Discussion: Should players be allowed to keep their characters ingame to hold a spot despite not actively playing?

[Balake]

Queue has reached 8k in a monday afternoon now. So many people want to log in and play, however there are many players who were able to log in before them and are afk but because the queue is so long, they are compelled into using inappropriate methods to keep their characters ingame, just in case they want to go back and play later without waiting queue.








As you can see from screenshots, it has become very common to just go to a training dummy and autoattack it for hours on end. Not only do they keep their characters ingame while not playing, their characters are doing an action in the world and they're all stacked together, this is heavily taxing on the server's resources and causes lag.

There are many other methods to keep your character ingame. You can get a health regen aura like troll's blood potion and enter combat with a low level mob. For as long as you are regenerating health, you'll never die and the mob will keep you ingame.

And of course the most notorious method is autohotkeys, there are people who keep the client open and leave for hours and set autohotkeys to jump every 5 minutes.

This post is not to call anybody out, or make a report, this is to draw attention to this problem that is on the rise. With a 13k population and 8k queue, even after opening the SEA realm we'll still be seeing big queues so don't dismiss this issue because of that because we all know it's going to persist.

[Wafflecrusher]

I think the vast majority of players would agree that this sort of behavior shouldn't be allowed. That being said, I imagine it's difficult to police.

[Wilczan]

It's a snowball effect.
Queues were present so people started doing things to prevent being logged out, so queues rised, so more people started doing the same etc.etc.

Besides, I have read somwhere that autoattack (only) on training dummy put you on afk after some time, so don't know if it's preventing anything.

[Geojak]

I am not convinced dummy auto attacking or health regen and getting attacked will keep you ingame. You kea boar or mouse inpit means, flagged for afk and eventually off. No matter you auto attack or not.

Now Auto key clickers. Those will work but these are by definition botting and should be bannable

[Balake]

It's a snowball effect.
Queues were present so people started doing things to prevent being logged out, so queues rised, so more people started doing the same etc.etc.

Besides, I have read somwhere that autoattack (only) on training dummy put you on afk after some time, so don't know if it's preventing anything.

Actually it flags you as afk in the client but it doesn't disconnect you from the server.
The way it works is, client knows you are afk because you are not pressing any buttons, but the server won't kick an afk person if theyre in combat.

[Tawneyturtle]

make dummies pvp flag you so I can kill these vermin :)

[Balake]

I am not convinced dummy auto attacking or health regen and getting attacked will keep you ingame. You kea boar or mouse inpit means, flagged for afk and eventually off. No matter you auto attack or not.

Now Auto key clickers. Those will work but these are by definition botting and should be bannable

Not convinced? I guess the hundred people doing it in the screenshots isn't enough proof that it worked for them. Surely if it doesn't work they would all be afk kicked by now and looking for a different method, don't ya think

[Anadrol]

It doesn't matter, the same thing happened in wow classic, like he said above it's a snowball effect, it was only solved when they opened new servers or gave free migrations.

[Jammyxx]

Imagine thinking the SEA servers gonna fix this population and queue issues. Hahahahaha

Will atleast need another hardcore server and even then they might be queues on the original server.

13k + 8.5k in queue and 1.17 not even released yet

Wake up Devs

[Balake]

It doesn't matter, the same thing happened in wow classic, like he said above it's a snowball effect, it was only solved when they opened new servers or gave free migrations.

It's gonna need TWO new servers to ensure there's no queue. 13252 (7854 queued) players right now. That's 21k people, if you split them on two servers you'll still have a queue of 1k each.

And with 1.17 I think the population will increase by 50% so 5k queue each.

[Anadrol]

It doesn't matter, the same thing happened in wow classic, like he said above it's a snowball effect, it was only solved when they opened new servers or gave free migrations.

It's gonna need TWO new servers to ensure there's no queue. 13252 (7854 queued) players right now. That's 21k people, if you split them on two servers you'll still have a queue of 1k each.

And with 1.17 I think the population will increase by 50% so 5k queue each.

1K may be questionable, we are talking about 8 times less waiting time, from hours to minutes.

[Balake]

1K may be questionable, we are talking about 8 times less waiting time, from hours to minutes.

True 1k is a lot more bearable but it's important to emphasize server population will grow heavily once 1.17 is released, there will be a huge influx of new joins and thousands of old players will want to come back to check it out as well.

[Hctwowfan]

It's not exclusively about the queues. It's letting too many people play in a world with limited space at the same time. Just because you can fit up to 32 extra pieces on a chess board doesn't make it a sound plan. There's room for em, but we're not playing chess anymore, that's checkers at best.

[Kairion]

If there is one thing i hate about classic world of warcraft, its how it brings out the absolute worst in human beings.

The mere fact that this now has to be addressed because of some entitled pricks who can't log out when they need to go is a disgrace. If it was me i'd just hand out 3-7day bans to offenders. But even then, its a game of whack a mole and a waste of the turtle wow teams time.

[Mac]

Autorunning into a corner and attacking a dummy both prevent you from logging out, although you will AFK.

I have reported players for doing this and GMs sometimes crack down on it but more often than not I come back an hour later and they are still there.

[Geojak]

Then they need to work on that so oyu get logged of offline no matter what. Hopefully devs see this thread

[Queefking]

It's gonna need TWO new servers to ensure there's no queue. 13252 (7854 queued) players right now. That's 21k people, if you split them on two servers you'll still have a queue of 1k each.

And with 1.17 I think the population will increase by 50% so 5k queue each.

So just make more servers. The population is big enough to sustain HC only realm, PvP realm and an RP realm.

[Pepesmite]

It's gonna need TWO new servers to ensure there's no queue. 13252 (7854 queued) players right now. That's 21k people, if you split them on two servers you'll still have a queue of 1k each.

And with 1.17 I think the population will increase by 50% so 5k queue each.

So just make more servers. The population is big enough to sustain HC only realm, PvP realm and an RP realm.

More realms can provide unforeseen bugs and problems. This is not the best solution. But we are working to reduce queues as much as possible. Soon you'll see the result

[Queefking]

This is not the best solution.

Yes it is.

[Hctwowfan]

I just hope we can find a way to alleviate the queue situation while returning to a healthier max pop of 8k+-

13k pop is just not it

[Skumbanana]

It's gonna need TWO new servers to ensure there's no queue. 13252 (7854 queued) players right now. That's 21k people, if you split them on two servers you'll still have a queue of 1k each.

And with 1.17 I think the population will increase by 50% so 5k queue each.

So just make more servers. The population is big enough to sustain HC only realm, PvP realm and an RP realm.

More realms can provide unforeseen bugs and problems. This is not the best solution. But we are working to reduce queues as much as possible. Soon you'll see the result

Congrats on the huge server success! But perhaps devs will eventually need to bite the bullet here. TWoW might turn out to be a victim to its own success. There's no easy solution to such a disruptive and massive influx of players...

Increasing the number of realms is indeed the obvious solution, as the Sea Server underway proves. This of course demands more manpower so you need to increase the team. Scaling up, though, might have nefarious consequences. The original spirit of TWoW as a small cozy server being run by a passionate group of devs may be lost to a more franchised management. This is the consequence of hypergrowth in all economic activity. It will be sad if such a thing happens. Still, I think a couple of servers more would still be manageable.

If not more realms, how are you going to keep players happy and provide a pleasurable experience if queues are 8k in number, if resources are scarce, if the community is split etc. etc.? People are pissed off and there's lots of toxic behaviour, which is unfortunate for such a passionate project. If you are not willing to ban IPs, I don't see how you can a priori guarantee you won't have to open new servers to keep the project alive. Just my two cents anyway.

[Karrados]

People really need to stop throwing around "Add new servers" as a suggestion for the slightest queue problem. There is one server planned and that is enough for now.

There will be 20.000 people allowed in total, 10k on the SEA, 10k on the Western Server. How about we wait and see what happens there before adding even more?