The idea is that when you timeout in a zone you are still subject to battle damage right..

And the exploit for this would be to have something (like a 3rd party app) automatically kill the connection as soon as your near death if the obvious remedy of constant connection monitoring were implemented, right? Well how about just sending packets to verify that you havent timed out before the battle has initiated. Like imagine that say your crossing some hostile territory and have been killing tycorps. Well you have a verified 25% damage done to your hull and your radar is blank. There is nothing to notify you that you've timed out and in the meantime more tycorps are coming along blasting the hell out of you. Why not have the game verify layer 4 connectivity explicity before attacking you. If you timeout mid battle then boo hoo.. your loss, but at least it would prevent ships from ganging you when you dont even see them.

I'm just pissed is all. Ive already lost two ships to timeouts and am not really happy. Oh and its not my circuit either, my two roommates maintained their connections while playing on the same circuit when i died which rules out hardware failure for the most part.

Appreciate your help;
eDfGr33n

Unfortunately, this could then be exploited, allowing a user to periodically only answer "are you alive" packets near the maximum limit, which would keep them safe from bots.

The only real way of solving this problem is for the server to take over your account and try to fly you home while fighting off attackers. But, unfortunately, it's complicated to actually implement, which is why we haven't to date (although it's been an oft-discussed problem in the past). We know it's frustrating to be disconnected and have these sorts of things happen.. but it's nontrivial to solve either way.

something definitely has to be done, because all my deaths except for 1 (one) are due to LOD (lag of death). this is very sad, i'd be happier if it was more like 50% cause of death, but right now, as it stands, it's not :(

Regarding flying home while fighting off the bots, if someone goes linkdead, rather than flying home, they could head to 3000 range, and jump to the nearest empty sector, or maybe even just jump to the nearest empty sector if at 3000 when the LD occurs. The second one sounds a bit less complex, but I'm not sure of what the programming would be like, for sure :)

actually that's really good idea. if a server did not get a message from client for 1 or 2 seconds
1 if player is not near large object then jump to empty sector. hopefully there is no ion storm ;) else turbo away from it and goto 1.

normally connection resumes after 3-5 second dropout, without disconnection. during these 3-5 seconds I am sure of my death, tycorps love lag.