A Plea to the Community: Long Queues

[Thortok2000]

The game's designed to not even have an afk timer in the first place. They only turned it on because of the congestion, and the plan is to turn it back off again when it's no longer needed.

In my opinion they should do 2 things:

1 - Turn off the afk timer
2 - Make it so you don't have to be able to log in in order to transfer to a different world.

Problem will fix itself.

Of course, fixing the afk timer so it can't be circumvented also works. Splitting Balmung works. Force-moving people off of it works. There's lots of options here.

My point is that the afkers aren't the problem...the system is.

[Gyson]

The game's designed to not even have an afk timer in the first place. They only turned it on because of the congestion, and the plan is to turn it back off again when it's no longer needed.

In my opinion they should do 2 things:

1 - Turn off the afk timer
2 - Make it so you don't have to be able to log in in order to transfer to a different world.

Problem will fix itself.

Of course, fixing the afk timer so it can't be circumvented also works. Splitting Balmung works. Force-moving people off of it works. There's lots of options here.

My point is that the afkers aren't the problem...the system is.

First of all, players are going to find a way around almost any system SE puts in place to stop abuse of the AFK-timer. Only extremely intrusive setups (like throwing a captcha puzzle up in the player's face every 30 minutes) would deter the current abuse, and that's likely not a route SE will ever go.

Second, turning off the AFK timer accomplishes nothing - people will still go AFK for extended periods of time and prevent others from logging in. You can only move through the queue at this point if players are logging out of the game, but if they're not leaving (and remaining AFK-idle instead), then the queue moves much more slowly. Sure, we can argue that (due to player abuse) in its current form the AFK timer is doing little to alleviate that problem, but you seem to be implying that removing the timer will magically solve the problem and that's just not true.

So, I obviously disagree. At this point the players abusing the AFK timer are the primary cause of the problem.