Dear god.. kick the AFKers

[Tristaris]

In fact, with the sheer numbers of afk players sitting around aetherytes, SE has one hell of a warped view of actual healthy active population on any of their servers. Made noticeable by it taking anywhere between 40 minutes and 3 hours to get a Duty Finder group running. It doesn't help that character creation has essentially been non-existent since day one of launch, so despite being a "new" game, there is hardly anyone available at this point to run the required lower level dungeons and group main story fights.

Considering this is a billion dollar company, the amateur hour management is more than a little hilarious.

I've actually had no problems getting into dungeons and whatnot. Granted I main a paladin, so I don't guess that says a whole lot. Unfortunately DD are a dime a dozen so the queues are going to be high regardless for those not healing/tanking or grouped with either of the two. Also, I wholeheartedly disagree that kicking anyone AFK is going to help. The servers are still going to be that congested, and then when folks get kicked offline, it's going to turn into the same mess you have now. The only thing that's going to fix the problems is to increase server capacity/the amount of servers to spread the population out a bit more or whatever they do. I don't know about anyone else but every time I'm in a main city or town, I see maybe a few folks AFK, and I know in my FC there is maybe one or two afk at any given time - there's bigger issues than AFKing people. If you're going to bitch about people being AFK, at least have the common decency to gripe about the bots and gold farmers wasting "precious spots" too.

[Malzian]

Oh, and there's no afk boot because in their minds, it's actually a feature to allow players to stay logged in and run a personal store. They're hoping enough people leave, especially after the first free 30 days, like in most MMOs that the problem solves itself. Just like in 1.0.

But... but.... Market Boards. Your retainers sell on the market boards for you now, just like the AH of old on top of being extra storage. Is there even an option to run your own personal store now? Not that I've seen. Without that system in place there's no justification for this kind of mentality, unless they plan to implement it in the future, which for the love of everything I hope they -don't-.

Personal character stores in FFXI weren't so bad, I could handle those since they were relatively sparse and there was an AH. The stores in XIV v1.0 were an absolute nightmare, 60 to 80 retainers all crammed into a single room, so tightly packed that you had to move one step at a time to find anything. Oh and make sure to go slow and look everywhere since they'll only display 20 or so at a time, so you need to make sure some are off screen so new ones would load.

No... Auction Houses are proven effective, good drivers of game economy and good incentive to crafters, even with the standard Auction fees (Tax rate per ARR). Personal stores are places where people can go listing their 'prestige, look what I have and you don't' items for outrageous sums like 99,999,999 gil all while taking up valuable server resources.

[ThePassport]

I thought I logged out last night, but was so tired I didn't see the OK button to confirm the logout.

Was disgusted to see my character was still logged on. Where was 0 % need for my character to stay on. He was not running a store or any of the other bs you guys are mentioning.

[revial]

I've actually had no problems getting into dungeons and whatnot. Granted I main a paladin, so I don't guess that says a whole lot. Unfortunately DD are a dime a dozen so the queues are going to be high regardless for those not healing/tanking or grouped with either of the two. Also, I wholeheartedly disagree that kicking anyone AFK is going to help. The servers are still going to be that congested, and then when folks get kicked offline, it's going to turn into the same mess you have now. The only thing that's going to fix the problems is to increase server capacity/the amount of servers to spread the population out a bit more or whatever they do. I don't know about anyone else but every time I'm in a main city or town, I see maybe a few folks AFK, and I know in my FC there is maybe one or two afk at any given time - there's bigger issues than AFKing people. If you're going to bitch about people being AFK, at least have the common decency to gripe about the bots and gold farmers wasting "precious spots" too.

There are a TON more people sitting afk then bots. Anyone who tries to pretend it's just a few people are passive aggressively defending this via deflection and lies because they're afraid of having to ever go through login roulette again.

We're not talking about kicking people off who are immediately going to try logging back in. :eyeroll: We're talking about kicking people off who really are afk. You know. Sleeping. Working. etc. This strange world you live in where they'll all immediatly try to log back in, clogging the servers to the same extent is more strange fantasy.

Every single city, and just about every single Aetheryte, has more afk people than not, even accounting for people who are actually afk (ie: bathroom, etc). This is not new. This is the EXACT same issue that occurred during 1.0 launch, just on a larger scale due to all the hype the relaunch got.