Instant logout is ruining every part of this game

"

patirce wrote:

Removing instant logout means you will die everytime you have a disconnection or client crash.

Which would be the final nail in the HC coffin.

D3 has a logout timer and there are still people playing HC. It's pretty much the choice between screwing over a percentage of HC with technical issues (which still happens, mind you), and messing up the entire game to a degree because of instant logout. I don't like their choice of lesser evil, but that's just me.

"

patirce wrote:

Removing instant logout means you will die everytime you have a disconnection or client crash.

Which would be the final nail in the HC coffin.

I know nobody gives a shit about HC players nowadays, but hopefully there are still one or two guys in GGG offices thinking about it.

really?

if you crash - you cannot logout. it is already closed connection and server DOES NOT KNOW you crashed

if you disconnect - you also have no control over that. youll mostly get removed from the area but not always anyway

these are pretty frequent EXCUSES for instant logout - used mostly as the strongest spell in the game to make careless people not pay for their mistakes.

D3 did that better - both TP and logout has a timer. that game can crash/DC too. and people still play HC there and surprise surprise - they manage just fine

you overextend, you die. but not in POE where 'cheating' is a skill

I agree 100% with OP... but I also don't see how they could fix any of this now. A decision to change this should have been made a long time ago.

Like Sidtherat said, GGG rushes stuff out of the door at break-neck speed and never goes back to clean things up. A change to the logout macro would require an entire rebalance to the game. A similar issue exists with Vaal Pact. At the end of the day, the game we are playing is a 100% product of balance (or lack of balance) being neglected for so long.

The reason they are so weary to change shit like this or vaal pact is because they know players build around this stuff. The proper time to fix vaal pact would have been when the ES changes were done so once everyone switched to life, they would experience it without vaal pact and train themselves to live without it. /tangent

OH...by the way to the person that said only HC use logouts...that's not true. Some players going from 98+ will use it because 1 death = 4 days of xp.

"

sidtherat wrote:

"

patirce wrote:

Removing instant logout means you will die everytime you have a disconnection or client crash.

Which would be the final nail in the HC coffin.

I know nobody gives a shit about HC players nowadays, but hopefully there are still one or two guys in GGG offices thinking about it.

really?

if you crash - you cannot logout. it is already closed connection and server DOES NOT KNOW you crashed

if you disconnect - you also have no control over that. youll mostly get removed from the area but not always anyway

If they disable instant logout, they will have to keep the character in game for X time after losing connection too. Otherwise nothing stops you from using a macro that breaks your connection instead of an instant logout.

"

sidtherat wrote:

D3 did that better - both TP and logout has a timer. that game can crash/DC too. and people still play HC there and surprise surprise - they manage just fine

Nonetheless, that's the exact reason I stopped playing D3 less than a month after it came out (well ok, that and the fact that D3 was shit and in no way a sequel to D2).

Anyway I'm not sure why it should be a matter of complaints... as you can see by looking at HC ladders, instant logout or not, most HC characters end up dead.

And actually pretty rarely from one-shots (speaking for myself here).

"

adghar wrote:

"

Kelvynn wrote:

I wasn't aware of that. Could you provide a link to Chris saying that?

It took me forever to figure this out, but since this forum's search function sucks, it works better if you go into Google and enter site:pathofexile.com and then your queries.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/536962/filter-account-type/staff/page/1

(my search query was:

site:pathofexile.com chris log out exciting hardcore

)

Oh wow, that's a friggin' quote goldmine. Thanks for that.

*cracks knuckles*

"

Chris wrote:

We want our fights to have large swings of damage and to cause a rush of adrenaline in the player.

Getting oneshot is not an adrenaline rush. Neither is nearly getting oneshot, and pressing a button to instantly teleport to safety. Adrenaline rushes come from things that last for more than a second. You're doing the horror game equivalent of throwing jump scares at players without any pacing or tension building. It's cheap, and it gets old fast.

"

Chris wrote:

If the game didn't allow you to drop instantly then we'd have to dumb down the fights so much. We've tried it.

I don't see how fights could get any dumber than the current "facetank, facetank, dodge oneshot, repeat" pattern. Keep trying, cause other games somehow know how to make better bossfights.

"

Chris wrote:

In addition, it means that we're able to make hard boss fights that players can attrition if they choose to. If we had to design the act bosses so that players needed to kill them in one go without dying then they would be pushovers.

This is simply not true. A boss can be difficult and still possible to defeat in one go, if you make the fight about strategy and resource management instead of who has the bigger numbers. Atziri and Dominus are great examples of this. Also, "instant logout all the time" and "kill the boss in one go" are not the only two options. Portals, think with them.

"

Chris wrote:

We have said this multiple times on the forum and in interviews before (as well as implementing the game to be that way) - our stance shouldn't be a surprise!

And by the looks of it, every time you did, players called out how absurd it is.

"

Chris wrote:

It's not that we're actively attempting to make fights where we want people to alt-f4, it's that when faced with the choice of:

• Disable it and put a timer on exit
• Allow it, which means we have to be able to justify it

We vastly prefer the second option because it leads to fights that are honestly a whole lot more fun (for us, at least).

Is alt-f4 more fun than portalling out? Or is it just easier and more effective?

"

Qarl wrote:

And no, we don't specifically plan for quitting out as part of a boss fight.

"

Qarl wrote:

Of course we balance knowing players will Alt-F4 out of there.

I'll just leave that to simmer for a while...



Moving on.

"

Chris wrote:

I played hardcore d2 for many years. I pressed alt-F4 once every few days on average. I cannot imagine an Action RPG design where it's blocked. We discussed this heavily when designing PoE. I'd love to find a solution (because I agree it's bad in principle), but being able to "Nope" out of situations drastically changes a lot about the game.

You already have a solution. It's called portalling out. Problem solved, can we get rid of instant logouts now?

"

Chris wrote:

It should be noted that the guys who actually do the balance (Carl, Rory, Mark2) don't necessarily play the same way I do. It's just that when the founders were deciding whether we should allow instant exit, we decided for it because we think it leads to a better game.

Well, with a few years of hindsight, I think we can all agree that it didn't lead to a better game. When most of the defensive features you designed are next to useless compared to stacking nothing but life and DPS, you done goofed.


But please Chris, if you're reading this, feel free to chime in with some up-to-date opinions. I'd love to hear them.

"

suszterpatt wrote:

But please Chris, if you're reading this, feel free to chime in with some up-to-date opinions. I'd love to hear them.

I went looking for a nice snort sound to paste here but none were loud and expressive enough.

Balancing the entire game around Vaal Pact is the real culprit.

"

wegebah wrote:

I find your feedback a little confusing. You seem to be suggesting that instant logout is a problem with the game but in reality it seems like your issue is more with the instant kill mechanics of the game and the one try mechanic imposed on lab runs.

In a sense, yes. What spoils my gameplay experience is not the instant logout per se, it's the oneshot meta. But as long as instant logouts exist, a oneshot meta also has to exist by necessity. Otherwise, everyone could just instalog their way to level 100. Removing instant logouts is a necessary (but not sufficient) first step to fixing all the other problems with the game.

"

wegebah wrote:

You seem to suggest that having a logout timer means that instant kill mechanics and one try lab limits can be removed. You also suggest that there are other methods [portal out] available to players to help them survive. I think your idea that removing the limited lab tries could be removed if a logout delay was added is a very poor assumption in that you would then have the ability to portal out whenever you want which is just as bad. The current implementation limits the instant logout ability in labs as well as portal out mechanics. While I am also not a fan of the one try mechanic of the lab, it does seem to be the only method to make lab runs meet the challenge level that GGG is interested in.

Ok, let's talk about this intended challenge level.

The unit of challenge in the lab is a single trap gauntlet, or a single Izaro fight. This is evidenced by the fact that these units are surrounded on both ends by hordes of pushover white mobs, allowing you to completely recover your resources inbetween them (recharge flasks, leech back life, etc). You can leave an Izaro fight with 0 flask charges and 1 life, and reach the next gauntlet in the same zone fully healed and flask'd up.

Now imagine that you can leave the lab at any time and re-enter, but whenever you do, you are placed just after your most recently completed Izaro fight (or at the start if you didn't beat phase 1 yet). And if you portal'd out of an Izaro fight, it resets, so you have to start all over again.

This would do absolutely nothing to the intended difficulty of the lab. You were always expected to reach each Izaro fight and each gauntlet on full resources anyway, and even with this change, you have to beat each unit of challenge in one go: you cannot make partial progress by portalling out and coming back in.

The only difference that this could possibly make, is to make it easier for builds that aren't dedicated lab farmers to complete the lab (lab farmer builds never fail anyway). And considering that those builds typically only do lab once anyway, I don't see how that could have a significant impact on anything.

"

wegebah wrote:

Another issue with the implementation of a logout timer is what happens then to uses who crash? Technically, a crash would need to be handled like a logout request because if not then people could just purposely crash the client to achieve a logout instantly. Implementing a delay to people who crash seems really unfair to the game as a whole. I would rather keep the instant logout and not have to worry about crashing and dying because of that uncontrollable crash.

An unintentional disconnection or crash already incurs some delay. The game has to wait at least a few seconds before it decides to drop the connection, because the connection might recover in that time. What needs to be done is to make manual logout have the same delay, so that neither manually logging, nor forcing the client to crash or break the connection, is a better alternative than escaping via in-game means.

"

patirce wrote:

Removing instant logout means you will die everytime you have a disconnection or client crash.

Which would be the final nail in the HC coffin.

I know nobody gives a shit about HC players nowadays, but hopefully there are still one or two guys in GGG offices thinking about it.

You already die each time you get a DC or client crash, and instant logging doesn't help there because, well, you already crashed. The only thing that would help with that would be to make monster damage less spiky, but guess what, we can't do that as long as instant logout exists.

Thanks for reminding me though, I added this to the OP.