Since about a week into Classic, measures taken to prevent players from dodging queues have caused roleplayers to face extremely predictable and repeated disconnects as chat, emotes, and movement are not sufficient to avoid being removed as if you’re AFK. This is likely a measure taken to prevent people from using macros or autoclickers to avoid being thrown back into queue, but the measure has lasted long since queues have stopped being an issue, and seems to have crossed over into Season of Discovery.
roleplayers have been plagued with pretty predictable disconnects while trying to RP. This seems to be caused by some kind of automatic script or tool that’s kicking people for being idle or for idling in the wrong way, as it occurs specifically during roleplay, and often at very predictable intervals.
In Classic, this was reported by separate communities across Bloodsail Buccaneers and Grobbulus, and has recently been reported as having been occurring in Season of Discovery as well.
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If there are going to be RP servers, RP should not be penalized with perpetual disconnects. This is such a well-known issue in the RP community that it really needs to be addressed if Season of Discovery is to retain a healthy RP scene, and it’s been identified, replicated, and repeated across multiple servers, multiple years, on multiple ISPs and in multiple countries so it’s inconceivable that entire raids of RPers are just all having internet problems hourly.
The trend is usually you get two hours of RP after your last time engaging in combat or using the auction house–then, it’s hourly disconnects until you go do content again.
Just a suggestion. I am probably WAY out of my depth here. Could it possibly be a timed disconnect from your provider? Maybe that went away with dial-up, and I am wasting everyone’s time.
It isn’t from my provider: this is something that effects virtually everyone roleplaying on Classic from about a couple weeks out of launch. When you gather twenty people together for an event, people start disconnecting hourly effectively on a rolling timer based on when they showed up. It happens to people in the US, in Canada, in Europe, everywhere. It’s a very known quantity that has been reported before but never fixed.
I’m not sure why the sarcasm, but–walking and jumping does not stop the disconnect timer. The only things that stop the timer from disconnecting you are resetting it by engaging in combat with appropriately-leveled mobs, using the auction-house, entering a battleground queue, or travelling entire zones across. So, unless we incorporate combat in zones close to level cap with random NPC mobs, that’s not going to do anything.
Previously, people were disconnecting in queue due to the same timer, before queues were made an exception to the rule to stop Horde players from disconnecting in the insanely long BG queues they were suffering early Classic.
People have tried running around, engaging in trades, using mechanical emotes, equipping and unequipping items, etcetera. Nothing works because this mechanism was added seemingly to keep people from skipping queues by staying online all night with a jump timer or similar. The only issue is, there haven’t been queues for a long time, and players are still penalized for attempting to RP on RP servers by having hourly disconnects once they pass that first two-ish hour threshold.
While I’m aware that RP is a niche community, given there are multiple Season of Discovery RP servers, we were hoping this issue could be addressed so that people don’t wind up quitting out of frustration at the perpetual disconnect timers like they did in Classic, TBC Classic, and WOTLK Classic once the shiny new car smell wore off.
I’ve been able to confirm that this is still happening to virtually everyone who RPs for more than two hours at a time, even if they try moving around or trading or using vendors.
I’ll reiterate that this is not an ISP issue and is happening to people from all around the world, different timezones, etc. These issues fade as soon as you go back to doing content. This is a measure to stop people from skipping queues that has been ruining Classic RP for years now, and really needs to be addressed if the new Season of Discovery RP servers are actually intended to be used for RP.
It creates a headache when you want to do events and people are on a rolling disconnect timer, yes. It also makes it much harder to justify just going out and being in-character without setting up appointments, since you don’t want to start your timer early before descending into the disconnect timer.
I’m not going to say Classic is some sort of oasis of great writing or roleplaying, but I don’t think that means it deserves to have an unnecessary impediment placed on it given that the queues that this measure was originally implemented to support don’t exist anymore.
Once you DC and log back in, you’re on that one hour timer again because the system has flagged you as not participating in content. That timer also persists if you log in and out manually.
You can brute force it by having everyone just log back in and just hope everyone is using addons to try to log chat so you don’t have to keep being asked ‘repost pls’, but it still means potentially losing posts when you’re typing, or having to type into a notepad if you want to write an emote/post when you see the clock winding down to that automatic disconnect.
It’s also just, frankly, very annoying to disconnect every single hour for participating in an activity that’s endorsed by the very tag they put on your server.
The more people you’re RPing with, the more inconvenient having rolling hourly disconnects becomes, because they hit everyone at different times based on when they started RPing, so people wind up poofing in and out at varying times. It’s worse for people with slower computers for obvious reasons.
We tested it last night and neither ability usage, changing runes (presumably linked to enchanting and other profession-style actions in the actual system), changing equipment, moving, jumping, or eating food / drinking water stops the disconnect timer as it’s been honed in so specifically to try to stop various ways people were trying to stay logged in overnight to avoid queues in early Classic. But again, those queues are a thing of the past, while the disconnect timers remain even through the creation of two new RP servers.
Which, again, causes the various issues for the community already listed. I’m aware this is par for the course in general discussion, but this is where I was advised to take this problem.