Quitting

I am reminded of the maxim: It's better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

I wouldn't bother posting on the forums about it. For some reason the forum community turns into white knights here and believe in guilty until proven innocent no matter how many screw-ups Darkpaw has been guilty of. Maybe because they themselves cheat to no end, maybe it's mob mentality of the white knight but either way nothing good will come of threads like these, innocent or guilty.

When they post only things that make them look good and daybreak look bad such as just claiming to be suspended what do you think people are going to think?

Some are imagining the OP wrote something else.

Read what was actually written. No screenshot of the suspension email. No words stating, “I did not receive a reason.” No candid details: unaware, I may have set my boxes on aggroable spawn points and let my pets AFK kill for plat or slayer. Instead, the OP consciously decides and devotes time to write about his economic impact. His post is not really a convincing defense.

He was playing his main and he was actively playing all 3 boxes. The playing of the main is implied so only the playing of the 3 toons that would have been AFK was stated. You are bad at inductive reasoning in math word problems.

Also, pretty sure there is no rule against having a toon AFK that is not involved in actions.

AFK letting Mercs and Pets kill = not allowed
Taking a poo while your group continues killing = allowed
Letting a merc and pet kill while you chat in tells with friends = allowed

So even if he had 4 toons, playing 3, and the 4th was a bard in his group doing /melody, it's not against the rule. He's not AFK on the bard, he's just not doing much with it.

I have had 7 accounts logged in at a time, but I only play 3. My FTP druid just stands in a corner and I zephy myself when I want. If the act of being AFK is not allowed they should plow through the GL with bans.

Also that druid also doesn't do anything when it's with me to level up for the next Zephy. A Power Level is not against the rules either. Neither is keeping that druid there doing absolutely nothing until I decide to Evac. I'm not "playing" the druid, but it's not "AFK gameplay". None of this is against the rules.

So you guys are acting like theres some gotcha with this "playing 3" but there are SO MANY ways that having 4 toons logged in while playing 3 is NOT against the rules...

In fairness, the OP is assuming the suspension was related to a specific time frame or play session.

He could have been AFK killing (unaware or aware of the rule) at another point. He could have set his one or more of his boxes on an aggroable spawn point and let pets/mercs do the work. Many people are unaware that AFK killing for slayer (setting boxes to aggro in Sanctus Seru) can earn you a suspension.

In fairness, these could trigger false positives and/or be considered violations. GMs don’t have access to your Ring cameras. A 15 minute toilet break while pets/mercs AFK kill can get you in trouble. A 30 minute store run while pets/mercs AFK kill can get you in trouble. Watching Netflix or “talking to friends” for 30 minutes while the pets/mercs AFK kill can lead to a false positive.

Don’t let your mercs/pets kill if you need to do something else. GMs are not mind readers and they do not have panopticon powers. Finish the kill and go to a safe spot.

In fairness the check in the problem. The reports from players is that the GM is checking to see if they respond in say. I barely pay attention to say and completely ignore it while boxing. I pay absolutely 0 attention to it on my boxes.

While I have not had this issue, I have some level of sympathy to people who do. I box ENC, CLR, MAG. I do everything on my ENC. My mage and CLR stand in one spot. My warrior mer tanks. My CLR merc does a lot of healing. My mage can DPS with /assist Vumad /pet attack and a hotkey that does 5 nukes in a row with pauses. My cleric can heal off a few /tar Vumad /cast heal hotkeys. I literally never have to move my CLR or my MAG and I literally never have to look at their screen. If a GM popped in and said in /say are you AFK, I would never see it. I'm not filtered to see it. Heck, I could even miss a tell on my 2 boxes using tell windows, not because I am cheating, but rather because the game is designed in a way that I don't even need a monitor to box a caster.

I’ve heard of this rumor (supposed chain of events) for awhile now. Not to be a jerk, but it’s a rumor until someone can actually document the event.

Have you been falsely suspended yourself? I’m inclined to believe established players (like you) but not some ‘New Member’ on the forum (which is the overwhelming majority of cases).

Yes, I’ve heard of mass suspensions. But not directly attributed to missing GM messages.

Are people operating under the assumption that GMs are actively patrolling like some sort of Mall Cop? Somebody reported the OP and automatic report systems are easily abused.

To play an old, low budget MMO like EQ you kind of have to accept that the enforcement is as low budget and disorganized as the rest of the game. People who box groups especially. I've never had any action taken against my account ( been banned from these forums a few times though!), But I'm one dumb player reporting me and one ignorant GM acting on the report away from getting suspended ingame.

I've just accepted that if it happens I'll have to go to war against these clowns that let bots run 24/7 to get my record cleared. You can't even just take a false suspension or warning on the chin because the next time you get falsely accused you'll be a "repeat offender" and get permabanned. Cost of doing business as it were.

I don't know what I'd do if a GM plays games with me, probably escalate until I'm sending cakes from Elite Baking with "#freetuco" and good, bad and the ugly memes on them to 13500 Evening Creek Dr N, San Diego, CA 92128. I can definitely see a player already disgruntled with the game not wanting to go through that, throwing up his hands and ragequitting on the forums. So whether OP is telling the truth is irrelevant to whether it happens.

Which part do you think is a rumor? The /say check? That's not a rumor lol.

In all fairness they claimed to be playing 3 accounts not 4 accounts. Also in all fairness they didn't say why they got suspended the question was about why claiming to be playing all 3 accounts when you just claimed to have 4 accounts logged in.

As for being afk I am pretty sure if you are afk in a full group you can still get busted for afk play even if the other 5 players are active.

We are one dumb pilot away from an airplane crash or one dumb doctor away from injury or death.

That’s with everything in life.

i hope they not just going near the player they think they are cheating and just /say , i got audio triggers for tell , that i should hear ,

GM's could use a big illusion that we can't miss on top of us , if we fail the /say ,,,/tell and that big illusion we might be in trouble.

The chain of events taken in total.

They could have also been suspended for something that is easily verifiable and we are unlikely to find out as they don't seem to want to provide more information and just make claims that this will hurt daybreak.

Too much speculation and suppostion going on.

All the OP did was post an "up yours" at Darkpaw.

The thing a lot of people in this thread are just not getting, is that the rule is the problem, and the enforcement of the rule is also a problem.

But before I get into that:

Dismissing someone because they don't post a screenshot of the email or support ticket is amusing. If they do that, the post would get nuked, and it's also too easily faked anyway. You're just going to dismiss it as not being real.

Here is an example from my personal experience with the topic. I was suspended right before Kunark, for doing the following:

I was farming the 3 named in permafrost right mostly using my pet and an occasional lifetap. I was in the middle of a project so this was an easy camp. If I knew I was going to be afk for just a really brief period of time to grab water or something, I would just simply feign death. If I knew I was going to be afk for more than a couple of minutes, I would kill my pet and feign death.

Earlier that morning, some person who I did not know asked me if I would send them a tell when I was done with the camp. I said no. I said no because I was being honest, I was not going to keep track of that person and I also did not want to have them keep sending me tells "are you still in perma?" because that's my perogative.

About 20-30 minutes later, my phone rang, so I killed my pet and feigned.

I was feigned (and for the 20th time, I killed my pet before I answered the phone) near where mobs could spawn, but when you are feigned, you can do nothing.
I did notice some gnome wearing a green silken drape poking around, skating around the edge of the room, at the time I thought they were some low level person trying to check if things were see invis or not. I thought nothing of it, and just continued my phone call and my focus was largely on my second monitor. Unknown to me solely because I did not have an audio trigger for it and the "You have been summoned" text appears in a spam window, and there was no hail, no say, no tell, no ooc, no shout, no auction, nothing...just the summon. My call ended a couple of minutes later

So when my call ended, came the "check". What the check is, is whether or not you move back to your camp. I was summoned about 10 units away from where I feigned, barely enough to even really be noticeable. Small enough of a distance for me to not even think about it, I literally just forgot where I had feigned and took a couple steps back to the rock and was instantly disconnected and got the spam email.

I learned from talking with the people in my guild that since I didn't immediately start talking to the gm when I got summoned, that I was screwed no matter what I would have done.

The funny thing is, the amount of time from when I killed my pet, feigned, got summoned by the gm, and came back to the game was so short of a time that the mobs had not even respawned yet. So not only did I perform no action of any kind while I was looking at my second monitor, it would not have even been possible for me to do so. I moved when I came back to the keyboard.

Here is the rule:

https://help.daybreakgames.com/hc/e...y-on-AFK-or-Unattended-Gameplay-in-EverQuest-

It is not permitted for an account to be played unattended or AFK.
If you need to be away from your PC for longer than a few seconds please move your character to an empty corner of the zone or log out completely.
If a character, including any pets or mercs, is found performing actions while the user is away disciplinary action will be taken against the account.
Disciplinary action for unattended or AFK gameplay can include, but is not limited to; account warning, account suspension, and account termination (ban).


Notice there is nothing in that rule that says WHERE you are afk. I was told that a player is required to respond when they have a gm "interacting" with them. What did the gm do when I was there? Nothing, except summoning me. Not a damn thing. Again, there was no message in say, tell, shout, ooc, auction. NOTHING.

Later on in Kunark, I was trying to get warlord skargus in open world. On one occasion I came to the camp and there was a shaman standing in the middle of the room. You know the story. No buffs on the shaman or the pet, and all the mobs in the room were dead. Classic afk pet killing of course. Most likely just had an audio trigger set up for "angry goblin" or something like that.

I hung out there in the cave for a while, killing the other goblins in the other rooms out of boredom, and also started killing the goblins that respawned in that room out of the same boredom. No movement or change from that shaman of any kind, even when I killed the trash mobs in the room for about an hour.

So yes, I put in a petition ticket, describing what I saw, what the room was, and some screenshots with timestamps.

2 or 3 minutes after I submitted the petition, the person disappeared out of the game. No linkdead, no camp, nothing.

About 15 minutes later they logged back in, used some /emote on me (I think it was something like /rude) and then they left.

Now I don't know what happened with that person, maybe my petition wasn't read. Maybe it was read and they booted them offline or maybe the person just came back to the keyboard saw that I was there and left because I was there. I don't know. But it certainly felt inconsistent to me.


TLDR: They really expect you to camp out of the game if you are afk for more than a few seconds. That rule is problem number #1. The illogical and inconsistent enforcement of it is problem number #2. As I wrote to them in my response to their seemingly auto-generated mail, it would be extremely common for people to play for 12-24 hours in one session when kunark launches to grind experience.

How many of them camped out of the game every time they had to go to the bathroom or grab a snack?

Are you decribing an event from like 2003 or TLP Kunark?

TLP enforcement is stricter with the "mall cop" GM analogy.

For all we know they got banned for disruptive gameplay such as training other players. The point is they didn't bother to even include the reasons for the suspension which is something that they can do without posting the content of the suspension email. All they did was make a post saying that they got suspended while playing 4 accounts and now daybreak was going to lose the money from 6 subscriptions and 6 expansion purchases.

If someone wants support they should at least include some basic details and not just post how their quitting is going to hurt daybreak.