Most ships wouldn't even resist a 15 second attack from an engineered aggressor.
Many ships will last much longer. I've seen people use the timer to escape attack in CZs, just to log back in a few minutes later to ambush people, rinse and repeat a dozen times.
The log out timer isn't there to give you the ability to escape from destruction, it's there as a compromise between letting someone leave the game cleanly and forcing them to stay and face whatever situation they have got themselves in to. Were this not a peer-to-peer system, they'd surely have your ship stay as long as it was at risk.
There's no counter to logging that I'm aware of.
Not unless you can destroy them before they can react.
It's already now high enough to make it a "no-option" during combat because nearly everyone would die sitting 15 seconds just around.
Essentially no ship without sufficient reverb cascade, or an all frag loadout, can strip the shields of a combat vessel of similar caliber in 15 seconds or less.
It takes my Corvette with 4 pips to WEP something like 120-200 seconds to make it through the shields of a heavily engineered Cutter that just sits there.
So in your ideal game, the options when ganked by some slughead are to die or have bad karma?
If you can't avoid the 'slughead' and haven't the ability withstand a close encounter, then yes, you should be destroyed. In practice you have to make a rather serious string of mistakes to be destroyed by another CMDR.
I personally wouldn't bother with karma, I'd just expunge the save of anyone who cheated their way out of legitimate in-game consequences, no matter how unfair the situation was.
Which I guess is why I typically choose option three: stay out of open.
A far better option than to cheat your way out of trouble.
It should be at least 60s. No matter for who and when.
Agreed.
Again, you aren't supposed to be logging out to escape danger...it's simply that they can't categorically refuse you the ability to leave the game legitimately. The timer should be the same for everyone and should be as long as is reasonable...which still wouldn't be long enough, but again, the whole thing is a compromise because it's a peer-to-peer game.
I'm not sure what would actually help beyond keeping the CMDR in the instance for a measure of time if he logs. FD doesn't seem to want to do that.
FD would love to do this. FD
cannot do this.
The game is peer-to-peer. The instance host is always a CMDR and the clients talk to each other. There isn't any way to tell who disconnects from whom in real-time, and thus no good way to keep a CMDR in an instance after they disconnect. Trying to do so could well result in both CMDRs destroying each other's stationary vessels, one CMDR combat logging to turn the other's ship into an easy target, or one or more CMDRs being destroyed multiple times by different people in different instances at the same time.
Either way, confirmation should be moved to the beginning of the countdown.
Agreed. That way the timer can serve it's primary purpose no matter how long they make it.
Make it a five minute timer...click once, game minimizes, you can use your system for whatever, or just get up, and whatever happens in game happens.
Would be even better if it had a 'shut down system after timer' check box, so no one could reasonably complain about the four milliwatthours of electricity hanging around for a few seconds longer than they otherwise would have would cost.