Is Multi-tasking considered "AFK"?

Hey all,

I’m reaching out in hopes someone else who is more knowledgeable than I can help me understand if I actually did something wrong while waiting for an appeal.

Like many of you, I have been working on farming the pvp gear for TBC launch. I am fortunate enough to work from home, so I am able to play often. Since pre-patch, I have been focusing on doing BG’s and during my work day I’ll queue BG’s, secure a point to defend (i.e Mines in AB, or a Tower in AV) then do my work while defending. To be clear, I am not “afk” I still defend when attacked, make call outs when I can, AND move on to a new spot when I need to.

I have never joined a “loss-made”, but did get put into one that was a semi-premade that was purposefully losing. However, even in that one I attacked and secured a point for as long as I could before our little group was overwhelmed.

My point is: have I really done something unethical that is ruining other people’s BG’s or considered “AFK”? I will say that even when I’m working my teams generally win more than they lose and am so caught off guard as to why I am being punished.

Much love to our community, and look forward to playing with you on the other side of the dark portal.

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I would consider it to be “semi-afk” but honestly, it’s a random bg so who cares. People are doing literal boosting groups where one entire team is afk in battlegrounds and Blizzard doesn’t bat an eye, they shouldn’t worry about someone being semi-afk in a random battleground.

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If an AFK premade is flagging you afk because you are participating and “nerfing their marks per hour” by making their 1 mark take longer to get…

You didn’t do anything wrong.

Every person in that premade should get outright bans for cheating, AFKing, non-participation, griefing and false reporting. All 5 of these are against established rules and these premades break all of these rules.

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they ban every one with 0 gear and afk bgs for 8 day
Bans for the naked - WoW Classic / The Burning Crusade Classic Discussion - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)

I used to run premades in vanilla when we were grinding HWL. Farm D was for people that needed to eat/semi afk.

I see nothing wrong with your multitasking and commend your thriftyness.

If you never told anyone this is what you did, people would just think you like to defend. It’s all good man.

/Salute

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If I’m ever unfortunate enough to be queued into an AFK group, I will do absolutely everything I can to stall the game out. (:

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If you are standing around doing nothing in a BG longer than you are doing something then technically you’re AFK and it makes it worse for people on your team because they could have someone who is actually playing 100% of the time. If you are going to ‘multitask’ at least stand on a flag, but dont go AFK because if the flag goes down and you don’t call anything then people will be even more angry.

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So “technically AFK” means you’re technically not close to your keyboard, which is explicitly not the case, as least as described.

AFK is just another word for idle, not participating…doing something else.

For example, if someone didn’t wanna fight trash in an instance, they would alt tab and do something else while it was happening. They would be considered AFK even though they weren’t physically away from the keyboard.

Even the game puts an afk tag on your character after a certain amount of idle time. You could be at the keyboard, but still considered AFK.

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I think I’m mostly asking people to please consider what the words they’re using mean. In this case, inserting “technically” made an otherwise reasonable and true statement irrational and false.

this word implies that it closely follows the thing it is referring to.

It is closely following the widely accepted gamer use of the word AFK, not the literal positional use of AFK that almost no one uses.

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At least you’re defending the base, and not fighting on the road.

We’re into subjective-land now. I only use AFK to mean I’m literally away from my keyboard, and “tabbed-out” to mean I’m using another application.

Otherwise, I agree with you and grant your argument holds water. Nonetheless, omitting “technically” would be a better choice than inserting it. It adds nothing but confusion.

I didn’t feel too confused when I saw what was being said… this seems like a pretty pointless argument and just feels trollish.

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whoa whoa whoa, you are the one using the subjective abstract anti-reality based arguments for no other reason than contrarian literal interpretation.

In other words, someone is saying “Haha, you guys kill me” and you start honestly and seriously taking it as a euthanasia request rather than someone responding positively to a joke.

That’s what you sound like right now when it comes to misinterpreting simple widely understood words and phrases.

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Yeah we used afk to mean pretty much we weren’t paying attention to the screen back in 1994…

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Well you play a paladin so you probably suck anyway. Doubt it would have made any difference if you tried to help.

Fair enough. I’ll leave off with this. When I read it, my first thought was…“What do you mean ‘technically AFK’? He was technically not AFK”. I still think he was technically not AFK.

Yeah, I apologize.

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You technically were afk.

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