Away from keyboard (AFK)

Imagine a situation where you are in a group of rebels getting ready to ambush an imperial moff. You’ve tracked his ship to corellia where you are about to jump in and take him down. You pop the hatch and everyone piles in to find….he’s afk. Now there’s nothing wrong with him being afk. We all need to use it from time to time. The problem with afk is that we all have to treat the afk player as if they are invisible/immortal. We can’t rp with them, attack them, steal from them, or even acknowledge their existence. The problem with this is that the afk player CAN acknowledge that they were in the room at the time and saw a group of people come through their ship hatch with weapons drawn. Now your quiet operation that would have ended with the moff in custody and nobody the wiser to who the rebels are turns into a situation where the whole empire now has your people branded as ship thieves and rebels and are diligently hunting you down. My point to all this is, afk should be a two way street. If you don’t exist to me when we are in the same room, I shouldn’t exist to you. It’s easy to enforce any breaches of afk knowledge with logs. If player A claims his reason for perming player B was because he saw him take out player C, then player B can show the log from the murder where Player A is statued out with an afk flag, having never actually participated in the moment.

I am totally and 100% on board with the AFK flag gagging literally everything from the IC world or information gained while AFK being completely illegal to use IC.

100% agree. AFK should allow three things, and three things only:

Commnet Traffic
Clan Traffic
OOC

100% of the time in your hypothetical situation imms will then allow you to capture said AFK flagged player.

Most of what you said is totally false anyway. Off the top of my head you can look at, emote at, lookup, diagnose, first aid, dub, track, approach, and true examine an AFK player in addition to seeing that they’re in that place be it in person or on monitor camera. You used to be able to grab and give things to AFK players too like here you go buddy here’s a thing we were literally just talking about me giving you but you had to run because your kitchen is on fire but I don’t know if you can still grab them and give them things. You can group them if they’re following you too. There’s just so many ways you CAN interact with AFK flagged players that your entire spiel is based on the wrong premise.

All that being said, if you do magically know all kinds of things from when you were AFK or make up some IC bullshit about “your armor has a recording device” or anything stupid like that you’re just a shitty player and I hate you.

If I could verify through logs the AFK had broken Rule 6 or help quit, that’s the only time I’d “allow you to capture said afk player.”

If not, he’s protected by AFK and that’s it. You wouldn’t catch an imm handing over squat.

Sure, people meta that stuff they learned while afk, and maybe it needs looked at. But as far as metagaming, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Neven.

Really, I’d be alright with absolutely everything gagged in AFK. If you are AFK, you shouldn’t be privy to anything that goes on IC. Gag it all. Let them have their OOC.

It’s not like it really matters whether you gag everything while AFK or nothing. Really, all you are doing is allowing a certain select group of people to play the metagame and you really have to ask if the amount of times something like this has ACTUALLY happened really worth taking away people’s ability to stay caught up on shit. Not everyone on this game has a reliable IC or OOC source for keeping up on IC happenings.

Edit: Now let me emphasize that I am not against gagging stuff that happens in front of you. I am against gagging everything period. It won’t matter in the end because there will always be those certain people who will find a way to game the system anyway.

I don’t care about the whole capture scenario painted here. My argument is this: Every day, we(as players), get on, and most of us take time to check our backscroll to see what has happened since the last time we played. We all, for the most part, do it. With the exception of a crash, you get all the information in game that can be received with absolutely 0 risk. So my issue is this: Why should you be able to be tapped into the system, but not have any risk doing so. If you gag everything, you either a)unafk and have to ask around to find out what happened or b) sit, unafk, and be open to all the information and all the risk involved with being unafk. In my eyes, that’s a fair trade off.

I don’t care about the whole capture scenario painted here. My argument is this: Every day, we(as players), get on, and most of us take time to check our backscroll to see what has happened since the last time we played. We all, for the most part, do it. With the exception of a crash, you get all the information in game that can be received with absolutely 0 risk. So my issue is this: Why should you be able to be tapped into the system, but not have any risk doing so. If you gag everything, you either a)unafk and have to ask around to find out what happened or b) sit, unafk, and be open to all the information and all the risk involved with being unafk. In my eyes, that’s a fair trade off.

1) There are many of us who are busy people and don’t have the time to be unafk all the time.

2) As I stated before, some of us don’t have a reliable way to catch up on what has happened whether ICly or OOCly, and even still with being able to see the backscroll, there are quite a few who STILL ask about anything that has happened.

3) Because the only reason this got brought up in the first place was because of PvP scenarios which have likely only happened every so often, been blown way out of proportion, and could have likely been avoided altogether.

Why is catching up on things by RPing with people not an option?

Kirash you are missing the whole point here. There’s no reason you should know absolutely everything that went down while you were AFK. None. You literally collect information with no risk to yourself. My whole argument behind gagging while AFK is so you don’t gain information while immune to the galaxy. If you want to be omniscient, then you should have to leave yourself vulnerable. Otherwise, as Zeromus said, go RP and find out what’s been going down.

No. No, I am actually not missing the whole point. I read you guys super loud and clear.

However, if you believe that just being able to keep an ear on your comm channels makes you omniscient, then you are sorely mistaken. It is similar to believing that just because one person thinks something is right, everyone believes it.

@Zeromus: I do not really speak for myself because tbh, I find most of the comm drivel to be sophmoric at best and I do have people I can RP with for info. That does not mean that everyone does. There are a few people who come around late night who may not have someone who can tell them what’s gone on.

I still believe you all are blowing this issue up to be greater than it is. This is no game-breaking issue. However, I realize that I am in the minority here and that this is not a democracy. So if the Admin feel it is necessary to gut it out, there’s little I can say otherwise.

My only problem with this is that sometimes I need to go pee. So I miss like all of maybe two to three minutes of IC trolling on the zero. I normally scroll back and reply as if I was there the whole time, because I should not be penalized for taking a poo and a few minutes ain’t no big deal. Gagging it all would mean that should I go piss then I might as well log off and then come back later.

Of course I do understand that in some cases like PK that the AFKing can be abusive, but I thought that is what Rule 6 was about and so it is covered. Now you launching a surprise attack on someone who has been AFK for a few is just bad luck. It happens, deal with it and wait a few minutes until they come back.

What I would support though is an auto log off to prevent people from going AFK for like several hours. That I could totally get. If your AFK then be AFK for a short time, if your gone or if something takes longer than expected then I don’t think being forced off line is all that bad of a deal.

@illyduss: The game already disconnects you if you are idle for too long. However, having a save timer is legal and resets the idle timeout, which is what most people do to keep from idling out.

@Kirash: no, you are absolutely in tune with my own thoughts on this. The amount of people/scenarios where AFK ISN’T metagamed vastly outweighs the amount where it is. Not going to be removing global channels from AFK characters any time soon, the only argument I see here is the potential for local/in-room issues.