Now that there are few players, could we have less punishing for no apparent reason? I want to check trading post without a notification saying that “are you afking?, you get kick luls”
Afk penalty is only used for players who are abusing the queue and there are not queues in Australia server so what gives? Just remove it from the system.
Please do tell me if you are from EU or NA if you have queuing in your server. I wanted to remove it because I just want to check trading post for at least an hour.
Then they should not remove the system at a whole, but fix the bug where browsing trade post isn’t registered!
don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater< If that translates well.
Or are you just standing around for hours waiting for someone to post something interesting? I mean AGS made some very stupid bugs, but an AFK-system not registering you scrolling through the warehouse is really hard to imagine.
AFK macroing is cheating. And it’s recognized as such in the game’s Terms of Service. It’s especially obnoxious if the AFK macroing involves harvesting or mining of resources in competition with live at-keyboard players, as is happening now to me as I write this. I’m tracking a character that’s using an AFK mining macro that allows the character to autosense and tap an ore node the instant it spawns, faster than a human can react to it. The macro even allows the bot to sense and tap a node through walls!
THIS IS AN UNFAIR EXPLOIT, and I find it greatly degrades my enjoyment of the game, because it’s impossible for me as a human with human response times to compete with a computer app that responds at light speed.
But I will definitely agree that the system is overly-aggressive on “AFK” behaviors like browsing the Trading Post or crafting at a crafting station. That “ARE YOU STILL HERE?” prompt was particularly annoying a few months ago, when the crafting bug was repeatedly dumping crafting attempts instead of executing them when I’d hit the “CREATE ITEM” button. It was particularly bad at Outfitter stations when I was trying to grind Jewelcrafing – I’d get dumped out of my project dozens of times in a row! And then, when I FINALLY got it to work, the system would ask me, “ARE YOU STILL HERE?” and I’d have to exit the station and move a bit to reset the movement sensor’s timer, then go back into the crafting interface… and restart the buggy process of getting the station to work again!
That bug has improved, although it’s still buggy. But I agree: it annoys me that the system does not recognize interactions with things like the Trading Post and crafting stations as in-game activity.
I see a lot of bots at this particular location. They stand there, will not reply to DMs, will not respond to group invites, and their macros appear to auto-sense and mine the nodes. After mining one node, the bot moves to the next node location. It also appears to have timed routines in which the character will jump or crouch, or switch armor pieces to spoof the system into not triggering an automaticl log-out due to inactivity.
