Ideal idle time to log out character and leave at account screen?

[jerc]

I just really, really hate talkingto people and waiting for five minutes and it turns out they're AFK so I'm not going to geta response.

This change is actually going to make that situation worse with people who use anti-idle scripts. They weren't necessary before, since there was no auto-logout, and ping was enough to prevent ISP tcp idle timeouts. Now if someone wants to anti-idle, they have to use commands that make their character look non-afk.

I think there either needs to be a way to disable the auto-logout, or make ping prevent it so that anti-idlers will still appear AFK.

[Gorth]

This change is actually going to make that situation worse with people who use anti-idle scripts. They weren't necessary before, since there was no auto-logout, and ping was enough to prevent ISP tcp idle timeouts. Now if someone wants to anti-idle, they have to use commands that make their character look non-afk.

And this will, IIRC, be against policy.

[jerc]

And this will, IIRC, be against policy.

I'm not sure that's ever been made explicit, just that action might be taken if it "becomes a problem." As I understand it, this is intended to be more of a quality of life change than an "idling is illegal" policy change.

Rias said:

If they deliberately prevent being AFKed out, they'll have no excuse when Things Happen to their unresponsive trance selves! Beware the bored GM looking for trouble to cause.

Also though, if it seems like an innocent one-off situation, staff can just force the character back to the account screen. We'll handle consistent or deliberate problematic issue cases individually.

If it's not against policy with the caveat that GM Things Might Happen, I think people at least need a way to deliberately anti-idle in a way that's visible to GMs, but doesn't break the experience for other players by making them never-afk.

Or make it against policy to anti-afk and give us some knobs to tweak the AFK/idle timers to our liking. I doubt there's a one-size-fits-all answer.

[Rias]

Right, characters don't idle out when in bank vaults or inn rooms.

I think a big contributing factor to the feeling that the AFK status is being set too quickly is that it doesn't reset when one starts typing, which is a limitation of MUDs in general. There's no activity presence until one actually sends a command. You might have been quietly observing for a couple minutes, then you start typing up an emote as a response to something that happened but the AFK timer gets set while you're doing that, and it feels annoying because you're clearly active - you're typing right now - but there's no way for the server to know that because no commands have actually been sent. All that said, the AFK auto-set could probably extended a small amount.

For the idle logout, 20 minutes seemed like a good way to prevent things like frostbite and too much chance of creatures wandering in to a less-frequented area or something. Trying to find that sweet spot that's effective but not too annoying. Can I get a little more information on why one would not want to be logged out if they've legitimately been AFK for 20 minutes, aside from bucket-emptying purposes? I've been to events where I've just been an observer and not really participated at all, but I do find myself doing things like looking, checking inventory, using the INFO or WEALTH commands, etc. easily more than once every 20 minutes if I'm actually present and not off in another tab watching YouTube or something.

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.

[Rias]

P.S. The idle logout uses the same timer as the AFK timer, so in order to have a command that prevents idling out but not auto-AFK, we'd have to do some fiddling. Hmmm. And if people set up anti-idle scripts for the sole purpose of frequently being idle in public (most anything other than inn rooms/vaults which are already exempt from idling out) for extended periods, we'd consider that a Not Good Thing. I'm assuming anti-idle scripts would only be utilized on demand, like at events where one is just part of the audience as an observer or something.

[Lexx416]

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.

[Serity]

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."?

Yes, absolutely.

I've been to events where I've just been an observer and not really participated at all, but I do find myself doing things like looking, checking inventory, using the INFO or WEALTH commands, etc. easily more than once every 20 minutes if I'm actually present and not off in another tab watching YouTube or something.

If it's something like a town hall and you don't have any questions, there's really no point to doing any of that (aside from avoiding the idle kick, of course) unless you have a thought come to mind or are just being fidgety. Passively absorbing the conversation is pretty common in my experience, even in normal social situations (often with crowds). ...That being said, the game obviously can't easily distinguish between something like that and other forms of idling unless you want to add a lot of other criteria in - perhaps if there are 4+ players in the room when the idle timer tries to kick you? But that may be getting too messy and perhaps false positives, as well, when it is easy enough to just type a command.

[nobody]

unless you want to add a lot of other criteria in - perhaps if there are 4+ players in the room when the idle timer tries to kick you?

That is exactly the fix I came to propose (though I was going to suggest 5+), it'd work great for events and combined with the warning should be able to handle smaller groups RPing together pretty well.

[Teri]

I think a notice would be neat. My thoughts on that are there are times where I'm not inputting commands but present, and I might not realize how much time passed. My thoughts on auto afk feature are I would like an option to choose between 5 or 10 minutes. I would prefer a 10 minute timer while typing long emotes, but there are times I may have juuust stepped away that the 5 minute timer kicks in a bit sooner to let someone know if they just showed up, that depending on what I'm doing I might prefer both.

[Prism]

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.

I agree with this