Please change how the Solo Achievement works in Deep Dungeons.

Last week, due to summer, I had a power outage right as I pulled the floor 80 boss in PotD.
I didn't die.
I didn't wipe.
I was in no danger of either, the fight is trivial.
Entire achievement run dead.

About 10 minutes ago, I open a treasure chest on floor 57ish and notice I'm not moving.
Error 90002. Not even on my end, not my ISP, not a blackout, just a common 90002 hiccup.
I log back in as soon as possible.
Entire achievement run dead.

I shouldn't have to fight RNG gods on a combat achievement testing my knowledge, gameplay, etc.
Even if someone could "abuse" it, they really can't do more than fish for a little luck.
At the end of the day, they will need to clear the entirety of that Deep Dungeon solo.
So what if they retry a few times from 160 or 190? It doesn't invalidate the fact that they still had to clear every inch of it solo, which IS the stated challenge and achievement.
But the current system throws dozen hour runs away because of a two second server hiccup, through no fault of the player.

It would be much better to remove the "wipe" counter aspect entirely, because it serves no meaningful purpose beyond the RNG and frustration element, and the timesink of making people restart from floor 1... and for what? I mean it makes the achievement more exclusive, but the "gather thousands of items in [category] nodes" and other hilarious timesink achievements are really exclusive too, and not in a fun way that challenges the player.

And now I'm really unmotivated to try again.
I literally have not even died once in my solo runs so far, but fighting the 90002 RNG gods, or Spectrum or Comcast going out, out-of-game luck should not be the challenge I need to overcome for this Achievement.

Yes, the trouble with the EU servers back then made me stop HoH as i just didnt wanna deal with that anymore, as long as there are no real savespots. even if you fish for better rng, the only thing you save is time.

The thing that makes it particularly frustrating is that the same incidents don't stop your group runs because the instance does not become vacant.
So the solo run not only requires doing it solo, it requires an extra RNG condition not present in the group version.

But even solo, the solo achievement would not be diminished in anything but TIME investment without the "wipe" counter.
The ONLY thing the wipe counter does is pad the TIME between pushes. Retrying from 1 vs retrying from 191 is only a matter of doing the same thing you'd already done.

So PLEASE change this achievement. There's nothing more frustrating than doing everything right and then losing almost a dozen hours to a 90002 hiccup.
No other achievement in this game breaks on a short disconnect.

No. It is extremely easy to exploit it and Necromancer title is an EXTREMELY rare title for a good reason.

Puremallace I'm having trouble putting two and two together, how would DCs not terminating a solo run be exploitable?

I sympathize pretty heavily with you, I can imagine that being horribly obnoxious, especially since my connection seems to have periods where it just refuses to remain stable. Only thing I can think that they can do is maybe have the instance remain open for a period of time if you DC to give you time to get back in, but I know they are conscious of how many instances are up in the game at any given time.

That said, I don't think they'll add more checkpoints because they want it to be a grind, and the solo achievement was meant to be a serious reward. Hell, I don't believe the necromancer title was even achieved by anyone until Stormblood came out, so that was like at least a year of time where nobody was able to get it.

I'd have it keep the instance live and running while you're DC'd. The timer keeps ticking and enemies keep spawning (and patrolling), but if you reconnect and aren't dead when you get back, you can keep going without losing the entire run. (Of course, if something spawns on top of you and murders you while you're reconnecting... too bad.) Only way I can see them at least partially mitigating this without leaving it open to abuse.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Puremallace I'm having trouble putting two and two together, how would DCs not terminating a solo run be exploitable?

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The fact of the matter is that you can decide to disconnect on purpose if you get undesirable chests and mob spawns (i.e. only Ice Sprites and Crawlers on 183, only Anzus on 176-179) and can reset as often as you want until you get the desired result. (Assuming it would work like that. But I highly doubt it because you can't check it out due to how the game works and it also not being like this in a party sitting.) It sucks for people whose internet isn't as stable, but unfortunately it is what it is.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Puremallace I'm having trouble putting two and two together, how would DCs not terminating a solo run be exploitable?

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Behemoth on the 180th floor comes to mind as one easy way to exploit this. Before his meteor impacts just dc and miss the explosion until your CD's come back up. There is no way to fix what the OP wants without some type of exploit associated with it that functions similar to the live game.

This is just a guess but the fear of a possible exploit would be my only reason to be against this.

or if we say for example if you dc it does not end your run and you can run whatever floors you were on well then that means ENDLESS attempts on floor bosses by simply unplugging your modem and causing a user side DC that mimics a power outage.

Trust me I understand as someone who has run PoTD solo a lot but simple changes like this could ruin the most rare title in FF14

I've often thought given the old-school type theme an independent levelling, they could give you 3 strikes rather than none, like the good old days :)

ArchlordPie's idea pretty much solves any potential abuse issues i can think of. You already have an instance, its already live(so not possible to try and fish for good spawns). Just keep it going while you're disco'd. Mobs keep spawning, patrols keep moving, and most importantly timer keeps ticking. The only specific thing i would add to what he wrote is that your character doesnt just vanish when you disco. The game treats it like you trying to log out in an unsafe area. It takes 30 seconds for you to vanish. So you discod during a boss? It probly killed you since you stopped fighting back, but it if was weak enough youll get a fair shot at it.Once you vanish its gonna reset to full health and move back to its default position. Then when you log back in, depending on where you were standing compared to its default state, it might start whacking you before you even have control of your character. And again, the timer is still ticking. If your hour runs out(online or off), you still fail. This would save some runs, and i dont see where the exploitations would be.

I am in support of some sort of buffer or protection, like keeping the instance live to prevent abuse, against disconnects.

I lost another yet another 100+ save to a 90002. I have very limited time to play and solo PotD is something I enjoy for the difficulty. That difficulty shouldn't be coming from random disconnects and having to start from floor 1.

I understand the need to preserve the exclusivity of the title, as its why I am after it, so I hope any solution considered is fair from both fronts. :)

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Behemoth on the 180th floor comes to mind as one easy way to exploit this. Before his meteor impacts just dc and miss the explosion until your CD's come back up. There is no way to fix what the OP wants without some type of exploit associated with it that functions similar to the live game.

This is just a guess but the fear of a possible exploit would be my only reason to be against this.

or if we say for example if you dc it does not end your run and you can run whatever floors you were on well then that means ENDLESS attempts on floor bosses by simply unplugging your modem and causing a user side DC that mimics a power outage.

Trust me I understand as someone who has run PoTD solo a lot but simple changes like this could ruin the most rare title in FF14

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That's fair... But if they had DC protection who's to say you'd spawn in right where you left off.
If they added it I can't imagine they'd let people blink around attacks like that. At the very least the boss would become unengaged and reset, but I imagine they'd probably push you back a few floors for DCing too if only to curb people trying to reroll floors too.

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Originally Posted by ArchlordPie

I'd have it keep the instance live and running while you're DC'd. The timer keeps ticking and enemies keep spawning (and patrolling), but if you reconnect and aren't dead when you get back, you can keep going without losing the entire run. (Of course, if something spawns on top of you and murders you while you're reconnecting... too bad.) Only way I can see them at least partially mitigating this without leaving it open to abuse.

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That would be good but they don't seem to have the tech for that.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Behemoth on the 180th floor comes to mind as one easy way to exploit this. Before his meteor impacts just dc and miss the explosion until your CD's come back up.

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What even are you on? A DC boots you from the instance. That's the point. There is NO way to exploit this to get around doing the actual criteria of the achievement.
In a group, the instance would remain active, so a 90k doesn't instantly burn a dozen hours of effort. It's a shame soloing an instance does NOT work like it does in a group.

At the end of the day, the added Party KO counter is a completely arbitrary timesink added on top of a challenge that already involves playing and managing resources well.
If someone wants to keep redoing a floor set to try to get better rng, it really doesn't change anything.
The only thing the Party KO counter does is force you to redo things you already did successfully.

Imagine if you had to redo all of the first 3 Savage bosses PER PULL to attempt the 4th, or the entire tier of 4 PER ATTEMPT at Ultimate.
It adds nothing to the encounter but an arbitrary time wall. And not a single person would defend such a design on something so difficult. Baldesion Arsenal got away with it because the encounters are not all that challenging so the success rate on single attempts was very high.

The fact that it also exposes technical limitations of the way achievement is tracked just adds a 2nd strike to what is wrong with it.
The achievement should be for the challenge of doing it, and not a battle with rng. There really is no way to exploit removing the Party KO limitation.

I agree it'd be nice to not lose a run because of an internet connection issue--I've had more than a few failed attempts happen because of that very thing, and nothing is more frustrating or puts me off wanting to try it again for awhile than losing a high-end run due to a internet hiccup.

The achievement should be rare because of it's difficulty, but part of that difficulty shouldn't be immediately failing a run because of a loss of internet. It's a skill test, not a "how good is your internet" test.

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Originally Posted by Shofie

I agree it'd be nice to not lose a run because of an internet connection issue--I've had more than a few failed attempts happen because of that very thing, and nothing is more frustrating or puts me off wanting to try it again for awhile than losing a high-end run due to a internet hiccup.
The achievement should be rare because of it's difficulty, but part of that difficulty shouldn't be immediately failing a run because of a loss of internet. It's a skill test, not a "how good is your internet" test.

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Indeed.
At the end of the day, the "party KO" counter limitation is nothing but an arbitrary timesink that forces you to go re-clear things you already cleared because reasons.
I likened it fairly to having to reclear prior floors in savage PER ATTEMPT at the 4th boss or PER ATTEMPT on Ultimate. It doesn't have a meaningful or fun impact on the difficulty of the later boss, it just wastes everyone's time. And raids aren't structured like that for those reasons, it wouldn't be fun and it adds nothing worthwhile to your current challenge. There's NO reason for Deep Dungeon achievements to be locked that way.

You can say "But you can fish for better RNG"
Okay, and? Whether you do 10 floors or 190 to fish for that better RNG, the only difference is time wasted on reclearing content you've already cleared successfully.
You aren't getting these achievements without doing every single floor alone even if Party KO was removed entirely.
The only thing removing it does is remove being randomly screwed out of a dozen hours of playtime by a small packet drop.

An alternative would be to not mark your save when disconnected. And add then a 24 hour period where you cannot enter PoTD. That would discourage the cheating.
You would still loose your progress in that instance. BUT would allow you to continue without your save having a KO mark.