Script daily reboot of servers at lowest load level to flush the AFK'ers & free slots

Seriously... it is such a simple solution until you can get a better fix in place. Doesn't have to be an ongoing thing, just a temporary adjustment to procedures until a more appropriate fix can be put in place.

There is absolutely NO reason for anyone to sit around AFK in this game. All it is doing is killing the game for those who actually want to PLAY and not sit idle all day.

They can't set up a Bazaar---retainers handle that, and there is no need to watch a spawn area over night to catch the time of death for a rare monster like we had to do in XI. Why are they standing around all day, often times in the cities/sanctuaries at that?

Please, someone explain why in the world, given the current situation, are they being allowed to sit around all day doing nothing but preventing otherwise active players from logging in?

I am dead serious. It would be interesting to see an official representative of SE to try to justify that in light of the current situation.

Not only will this benefit the players and calm the angry masses, it will provide a superb opportunity for you guys to work in little tweaks every day as you have fixes ready to implement. This will go a LONG way towards instilling confidence with the players because not only will they see you addressing a very BIG problem, but they will also see you being proactive in fixing things on a regular basis.

It all leads up to creating a much more enjoyable experience for everyone.

And before anyone calls this a lame approach---it is nothing new, and has been very successful for other games. I have been in several that ran regular, scheduled shutdowns for basic maintenance. Everyone has advance notice of when it will happen, and for how long the game will be unavailable, so no one has an expectation of getting on during that time.

Again, this has multiple benefits--both for allowing players access to the game and potentially increasing stability in general, but also provides a host of positives for SE.

The only con may be the fact they would be rebooting more often than they may like to, but hopefully this would only need to be a temporary fix until they have more appropriate measures to put in place so they wouldn't need to continue flushing the AFK offenders in mass like this.

Please, SE seriously consider the potential in this approach. Pull in your IT guys on this too, not just the Dev's and Exec's.

Players, please like or /sign if you approve, and feel free to add additional thoughts/solutions as well.

Please, no trolling. We need to keep this conversation going in the right direction in the hopes that it might garner SE's consideration.

Thanks in advance for your time and consideration.

wow... forum fills up so fast with the 1017 complaints... this scrolled off the page with no new views.

Can't believe I'm actually bumping a thread.... but I'm afraid it must be done.

It's a sound solution; and frankly I'd far sooner a little downtime everyday than this constant lock-out.

But to be honest I think the biggest issue here is lack of communication; all people really want is some sort of acknowledgment that there IS a problem, but we're not even getting that. The silence is deafening.

Either way:
/signed.

Ofcourse people are going to sit afk.
SE refuse to communicate, they failed to add something as simple as a queue, and people are forced to sit there for, sometimes hours, if they want to even play.

I hold no grudge against the afk'ers when SE are proving to be a shameful company, when they add a queue (no the pitiful 100 person queue dose not count) then they can deal with afkers

Since I saw a couple posts in the main 1017 error thread asking for someone capable of posting some specific fixes, going to try pulling these posts I made the last couple nights back to the top, since the disappeared so fast from the front page. Seriously.. all the new thread spam on existing topics was getting out of hand. A post made 23 hours ago is already buried on page 26.

Things seemed to have slowed down a bit on the forums now... hopefully we can get more conversation going about possible solutions instead of rage posts.

bump because this is really reasonable

Bumping for another pass to see if we can get anyone else to comment.

I'd agree with this too.

good grief... front page is geting litered with the same ideas over and over again...

Try one more time to get this thread going again.. probably disappear from front page in 20 minutes... but, worth a shot.

wow... it was off the front page in just under 17 minutes.

Lets run it again, just to see what happens.

As a temporary solution, /signed.

This is actually a really good solution to the problem! SE please consider!

Agreed. Bump

Actually they don't even have to do a server restart each day. It can be scripted in to automatically disconnect people who go into AFK status and stay there for 15 minutes. I've seen it in multiple games and it's still around in some. In others the server load was stabilized and the script removed. SE does have a queue in place. Only problem is most of us get the 1017 error before we get thrown into the queue. I've only personally seen the queue message three times. I highly doubt that SE does anything like this. They are starting to strike me as a company that doesn't listen to us because of course their devs are more experienced and know all that there is to know about things like this.

Not sure that a scheduled restart would work. If people knew what time it was going to happen, afkers might just log in again right after the restart. For something like this to work, it would need to be random with players getting an ingame message of "servers are going down in x minutes." I understand that the problem started due to SE not being prepared, but I don't think people need to make the problem worse. Yes, they may have dealt with 1017 for hours before being able to log in but others are dealing with the same issue, and because there are people staying logged in all day, it expands the problem to times when server load should be less populated and creates false data for SE to work with since 1. servers seem fuller than they should be at certain times of day; 2. the log in system is not showing an accurate curve of when people would typically be logging in; and 3. even if the system is improving it wouldn't be noticeable because there are people afk even during active parts of the day. Yesterday being Saturday, I was surprised at the number of people I saw just sitting around afk as Saturday seems like it would be prime play time.
When it comes to being afk, I can understand doing it for an hour or two as "stepping away from the computer" ends up taking longer than someone expected, I can even understand occasionally getting distracted and forgetting to log off, but these are people who are refusing to ever log off.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Indovi

Actually they don't even have to do a server restart each day. It can be scripted in to automatically disconnect people who go into AFK status and stay there for 15 minutes. I've seen it in multiple games and it's still around in some. In others the server load was stabilized and the script removed. SE does have a queue in place. Only problem is most of us get the 1017 error before we get thrown into the queue. I've only personally seen the queue message three times. I highly doubt that SE does anything like this. They are starting to strike me as a company that doesn't listen to us because of course their devs are more experienced and know all that there is to know about things like this.

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yes, but that requires more complicated coding, specific to the game.

This is a feature available at the OS level, and resides outside of the game environment.

For instance, in Windows, it's a command that can be run from the command line, can be put in a shortcut, or a .BAT file. That last option can be easily run from Scheduled Tasks on a set schedule. And it doesn't even have to be done locally... because of Terminal Services/Remote Desktop, I can remotely bounce my daughter's laptop at will.

All from a simple command line interface, shortcut, or .BAT file.

This is all it takes on a shortcut to restart my Win8 machine (and I can use it to get the screen for the option to reboot from CD):

Quote:

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%windir%\system32\cmd.exe /c shutdown /f /r /o /t 0 /d P:0:0

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By changing the flags at the end, you can control different aspects of the shutdown, like a countdown delay, whether it forces programs to close or waits for them.

I put that on a shortcut on my desktop, and I don't have to right-click restart, or pull up the charms menu... hell, I don't even have to click the freaking thing---I can bind keyboard short cut combination to call it from the keyboard.

You can write a script that closes tasks and shuts down services (there are specific commands for killing tasks and stopping services, establishing/killing mapped resources...all kinds of goodies that can easily be scripted by a NOVICE), and then calls for shutdown. Or, if they prefer, they could manage task/service shutdowns in separate scripts, scheduling them to run x minutes apart if they want to be able to adjust the timing more easily.

EVERY OS I've worked on in the last 10-15 years has this capability built in to them. And it is usually very simple to use, so it only take a few minutes to setup once you figure out just how you want to use it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gamegal71

Not sure that a scheduled restart would work. If people knew what time it was going to happen, afkers might just log in again right after the restart. For something like this to work, it would need to be random with players getting an ingame message of "servers are going down in x minutes." I understand that the problem started due to SE not being prepared, but I don't think people need to make the problem worse. Yes, they may have dealt with 1017 for hours before being able to log in but others are dealing with the same issue, and because there are people staying logged in all day, it expands the problem to times when server load should be less populated and creates false data for SE to work with since 1. servers seem fuller than they should be at certain times of day; 2. the log in system is not showing an accurate curve of when people would typically be logging in; and 3. even if the system is improving it wouldn't be noticeable because there are people afk even during active parts of the day. Yesterday being Saturday, I was surprised at the number of people I saw just sitting around afk as Saturday seems like it would be prime play time.
When it comes to being afk, I can understand doing it for an hour or two as "stepping away from the computer" ends up taking longer than someone expected, I can even understand occasionally getting distracted and forgetting to log off, but these are people who are refusing to ever log off.

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For that matter, they could do it as they are coming in to peak time if they feel that would have a more profound impact. It shouldn't take too long for the servers to reboot, and yes... if we all know when it is happening, players can adjust to the schedule.

You inadvertently have supported the purpose of the restart---it is to force the AFK'ers back into the same queue as the rest of us.

While I get where this idea is coming from, it is not in any way a viable solution... not even a temporary one. The time right after a reboot would lead to massive amounts of people trying to log in simultaneously, probably on a scale much larger than what's happening now.

That problem could be fixed by having a different reboot time for each server, but i think the best solution would be the auto-kick one...
ofcourse 15 minutes is way too short, as I often find myself checking several instances in DF and then watching YT vids or anime, with the right side of the game visible.
My waiting times vary between 20-40 minutes generally (as a DPS with all languages checked), so an auto-kick at 1 hour AFK would be best.

Or they could "get off their ass" and send waves of Dev teams in to manually remove people who are afk. Happens all the time in WoW--where they listen to their customers complaints. Yeah--real low blow, huh?--I went there.

Seeing as they won't add a simple AFK Timeout for their game what gives you the impression they would even fathom to incorporate an idea like this?

Have you even read the news of what they are doing at the moment in order to fix this problem? (according to what they said it should be fixed by wednesday)
But you're suggesting taking manpower of off fixing the problem, to do something that can be automated, not to mention the automatic AFK kick would be much more reliable, since you could go to the kitchen to get a drink, only to find that in those 5 minutes you weren't there you got kicked by a GM...