It's been said before, worth saying again. AFK bot groups are rampant in EQ. Povar...in RoS zones, The Overthere and Frontier Mountains for sure. Likely elsewhere. DPG clearly doesn't care--and please, spare me the "you have to report, yada yada, blah blah". That is an excuse used to avoid action...it's not unlike those shady "You've been signed up for a fee trial" only to find out YOU have to do something to AVOID something bad (unsubscribe, decline, etc). These are systems based around people NOT taking action. It would take one employee at DPG to just log in a few times for short periods and watch. So clearly, DPG does not enforce their rules. Maybe change them? Then build a bot program and sell it? Or I can just train everyone....THEN DPG would ban me...ahh yes...
It is strange that this is happening considering over Thanksgiving last year a GM came into Plane of Disease to named camp I was doing and didn't send me a tell or anything, said in say " please respond to this message in a timely matter" or something close to that. If I hadn't noticed the say, because of battle spam and /gu messages, /general spam - I would of most likely been banned like a guild mate of mine was recently given for camping named from PoP era for achievements. I even sent a tell asking why would you do that in say, and not a tell? Its ridiculous. I could have walked away for a moment, FD ungored and went to the bathroom and missed the say. I was pissed....yet this stuff continues to go on.
I think the say thing is pretty dumb, people who are supposdly paying attention can't even follow raid emotes.
It'd be pretty funny if GM's started showing up during raids and booting people who are /afk ...or maybe not
Well if their pet is assisting the raid and they afk to use the bathroom they should be banned in the minds of some of the people on the forums.
I think people should be put in jail if they are asleep at their house and their pet does anything. Like if a dog barks while their owner is asleep arrest them!
I am not saying they should do that, just putting out the idea. Personally, I could be moving around, talking in guild chat and general chat while killing and never see a message sent to me in /say. I have learned to tune out the white text.
I have an audio trigger setup for tells to me so if it was a tell and i afk watching a movie while merc / pets are doing the work I would be notified to look right away. They probably figure say message that isn't addressing someone directly keeps people from being notified when they are afk doing stuff.
If the bot groups were handled properly, you would have not experienced this issue. The thing is, tells you' can trigger an audio in game so these afk players watch TV and her 'DING' then they jump up to reply, yep, I'm here! Even the 3rd party programs have a 'gm alert' system. But I have even sent a bot group a tell and one hr later got a reply. Like you, I will miss a /say in battle.
This expansion is boring as fudgsicles. Can you blame someone from mashing some macros and pulling up Netflix on their phone while the mob dies? I bet the majority of players are guilty of it.