Maybe kick ppl after being afk an hour?

[LunaHoshino]

Frankly, I wish they would implement that. I'm sick of spending upwards of a minute trying to load into Mor Dhona because there are so many people there and 80% of them are AFK.

[Raist]

Queues during log in are solely for controlling congestion during the login process. It has nothing to do with how many people are on the server. Look at the structure. There are only 3 lobby servers for each region--neolobby02, 04, 06 are for Canada, and neolobby01, 03, 05 are for Japan. The 3 EU/NA lobby servers are managing logins for 30 some-odd worlds, each of which have multiple IP addresses (have verified at least 3 IP's are used for Midgard). It doesn't take much to see a potential choking point there.

The queue is there to gate the massive flow of traffic during the login process only. Once you pass through that gate, you are on your assigned IP address for your world--you no longer are using the lobby server until you logout and go back to the lobby again. Watch your connections in netstat or resmon as you login, play, and then log out. You will see the .74, .93, or .106 IP drop off into time_wait and then eventually disconnect once you are fully logged into the game. That is because once you are fully logged in, the lobby server and it's queue is no longer in play.

In other words, population of a server has nothing to do with you getting thrown into the login queue except when everyone is trying to log in (like right after maintenance and such) that it becomes an issue. People that are already fully logged in have no bearing on your login because they are no longer using the service. And the AFK'ers aren't consuming mass amounts of precious bandwidth either. My 16yr. old daughter probably burns up more data texting her friends in one hour on Friday night than one person could consume AFK'ing for 24 hours. It quite literally is a drop in the bucket by comparison (it's like 30 bytes per second...like 240bits per second up against 10 Gigabit pipelines).

Character creation limits are in place to stave off the potential problem where a server might exceed stable operating capacity if it were to reach full utilization. That is a metric for the world servers AFTER everyone is logged on, not during login... again, login is handled by a separate set of servers than the worlds and thus have different utilization and capacity thresholds. If it were to become a problem again like we saw in the early days of 2.0's beta4, pre-, and initial launches, then they would be clamping down on this like they did before. Since increasing capacity for each world though, they have not had to resort to such tactics again because the worlds have not reached the level of saturation that would call for it again. That's why the new character restrictions keep going back up... to keep the utilization in check. They aren't using the login queues to manage that--it's a separate layer operating under a different set of protocols for managing world server utilization, not login services.

And many of those that may appear to be AFK (or even displaying as such because they still have a timeout setting) may actually be sitting in front of (or nearby) their systems waiting for something to happen. Perhaps there is a particular FATE they need for their books or daily logs... or maybe they are a DPS stuck in an awfully long DF queue... or maybe they are waiting forever and a day for a particular PF to fill enough slots before queuing up the DF.

You're making a lot of assumptions on the state and impact of a lot of people that appear to you to be just squatting on the server...you don't know all the details on what is really going on, but SE likely has a much clearer picture of the actual state of things. If it had continued to be a major problem after restructuring, they would not have changed the system to allow us to remain logged in while sitting idle for long periods of time--a feature that was actually once implemented because the servers were exceeding capacity. By the same token, if it were to become a problem they just might bring those strong-arm tactics back again until they could get things in check once more.

[Riepah]

Frankly, I wish they would implement that. I'm sick of spending upwards of a minute trying to load into Mor Dhona because there are so many people there and 80% of them are AFK.

So 80% of the people in Mor Dhona should be booted and have to log back in so you can save a minute?

[LunaHoshino]

So 80% of the people in Mor Dhona should be booted and have to log back in so you can save a minute?

If they're AFK for a couple of hours? Sure. I'm not the only one who has had issues loading into heavily populated areas. Friends of mine who are on PS3 say it can be absolute hell to try to load in at high congestion periods.

There's no good reason to AFK for more than an hour. Just log out if you're going to be gone that long.

[Raist]

There's no good reason to AFK for more than an hour. Just log out if you're going to be gone that long.

When was the last time you worked on Braves book? Just saying.... people aren't always truly AFK even though the icon is there.

[Sapphic]

When was the last time you worked on Braves book? Just saying.... people aren't always truly AFK even though the icon is there.

And if they truly there as you say, having a kick tochar select would not affect them as they could just move a fraction every 59 minutes. If they are away then they can easily log back in which takes a few seconds when they are back.

Still no logical viable reason to stay logged on AFK for hours on end. Yet reasons to kick them offline.

[LunaHoshino]

When was the last time you worked on Braves book? Just saying.... people aren't always truly AFK even though the icon is there.

I've logged off for several hours and come back and they're standing in exactly the same spot they were when I left with the AFK symbol still there. These aren't people waiting on FATEs, these are people who are completely AFK and have been for hours.

It may not be an issue on less populated servers, but on a server like Gilgamesh or Balmung, huge numbers of people in areas create terrible slowdown for anyone trying to load in or even just run through. Mor Dhona is awful, Limsa has been especially bad since 2.4, and even Ul'dah can get congested at times. It's like trying to load into a zone with Odin every single time.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

And if they truly there as you say, having a kick tochar select would not affect them as they could just move a fraction every 59 minutes. If they are away then they can easily log back in which takes a few seconds when they are back.

Still no logical viable reason to stay logged on AFK for hours on end. Yet reasons to kick them offline.

So you just want people booted just because AFK people bug you somehow.

[Raist]

And if they truly there as you say, having a kick tochar select would not affect them as they could just move a fraction every 59 minutes. If they are away then they can easily log back in which takes a few seconds when they are back.

Still no logical viable reason to stay logged on AFK for hours on end. Yet reasons to kick them offline.

I've logged off for several hours and come back and they're standing in exactly the same spot they were when I left with the AFK symbol still there. These aren't people waiting on FATEs, these are people who are completely AFK and have been for hours.

It may not be an issue on less populated servers, but on a server like Gilgamesh or Balmung, huge numbers of people in areas create terrible slowdown for anyone trying to load in or even just run through. Mor Dhona is awful, Limsa has been especially bad since 2.4, and even Ul'dah can get congested at times. It's like trying to load into a zone with Odin every single time.

Have you adjusted your limits? Haven't had much trouble since I trimmed the objects rendering limit... and I play on a laptop from 2012 or a PC from 2009 ( A C2D E8400, 4GB RAM, and a Sapphire 5870 1GB... not exactly a lightning fast rig). Longest I've clocked a load in to Mor Dhona was 38 seconds on that PC, and that was while testing against a debate going on about the 45 second commencement timer. No matter how hard I tried, that was a close as I could get to missing the 45 second countdown. On the laptop, it was usually no longer than 30 seconds... during primetime, on the weekend.

How do you know they didn't do something and come right back to where they were while you weren't there watching them? I just sat 27 minutes waiting for Expert Roulette--you know, the one that nets you 75 Poetics once a day that should be pretty popular right about now? Cleared Snowcloak in less time than it took me to queue for it solo as a BLM. And you know what? I respawned in exactly the same location as when I went in. People have continually complained about waiting 3+ hours for a FATE to pop. It's not unusual for people to be hanging out shooting the sh!t with friends either...they may team up and queue for something and they return right back to the same spot. One of my best friends in FFXI loved to sit down under a tree in San Doria. Some of us would park our butts there on log out so we could meet Neza when we logged in. We sometimes would plan to meet for events at "Neza's Tree". Ascii kept a character plopped at the Dunes to sell supplies... seemed like he NEVER moved... but I caught him a few times not at his post just the same.

The point is there can be many explanations as to why someone may appear to be just sitting in the same spot for hours on end...you have no way of knowing what they are or aren't up to, especially when you aren't hovering over them the entire time. And if you haven't taken some of the measures that may counter some of the slow loading times, than you need to accept the penalty that may go with that trade off.

Just seems a bit like the proverbial making mountains out of mole hills thing.

Edit:
My character went AFK while posting this just now. It really doesn't take long for it to pop up at the default setting. Ported to MD to get my next Ironworks piece... load time was 21 seconds at 11:54PM Eastern on a Friday night. See tons of people here, as my object/character setting was at Normal. Changed it to Maximum... and from the aethyrite, I could scarcely make out the outlines of the vendors' stalls at the top of the hill, so it's hardly empty here.

[LunaHoshino]

Yes, I have. I've adjusted everything possible graphics-wise down to the lowest possible settings to see if it does anything. It doesn't help when there are 100 or more people in Mor Dhona proper at once, which is fairly common during peak hours on my server. For the heck of it, I just counted, and there are about 110 people in the city right now, and about a quarter to a third of those are AFK. I'd even say that's on the low side compared to how crowded it normally gets.

EDIT: Given that there's another thread in this very forum with people complaining about the terrible loading times into Limsa, I think it's safe to say I'm hardly the only person who has issues.