Away indication

[Cyl]

again such an one way discussion.

Personally I dont think that logging out is that bad, but maybe it depends on the fact that I am sitting behind ADSL, and just have to wait a minute while logging in.

@ Grono, erm Kiva: 3.You probably just could let the Chessboard where it is

[SeiferRune]

Well I personally think your name changing colour would be a great way.. because lets face it, RL you are called off to do something that may only take a minute and it is rediculous to sign out just for that. Of course laying down or sitting is a great way to compliment this, what about lets say blue name for OOC? Then you can differ those who are there to RP and those who are there to powerlevel.

wait okay going a little off topic.. but I think that RP  should be taken to a new level, it is not required but maybe it should be.

We need to set some rules for RP and OOC.. wait I will post a topic in general to go into full detail.. check there.

[Cyl]

What about X\'s guide to RPing here in Hydlaa?

[Lordbug]

Or people could just be let to die if they\'re silly enough to afk near monster spawns.

OMG!!! My kitchen is one fire!!! Oh wait I need to put my char away from this Ulber...

a visual indication of the model ingame. This is especially important for random encounters which you wish to talk to in normal chat, which sould be the prefered way anyway.
This couls be done by simply having the player go translucent like the inactive windows, but should in the end be designated by the player model doing something special, like sitting down with eyes closed or something like this.

Or simply a diferent label color like er... purple

Anyway I think it\'s a good idea Seytra


EDIT: This away thingy (you know not be attacked, pickpocked, blablabla) shouldn\'t let us move too or some people would exploit it.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Lordbug
Or simply a diferent label color like er... purple

I fear this would too easily be confused with GM colors, especially since there already is some reddish colur.

Originally posted by Lordbug
Anyway I think it\'s a good idea Seytra

EDIT: This away thingy (you know not be attacked, pickpocked, blablabla) shouldn\'t let us move too or some people would exploit it.

Yep. Either you\'re protected and can\'t do anything, or you\'re able to do things, but no protection. I, however, still think that a mixed approach would work best:

Originally posted by Seytra
a player who is AFK and doesn\'t perform any actions (to prevent abuse of AFK) won\'t be attacked by new monsters (attacks that have been going on before would continue just normally, also to prevent AFK abuse)

Clarification of my indeed cryptic sentence:
This would give the decision to the player: if you set /away, but move or do anything afterwards, your protection is voided until you revoke and reenable /away.
Also, if you are being chased by a MOB, setting /away won\'t stop it. This is necessary because otherwise people would /away heal. MOBs that weren\'t attacking you when you set /away wouldn\'t do so until you remove /away or perform any action.
If someone manages to get loads of MOBs to surround you while /away, that\'d still not be a real problem since you\'ll see it before removing /away and then can run, as long as MOBs aren\'t running themselves (which I think they should).

@ SeiferRune: This might work if the system would default to OOC, because it\'ll be the people who RP who will turn on RP mode, while the clueless / OOC  chatters won\'t bother just as they don\'t bother prefixing their talk with OOC: or any other indication now.
Sadly, such a default would be misleading in it\'s percieved message: it looks like encouraging OOC talk while in fact it\'s supposed to do the opposite.

Edit: speaking of encouraging unnecessary idling: the wall of shame does just that by ranking the top five longest logged in players. Well, mostly an invitation to log in before going to bed. :\\

[Kaseijin]

There should be two levels of away from keyboard...
first would be for cases when you are at the computer but doing something else, you\'re on the phone or something. This would be solved perfectly by Zan\'s suggestion with zzzZZZz\'s
The second would be more long term thing for periods going over 5 minutes. Now in this case shutting down the game would be perfectly legal solution but it would be great if you could diconnect from the server without shutting down the whole game. Ideally it would be great if you could disconnect from server but keep the game running with your location and map cached locally... so you when you come back you just click on the back button and you recconnect to the server wihtout having to reload the map or whatever. This is i imagine very hard to implement, so i suggest another simpler solution. Having a choice of quitting the game or going back to the character selection menu, it saves time. Often i want to switch characters, i have to quit the game(unloading of the game takes about 2-3 mins on my comp) and then load the game again (from icon click to character selection another 2-3 mins).

I don\'t think you should be immune while afk...you would have people using this as turtling technique... a mage casts heal on the party, uses up all his mana goes into afk mode until the battle\'s over....a big no-no

[jorrit]

Originally posted by Kaseijin
I don\'t think you should be immune while afk...you would have people using this as turtling technique... a mage casts heal on the party, uses up all his mana goes into afk mode until the battle\'s over....a big no-no

On the other hand one can also misuse that right now by simply quitting and entering the game again later.

Greetings,

[Kaseijin]

true but as i said quitting and reloggin takes time, 4 minutes min on my comp...that does not make a valid strategy and with immutinty you would have this

cast heal
/afk
*wait for someone in you party to get damaged critcally*
/back
cast heal
/afk
rinse and repeat

----
i still have trouble making a diffence between tactic and strategy...the above might be a battle tactic not a strategy...

[jorrit]

Originally posted by Kaseijin
true but as i said quitting and reloggin takes time, 4 minutes min on my comp...that does not make a valid strategy and with immutinty you would have this

cast heal
/afk
*wait for someone in you party to get damaged critcally*
/back
cast heal
/afk
rinse and repeat

You could slightly avoid this kind of misuse by making the afk have some small penalty. Like a delay after coming back before you can do something.


Greetings,

[Kaseijin]

that would solve the above tactic but here is another exaple of passive afk-ing

in guild wars

you could have afk look outs. you strategically locate a couple of you low level guild member around your base/meeting place these afk lookouts could see the enemy approaching... warn their base, however the enemy could not eliminate them as they are immune. I am sure there are couple of more abuses of immune afk that I can\'t think of.

i say this...in afk you shouldn\'t be immune but you should be able to heal. As afk should be masked as sleeping from rp perspective. What if you get attacked while in afk mode...well you could set it that your character defends itself by going into full defensive pose.

[jorrit]

Originally posted by Kaseijin
that would solve the above tactic but here is another exaple of passive afk-ing

in guild wars

you could have afk look outs. you strategically locate a couple of you low level guild member around your base/meeting place these afk lookouts could see the enemy approaching... warn their base, however the enemy could not eliminate them as they are immune. I am sure there are couple of more abuses of immune afk that I can\'t think of.

That\'s easy to solve. While you are afk you can of course not see what is happening either. i.e. your client would go to a kind of \'pause\' screen. So there is no way to see who is coming or not.

Greetings,

[Kaseijin]

ok then you should implement the following as well...the creatures should diffrentiate between afk players and non-afk players....to prevent any baiting techniques...where you would send a player into a horde of monsters...when attacked the player goes in afk...other members of the group attack the monster which are now conctrated on killing an immune afk player. If monster focus on the other player that player goes into a afk, send PM to the previously afk bait that he is no logger the focus of their attention, he goes out afk (delay or no delay he will be back in time, unless the delay is something like 1 minute which would make the afk command useless)

My point is....when implementing an immune afk-ing there are  too many things to consider.

[DivineLight]

Good idea but it requires good amount of code, i implemented a back button in Char Selection menu but it didn\'t get implemented.
Better try posting it in bugtracker.

[Zan]

Implementing an immune AFK isn\'t quite that hard to create I don\'t think.

Jorrit put it perfectly .. going on AFK should just lift your character out of the game for that period. That means it can\'t do anything anymore .. it can\'t move, can\'t look around, can\'t regenerate, can\'t attack or be attacked .. it would be a NPC basically.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Zan
Implementing an immune AFK isn\'t quite that hard to create I don\'t think.

Jorrit put it perfectly .. going on AFK should just lift your character out of the game for that period. That means it can\'t do anything anymore .. it can\'t move, can\'t look around, can\'t regenerate, can\'t attack or be attacked .. it would be a NPC basically.

However that would encourage /away fleeing. Now you\'d have to log out for this, but most MMORPGs have a forced waiting period of 20 seconds to prevent this. So this could be used for /away immunity kicking in: you\'d basicly give up control of the char immediately, but the immunity won\'t kick in for 20 seconds. That should be enough to prevent afk fleeing.

However, I stuill think any attack that a MOB started on a player before going AFK should not be subject to AFK immunity at all; only MOBs that didn\'t attack the player before AFK would not attack while tha player is AFK.

If the player is lifted out of the game, it must of course be invisible ingame as well, because otherwise you\'d be in for unpleasant surprises if people drag MOBs to your position while you are AFK and unable to notice it.