List AFK checks

[Wallicker]

Legacy items should be extremely difficult to obtain, if you wanna do a casual camp and come back after doing laundry or the dishes or whatever pick one of the hundreds of other non list camps... this isn’t complicated. If you want Ruby BP, Guise, Manastone you gotta put in the consecutive man hours OR come up with platinum.

[Videri]

Quick question. Would it work to have the AFK checks only when the mob respawns? Then everyone camping it could just set an alarm to click the AFK check box, and a mob would be there and most people would kill it, then they'd have one respawn period to go about their lives. Why are the AFK checks at randomized intervals again?

[Smellybuttface]

Originally Posted by Videri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Quick question. Would it work to have the AFK checks only when the mob respawns? Then everyone camping it could just set an alarm to click the AFK check box, and a mob would be there and most people would kill it, then they'd have one respawn period to go about their lives. Why are the AFK checks at randomized intervals again?

The thought seems to be that it controls the length of the list since folks are more likely to drop when having to do afk checks every 5-15 mins. This is probably good for everybody. The /list system should not be built around appeasing the more casual player, since the items themselves are of such high value that the Devs wanted to make acquiring them an effort to match that value. If the /lists become much easier, the item itself gets devalued, and people that desire the item more and are willing to work harder for it aren’t incentivized to do so. It just makes the lists significantly longer by lessening their difficulty, so overall time spent by people could very easily be 100-150 hours.

[Videri]

Originally Posted by Smellybuttface [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The thought seems to be that it controls the length of the list since folks are more likely to drop when having to do afk checks every 5-15 mins. This is probably good for everybody. The /list system should not be built around appeasing the more casual player, since the items themselves are of such high value that the Devs wanted to make acquiring them an effort to match that value. If the /lists become much easier, the item itself gets devalued, and people that desire the item more and are willing to work harder for it aren’t incentivized to do so. It just makes the lists significantly longer by lessening their difficulty, so overall time spent by people could very easily be 100-150 hours.

Good points. However, the frequent random AFK checks are not the only thing making the camp difficult; there's also the overall span of time the character must remain at the camp.

The character that's #1 on the manastone list right now has been there for 77 hours. If the typical manastone camp time is approx 60-80 hours, frequency of AFK checks isn't what's separating the wheat from the chaff...it's whether people have multiple days in a row with virtually no commitments, or a dedicated group that takes turns on one character.

Decreasing frequency of AFK checks would make it more comfortable, so perhaps more people would join the list; but most of those people wouldn't stay on the list long enough because most people have jobs or families. Sure, the list would be 5 people longer, but if all 5 drop out after only 36 hours to go to work, they actually don't slow down the other people on the list from getting to #1. They joined and then left before getting to #1. It's as if they never even joined.

The exception would be squads of multiple people (perhaps with jobs/families) taking turns for only a few hours at a time. One wonders whether frequent AFK checks would slow those folks down. Let's imagine an ideal situation where you had 8 people with different daily schedules, each doing 3 hours every single day...3 hours with 6 AFK checks or 3 hours with 27 AFK checks...it's fine either way. They'll do that ez-pz.

I'm still not convinced the variability and high frequency of AFK checks keeps dedicated manastone campers off the list.