Have all SICs come across as encrypted. Make messages about cameras, the world around your character, and people speaking come off as vague. Player names no longer show, only short descriptions as if they were disguised.
The world begins to blur as you escape into your own mind.
joebakajoebaka >> 7 tsAd Yrw oh
joebakajoebaka => ot 5tj w9 p h+
You see a shabby hulking femboy do something...
A shabby hulking femboy says something...
A shabby hulking femboy says something to you...
There is a loud noise from nearby...
You hear someone shouting nearby...
joebakajoebaka => ijk 64 G9 4gk
You see motion on [surveillance device] but you're not paying attention...
As you regain your focus, the world clarifies itself before you.
For some reason this stuff didn't post as part of the main topic. Second try.
1hr idle?
Potentially getting up and moving around? Drinking coffee? Popping an everup?
And something like an hour seems about where I might make this start happening. I take some long shits, so you might too. :-D
That being said, I love the idea of removing the time-machine ability that is seemingly granted de-facto by simply idling in a location to be able to see what is happening.
Usually watching busy events or watching cameras or television programs or listening to a long stretch of SIC conversation.
I've rarely ever gone an hour without issuing a command unless it was because I was working through a grid window reading or writing, I don't know if grid use resets idle timers.
I would tend to agree that if someone hasn't issued any commands or used the grid in an hour, it's questionable if they're actively playing at that point.
Beyond two hours it's definitely just soaking information passively, which drives me crazy, and players who just spend hours idling their characters with 'sleeping' ctags are really pushing the boundaries of what should be enabled in my opinion.
Recalling from that time I'd like to recommend that an interaction such as sipping coffee is suitable to reset the timer, or potentially extend it (giving a distinct use to coffee's caffeine boost). It's also very thematic for Joe Security to have to sit there for hours and subsist on sipping coffee alone to remain at attention.
My bad for forgetting to link the prior posts - I meant to do that.
Threads for reference:
https://www.sindome.org/bgbb/game-discussion/ideas/sleep-deprivation-consequences-2090/
https://www.sindome.org/bgbb/game-discussion/game-problems/idle-times-and-surveillance-networks-463/
Is it worth the effort though?
Every client out there has the ability to fire off timed triggers.
What prevents this from turning into a game of wack a mole for the staff as they hunt for people using timers?
Why not just set a hard disconnect at 60 minutes?
Again, it suffers from the same challenge of clients auto-connecting. But at least it doesn't require a bunch of coding to implement.
I know that triggers are against the rules.
My understanding that idling and sponging UE is also against the rules.
What I felt was implicit in my post is that people who are going to break the rules are going to break the rules. Then it is going to be up to staff to have to find them.
Given that at some point staff is going to have to identify and find people who are breaking the rules, why put in the effort to code up a whole bunch of cool zoning out code that some people are just going to come up with an out-of-bounds strategy to circumvent?
From my perspective I would appreciate a hard disconnect after 60 minutes. I've lost track of the number of times that I've gotten distracted by work and come back a few hours later to find the window open. Or gotten distracted before bed and forget that I was logged in and go back 12 hours later to find out I'm still connected.
In those situations I self police. I do not go in there and look through my back scroll. But apparently there are enough players on the game who are passively sponging information that this is a concern. I tend to agree that it is a concern. I think the people who set their ctag as sleeping and stay connected are really stretching if not outright breaking the rules. I feel like staff should be extremely stringent with anyone who has a surveillance Network who also has over 30 minutes of idle time on any sort of regular basis.
I actually don't think the number of characters who are idling in permanent wakefulness is an issue in the sense that enough people are doing it that it's a problem, and I don't know of any characters who could be doing it for a gameplay advantage right now, it's just an annoyance of mine because of how unrealistic it is for a character to never sleep -- even for benign reasons.
(Edited by Slither at 8:42 am on 10/16/2020)
I suspect some others are as well, but to what extent this is true, I have no idea. I've never been a fan of idle timers, as you stated Slither, and I'd probably be one of the people getting annoyed by getting disconnected during writing work emails or being in a conference call. I understand these timers, but I think a lot of the commonly-raised concerns in the world of idle timers (things such as blocking server queues up, wasting bandwidth in realtime games, achievement/epeen farming, etc don't really apply to SD or MU* in general.
I get where Hek is coming from, in saying that people are just going to game the system. I won't even make the claim that they'll use rules-breaking methods, but rather just whacking the look command or something every thirty minutes or whenever the fancy strikes, and never having this idle system trigger.
What I don't understand is why make code changes for what seems like a pretty straightforward and easy-to-ID rules infraction? If JoeStaffer runs a @who and sees someone's idle X hours, shouldn't the policy be to just @boot/disconnect them and leave an internal note that the player was found to be idling? I guess code would be a staff QOL update on this, but it just seems like more timer/tick based overhead for the server to track and manage for what I assume is probably only a handful of people regularly 'abusing' this.
Just my two chyen.
