Mission Timer

That's not entirely true. If you leave your mission, switch zones an spend more than about 15 minutes out of it, the mission will deselect itself and reset. I've had this happen to me when I would leave to see a friend's costume, only to come back to a fresly-reset mission.

That said, I still support the idea. Leave mission instances un-reset for at least 10 minutes after people leave, provided the instance has been "initiated." Disconnects happen and, in my case, the nVidia driver likes to crash at random and force me to reset the game. It's really frustrating when this happens almost at the end of a mission, I'll tell you that much.

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On the technical side, this has to do with teams and mission ownership. Do a quick test and you'll find the following: You cannot chat in the Team channel immediately after you log into the game. However, as soon as you select a mission or enter an instance, you start being able to. That's because when you select a mission, an overaching "team" is created that you are attached to, and that the mission belongs to. Your missions, even when solo, do not actually belong to you. They belong to the immaterial team structure that becomes attached to you when you select a mission.

You can actually pass this structure and its properties on to another player. For instance, I was teaming with a friend, he entered his own mission, forcing it to select, then quit the team. "The team" was then just me, and I went about doing my own missions, but his instance was still attached to my team. So when he completed the mission, I got his "Mission Complete!" message, because that only plays for the members of the team which is attached to the mission. He attached his mission to the team I was on but he wasn't, so I got his Mission Complete and he didn't.

The problem you see with missions resetting is because your immaterial team structure dissolves. Teams are set to be removed from memory when the last member on the team leaves, sort of like how you "delete" SGs. The problem is that, when you're solo, you're the only person on that team, so when you get disconnected, the team dissolves. When the team dissolves, the current instance of that mission becomes orphaned and is removed from memory. When you log back in, you have to start a new team, and for that new team, a new instance of that mission is generated when you select it.

To solve this problem, the developers would need to do two things:

1. Make teams persist for some time even if no people are attached to them.

2. Make you automatically rejoin the last team you were on before you logged out, possibly within a set period of time. This in itself may be a feature people would want just on its own.

Once you have both of those features, the unintentional mission reset should no longer happen.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.