Disconnect Strats

[Strongy]

There has been a question raised around whether disconnects should be permitted within the rules. This is where a player leaves the instance to trigger/avoid triggering certain quest/mob updates, or to manipulate AI behaviour (or other, yet unknown, reasons).
Whilst there have been several records in the past that have utilised this strategy and have been approved (Urgoz, UW), I think its good to clarify for records going forward given interest on the topic.

Ill add key arguments to this post when as they are raised:

Initial arguments for:
Additional options for players encourages innovation
Other AI / game manipulations are permitted / used extensively.

Initial arguments against:
The leaving player does not receive credit for the area (vq complete, chest, mission completion etc)
Other party manipulations (e.g. slow-load) have specific rules defined and are only permitted for TAS.

Additionally, as part of the discussion, I would invite players to discuss how we should moderate this rule if disconnects are rejected, in particular:
How do we define a disconnect? Is it simply "all players must remain within the instance until area completion"? Theoretically, someone could finish their role in a record and leave for reasons beyond manipulating AI/game behaviour (i.e. accidental disconnect or real-life situations). Would this void the record? If only disallowing "intentional" disconnects - how should this be defined?
How do we prove all party members were present at the end of the run for TAS records (where only 1 video is required)? I assume we will need to add a general rule to have the party window open at the end of the run for all 2+ party member sizes, to prove this - but open to other thoughts. Obviously, the vast majority of players do this anyway so shouldn't impact players too much but I think this would need to be stipulated going forward. One could argue that "it's obvious if someone has intentionally disconnected", but this is not necessarily the case and we cannot predict all future strats.

[Lurker]

I think it's a very bad idea to ban something that is easily possible in the base game, similar to how it was a bad decision to put slow load into TAS.

For the (hopefully) unlikely case of disconnects getting banned they should all be handled the same as it's unreasonable to prove intention.

[BackTwoBaySix]

Imagine you are in a team based obstacle course race, the final hurdle is a big wall where you need to work together to get everyone up and across. What you are doing here is essentially leaving the last guy behind, and claiming victory when the remaining members of the team cross the finish line without him. It's kinda dumb imo.

[Rafe]

Imagine you are in an elite special military operations unit tasked with preventing a world ending disaster.
Just before you are about the detonate the device that could be used to end the world, you realise that the bunker it's hidden in is completely radio proof (and all other forms of communication). One member of the team needs to stay behind to manually detonate the device.
Did the rest of the team complete their objective?

On a serious note, I think for minute based (/age) it shouldn't matter as you can easily validate that (the person(s) remaining in the mission is the one that has to show /age, obviously). For seconds based potentially you can perform some tomfoolery with an intentional slowload so I do wonder if there should be a time penalty, but I think the existing rules around slow loading already cover this regardless of who the slowloader is in this scenario.

For pure though it does beg the question if a submission is valid since one person PoV will be missing partially but I think I'd land on it not mattering so long as their video is "complete" (pre load zone, area, post disconnect zone)

[Aria]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U7CjbfHgraU

[Snoop]

i think the answer is to bring back Standard category