Suggestion for improving mid-mission disconnect/rejoin squad reward

[v1ld_wf]

If you're forced out to the login screen mid-mission, you get the chance to reconnect to your squad on logging in again.  This is a very good feature but you lose all accrued rewards, probably - big assumption - because your own progress is tracked by your own client alone.  If you're doing XP or resource farming the rejoin feature isn't useful - for eg rejoining 18mins into a Helene XP run.

Would you please consider replicating each client's local accrued mission rewards to at least one other client in the session?  Even a once every minute update would be a large improvement since I would rather lose 30secs of progression on the average than all of what I've done so far.

One other client should suffice, the typical relogin/rejoin scenario has me reconnecting to the full remaining squad.

[(XBOX)DakVoidcloaker]

Seems much easier and more reliable to do it the right way and buy some servers.  At least 90% of my play time would be in squads but instead I play almost exclusively solo.  Can't help new players if we can't stay connected to them.  The game is really not playable in squads (the most fun arrangement) until these host change issues are resolved.

[v1ld_wf]

22 minutes ago, (XB1)DakVoidcloaker said:

Seems much easier and more reliable to do it the right way and buy some servers.  At least 90% of my play time would be in squads but instead I play almost exclusively solo.  Can't help new players if we can't stay connected to them.  The game is really not playable in squads (the most fun arrangement) until these host change issues are resolved.

I'd rather not get into "why doesn't WF use servers for mission state?" - that's been discussed a lot elsewhere.  I'd rather focus here on improvements to the p2p system we have today.

Edited January 14, 2019 by (NSW)v1ld

[peterc3]

Wouldn't this turn every player into a host? How would more data being shoved between clients improve things?

[v1ld_wf]

 

20 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Wouldn't this turn every player into a host? How would more data being shoved between clients improve things?

Not at all.  It doesn't seem like the host is the one tracking everyone's rewards today since if you disconnect and are forced to the login screen, when you reconnect to the game all of the rewards you had accrued are gone even if the host hasn't changed.  If the host was the one tracking that information, it could be fully restored and you could get all your rewards which simply doesn't happen today (unless DE overlooked this, unlikely).  So in all likelihood, your client is the one tracking all that was picked up by you and that information is wiped out when you're forced to the restart the mission on relogin.

All I'm suggesting is that clients send a periodic copy of what they have obtained to one other client, say once every 30 or 60 seconds.  The host and algos around it do not change.  When you relogin, you can then request a copy of that saved state and continue on though you will have lost on the average 15 or 30 secs worth of pickups - still better than losing everything.

I was forced out at the 18min point of a Helen XP run.  When I reconnected I did get the relic rewards at the end but all of XP I had gained was gone, as were all the resources picked up before reconnecting.  The above is one way to restore most of what was accumulated in a cheap way. 

Cheap is important as trying to track even more state in a distributed, transactional manner is expensive in many dimensions, not least of which is complexity and the additional potential for bugs and difficulties in debugging.  This is a simple best effort almost accurate approximation that may be easier to implement and doesn't introduce as much additional complexity to the implementation as a precise solution would.

Edited January 15, 2019 by (NSW)v1ld

[v1ld_wf]

21 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Wouldn't this turn every player into a host? How would more data being shoved between clients improve things?

In terms of data set size, this is not large: It is exactly what you see on the final mission screen for your personal rewards.  Base/bonus XP count per slot, resources picked up with counts.  That's a small amount of data sent very infrequently.