So a friend of mine recently procured one of those tiny humans, a baby or whatever they're called. I don't know if you have ever seen one those, but they is like well helpless and covered in drool all the time. And whilst they don't require constant attention, they do require varying amounts of attention at random intervals. Well annoying, I know right.
I found 17 pages of posts about the lack of pause on the Steam forums, and one post on this forum from late 2014 discussing the very problem of having kids whilst at the same time not having the ability to pause a video game. In that thread SethR replied the following.
QuoteYep, we're planning on adding the ability for all players to go AFK (basically despawning your player without leaving the server) and for the host to be able to pause the game for all players.
So how are those plans coming along? Any progress in the last 5 years? Or have you just given up on the dream?
And if you ever end up implementing the pause, you might also make it so that the game stays paused while all players are still in the character selection screen. That seems like a more sane default behaviour compared to the current one.