Any way to disable this new smart un-away system?

[sydh]

I am for one with having the old system back or a decent change. If I set /afk by the command line or search info menu I want to /stay/ in the afk status.

[mbncd]

Same. It seems the only way to stay /AFK is to already have your fingers on alt+tab as you hit enter on your "/afk" command, then alt+tab out of the window really fast. Either that or give up on the command altogether and just let the auto /afk system take you away after a while.

But neither solve the problem of someone coming back for a moment to check retainers or whatever and wanting to remain /AFK while they do that ~_~

[Gesser]

Just noticed this myself it's freaking annoying.

[Camate]

Greetings,

There are no plans at the moment to disable this feature, however, should that change we’ll be sure to let you know.

[Baneus]

Why did something that no one wanted get added anyway?

[Vaultor]

I'm with the OP. We should be given the option to AFK and manually un-AFK ourselves at the right time of our choosing, but the new patch takes that freedom from us.

There are situations we just wanna drop in quick to check the time, weather, friends online, and the AFK goes off by itself. Argh!

[DSN]

Greetings,

There are no plans at the moment to disable this feature, however, should that change we’ll be sure to let you know.

The fact you don't see this as a problem is some what bothersome. Let me try again so maybe you can see the flaws in this.

There is no reason a manually initiated /away or /afk should be removed by the new idle system.

When a player wants to set themselves to away this typically is because they want to be listed as away and not away until a cat jumps or kid bumps into my desk and the mouse wiggled. To add to this I live in CA and we have been having earthquakes semi recently (let alone historically this is a hot spot for earthquakes), if I was set to /away or /afk and we experience an earthquake guess what? I am still away / afk checking on my house, family, and possessions but the mouse moved so we should tell everyone I am in game, ready and available to do stuff with my FC right?

The system of online presence has many uses outside the individual, when I am looking at my FC members list for people to do content I select people based on who is "Online" not away, busy, afk, etc. If you are listing people as "Online" when they clearly are not and set their status to reflect such you are only creating problems and annoyances for the player base.

I really hope somehow there was some communication problems and misunderstandings of the issue at hand and they do plan to fix the flaw involved with the new idle / away system. This is a flaw, if this is what you consider working as intended then I worry greatly about the powers that be and decisions makers over there.

[Souljacker]

Greetings,

There are no plans at the moment to disable this feature, however, should that change we’ll be sure to let you know.

And this is the wrong answer. Yoshi-P has had a great track record of implementing good systems that make sense and help facilitate a good game experience. This is not one of those systems. I turn on away mode for any number of reasons, and often I turn it on to alert people that I am not available to do things with them. That may be because I am on another window doing school work or it may be because I just want to watch a video on some things or read the news. It doesn't matter WHY I selected away - I selected away because I am effectively away from the GAME. The fact that I am moving my mouse outside the game window should have no bearing on my status whatsoever. It's none of your business whether I am using my computer for other things or not.

The system worked perfectly. No one asked for it to be changed (that I have been able to dredge up, NA or Japanese). No one is thanking you for this change as evidenced by the lack of "likes" on your response. Please reconsider returning a functioning system to its functioning state. Thank you.

The only reason I can think of for you forcing this is to make people actually log out of the game. If that is your goal, then just say so. At least then you will have given us a "reason" this was changed. A terrible reason, but a reason nonetheless.

[Ransu]

-snip-

Set yourself to busy, problem solved. I don't see the issue here with afk. You don't respond in FC chat? Hey guess what, it's assume you are afk. People don't need to look at your status to see if you are afk or not. It's not the end of the world if you don't reply back.

[Souljacker]

I think that there are just more negative connotations surrounding the word "busy" as opposed to "away". Besides that, it's just a change that wasn't needed. If the answer was "just use busy" then why have "away" at all? ANY minute movement of the mouse cancels it, so it's not like you could even legitimately use it to walk physically away from the computer. They have made the status wholly unusable and no one even knows WHY