You can't have your character doing anything while you afk. Best way to skill up stuff like that is to put the hotkey on your hotbar, and then change the key settings so that one of your direction keys will also press that number hotkey. So as you play, every time you press forward it will automatically use the forage hotkey. This is how I boosted my Sense Heading in the old days.
basically if its an action that requires a key press to achieve you need to be present at the keyboard or it is considered unattended game play. I think one of the few things they have said was fine doing afk is swimming. I remember jamming a nickel in my movement keys to swim in the pool in POK many moons ago to raise swimming. I know some people have been known to raise spell casting afk but I don't recall seeing anything mentioned about this. Best rule don't have your toon doing anything other than standing around if you are afk. This is why I frequently just throw a campfire down and use my stein or anchor if I know I am going to be gone for more than a minute or two. No risk of even a mob some how pathing by me and afk killing it by accident.
Report the people that are doing so. Hopefully they suspend those people. I'd be bloody rich if I could automate my toon to forage all night.
With the amount of autobotting going on, this can only be a bad joke. Peeps seemingly working shifts attending their bot teams 24/7 digging Kronos for the company, lol. With that in mind - if you give me evidence someone was banned or even just suspended for sitting in a corner auto-foraging, I will immediately quit EQ. Promised.
So we going to start reporting people for standing around? Good times for EQ there. Reason for report "standing around looking suspicious...possible afk foraging". This is rather petty in the grand scheme of EQ. Sure ill grant its AFK play but talk about game breaking. Can we fix the raid lag? How about load and zone times? Plenty of other things need attention, but lets go after some dirty player possibly AFK Foraging.
They could add a "forage"-emote in a future patch, that other players could see and use to detect this. Probably wouldn't be hard to implement, It probably wouldn't get top-priority either though.
Would be handy if Roxx could chime in on the swimming thing as I could do with getting my toons to a decent level. If we press numlock, point at the seabed and leave the PC, is that allowed? We were there for the keypress...
Bigger question is... how would you prove or even find out someone is marcoing FORAGING of all things Roxxlyy? lol I can understand catching the afk people attacking a pet(which honestly is a stupid thing to suspend people over.. Its not like they doing something harmful) but foraging? lol
You cant selectively enforce rules for unattended game play, the moment they do that there is no point in having rules. So they should enforce afk foraging to the same degree as afk combat/botting.
Thats easy and they have had those tools forever, even before Sklugs big detection tools he made. They can see everything you do, say, press, private or public in the game file server side. The detection tools can check and if a character has not moved in X time and depressed a key at the exact same interval hundreds of times in a row. they are AFK macroing beyond the shadow of doubt. If you have ever setup or managed a server at EQEmu where P99 is you have seen the detection file that records everything and has been in the game since probably the beginning, that they can be scanned.
True, I would probably filter it away too, but if someone wants to be afk-police then it is better than guessing.
I'm of the opinion that using a macro for a mundane purpose such as leveling casting skills, fishing or foraging adversely affects no other players. Nobody wants to be taken advantage of by the disgusting bazaar leeches. If one uses a macro and stares at the screen all night - saving stress on the keyboard/mouse not to mention important things like your hands and wrists - that's extremely dull "gameplay" but not unattended unless the player happens to fall asleep. If you're using a 3rd party tool to engage in unattended combat - where your cleric automatically casts heals, your tank and melee dps automatically stick to the mob like glue, where you're sending automated AFK check tells, where you're gaining gobs of experience and loot and disrupting a zone for days or weeks at a time...that's where most reasonable people would draw the line.
What's next ? Getting banned for the autorun into a corner trick for skilling up swimming ? How about bards singing in the lobby getting skillups ? How about standing in a low level camp (grey mobs) with a tank merc and a cleric merc ? Does not involve any 3rd party tools, does not involve any keys being pressed while not at the keyboard. So, does not break any rules, right ? Just thought of another example if you want to get really stupid. AFK tradeskilling! Is using 'make all' a bannable offense ? It's your character doing something while you are , potentially, afk.
