Never got Bug Hunter, but one last report...
By
Rebel_Scum,
Posted on: 2012-09-01 09:44 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
The logout timer is NOT client-side. Try logging out to desktop and read the pop-up that shows up.
Over the years, there's been a few ways to log out "instantly". In all cases, your character stays online for the full 30 seconds (unless you log back in before those 30 seconds are up, which is going to shave a few seconds off, at best).
@Roderick
If you log to the character select screen though, doesn't that technically log you out and back in? So the character you just logged out would be ejected from the server before the 30 seconds were up.
Still, pretty minor as far as potential exploits go.
[Admin] Emperor Marcus Cole: STOP!
[Admin] Emperor Marcus Cole: WAIT ONE SECOND!
[Admin] Emperor Marcus Cole: WHAT IS A SEAGULL DOING ON MY THRONE!?!?
I'd always been on the lookout for a great bug to report for the bug hunter badge, but never found one. I did remember one I had meant to file just before my son was born, and then somehow I was distracted and never actually got around to filing it. :-)
I've verified it is still in game today:
Put CoH in windowed mode
/stopinactivedisplay 1
Start logging a character out (to character select screen)
Mouse down to start menu, swap to another application
Wait 5 seconds
Swap back to CoH: bypass 30-second logout window, you're now sitting at the character select screen!
Don't think there is any way to really exploit it, but I did find it interesting that the logout timer was on client side. It made me wonder what other timers might have been implemented client-side and if I could have found something bug hunter worthy (infinite-length tier-9 invulnerability powers? ability to run/fly/etc at arbitrary speeds irrelevant of enhancements?), but I never dug into it since I had a kid and drifted off to other games anyway. Now when I was contemplating coming back, its all over soon anyway, and my characters I loved are useless (IO'd to the 9s, but IOs aren't unlocked for me, and I can't sub or buy PP to unlock them, so... yeah... defense cap to 20% defense. Boo.). But I did find the note I made about it, which reminded me, so here it is.
This is, of course, likely to work in other games driven by the same engine. Just sayin'. /em muahahaha.
I suppose you could try to build some sort of flash-log hack for PvP or similar. Not relly stellar as far as exploits go.
When the servers are idle, you can sometimes see your other character still logged in to the world (saw it in my base once on highly-off-peak-hours), but I didn't get a chance to try to trade or drop an insp on them before they vanished (saw the world, couldn't interact before they vanished).