Why so much hate for an AFK timer?

[Kewhi]

I guess people live to complain, even if it gets them nowhere.

Much like Murphy's Law where "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong".. well..

Introducing the Internet's Law of Anonymous Consumerism, which states "Anything that can be whined about, will be whined about."

The auto-timeout feature should be optional, something that you tick on and off in your system configuration, because honestly there is no real reason for it. All the reasons it was needed at the beginning of the game have been addressed.

Digital sales have not yet resumed and there are still some character creation restrictions being enforced on select realms. Once the game becomes readily available again to everyone world wide, we will undoubtedly see another influx of players. Not to mention the new players that the sale of the PS4 in November will bring in. I reckon that this AFK timer is a counter measure to these things before they have the chance to cause any further issues in the near future.

If this is why you are for the AFK timer, than you should be much more concerned about SE's refusal to actually invest in a larger server capacity. Either way, people will quit once the P2P kicks into gear and the issue of full servers will no longer be a perminant problem. It should be an optional feature.

SE has increased their data centers and server capacities while addressing server stability. Twice. And I'm sure both times were not cheap. You are correct that there will be players who leave the game for "greener pastures". Which means that they need to plan their server upgrades around a long term agenda rather than bold spur of the moment action. An AFK timer is simply more cost efficient than expanding their data centers beyond what they foresee them needing over the long term. It's the same reason they haven't simply opened 20 new servers to address character creation issues. It would be counter productive.