Wrongful "Death"

[LavCat]

Tonight my ladder enchantress was enjoying herself in the Canyon of The Magi, when she came upon a large, fast band monkeys, with a conviction enchanted, lightning emitting boss.

She ran (very fast) but in the wrong direction. She found herself surrounded by crushers, slingers, maggots -- all not acting very friendly, and having all kinds of auras. About that time she thought it might be good to leave the game.

I hit <alt>F4.

As is usual I was playing on two computers. I glanced up at the second screen. My worst fear was confirmed: there was the message that she had died, and then the one that she had left the game.

Now for the strange part -- when I logged back onto battle.net, she was still wearing all her clothes. And she was miraculously still breathing when she got back in the game. But her life globe was empty and she had exactly one health point. She is not a werewoman by any means, and I can think of no explaination how the message could have come that she was dead and then still be alive, obviously not having lost experience? Not that I'm complaining too much, mind you.

[lemekim]

Are you sure that she did not loose experience? I had this happen to me a few times, but I seem to recall loosing experience, meaning that my character indeed sort of died =\

[LavCat]

Actually, no, I am not really sure. The experience bar did not look noticeably different to me, though. And unfortuantely I do not recall how much gold she had either.

One way, I suppose, to check this is to play hardcore.

[wsbchicago]

I am pretty sure you died and lost experience. This happened to me once in cows. (one comp tho). I hit escape to leave, but saw the death screen come up. I was shocked to see that I was alive (no corpse) the next game and fully dressed. But I had 1 point and (as I was close to leveling) was quite aware of having lost about about 11 million points.

Its clear to me that the sequence in the game is

1) death, reset life to 1 point (this HAS to happen first)
2) lose xp and gold
3) drop corpse (with items)

Apparently, you and I hit that magical millisecond between step 2 and 3 when we left. And the game does not reset the sequence when you re-enter a new game. Theoretically, you can leave between 1 and 2 also, as maybe all of us have at one time or another.

We assumed we had luckily left with 1 point left, but I have seen people "die" per the game screen as they leave the game, and yet insist they did not lose xp when they return with one point of life.

[Caaroid]

This would also explain why this ocurence does not happen in HC

[Epi]

Actually, this did happen to me once in HC. I was lagged (and later disconnected) in the place where the lag means pretty sure death. When I was able to reconnect to bnet later, I was pleasantly surprised to find my char alive, and with exactly 1 point of life left.

My theory then was that in some cases the game decides to spare life of the character - probably, if the last message from client came before the death and the connection was dropped after that. I didn't try to verify this theory, though.

[Caaroid]

If it was so, then after every death you'd only need to disconnect from the internet without quitting the game first.

[Jeunemaitre]

If it was so, then after every death you'd only need to disconnect from the internet without quitting the game first.

Not necessarily-
There may be a "recieved death notification" trigger that is sent when the cleint machine puts up the death screen. If disconnect happens between the killing blow and the trigger, then the server resets the character and gives the benefit of the doubt to the disconnect timing (in a "tie goes to the runner" sort of rule). However, when have we known the wonderful folks at Blizzard to be benevolent (No we can't bring back your HC character, so don't even ask, la la la, we can't hear you...)

[Caaroid]

knowing all these client-side hacks and filters it does not seem that hard to filter out an IP package... if it was so, some of them "industrious" people would've already implemented this (especially since it'd be in high demand among all those nice and lovable HC PKers).

[Jeunemaitre]

You're probably right. I'm not all that knowledgable on the issue of network communication, but the idea just suggested itself to me. Sorry I didn't help...

[Lady Vashj]

The way I understand it, the "disconnected before death notice hit server" works on the same principle as a fairly easy method of duping (an abominable practice which I deplore more than the lighting on fire of live cats).

It's theoretically possible to use a variant of this in SP, although I don't know what use it could be or why you'd want to. Under normal circumstances, the game saves itself every few minutes, so if you kill the power or hit Ctrl-Alt-Del (it doesn't work so well with Alt-F4 for some reason), your char reverts to the way it was at the last save.

[Nightwind]

so what kept the script kiddies from blocking the computers they played on from sending that packet?

[Lady Vashj]

so what kept the script kiddies from blocking the computers they played on from sending that packet?

Got me there. I'm not one of them.

But I did try cutting my connection just as my char died (an SC char, so no harm done if it didn't work). It took me four or five tries, but I did manage to get her back in town with all her gear and one single hit point.