AFK and/or inactive light?

[lordloocan]

At present we either have a green light to show a player is on-line or no light at all when they log off.
Would it be feasible to have an orange light to indicate a player is afk or have gone inactive?
A player could select AFK when heading off for a bit but staying logged on and, if they haven't selected that, it could also go orange if there is no activity on the account for a given period - 30mins/an hour?? That way we would know a player has not logged off but is still unavailable.
Thoughts?

[sparkz]

Depends on how much weight they put on the client side in Unity version.

If its server side, then the status updates would require constant polling from the server to the client to see if client is active, which means extra work the server would have to do.

If its client side, there shouldnt be much issues with extending what is already present ( since client sends a status update to the server upon logging in anyway).

I dont see much use for it, but wouldnt mind it otherwise.

[Qualan]

afk is useful toggle in many cases as in guild it is great to know who is available and who not for trades/quests and lootspots and many have game in background open while not looking at it for extended periods of time

[zygotes]

I think this would be a useful feature.

[joeonthego]

Also be handy to see if someone has gone afk on coops, lootspots etc.

[Qualan]

Erm, they usually don;t bother telling us they go afk, they just ninja and leave u hanging and come back 2 hours later saying the neighbour came to borrow some salt :P

[HunyBun]

and that's why I hate co-ops!

[JohnRo79]

there's whisper, adventure chat, chat and the green light.

oh well, why not ask for one more thing to only find out a player is not available. great

[TarsanM]

At present we either have a green light to show a player is on-line or no light at all when they log off.
Would it be feasible to have an orange light to indicate a player is afk or have gone inactive?
A player could select AFK when heading off for a bit but staying logged on and, if they haven't selected that, it could also go orange if there is no activity on the account for a given period - 30mins/an hour?? That way we would know a player has not logged off but is still unavailable.
Thoughts?

Sounds like a good idea at first glance. I wished I had something like that before. Something similar works well for me for example on Skype. The problem here is, that due to the nature of the game, where many just come and go, send some personnel and leave, such signaling would hardly have much real value and certainly no reliability. Maybe if the off-to-yellow timing was set in seconds or 1-2 minutes maximum. Then it would provide some real time info as to how the player is active or not. Anything in the realm of 30 mins and such says nothing more then that the player has been in within the last 30 mins, while currently might be eating, fishing, arguing with their spouse, calling their mental health advisor or anything else - and we would not know. :) But then again, if you log in and see full list of yellow lights instead of green, some general information value has been certainly achieved even with 30 mins and higher off-timer. So while this would reliably signal dead guild, green lights would still have little info value other than mentioned above.

[vigabrand]

i think i suggested something similar years ago, so a big thumbs up from me

[DorotheusII]

Kudos for trying to fix two separate problems with a single fix, but there is no all in one solution. The fist problem is human decency, if they can't be bothered to tell you they are going AFK they are not going to click a button to indicate that to all guild mates/friends. The second problem is having a players attention called away from the game, this is the only problem the dev's can do something about. This problem can be broken down into two parts, how long and what to do about it. The how long bit is dependant on the situation. The what to do about it does us no good if it's only telling us what we already know without offering a means to do something about it. Given how we play the game any solution needs a means for a player to enable/disable it, unfortunately in some cases this will still result in the original issue rearing it's ugly head again.