Behind The Scenes - May

There's a fair bit of talk about "AFK" amongst us and I am concerned that you may be reported or "detected by Jagex".

Q&A:Customer Support's Answers

Mattonline asks: Afk training is becoming a massive problem, and after having a disucssion in game with some players, many think that it is ok, since you don't stop them from doing it. My questions is, will you try to put a stop to AFK training.

Mod Murray: AFK (away from keyboard) training is as much a breach of our rules as Macroing. Both methods of training allow a player to increase their levels in a way that they would not be able to do themselves and that provides them with an unfair advantage.

Mod Murray's answer creates confusion for me. How is watching TV, browsing another website, chatting to someone (outside of the runescape facility) constitute "increase their levels in a way that they would not be able to themselves"?

I could understand a response that suggests an AFK person is not contributing to the runescape community whilst playing, but not this ideal that watching TV is like someone else helping you. Maybe the someone else (the people in the TV show) is helping you by alleviating boredom. I don't know.

Have I got the notion of AFK wrong?

In any case AFK, whatever it means, is not tolerated.

The thing is AFK as in away from keyboard where you train without controlling your character at all which means you didn't increase your yourself. What you described is NPA(not paying attention) training where you are still controlling your character yourself but at the same time you are looking at other stuff so not really focused on the game. I always NPA train since I play on my laptop so always sit in a spot where I can watch TV while I am on RS and I have multiple windows open on my laptop and look around when doing something that doesn't require my full attention. You gotta learn the difference between AFK and NPA. Jagex don't mind NPA since you are still at your computer and manually controlling your character. In fact if I remember right in the rules it actually states that NPA training is fine they just want to make sure you stay at the computer.