FFXIV: People are circumventing the auto-log timer and staying logged in indefinitely

[StouterTaru]

To my knowledge people are doing it by:

-Staying at the retainer bell having their retainer active (which explains the large, never moving crowds around these bells).
-Opening a crafting window then just staying like that.
-Getting into a cutscene then just leaving it.

Autologout is essentially the game entering /logout and selecting "Yes" for you after a certain amount of inactivity. Pretty much any interaction that locks your movement prevents logout.

Changing the way it works would require coding that bypasses safeguards and could result in unforeseen bugs and new exploits. Easier solution is just to have brief emergency maintenance during low activity periods to flush everyone out.

[UkcsAlias]

Changing the way it works would require coding that bypasses safeguards and could result in unforeseen bugs and new exploits. Easier solution is just to have brief emergency maintenance during low activity periods to flush everyone out.

Not realy. Forced logouts are very disruptive because you essentialy prevent people from doing any dungeon 30 minutes before that timer as otherwise they risk getting kicked out during one.

Normaly 1 hour without any interaction is already more than enough already to say someone is afk. Even if they are in a dialog window, it makes no sense to keep it open for 1 hour without doing anything. This is very basic afk detection. This system must bypass those things. And on that it can have a very simple mechanic to trigger a timer restart, in such way its nearly impossible to not trigger a logout by accident. A single mouse or keyboard press could be enough to refresh. For cutscenes, in automatic mode, each time the cutscene does a click, it counts as a player click.

But yes, some people will install an autoclicker for that, or even use a physical method that behaves like one (yes, they exist and even involve randomized timing). So for proper afk detection additional mechanics would be needed. But usualy those would already be complex enough to fall under 3rd party software usage, which for most players is enough to not use these.