Suspended only 33 seconds to respond

Key point here is "commonlands". Let's have some fun with it.

You race on some back country road chances are you won't get caught and even if you are, the cop might let you off. Race in a school zone and you are putting them in a situation where they have to send a message.

Now we apply the same to afk pet attacking. Some random island in Erud's crossing, nobody is going to notice or care. Spam a bunch of traders in the EC tunnel and players are going to report you. The GM will probably feel like you're taunting them.

Maybe he wasn't in the tunnel. Idk.

Back when fire beetle eyes were the thing, people AFK farmed those at the spawns in Paineel. Like 9 people fighting over 3 spawn points and two beetles per spawn. A couple of those guys sat there for at least a full week, only leaving to dump the loot. Don't think anything ever happened to them.

The log shows i was suspended with only 33 seconds to respond, which is pretty unreasonable. And as stated i only interacted with the character with the occasional tell. The AFK tag gets put up if you dont move or use a skill. I was at the keyboard just watching TV on the side monitor.

He said he was starting a response when he got disconnected. Basic reading comprehension would infer that means he was in the process of typing a response when the game was disconnected and the log file ended as shown above before his response was entered.

Of course if could be a big conspiracy and maybe there is more to the log and he just edited the whole thing to cause drama on the forums. You might be on to something there.

Well, I use afk if I am not in a chatty mood. I also used to use it when TSing in PoK, to avoid some of the numerous unwanted group-invites. And if you don't use /auto afk (which would have prevented me from using afk while running around in pok), you can simply forget to turn it off again. In any of the cases, I would expect more than 33 seconds to prove I am not actually afk.

There are no rules about not having afk up when skilling, but about unattended skilling. If skilling with afk on was against the rules, there would be no point whatsoever in the GM checking if you are indeed afk at all. Program an automatic suspension if any skill is gained with the afk-tag up then.

IIRC on Live servers, the AFK flag is placed on a player if there is no activity from said player for a fifteen minute period. Which means that at bare minimum, you had been AFK for at least fifteen minutes before the GM sent you a tell. For all we know, you have been AFK for five hours at the game while watching television.

I am not saying you were, nor am I saying you are right/wrong in this situation. However the logs don't really show anything outside of a tell from a GM at a certain time with an AFK flag up. It seems like you conveniently picked out the one part of the log to make you look good, knowing if you showed the entire log it woukd make you look bad.

Also, what were you trying to skill up on with a pet that you could not normally do in a 3-6 person group? I remember a long time ago if I got a new two hand weapon when I had used dual wield my entire life, I would just ask the group if I could use it for a bit to skill up. 99% of the time the group was cool with it...

3 days , 5 days , or are you ballin with a 7 day?

"AFK" attacking a pet for skill ups doesn't even violate the RoC, it's possible the OP was being suspended for something else outside of this and the GM sent him a tell to inform him. But since he was "AFK" he just booted him off

EQ RoC here

Eh. Over the course of 16+ years, I've learned to take these kinds of stories with a grain of salt. The player is always so innocent. Maybe this guy really is a victim of GM oppression, but how many times have you seen the actual facts emerge and turn out to be different from what the player claimed? I've seen that happen at least a dozen times. Probably more than that.

Anyway, if the GM was trying to determine whether the guy was AFK, 33 seconds was plenty. In fact, the guy really was AFK. If you're watching Breaking Bad while your character fights a pet, you're AFK. Someone must have complained about it, which means that the player must have been doing it in an obnoxious location. Of course, if you are watching TV while your character fights a pet, you're not exactly a player with high standards, so it is not unreasonable to assume that this guy did not give much thought to his choice of location. My guess is that the other players in the area cheered when the GM shut this guy down.

Again, this guy could be totally innocent. However, given the level of moderation I've seen in EQ of late, I would question the plausibility of this being a random act of GM violence.

GINA audio alert whenever you get a tell, FTW.

Ever try asking a group if say, as a rogue for example, you can cap your Defense skill? Yeah, tank just go afk for the next 24hrs or so while I facetank every mob so that I can have the proper amount of AC for my level.

I hit 50 on my Rogue with like 30/200ish Defense/Parry/Etc because I actually played the class correctly and avoided pulling aggro where unncessary. But going into a raiding situation like that would have been stupid because I would be down roughly ~500AC and you are going to eat the occasional Riposte. So I had a mage duel me and send his pet on me over and over in an arena until I capped these skills, it took roughly 20hours of nonstop Burnout pet swings.

Very immersive gameplay, 10/10 would watch Movies again.

Wow, I've watched dozens of people AFKing while attacking pets in the tunnel, and have done that myself for many different weapon skills on Phinigel - entire overnight AFK sessions (and it still takes several nights to level up just one weapon skill from 10 to 250). I don't see how this isn't allowable - there is ZERO automation, just a /duel, /pet hold, and autoattack enabled.

Let's also consider that skillups have been adjusted for the 1500+ dexterity that live players have, and it takes ~20x longer to raise skills on Phinigel than it did during real classic times. Does anyone else remember the flurry of skillups you'd get when leveling a new weapon skill back then? It's nothing like that now - last I remember it took about 20 hours of grinding with a fast 2h slasher to level that up on my Ranger, which to me seems really unfair to all the groups that you do crappy DPS for during that period.

I missed that, but still, providing logs without the reply is incriminating.

We can't tell from the log if that was the first tell from the GM either.

AFK stands for "Away from Keyboard". He specifically stated he was at his keyboard, watching a show or movie on his second monitor. So he was not, in fact, AFK if he is telling the truth. I frequently do this in groups myself. Should I be worried I'll be booted/BANNED for looking at another screen while auto attacking and tapping kick every 5 seconds?

OP isn't telling the whole truth so don't worry I regularly afk my 40+ characters in exp groups in a corner and come back 9 hours later.

Difference is I'm not running a macro or automating my character somehow during those 9 hours.

Everyone should keep in mind we are only hearing a single side of the story. 'I was only AFK for a minute' ranks up there with 'Just the tip' in phrases often repeated but rarely truthful.

Over the course of 16+ years, I've seen a lot of these threads. There are always people who will doggedly defend the player and who will come up with justifications for just about anything. In this case, we don't even know what really happened. The player could be telling the whole truth.

Having said that, if you are watching Breaking Bad while your character fights a pet on another screen, you're AFK. It doesn't matter that you are near the keyboard. It doesn't matter that the keyboard is in the same room or in the same house, or that you check it occasionally. If you are doing something else, you're AFK. This is not the same as playing in a group while a TV show is running on another screen.

Furthermore, it is not plausible to me that a GM would just haul off and suspend someone for something like this. I'm not sure which server this guy was on, but I sure haven't seen any GMs wandering around looking for miscreants since . . . well, maybe the original Luclin or PoP expansions, but even back then it was pretty rare. I've never heard of anyone getting suspended for AFK swimming and the like. This guy could be telling the truth, but there are an awful lot of red flags here.

So i got some pictures proving that Dunbar hadn't messaged me at all anytime before the incident.
http://imgur.com/a/ZcQee This is the email i got about the suspension
http://i.imgur.com/mIlbxc8.jpg This is the picture using Gameparse to show all activity with dunbar in it
Like i said it was 33 seconds from the initial tell to suspension, not giving me any time at all to respond to him.

7 days for attacking a pet and not responding to a tell within 30 seconds does seem excessive.

If that was the only thing you were doing, if it were me doing the disciplinary action on a questionable offense, I'd probably have summoned you to confinement/away from the pet and warned you.

Good luck with your account.

7 minutes would be excessive.