fleacircus

I certainly agree that something needs to be done about ghosting and abort-on-contact exploits but this solution doesn't strike me as simple nor elegant. Players will need 3+ significant items (radio tower, generator, one of more jerry cans) to combat an exploit that ideally wouldn't exist in the first place. These items will take time to gather and eat inventory space. This means you're actually punishing the victims ​of this behaviour, not the offenders. This will only solve the problem in very specific circumstances. Any players who are travelling from A to B can still be ghosted. Any players who decide against making their camp even more painfully obvious can have it ghosted. Any players who have not yet found and deployed the items can still be ghosted. Anyone with a weapon range greater than the tower range can still ghost to a new vantage point. A somewhat more subtle result of this scheme is that you're essentially condoning ghosting in any circumstances where an exploiter is able to do it. There will be many circumstances where deploying this anti-spawn measure will be impractical or impossible for a group. When this group is killed by a ghoster, the ghoster will simply claim "They should have had a tower up". This idea seems like a cumbersome attempt to fix game problems via the game world. I think these two things should be kept entirely separate. Yes, players vanishing and reappearing is unrealistic - but it's also obviously required. It's okay to use something unrealistic but required to fix problems with it. You don't need some plausible game world solution like this. It will always feel cumbersome if you do. I'm not entirely sure why you wish to use the game world to address this problem. Preventing ghosters will never be fun and using out-of-world systems to prevent the problem will be much more effective. Along these lines there are probably vastly more elegant solutions to the problem. So, to try and be constructive in my criticism, here is my proposal: Log players "last played server" to the hive when they disconnect. Have the server maintain a list of players who have disconnected within the last 15 minutes. When a player connects to a server, check if they're in the disconnected list. If a player exists in the disconnected list and that server not the last server they played on, do not allow the connection. This would allow players freedom to change servers but not for ghosting. If players are on server A but it's lagging or bugged, they can rejoin server B. They can freely rejoin A in 20 minutes when the problems have passed. If a players internet goes down and they are disconnected from server A, they can immediately rejoin as server A is still their last played server and thus they haven't been able to alter their position in any way. A final touch would be to broadcast join/part messages over direct comms. This means if you see a join message, you know someone has just spawned in within X metres. Yes, this advantages the players already in the server but that is a fair penalty for them not logging off somewhere safer. It would also help to name and shame players who abort on contact. It could be used by bandits watching a camp to learn when the camp is clear and safe to raid but this is unlikely and losing all your tents is a just punishment for failing to notice a bandit in direct comms range of your camp. tl;dr: No. This scheme adds nothing fun, punishes the wrong people and will only work occasionally.