SuperSpicyJad wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 6:48 am
Gorth wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 5:58 am
If a player is there for something that requires no interaction, it isn't hard to send heartbeat commands every now and again, if you must.
While that is true, I don't find it to be a good enough reason to disregard looking into a toggle. The point of QoL changes (which I believe the logout-timer is) is to make the user experience more pleasant, and just because you can mediate to a problem by doing something mildly bothersome doesn't make the problem null.
This isn't JUST a Quality of Life change for the player getting kicked - it's a QoL change for people that have to exist in the world with infinite-idlers. It's pretty jarring (and frustrating) when someone infinite-idles in the cold weather, for instance. It frequently turns into a case of "quick, we have to save this person from their own demise", and it puts social pressure on people to interact with someone who
is clearly just AFK.
Probably an unpopular opinion but, I think it
should just be against policy to script around the idle-kicker, and let Inn Rooms bypass the idle-kicker. If you
do want to idle forever without consequence, be somewhere where you can't have an impact on other people. If you have to step away for more than 20 to 30 minutes, log out or go to an inn-room.
Would it help to have a 5-minute notice and 1-minute notice before idling out, saying something along the lines of "You've been idle for X minutes and will be logged out if you remain idle for Y more minutes."? Then you'd know oh, hey, let me just enter INFO or STATUS or something real quick to reset the idle timer. And if you're in the middle of typing something when it comes up and you feel like it's still going to take a bit to finish, you can do the old select-all, cut, enter some other command, paste, continue typing.
I think this, plus increasing the AFK flag to 10 minutes (and the kicker to 20 post that, per Karjus' suggestion) would be a good way to help deal with this.