Do you think implementing a AFK Kick outside of Expansion Releases would do anything?

[Syln]

You know what's more boring than a hub ? A deserted hub.

This game feel already empty enough when you go around in the world and you want people to get disconnected when they afk ? come on

[Shuuchi]

Agreed 100%. Be it Dynamis, Primal, Crystal or Aether, there's always someone who makes like 7-10 accounts of the same character to just AFK in Limsa 24/7. I've said it in another thread, but cloud servers can't come fast enough. At least that way people won't feel obligated to travel to another DC just to get better queue times.

Does reporting them do anything? I remember at the start of EW, the usual suspects managed to go right back to afking in Limsa a day or two after launch while everyone was dealing with 7k+ queues.

[Archeron]

It's completely pointless once the initial hype has died down, and I wouldn't even think it necessary during patches.

The content droughts are long enough to ensure the game is desolate between patches. I doubt Aether is even having exceptionally long log in queues, doesn't need to exist. I don't even think the 7-10 alt characters standing around are even that much of a problem unless they're on a highly populated world.

[Hasrat]

Everyone kinda glossing over the fact that purging the servers would do literally nothing to the "short wait" OP notices on login. That has nothing to do with how many players are online, it's simply due to the login server processing in batches. You're still going to have a short wait to log in, and in fact, may even make the waits slightly worse by forcing more players into the login servers more frequently, rather than having them already processed and online on servers with capacity to handle everyone currently.

[Jeeqbit]

As a residential Aether Player, I very much often come into the game with a short wait ahead of me which isn't an issue

The AFK kick certainly isn't needed outside of expansion launches (or that one time the game went viral on twitch and Asmongold played). As you said, there are short queues except those times.

unless you also consider all the friends outside of Aether that are almost incapable of touching Aether.

I think the limit on DC travel to each world is a "cap" on the number of travelers and the cap is different depending on if the world is congested or not. There seems to be a separate cap for World Visiting which is also affected by if it's congested or not.

I think it is likely that if they are kicked for being AFK that it would allow others to travel, but once they return from being AFK they wouldn't be able to login.

Perhaps the AFK kick could apply to travelers only or when the world is actually Congested? This would prevent it being of inconvenience when it's not needed.

would it really hurt if they added in an AFK timer

The most annoying part about it is when you have been logged in for 2 days or more, the game forcefully exits after being kicked and that means entering passwords and 2FA all over again.

Am I just not seeing the real issue somewhere, is an AFK timer somehow stupid of an idea?

It's just seen as annoying in other games. Yoshi-P, who oversees the game, is a gamer and knows it's annoying so only puts it there when it's absolutely needed.

Most likely the travel limits are there to get people to form parties on other data centers instead, to help solve the lack of PFs on other data centers.

[TaleraRistain]

We have that short login queue even when the afk auto-kick is turned on. It has nothing to do with the amount of people on the servers. And afk people aren't really the problem with DC travel to Aether. Before they put those stupid restrictions in, we had no issues with people coming to Aether even with the auto-kick turned off. The problem are those restrictions and how people are just squashing onto Aether anyway in lower activity times like late night or early morning and then parking there for as long as they want to do content. So people on other DCs are finding ways around the restrictions anyway. They need to remove them and allow free DC Travel again.

[ArchlordPie]

As others have already said, any sort of AFK kick or other forced log out mechanism would just get circumvented by the exact people it's meant to affect.

There's not a whole lot that can be done unless SE wants to unironically ban people for AFKing and/or circumventing the expansion launch AFK kick that already exists.

[Asako]

Just remember if the log in queue says it's less than 100 in queue then the server isn't actually full. They just do batch logins to help with server stress. So don't confuse world is currently full for the world being actually full.

[Gurgeh]

Not on Spriggan it wouldn't. You can't be AFK from Spriggan if you've transferred or traveled to Light, or your not at all logged in in the first place. And it hardly seems fair to kick people who are AFK waiting for PF, and can't play the bits of the game they want to because they've had to travel, because your Home DC has been murdered by lack of cross DC PF, or for that matter your just there to Duty Finder regular content, becuase all you can fill back home is Temple of Quarn and Labarythn of the Ancients.
But hey at least they are putting effort into the Solo game! /indifferent-shrug
(I'm only posting because I'm hoping Square Enix will make sure I'm wrong before continuing to do nothing)

[Absurdity]

Ah, good old DC-travel.
Good feature in theory but once again nobody thought about the potential consequences, certainly not the devs.