I really like the concepts of offline farming, thatâs a very common strategy on many games and platforms, and usually very well accepted by the players!
Sadly, many creator decisions are moved by monetary reasons and will just refuse to add that feature, just because offline players donât give playtime and consequently donât collaborate a lot for revenue⌠(And I can speak for it, because I wanted to implement that feature on a past project and was denied due to that exact reason! 
)
Other options to make progressive games fair and player attractive:
-
Daily Rewards:
â Login Streak (Can have rewards such as increasing gains multipliers)
â Weekly (Or âStreak Checkpointsâ) Bonus Rewards
-
Offline Farming/Gains:
â Max earned stuff can be limited (such as max 24h offline farm, or max XX inventory size for offline farmed content);
â Gains can be based on current progression of other stats, or having itâs own stats, to adjust and ballance the feature over time and with other gameplay styles/actions;
â Possibility of having upgrades to improve offline farming, such as increasing max offline backpack storage or increasing gains per hour/minute. This adds even more content to the gameplay itself, upgrade paths to incentive players coming back constantly over time, more variations of gameplay style (for example, the player may be able to make upgrades and choose between offline farm or a more active in-game farming, instead of being forced to a single gameplay style)
All these examples above are already possible on the current state of UEFN, usually all based on math and working with current/saved player stats over time.
To calculate time elapsed between logins for example, you just need to store a single float on persistable data, the âLast Loginâ timestamp, and use that to calculate time difference when player joins again.
But, I still have mixed feelings about this. While I agree with AFK checks in game-based experiences (regardless of XP/Game Genres/Abusing/Server Cost scenarios like people mentioned earlier), I still think that it can be impactful in some ocasions.
A good example is the Star Wars map, where I got myself kicked from the map days ago because I was âAFKâ watching the episodes without actually playing the combat area or interacting with others. (They even increased the afk timer and made a Public Twitter Statement about this)
People mentioned Game Cutscenes, but I doubt there is cutscenes longer than that, I canât remember any example by mind. Even Epic own events and the Genesis Studios event experiences are not that long, and they also include interactive parts from time to time.
To finish, I think that with this AFK timer, is possible to see if some creator/team is really intending to give the player a good experience on the gameplay (for both progression or game activity scenarios), or if that creator/team has monetary revenue as priority on its decisions (and only using excuses to avoid that topic). Itâs worth also remembering that many other platforms or games also have afk times, this is not a exclusivity from the Fortnite ecossystem.
And even with that in consideration, the ecossystem itself is still young and growing. Due to that, lots of rules, scenarios, opportunities and feature usages are still being âadjustedâ over time.
Making a project/game that is entirely based on a very very specifc scenario/dependent exclusively on a feature that you canât guarantee the project survival if that feature change over time, from my point of view, is not much recommended, at least not if you donât consider future changes or adaptions as neededâŚ
