[2023] The "self-casting teleport" is 80% of the way to being an awesome idea, but will be incredibly annoying if it's implemented as proposed

In case you missed it, there's a question on poll 79 about adding a "self-casting teleport" item, that aims to guard against server disconnection by teleporting you somewhere safe if you don't interact with the client for X seconds, where X can be configured by the player.

This is a really cool idea in theory, but while it will catch all of the disconnects, I suspect it will trigger far more often from random AFK periods when people are connected fine, but tabbed into YouTube or Discord, or even just playing normally for a little while but not doing any client inputs. Think about how much people hate the 5-minute logout timer, except instead of 5 minutes it's like 10 or 20 seconds, and instead of just logging you out, it teleports you far away from where you were (and maybe loses your GWD KC, to boot).

I know technically people can just turn it off and on in between kills, and configure it to whatever timeout they want, but I don't see a scenario where this doesn't end up being super aggravating. Either there's some additional thing you need to do between kills, or you need to be constantly vigilant to not AFK for a few seconds, or you forget to turn it on or off (both of which could have dire consequences).

There is, I think, a straightforward alternative that fixes this: the game client currently sends a heartbeat to the server every second, unless the client is actually disconnected. So instead of checking the for absence of client inputs/clicks, they could check for the absence of that heartbeat, and if THAT isn't received by the server for X seconds, trigger the escape teleport. I think this handles all the disconnect-related cases but avoids all of the situations where you're AFK but still connected (which I can't imagine most people want to be teleported for, almost ever).

It's possible this is what they are planning to implement but something got lost in translation on the blog...or maybe there's some unforeseen reason this approach doesn't work. Either way, would be cool to get some clarification.