The Weekly Raid: Does AFK Gameplay Have A Place In MMORPGs?

Thanks to the lovely gentle[people] at Reddit for bringing this one up. What's the deal with AFK gameplay? And I don't mean League of Angels 2, I'm talking about games like Black Desert Online where botting is built into the game.

You can step away from your computer, eat a bologna sandwich, and come back to a bag squirming with fish. And the game encourages you to leave your computer on all night long if you want to min/max your gameplay; if you want to be the best you'll never log out.

Are these systems desirable? (Pro-tip: writing them off as "well that's just because they're Korean" is not an answer with substance.) Is it just a way for developers to say, "look how many active players we have!" when most of them are essentially bots.

My initial impression is AFK gameplay mechanics are fine so long as they're a part of meaningless systems. Yeah, that's a debatable definition, because I could say fishing is meaningless and you could say that the money gained from AFKing would enable me to buy end-game gear in a game like Black Desert Online.

And what's the point of meaningless systems if they're meaningless anyway?

But maybe AFK gameplay systems prove how meaningless these systems are to begin with.

The Weekly Raid: Does AFK Gameplay Have A Place In MMORPGs?