I definitely agree there's a fine line, but "passive play" and "AFK play" are still different, "passive play" has always been around and was necessary because of over populated servers and long recovery times early in the game's history. "AFK play" has always been around but seems to have gotten worse when they did the pet melee damage revamp awhile back that seemed to make many of the pets OP. I like playing mage, but if it were technically feasible, I'd like to see the mage pets super nerfed in during the old expansions in TLPs. Pet's use to be weaker & more costly in that you'd also lose them if you zoned or went invis (I think?), making gearing much more expensive. To digress, people use mages & necros because that's the easiest way to passively farm while you're at your computer doing other stuff. In that setup, there is no third party automation needed, it's mostly the pets clobbering whatever you're farming. And it's still technically legit *if you're at your computer*, again I know there are people that try to AFK farm with this setup, and it seems like DPG is cracking down on this. But, the number of people are responsive (from my experience) or don't get kicked by GM's is indicative that many people are engaging in "passive play" instead of "AFK play". I'm not saying there aren't botters or that botters aren't an issue, they are. But botters are a totally different issue that DBG & most developers struggle to keep up with. You don't need bots to farm plat from giants, you just need a mage or necro with pets. Now, if "passive play", particularly with pet classes is getting abusively utilized to the extreme, then DBG could resort to nerfing our pets with some form handicap like a cool down timer or stamina bar that reduces the recovery time of the pet so it's not in most encounters. However, the backlash from the pet class communities would be HUGE. Maybe another option would be a "recall timer" where if a pet's owner hasn't moved enough in a 2 minute period, the pet temporarily "poofs" until they become active again or even permanently dies. (That feels a little fair or reasonable, at least in older content because again, the pets poofed away when you just zoned...) I kind of wish the DBG could incorporate some form of in game camp waiting list system similar to what the P1999 non-profit project is doing. That would mitigate a lot of these problems.
As far as passive pet farming (or merc farming in later game) the best solution in my mind would be for there to be no loot if the player has done no actions, similar to how a DS will generate no xp for a player if it does soley to the ds, if a pet/merc does 100% of the work then no loot. This doesnt nerf active players at all, doesnt penalize a person who goes afk for 3 minutes (your 2 minute pet poof solution). As it stands, you can use 3rd party apps to see where all the mobs are, warp, play completely for you ,etc etc and barely get noticed but if you do absolutely nothing besides walk away from the keys and let the mechanics put in place by the devs (pet aggros anything that aggros you and kills it) you can get suspended/banned.
I agree with your stance and I believe that we both have the same concerns for pet classes... However, the reason why these players use them are not the pets - its for the near guaranteed kill credit with DoT ticks and burst damage. No 2 classes in the game can exploit kill credit better than Necro/Necro.
