I started an album: called here but not.

Every single town, hamlet, village, city that I got to now, has hundreds of afk people waiting until they get back from class or work or dinner or honestly there are many reasons.

Yes this issue has been raised before, yes I will continue to do it until someone in Japan, has enough courage to address it. Yes, I do it too.

Now there are tools that you can download that macro the log-in process and replicate it while your doing something else.

So I am asking once again, please kick afk, for more than 1 hour, so other people who want to play can log in.
One day when I have enough pictures (I took no names, just bodies) I will publish it.

If the server limit is indeed 5000, I would roughly estimate 2000 of them are afk for more than a few hours.

That's an exceedingly rough estimate considering there is no possible way for you to know who is afk for hours, who is afk for a minute grabbing a drink, who is standing still talking to people, who is trying plot things on their map, who is reading their quest log, etc. etc.

I mean, unless you were in every single town, hamlet, village and city simultaneously for hours watching these people. Then by all means, your 2/5 ratio could be correct.

And while I do agree that it may be a problem, regardless of exaggerated numbers, an auto-kick function would probably be a waste of resources due to how easy it is to circumvent such a thing.

Yes I completely agree, I basically watched each location for approx 5 minutes, If people were talking or conversing or going to the restroom what ever I would have gotten false estimates. However, It was such a large concentration and after the 5 minute period I took a screen shot. Again, this isn't going to be statistically significant or collectively exhaustive. I don't know the population, and did not perform sampling that my statistics prof in college would call meaningful hehe.

They are just pictures, but their number and multiple locations would give you a plausible reason to raise your eyebrows at the numbers. I have approximately 20, in areas from Ul'hah to Gridonia to Limsa, there are more and I am not going to be foolish and suggest 30 would be a proper sampling size for a non known population. :)

It is a coping mechanism that people are using to stay in game. That is all, but it actively prevents other people from logging in to play.