Guild Wars 2

I know I’m not the only one to have many stories about losing credit and not getting rewards for events and bosses all due to the random Disconnect and Client Crash that usually is 100% not our fault. What I would like to discuss is why ArenaNet didn’t create a function that stores last know information so that in case of the situations you would still get the reward like everyone else as long as you logged in within a reasonable time frame such as 10 minutes.

It does seem to work in some circumstances. Yesterday, for instance, I disconnected during a champion fight. I reconnected as soon as I could, yelling at my poor computer to ‘hurry’. It seemed to take forever though probably only a minute or so. When I returned, the champion was dead but I had a mini chest bouncing in the corner of my screen and I was also able to access the main boss chest for goodies.

Except for the painful client crashes in regards to some poor integration of certain operating systems and graphics, I would say a system like this isn’t really needed for the function of the main game. Most disconnects and crashes I have experienced have been entirely user-ended, and if they were server-side problems – there was a high chance most people were having the same problem (such as when COX was disconnecting like every 15 seconds).

So I guess I would say…your claim is refutable on the grounds that most problems are user-side? I don’t believe tracking progress would be that useful because if it were something like that COX incident I mentioned earlier – say I had been running a dungeon when suddenly the outages and problems with connectivity suddenly started and I couldn’t stay logged in for more than 10-20 seconds. That issue wasn’t resolved for almost six hours.

Should I have been compensated? I sure would’ve liked to. But it’s illogical to store that much information on such a small chance. Especially on a free-to-play game.

I believe getting into something like that is a slippery slope though, at what point do you draw the line between communication errors and just bad luck/poor services? Just because you might have DSL (not saying you do, just using it as an example) that can’t stay connected to the GW2 servers doesn’t mean it’s their fault.

Most MMOs have a logout timer which prevents this. Even when you exit the game, your character will stay for up to a minute. In Gw2 however, as soon as you disconnect, you’re out. The downside of course is you lose the reward call, but you do gain the ability to “phase out” of the world at any time (about to get killed? logout).

When your client crashes, you’re actually still connected until the window closes (the main window, now the crash report). If the boss is about to die, don’t close it. If your timing is right, you’ll be able to log back in and collect your loot.

It’s not just event credit, there is other things that should be retained when you reconnect within a few minutes, examples that I remember happening to me:

[…] put us back on the map AND server that we DCed from*. And on the same map and server, maybe retain any active buffs required to complete the content.
I’ve had random disconnects before and it screwed me up quite a few times, examples:

• DC in Southsun, reconnect, end up in a completely different overflow in the middle of an angry mob instead of the event that you were just partaking in / a liberated camp / the zerg you were running with
• DC in Southsun, the Settler/Consortium buff is gone, and you have to WP (if you’re not in combat immediately, see above) and fight your way back to your original location
• DC in Labyrinthine Cliffs, logged back in, be somewhere up the airship stripped of all aspect charges, left with no other option than to WP and start over
• DC in Chaos Clockwork zerg, you come back in, different overflow or original map where the event has been finished
• DC in Scarlet dungeon, entire party was kicked even though I never left the party and was back in game within 2 minutes

From Disconnection grace period – a thread that (I think) got even more relevant with the mega-server introduction, as we’re basically playing in overflows all the time now.