What is the future of Hardcore Logouts

In Path of Exile 1, you can liberally slap a logout key in any dangerous situation to get out with no consequences. That is unfun, and limits design space since the only way to kill a player is to one shot them. This tendency toward 1 shots and generally unfair mechanics to overcome logout macros has been harped on for literally a decade in PoE 1.

In Path of Exile 2, we've ended up in the same position with the ability to avoid death instantly, except you need to AFK for 15 minutes to reset your instance. This inconvenience adds a penalty to disincentivize its usage which is good, but ultimately it's even less fun than the PoE 1 system. Your ability to avoid death is higher the more you're willing to sit around and waste your time instead of playing the game.

Overall, it feels like the "logout macro" discussion has been left behind completely with the implementation of a "pause system". I would really love to hear the devs' current opinion on the state of instant log outs, and which direction they would like to take things.

My opinion: Hardcore should not have any instant logout capabilities. Logging out should leave your character vulnerable for a very brief period (~2s), which prevents being saved in critical situations, but likely still saves you in case of a real disconnect in a less-dire situation. Bad internet is a 100% death sentence in hardcore regardless of protection systems, so leaving protections in place is a 0.1% crutch hampering the other 99.9% of gameplay.

Ultimately, being able to log out in a pinch is completely doing away with some of the most high pressure, exciting situations in hardcore. Running away from a giga rare with your butt puckered, or narrowly surviving a boss with no flask charges is something that most hardcore players simply won't experience.

poe2 started out very promising with an attrition based system where your life flask matters but it has now turned into the same thing as poe1, you either die to a oneshot or you dont die at all

this will very likely not change, in fact the game has moved only in the direction of becoming more like poe1 ( not in the areas where it would be good though like endgame system, crafting, build freedom )

There is a lot of people who love the pausing system so im not gonna say its bad but from my perspective there should be a lot more restrictions, like you shouldnt ever be able to pause in any boss fight ( or logout )
The whole 15 minute instance reset thing is just straight up worse than poe1 solution

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this will very likely not change, in fact the game has moved only in the direction of becoming more like poe1

yeah that's the feeling I've gotten as well, as they've been trying to ship things fast and cargo culting some anti-vision out of PoE 1.

It'd be nice if we could hear more around the big picture vision for things like this. I recall Mark talking about how attrition-based combat wasn't really working because folks just break the game with leech, regen, or any other system. While I don't love it, I at least understand why it doesn't work and maybe their overall ideas now. But cataloging that change in mindset and keeping the philosophy open on this + logout + game pacing + etc would be nice. As-is it's hard to tell what they're flip flopping on deliberately, what's counter to their vision, and what's just plain bad/uniterated on.

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Demonsoul1616#7179 wrote:

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this will very likely not change, in fact the game has moved only in the direction of becoming more like poe1

yeah that's the feeling I've gotten as well, as they've been trying to ship things fast and cargo culting some anti-vision out of PoE 1.

man im getting a bit sad thinking about this and how excited i was initially about poe2 not relying only on oneshots and having some kind of souls-like system where your health pot actually matters.
Like how cool would it be if you would have to make it through a zone with 1 health pot and you are slowly dying to attretion or have to restart the zone.
But when they started to spam checkpoints everywhere i knew its completely over for this.

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raV#3445 wrote:

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Demonsoul1616#7179 wrote:

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this will very likely not change, in fact the game has moved only in the direction of becoming more like poe1

yeah that's the feeling I've gotten as well, as they've been trying to ship things fast and cargo culting some anti-vision out of PoE 1.

man im getting a bit sad thinking about this and how excited i was initially about poe2 not relying only on oneshots and having some kind of souls-like system where your health pot actually matters.
Like how cool would it be if you would have to make it through a zone with 1 health pot and you are slowly dying to attretion or have to restart the zone.
But when they started to spam checkpoints everywhere i knew its completely over for this.

yep same for me. When they first announced PoE 2 the revamp of combat pacing and logout macro use was 100% what I was most looking forward to. I think it was more front and center in the discourse when more of the community played hardcore, but honestly the game balance in this regard heavily impacts the gameplay loop across both game formats. At least now folks can't death rush bosses, but we certainly aren't seeing any of the extended high adrenaline scenarios of barely hanging on I was hoping for. This is one of the only legs up Diablo has had on PoE for many years.

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This tendency toward 1 shots and generally unfair mechanics to overcome logout macros has been harped on for literally a decade in PoE 1.

Ehm, why do you think 1 shots exist "to overcome logout macros"? That would assume the game is balanced around hardcore which simply isn't true. The game is balanced around softcore and logout macros exist to compensate somewhat.

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onetruelai#7327 wrote:

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This tendency toward 1 shots and generally unfair mechanics to overcome logout macros has been harped on for literally a decade in PoE 1.

Ehm, why do you think 1 shots exist "to overcome logout macros"? That would assume the game is balanced around hardcore which simply isn't true. The game is balanced around softcore and logout macros exist to compensate somewhat.

10 years ago, hardcore was much more popular and a lot of the balance discussions centred around this fact. You're right that hardcore is an afterthought now, but my impression is that we're still paying now for balance directions taken way back then.

That said, you're right. They could have any number of reasons for unfair mechanics now, including:
1. Players have too many tools to overcome attrition-based gameplay (life leech, regen, flask recharging, ...)
2. Balancing a game full of combinatorics is impossible

However, I still think it's fair to say that GGG puts a tremendous effort into trying to kill players, softcore or hardcore. Whether or not logout plays into actual balance decisions now is complete speculation on my part. Logout does definitely play into player perception of balance though, because folks simply log out to survive anything that isn't a one shot, then think that 100% of their deaths are BS