Realm game keep-alive oddities

[Crystalion]

I read something today on AS that sounded odd, which is to say, doesn't sound odd at all when translated to implementation code-speak:

How long does a game have to be active on Battle.net before it will stay up without any other players in the game?
If the game has existed for less than 1 minute, it will stay up for 1 minute to make sure players can join the games they create.
If the game has existed between 1 and 5 minutes, it will go away immediately if there is no one in the game.
If the game has existed for over 5 minutes, it will stay up for an additional 5 minutes if there is no one in the game.

If you are a programmer, and you like puzzles, you might want to stop reading for a minute to enjoy puzzling out a couple implications of the probable implementation of these "rules".

Based on using a single account, I verified that I can start a game and *immediately* leave, then enter (join) that game with a different character such that the game quest (available) state still reflects the now (and eternally, since this is a "private game", to wit, one with a limit of one player) absent creator. The test done checked Den of Evil quest state. However I strongly suspect this works for the Countess chest and Duriel chamber staffed open states (notably among others).

While I've always known this could be accomplished with two accounts, that being similar to using two games in "LAN" mode, I did not realize previously that a game does not need to be held for five minutes to use the trick on realm.

I also had forgotten the evidence that realm games have an idle timer and will kick you out and end the game after a length of time (I don't see this documented on AS--anyone else notice it and have the time-out number?). I suspect this exists to lower server load and to make it punatively harder to get the initial 2 hours of play logged that is required for a character to not be potentially deleted after 48 hours past creation (this is a bit fuzzy, as I suspect they don't queue up a garbage collect precisely 48 hours after every character is created and further, if you create a character and only start to play them in a game 46+ hours later I doubt your character will be zapped while you're playing).

In any case, if you haven't puzzled it out yet, the "fun" in this 1 minute after creation "keep alive" is that one character can psuedo-simultaneously (on one account, and without violating terms of service, afaik from reading the agreement today) play in two solo (i.e. just them) games.

I'll give you a moment to puzzle that out...

This was tested today, in a v1.09 US West realm game, with a brand new barb (now level 6 with a level 6 cold arrow hireling, no stat or skill points distributed) who spent his requisite couple of hours bouncing back and forth between two games (both created by him and only played in by him).

This means he cleared the den of evil in one game and immediately bounced to the other where Akara rewarded him for it even though in *that* game he'd never even entered the place. It also means he killed Blood Raven in one game, bounced over, and got rewarded in the game he'd never entered the burial grounds in. Interestingly enough he touched the tome triggering the Countess quest in one game and the other (game) didn't recognize it but the first game remembered it still when he bounced back. So some quest sub-states are tied to game trigger state in an interesting way (we all knew that already, I'm sure--I've seen a lot of examples of that sort of thing, including a "new" one today, for me, that doesn't seem worthwhile to mention here).

Okay, enough time. Bzzt! Puzzle spoiler follows...

If you just use the 5+ minute keep-alive for 5 minutes then you can't get two games going with (one character and) one account because getting the second game to keep-alive state takes long enough that the first game expires. But the first minute keep-alive is a separate "rule" and implementation of both keep-alives is simple and thus can be finessed as follows...

(example times for illustration only, there is some flex in the schedule, naturally--there are no "pauses" between leaving and entering, so the difference in times shown is meant to indicate that you typically can perform the switch in under the time difference here, *not* that you should wait for some reason between leave-then-enter steps)

00:00 create/enter game A
05:15 leave game A (which now has 5 minutes grace)
05:30 create/enter game B
05:35 leave game B (which is still running under the 1 minute from creation initial keep-alive)
05:45 re-enter game A
06:10 leave game A (which now has a refreshed 5 minutes grace, ending at ~11:10)
06:20 re-enter game B (in the nick of time before the 1 minute grace ends)
10:40 leave game B (because we've now logged 5+ minutes since creation, so we now have 5 minutes grace)
10:50 re-enter game A (in the nick of time before 5 minute grace ends)

At this point we have nearly 5 minutes grace going for both games and can ping-pong back and forth easily between them ad infinitum. In my case I set a kitchen cook timer for 4 minutes and every time it went off wrapped up fairly quickly and switched to the other game, keeping both going, as I said, for a couple hours. Once BNet lagged me out at the chat channel, locking my interface for a while and forcing me to log back in, so it was a good thing I had the timer set at 4 minutes instead of closer to the 5 minute allowance.

An interesting result of this fun and foolishness is that the "what is known" maps were maintained *correctly* for both games. I was impressed by that (and, of course, pleasently surprised, as I'd really expected to lose it between switches).

Playing this way makes for a lot of travel, so thankfully Waypoints are plentiful. I know it's silly, but it is kind of amusing. It is also fun, when you're playing through for the first time, that finding a waypoint in one game "grants" it to the other.

It also creates the realm trivia that it is probably possible to start a game with a character where you haven't killed Baal yet and thus are not allowed to open the MooMooFarm, but can get that credit in another game and return and be so allowed. Also, of course, if you were just playing along happily in your own little game and a friend messaged you to come to his game as he was ready to rush you past a particular quest, you could probably do that and then return to your original game. No news there, but interesting to consider.