But any facility to make the player intangible but in game would be nice, similar to exit the game but still be present. Spawns could be dealt with like the de-spawn feature of City of Heroes/Villains (mobs always despawn around the entrance/exit when someone exits from an instanced area). Or possibly have the option to be transported to a safe spot before becoming tangible again.

Once a campfire is set then naturally it would draw attention to other players more than mobs but it could allow players to sit-out the game for whatever reason, safe in the knowledge that their character had a ‘time-out’ in a safe player created zone(timer driven & cool-down limited). Players joining the ‘campfire’ would only receive a fraction of the time left as a safe area. It could also act as a good area for RP activities too.

My general instinct at these times is to go off the path and aim for a high spot. A lot of mobs seem to be vertically challenged.

Lotro can be cruel in this respect though, there are a number of regions that have no apparent safe spots or which have mobs with irregular or just very long patrol routes. Not fun to come back from dinner and wake up in a resurrection circle.

One of the easiest ways to add in a pause in all games is to make players ‘invisible’ to enemies when AFK. Simple, easy, and would work just about anywhere (outside of instances only, perhaps). The only downside might be clearing out an area of enemies, going AFK, then returning to find that they had all respawned, surrounding you in the process. Also, if someone bumped your mouse or keyboard while you were gone it might all go badly, too.

Still, it’s better than having to ‘port to safety whenever you need to do something.

When an MMO is built around sucking up huge blocks of time, it’s just not going to be something I can indulge in, no matter how fun it is.

Certainly, we can’t expect a true pause button in multiplayer instances but why not have one in a personal instance where you are the only player? And furthermore, even have the server instance be saved temporarily to disk (similar to how persistent instances in EQ2 works), so we can even log off and log back on at a later date and continue exactly from the point we left off at.