At Exilecone Mark talked about the system where if you log out the game pauses at that moment until you log back in and take an action and then everything will resume as it would have. But in the recent interview Jonathan said "You can always log out and reset the boss fight, if you alt F4 ultimately that ends the boss fight". so was that system scrapped or am I missunderstanding something?
External link →Okay so, here are the specifics.
If you are playing single player and you log out, the instance is paused. If you then log back in, you will resume right where you were so long as the instance is still open. Instance timeout is still a thing.
It seems clear to me looking at it now that when logging in, we will have to present an option to the player about if you would like to log in to the existing instance, or log in to town (and lose the instance) so that if you do want to reset the boss, you don't have to wait.
In multiplayer if you log out, the instance is not paused. In this case, if you were in a boss fight then you are not allowed back into that instance again and will log back in to town.
This is really the only approach to prevent abuse.
The abuse (and what Mark was originally talking about at Exilecon) is the fact that we don't want you to log out / log in in order to dodge an ability, then continue the boss fight. That is important for maintaining integrity of the fight. We don't want it so that logout / login is the meta for dodging some long and hard to dodge boss ability.
That being said, you can always Alt-F4 to abort a boss fight if you see a death coming, and you will not lose your hardcore character. You will need to start the boss again from scratch though.
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