Idle system improvement

[Tommer]

The Problem

One of the most common complaints about [TC] you'll ever hear is that a server is always full in the late hours of the day and when someone eventually leaves you've a tiny window of about one and a half seconds to actually get in before someone else connects.

Some people argue you should go to the other server, well, historically, look how well that has worked. Not well at all lets face it, and people are not about to change any time soon.

The idle system works fine in the early hours of the day. But by the evening people have clocked in huge amounts of km's and it is taking far longer for people to connect at the peak hours of the day because of the people who are just not leaving because they have the advantage of being a player who joined in the early hours.


Solution

In a recent InSim Update, Chuck announced that your trip could be saved if you leave the server in a safezone and come back within 30 minutes.

Why not build on this. Change the system so that everyone gets a standard 10minute Idle kick, and then how long they can leave the server and not lose there trip for, is determined by the length of the trip.

EG. If you have driven just 10km's, you can leave the server for 10 minutes max and rejoin and your trip will have been kept. And if you've got a 200km trip and you leave the server you get an hour max to rejoin before your trip is lost etc etc, however no matter what you will receive an idle kick after 10 minutes of being parked.

This would mean that there are constantly people leaving and could quite possibly mean that you could also raise the amount of people it takes to trigger the afk kick system. It'd mean joining the server was easier for everyone and gave everyone equal oppurtunities.

Problems surrounding the solution

I understand the main issue would be system abuse since the km bonus system is there to reward good drivers who don't crash. With this new system in place you could potentially crash, disconnect and rejoin and keep your km's.

My solution to the problem of the solution (lol) is to use insim zones to mark 'parking zones' onto the map, only in these locations may somebody go afk and expect to keep there km's when they rejoin after an idle kick.

The good thing about having only a 10m idle kick is that they would also be less likely to be knocked out of these parking zones because of the shorter time window. It would also mean that people who go afk in bad places would more quickly be idle kicked and thus be less likely to cause a problem.

As always, just a suggestion