I'm seriously not being snide - more just curious what the motivation is. I know that the game not forcing you to log off is a big part of it, but there has to be more to it than that. I like playing dress-up probably more than most people; I like showing off. But when I am not actively doing something, I tend to shut off the client simply because I am a) going to walk away and do something else non-PC related, or b) am going to play another game, in which case I'd rather not divert memory resources to something I'm not actively playing.

This isn't to say that I never AFK myself - far from it. But there are a lot of times when I will visit, say, Ul'dah, and see a person doing some emote or something, and then come back 3 or 4 hours later, and they're still there, doing the exact same thing. Hell, on Balmung, there's a person who somehow manages to kill their character in the Ul'dah aetheryte room (not the feign death emote - I mean actually a dead character), and just leaves it there for like 8-10 hours straight (a group of us have taken to calling her the 'resident dead prostitute'). Another guy in Limsa Lominsa has attained minor fame for wearing a giant mog suit and then using a double and doing the vanu vanu dance for something like 18-20 hours a day - as far as most of us can tell, it is the singular function of his account.

Again, these people aren't hurting anyone, etc., and I'm not here to excoriate them. But, rather, I just want to know: why? Why don't you just turn the game off?