Game mode: [Online]
Problem: [Bug]
Region: []
When I am dragging a thrall, and I need to stop to repair my rope, the thrall will teleport at light speed somewhere off into the void as soon as I connect the repaired rope back to the thrall.
Steps on how to reproduce issue:
1.Knock some fool out
2.Drag him a distance with your rope
3.Repair the rope
4.Reconnect the rope
5.Rage, because you just lost the damn thing you have been dragging across the world.
Way to avoid this:
Smokified, I have seen this issue also. Not sure the cause, but there definitely appears to be a binding bug that can be aggravated if you do not loose your hostage in a safe fashion.
I believe that this is the safest way to disengage your hostage. Note that when you re-acquire, and your binding goes haywire (it visually looks as though it is going out or up a long distance, and then coming back to your hostage), you are likely on the verge of losing the hostage. If you disconnect and attempt to reconnect again after your rope goes kinda nuts, you will likely risk losing the thrall.
Keep your line repaired as you can, carefully. And unbind/rebind as little as you can possibly afford.
Also note that standing still with a thrall bound (not moving, afk even) will cause your binding to start degrading. Make sure it’s repaired before you hook, and be ready to go when you do hook.
This is very important. Thanks to that I just reviewed my video from a very costly loss, Shendelzare. If the rope goes wacky, I find you must walk out of the area to level ground, drop him or her and hope. After losing the armorer I have a T3 Carp on the hook – rope goes ham. I take her over to the levelest part of the promontory, reacquire and no more weird rope.
Glad you could reproduce, and that you saw the same behaviors that I did.
For more testing - perhaps it is very much tied to the map terrain.
I have noticed that the map has a couple of different layers. There is a graphical rendering layer (what we see), a player collision layer (what our character can walk over, climb on, fall, etc.), and an NPC collision layer (the layer where NPC pathing happens). The presence of these layers (and their occasional lack of congruity) becomes obvious in a number of different trouble spots. Sometimes when climbing, your character’s toon will go into the wall (render layer larger, or overlapping the collision layer). This can happen in the reverse, also, where you look to be climbing on air about 6-12 inches off of the cliff face (collision layer larger, or overlapping the render layer).
I would wager than when you “leash up,” the game is doing a calculation of the distance and the terrain between you and the thrall. If there is a rough hewn area, or if for whatever reason the NPC collision layer is jacked up, the binding will need to find a “smooth,” walkable path between you and the thrall.
What we are witnessing when the binding goes wonky is a longer pathing or route to the thrall. It would play to reason that if the path is too far for a walkable NPC surface, the binding leash-up encounters an exception, and fails. Player and game client say bound, server and NPC don’t bind because the path is too long, or does not work, and thus fails. The exit of that failure removes the KO’d thrall from the map.
I could be entirely off base. But what I have described is pretty consistent with my experiences. As you said, Barnes - hooking up the leash on a flat surface with little to no relief seems to reduce the hook up risk.
That’s why I record everything. In solo play so much happens with such coordination you’ve gotta just workaround and move on. 
Lose a Named Armorer, gain a T3 carpenter, gain video footage that seems to comport with your very-unwild theory. I have tried every variation I can think of: KO thrall density in the area, NPCs in the area, walls in vicinity, elevators – nothing screws me over like that whipped-cream layer of terrain. Beautimous. Thanks again.
With any hope, Funcom will read this one, and make a pass as trying to synch up the many different layers of the map.
I’ll try to capture some video or screenshots of places where I find issues (and the coords), and post them here for them to track.