So I just recently returned to Darktide after a break and ran into something that genuinely confused me.
Mid-mission, I got disconnected (thanks to what I assume was a server hiccup, my connection is stable otherwise). When I reconnected, I expected to just spawn back in like in most co-op games. Instead, I came back captured.
At first I thought maybe this was a bug or I died during the disconnect, but it turns out. that this is actually a deliberate design choice to prevent people from abusing disconnects?
I get that you don’t want people rage-quitting and rejoining to cheese tough fights, but… what about those of us who get booted because of server instability? It feels punishing to get kicked against your will and then punished again for it by the game treating you like you’re dead.
I’m not sure how often this happens to others, but it left a bad taste. Why even give people the option to reconnect if they’re just going to be considered down and out? Isn’t the whole point of rejoining to keep playing?
Would love to hear if there’s a fix planned for this or if it’s just “working as intended.”
Personally, if the goal was to stop players from dodging mechanics like trapper nets by disconnecting, then the game should simply track the player’s state at the moment of disconnect. If someone was caught in a net or downed, then yeah, rejoin them in that state. Fair enough.
But applying a blanket punishment where every disconnect is treated as if you died or got captured feels like a serious overcorrection. It punishes the majority of honest players just to stop a small minority from exploiting edge cases. Surely there’s a better middle ground?
If there is a way for them to genuinely and consistently differentiate between intentional and unintentional disconnects obviously that would be better.
If not though and it’s one or the other, the way they’ve got it now is infinitely better and I (along with a lot of people here I’d wager) will die on that hill without hesitation.
Your suggestion doesn’t really work because it just encourages the alt F4 crowd at DC at the first sign of real danger to them rather than after they get netted. It also just may not be possible to implement without a huge amount of work. Hard to know.
The disconnect abuse was absolutely chronic before, including people using it and ruining countless games to get the Auric penance.
I’ve been away for over three months, so I can’t speak to how often people have been abusing the disconnect/reconnect mechanic lately. I did see it happen occasionally before, but for me, it was a rare occurrence.
That said, taking your point in good faith, rather than punishing every disconnect by forcing the player into a captured state, why not have them return in a downed state instead (assuming they still have a wound available)? If it was a legitimate connection drop, a teammate can revive them, annoying, but fair, and they’re still in the fight. But if someone was trying to abuse the system to dodge a trapper’s net, they’d still face consequences and wouldn’t get off scot-free.
Could be a bug for you. The new system is only supposed to put you back in the same state. So you should have only been dead if you were dead at disconnect. See people drop and come back uncaptured all the time, even post update.
With the horrible state the servers are in, you may have died in some limbo state during your disconnect?
That would make a lot more sense, I have been experiencing connection instability while playing, and I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of being captured every time server instability kicked me.