I spend a lot of time casing bases and snooping into peoples interiors in Official PVEC.
I believe I’ve discovered some things about this decay refreshing without owners online bug.
Lately, many of the offline players that I come across inside their bases are “swimming”/floating in the air whilst logged out. (I repeatedly check player list while snooping)
These are some observations that seem to all correlate:
–Floating “sleeper” (offline player) ALWAYS = full decay refresh
–Floating sleeper (offline player) does NOT have “unconscious” above their character.
– Floating sleeper seems by all appearances to be online, yet they are not.
–Floating sleeper can be hit (during PVP hours) but two possible outcomes seem to happen:
a) they lose all health and the red letters (DEAD) do appear, but the character does not die and cannot be looted
b) they can be brought to 1 HP but do not die and also cannot be looted via interaction
TO REPRODUCE:
Visit any base of an offline player, confirm that decay timer has refreshed to the full timer, and locate the offline player inside the base (often via windows and other methods) and very likely the unconscious player will be “swimming” floating, without the unconscious tag.
It is as if the game believes the player is still online/conscious but they are not.
I have witnessed some of these same observations on PvP. I don’t think I’ve seen it where the “sleeper” cannot die, or cannot be looted. Each time I’ve encountered one of these people - they were floating, or going through the swim/kick animation as if they were not on solid ground.
After the “sleeper” was killed, the decay timer began counting down.
To me - it seems as though something with the “body remains in world” function is not working as it is intended. At disconnect, for whatever reason, the server still holds that player character as connected and active. Even though it’s not getting packets from a game client.
Because of the hung, or incorrect player character state - the dependent system (the decay system) gets hung.
@Validusernam3 - I would highly recommend that you enter the information you’ve accumulated in the respective Bug Report forum section. And use their bug report template.
@Community - tagging you to make sure that any of this information makes it back to the systems folks who might be working on this bug.