, we see people that will actively hurt their experience because it sounds like a cool comment which fixes it. Someone posted a PSA, "Just do this" and then everyone applies it blindly. I'm pretty sure that if we put it in the config file, that people would still apply it when it's inappropriate for them, and I don't have a good solution to that.
Now maybe we just do it and they ruini their gaming experience and it's their fault, but that's not really a very good conclusion to their Path of Exile playing. I call it a conclusion because they're going to get disconnected so much that it will cause anger. I'd like to resolve this, we just need a more intelligent way of applying it to users when it's appropriate.

07:55:48
Ziz: Yeah... it is definitely pretty hard. I'm hoping that's going to be not in the game. It's one of the more frustrating deaths at least.

Chris: Yeah, I understand. But would you trade that frustrating death for a lot of frustrating disconnections? Because it could happen.

Ziz: That's the thing though. Especially if it's something that's in the config, if I do start getting a lot of disconnections, I move it back up to six, right? Or five.

Chris: Yeah, that is true. The end solution is people should aim to have the most stable internet that they can do. There are various solutions to this. Paying for better internet, or potentially using a VPN that has a more stable path to the servers. But, I do want to get this setting in. I'm just thinking, maybe this kind of solution, and this is probably too complicated for what we do, but thinking out loud, is something along the lines of: you set it to a number, and it merely records the number of disconnections you would have on that number. For example, "You set it to one second, well that would have disconnected you one hundred and twenty two times in the last day. Are you actually happy with that?" This kind of thing, where there's a process for the user to actually see what impact it will have before they actually use it. But that's complicated.
It's subtly -- Like, one second is impossible, even for people who claim their internet is rock solid, because stuff happens. A router reboots, and it has to path around it to another one, and this is just uncontrollable, and there are so many ISPs in the way.
And we're seeing substantially longer. The six-second thing is still catching a lot of users out, because six-second lag spikes are just an unfortunate reality of the internet these days.

07:57:26
Ziz: That's a great idea. A setting that wouldn't go into effect until a day later. So, you tried setting it to three, it would check it, it says they wouldn't disconnect any in a day in three seconds, then it goes into effect. That sounds like a great idea.

Chris: One way to do that is to have the game always sample where the lag spikes are. Then it builds a histogram of your lagspikes. There's the ability, when you go to the secret settings page that lets you change this, it lets you see, "Here are your lag spikes. At the setting you have chosen, you are going to get X per hour." It can communicate very clearly that you are going to get disconnected quite often. I mean, maybe it'll be fine for some people. There are probably people who live very close to the servers who they're not getting one-second of lag between them and two hops away.

07:58:14
Ziz: I think a lot of people are happy to hear about that. At least is it known, and people aren't too keen on the six-seconds at least. That's good for that topic.