Should players be rewarded for not using 3rd party tools to circumvent the afk timer?

[van_arn]

Increasing rested xp accumulation on logout (as an "event") wouldn't be a bad idea. Everyone sleeps, and even those people who stay online 16 hours a day actively playing would benefit from the additional rested with so much stuff to level.

If you stay online for 24 hours, you'd miss out. If you afk bot through a workday, you'd miss out.

[Packetdancer]

That's actually quite creative on their part. lol If I was SE I wouldn't even be mad. I'd be impressed.

Oh, Square-Enix demonstrably doesn't care about third-party tools that do stuff like that; it doesn't give some sort of gameplay advantage (honestly, it'd probably be a lot harder to play dancer that way) and they're really neat to see! Mad respect to the guy who made that dancer interface. (I did make a way to do dancer combos by playing chords on my MIDI keyboard -- since I couldn't make it work for Bard performance, I figured I might as well toy with my little tool further for a laugh -- but the Kinect-powered computer vision is just next-level creativity.)

They've even said outright that things like ReShade (or ports thereof like GShade or Nvidia Freestyle) are totally fine, as well; generally they're just for artistic work, or on occasion accessibility. For instance, I have a friend who is badly colorblind and uses a ReShade preset to color-shift the game such that they can actually see the different colors in color-dependent mechanics. And that's not something Square-Enix cares about.

So it's not that they universally hate all third-party tools. But they write the EULA very broadly -- as do many companies -- to say basically "if you use third-party tools we can ban you" because it means they don't have to revise the EULA every time some new tool (or new way to use a tool) that is problematic comes up. Which also means if you use a parser within your static to measure personal improvement and work on your raiding strategy, they can just turn a blind eye, but when you wield a parser like a weapon against other players ("Maybe if the black mage was doing higher DPS than the healer, we'd have a hope of getting out of this trial roulette sometime before next week!!") they can ban you.

Now that I've gotten wildly off-track from the original topic...

My point, however, was that you should never underestimate the ingenuity of people passionate about a game. Sometimes that ingenuity manifests in really neat (if niche) stuff like that frankly just plain brilliant dancer input tool, sometimes it manifests in less-innocuous stuff like AFK-prevention tools.

And in the latter case, it's all too easy to get into an escalating war with the folks writing those tools. I know this from painful personal experience, back when I worked on a gaming engine and got into that same escalation trying to prevent folks from writing aim-bot type tools; I'd do a thing, they'd find a new way, I'd prevent that thing, they'd find a third way, etc. There's no way that Square-Enix can reasonably prevent every single AFK-prevention tool -- nor, frankly, should they try to, because after a certain point you're much too far down that rabbit-hole and you're expending more effort on preventing things than it's worth.

But if you want to offer some sort of tangible reward for not cheating (as opposed to a punishment for cheating), you're going to also end up rewarding the people who did cheat but slipped through the cracks. Which only further incentivizes coming up with creative new ways to cheat the system, since now you not only have "stay online and avoid the queue" as a 'reward', but also an actual reward from the company in addition if you aren't caught.

Increasing rested xp accumulation on logout (as an "event") wouldn't be a bad idea. Everyone sleeps, and even those people who stay online 16 hours a day actively playing would benefit from the additional rested with so much stuff to level.

We actually were tossing that idea around in my FC earlier this week, along with the idea of turning on rested XP outside of hubs. That way, if someone got disconnected while out in the field, couldn't log back in (because queue), and had to wait a long while before getting back on, they wouldn't be out all the rested XP they'd have had if they logged off in a hub.

I do think both of those things would be nice gestures, and -- as you point out -- by their very nature, they'd only be perks that the folks who do spend time offline would benefit from. If you want to reward/incentivize not using AFK-bypassing trickery, a passive benefit to being offline (like that) is better than an active award (like a title or minion or whatever).

You can't cheat that method, because even if you bypass the AFK check, by virtue of being online you've denied yourself the perk.