Idea 1:
A setting similar to transparent exits and auto sweepers, where you can toggle a room to sweep anyone who has been AFK for X amount of hours.
Idea 2:
An update to the UI that shows a room’s/ area’s active user total and the room/area’s inactive/AFK total
With the changes to the town center, it has brought up an issue I have seen and myself taken issue with.
Excessive idling or loitering.
It seems prudent for the site to have an auto-moderation function that could be integrated into a room’s settings to sweep characters who have been AFK for excessive amounts of time and return them to their home room.
To avoid this, a user simply needs to be active. And to define active, it simply means they need to do any action that would pull them out of an AFK state for a period of time to indicate that they are, in fact, online.
Pros: Reduced clutter in rooms. Privacy and peace of mind. Hopefully, there will be better population retention.
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There have been issues with the clutter of the main landing areas, having a plethora of users who are sat idle in rooms. These hubs are typically the first things players see, and if most players are just there, silent and inactive, it can be discouraging. And to a lesser extent, all public rooms. For example. I do not go to the sacred valley as in a “boy who cried wolf” scenario; I do not believe the population is ever active or is as populated as the population leads me to believe.
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Privacy has been a concern of mine many times. I have also seen it expressed that, while yes, you are in a public room, it is uncomfortable to have characters simply sitting and logging in a room for long periods of time.
Cons: the system is easily dogged. And it would target non-malicious users.
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It has been pointed out by a pair already that it would take a simple script to combat this system and wake up and AFK a character to bypass the system. This is a legitimate issue, but to avoid going overboard, the solution to proof of life should not be a demand on the part of the player to meet an excessive engagement benchmark. However, this might warrant a change to the ToS to enable the moderation team to take action and sweep characters they believe are using Scripts/Bots to idle excessively in rooms.
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As said above, the auto sweep should just be a simple sweep to the character’s main homeroom, allowing an easy solution if a user returns. They simply just have to re-enter the world at large. No invasive bans, kicks or anything of the sort. The system should just incentivize activity and discourage any disruptive inactivity.
And if this is not agreeable. It was proposed by others that another feature could be used to either supplement this or instead this.
The site already displays who is in rooms and areas, as well as those who are in rooms they can not access. It might be nice to have a statistic that displays the population, as well as the populations of active and/or inactive users.
It would help lead players to where the true activity and lend clarity to when areas or rooms are being stacked with excessive characters to just bump population numbers.
I already know this is going to be polarizing, but hey, the point of this is to get a discussion going and to see what the community thinks, so let’s hear it.
