The first suggestion with blocks and signals is way too involved. Not just from a programming standpoint, either. It's too confusing to most players. Even when presented in a simple fashion, people like to know what the exact rules are.
Being able to save and quit (suspend) at elevators (or even only at terminals) sounds like a decent idea, but it doesn't lend itself well to grouping. It seems like this would break up the group every time. I'm not sure what would be an elegant solution to that.
An auto save feature would be extremely easy to exploit. Don't like the way this run is going? Boss didn't drop the item you wanted? Just idle out and try again.
Bumping oldest relevant thread I could find.
In general, I'd like to see a way to save progress. It's very frustrating to find that completing a full dungeon is taking longer than I can handle. It's frustrating to find that I've had something happen in RL that needs my attention, and 15 or 20 minutes later is too late.
I know the server has resource limits. So I've got a simple idea.
1: If a person goes into "zzzz" mode, and has no monsters nearby, and is not in a party, then that person is "idle". The server process/thread that is waiting on an idle person can fully wait on a response from that person, or a death notice from a "need to reboot". No computing resources needed. In a blocking wait for either a read or a signal, so it can be swapped out.
2: A level that contains only "zzz" people cannot be entered by another person, nor matched for grouping.
The idea here is that if a group of people need to take a break, they break up the party into a bunch of singletons, and then each singleton goes to rest. The server processes go idle.
Later, when people return, they wake up. Then, they see who else is around or not around, and join up accordingly.
Now, what this won't give you:
- Chat. While idle, the server won't be spending time forwarding chat to you.
- Same party. When you wake up, you may have a different party.
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If this is "too hard", then how about a "Save progress" option? At the very least, when you reach the point of being able to go down a level, have the choice be:
- Go down
- Save and return later
Choosing B brings you back to the character select screen, with your character saved at a certain depth of whatever dungeon. And note that this doesn't even need a server process; you become nothing more than a database row.
Equally, you could have an "auto save" like that -- maybe if you idle out while in the middle of the level, next time you will restart at the start of the level.