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There is a thing I want from Final Fantasy 11, I want the ability to hide myself on the friends list and everyone else, the offline mode they had in FFXI was the perfect thing.
HIDDEN. Which would really help against RMT when searching for your name, only people you know that you wanted to know that you were on could message you.
It was a nice feature in FFXI.
Does using a gamepad while the game client is in the background (with the option to allow that enabled) turn off AFK status?
Even if it does, you could very easily macro your way through easy enemies, regardless of your input method or whether the client is in the foreground or not, and the AFK flag would blip out for a split second at most:
/away on
/tenemy
/ac "Fire 1" <t> <wait.3>
/ac "Fire 1" <t> <wait.3>
/ac "Transpose" <me> <wait.1>
/ac "Blizzard 1" <t> <wait.3>
/ac "Blizzard 1" <t> <wait.3>
/echo Hit the button again, dude. <se.3>
Or whatever. I dunno THM well enough to make something practical. But the idea's the same.
Edit: Heck, for that matter, you could just make a set of hotbars where all your abilities are macro'd, and stick "/away on" as the first line in every one, and you'd be able to play normally and keep the AFK flag up as long as you didn't chat, or use the mouse, or open menus/windows you can't open with a macro, or move. (There are macros for lock on, autorun and jump, so those movements are doable. If you have automatically facing the enemy when you use a skill turned on, you could even lock on and turn on autorun, and you'd be able to do this as a melee, too, though you'd look even more obviously stupid and bottish.)
A lot of gathering bots have the away icon on too, it's crazy obvious...
The game is so sensitive to even the slightest input that a high DPI mouse will cancel your away status (due to perceived movement even when there is none) unless you change the active window away from the game within a mere 2-3 seconds of setting the status. Actively moving the mouse, using your game pad or your keyboard (even just to activate macros that will reset your away status after the aforementioned 2-3 seconds) will all obviously cancel it too.
Edit: Oh, and just for the record, FFXIV has never had an automatic un-away system that didn't affect the manual /away status. It was implemented in the patch just before I made that thread. Non botters used /afk regularly while actively playing and it would not be removed until they removed it (or until they were logged out due to errors or a maint). That's rather part of what gave rise to the issue in that thread, the fact that we could no longer choose when to remove the /afk status.
I have to admit that I was thinking it looked rather stupid (or at least ridiculous) that people participating in FATEs had AFK status activated when they're obviously not AFK. But there is no real damage in keeping /away status, is there?
The only negative thing I could think of for being able to keep /away on while active is if, for example, someone pretends to be away because they don't want to help out a friend, yet don't have it in them to just say no. They could pretend they're not there and get away with it easily if they can fake AFK. That would be kind of mean, by the way, LOL.
Also, I sometimes people sent me a /tell asking stuff but I couldn't reply to them because they had /busy status on. It is quite annoying, and some people keep /busy on while trying to communicate through /tell without realizing it blocks tells. I hope they make it so it blocks both incoming and outgoing tells, else /busy people could spam messages to someone without getting a reply, ever.
Since /away doesn't block incoming /tell, so I think I'm ok with people keeping /away status on all the time, for whatever reason.
Bixby, that's such a hard work just to keep the /away status on, LOL. Thank you for making the example. I agree it's possible, and agree that your described method will make people look stupid and bottish.