I'm pretty sure that they're intentionally vague about these sorts of things, as it would be nearly impossible to write out an official stance for every possible scenario that might come into play here. Just from reading some of the comments here and in other similar threads, I'm rather curious what some players (or any real hard GM) might require for any higher levels camping lower level rares. My high level bard is camping a lower level rare with a 28.5 minute spawn at a set location. The placeholder (or rare) attacks my high level character as soon as it spawns. In game automation features kick in faster than I can possibly react as a human and kill the mob. So what is actually going to be required of any high level characters here? Click off any damage shields? Position characters so that they won't be attacked by any mobs? Dismiss any mercenaries and/or pets? Again, the mob in question here dies in less than a second. Faster than I can react as a human, so there's no real imput from me. Would I be screwed I didn't respond immediately to any tells at any point while my character is at this camp?
It’s 2024 in an about a week. Instead of a broken persona system, can we get auto-forage and auto-fishing. Kinda like auto attack, /autoskill bash, kick etc, /autofire, and the tradeskilling has become automated as part of the EQ game code?
It is why I am not all access on a few of my accounts that I had subbed for years. I would go to some out of the way zone to do progression, partisans, mercenary, missions, hunters, etc and someone would be there max level whizzing around with bard speed and whizzling on my efforts to get stuff done. Now I am able to resub again since the finance problem is gone but I have learned to cope with 2 out of 5 being subbed and I don't feel like I am getting stomped all over and paying for the privilege.
They banned a shitloaf of accounts during a couple years back. Not timed out, permanently banned. They may claim that the do tells or /say to check for afk before bannjng... and maybe they do for stuff like abusing pets or mercs to ask farm, but for automation they do not. That crackdown lead to quite a few canceled alt accounts (and mains, obviously) and may be the reason why they have relaxed again since then. Or maybe the play automation people figured out what automation detection they were using and worked around it. Hard to say. But anecdotally it seemed like for a while after the big ban / suspension waves that stuff had mostly stopped. I wasn't seeing many of the same names afk grinding AAs after raid nights, when I did /whos to check on some folks I had caught in the past they *appeared* to be playing legit. (Or not at all) Without being one of the people either developing automation software or working for DBG all we can do is guess. The "jchann should step down because dbg hasn't solved a problem that blizzard hasn't" comment from upthread seems pretty outta pocket to me. I could see an argument if you're disgruntled that we only got 1/2 an expansion, but for this? Come on.
I report all AFK groups/raids I encounter. They seem to go away after some time. So either they get kicked/suspended/banned or they rebooted their computer.
Have at it, seen so many BOT groups this month since launch right out in the open with no care in the world. I have zero faith this company really cares.
I have personally seen a GM do an AFK check on a group I reported in Shadeweavers Tangle using /say and then kicked them when they didn't respond. They were back at it two weeks later, but it was still pretty cool to see.
Lol, this is obviously a troll post. He is just upset, because someone is farming a spot and he is trying to bring attention to it. Hooked a lot of fish in this one.
Say is the worst. With all the EQ spam, 6 chat windows, 11 hotbars, a combat abilities window, etc...say is relegated to a tiny window and ONLY because quest NPCs use say (well some of them use tell which is weird but would be a nice QoL improvement so I could completely remove /say to spam).
All my friends use macaroni quest, I'm the last one standing. Feeling the same as I do irl being last one I know with no tattoos. Don't want to poo on my friends' fun but also not really interested in adding automation beyond is boxer.
I do wonder if some groups labeled as afk are just bot and not afk. There are alot of people who use various types of software to run 6 toons (you need software assistance to do this at all). So tells to a specific character just get lost. Or ooc is never looked at. So you have a group of 6 run by 1 person that isn't responding, hence called afk.
Not to mention players who have different chat types set to different windows which can cause them to miss things. For some they might not use say very much at all and mostly communicate through guild, group, raid, fellowship, tells, or chat channels.
One solution is to use teleportation if there is no response to tells. If a group is teleported out and still doesnt respond then Id say thats proof positive.
Yeah I think the afk bot thing is overblown. Yes a fair number do it but I really do not think it is anywhere near what some on this thread say (AT LEAST ON THE SERER I PLAY ON). Dont know what other servers are like and I suspect its more common on TLP servers. To say boxed groups are all over the place okay I can buy that. But I think people mistake a lot of boxed groups for afk bots.
How do you teleport another person's group anywhere? Oh wait do you mean the GM teleports them? Like to the GM zone?
I would suspect that they mean a gm summon which can be to someplace in the current zone or another zone that the player has access to.
If you are AFK, they you are not there to interact with the game. You can only complete the current action (fishing, foraging, spellcasting, current maco button...). After that, you can gain hp, mana and endurance. Maybe even advance at meditation, but not much of anything else. To do so requires some way to inject an event while you are gone. That is the violation. I assume even some mechanism to physically poke a key or a programable keyboard counts. However, they cannot tell if you are there not doing anything and actually AFK. Also, if you are there and unresponsive, they cannot even tell if you saw their messaging. They need a better plan than spam and ban. Maybe the game needs to sense the condition and put up a pop-up that needs to be cleared. Until cleared, you get no XP or loot starting with the next engagement. Ah, they would just edit their scripts to do a little dance at some interval defeating the check
Wouldn't 14 accounts be a raid Yes, they are out there botting raids and selling raid loot. Got tens of krono.
