I also don't want to have to be tied to the game. A weekend camping trip puts me out of the loop for a good 40 hours. A weeks vacation 168 hours.
I take a weekend off and all my barons are toast. With that in mind I'd never install another baron again. 300 hours is just way too long a time for that.
It doesn't seem to be a game play balance problem, but more like a problem related to the time available to play. I understand that some players may require to take breaks from time to time, and when they come back they would probably want to take the game from where they left it.
I think we can make this work if we introduce a vacation mode, I've been thinking for a while on how this could work.
What will happen when the vacation mode is activated is this:
- there will be a 500 AP cost to activate vacation mode.
- once activated, vacation mode can only be deactivated in 24 hours or more.
- the player will not gain any more AP until vacation mode is decativated
- each owned gateway will change IP and then be put in a "frozen" state. This state will make it so no-one will be able to connect to the frozen gateway or attack it.
- only the vir process on the frozen gateway will be preserved. All other tasks will be dropped, including research and running software
- when coming back online and deactivating vacation mode, vir timers on the frozen player owned servers are updated with time from when vacation was started.
-> example: went on vacation for 72 hours, when vacation is off 72 hours are deducted from virii on owned gateway run timers. This effectively negates any runtime hours on any RB virii for example, as the run hours will remain like it was just before vacation started.