Days Offline Curiousity

[Erratic1]

When Homecoming opened to the public my first character made the first character I made and played to 50  also became the leader of the SG most of my characters are in. As much as I like her, I do not play her often and rarely log her in. Weekend before last I noticed the display said she had 0 Days offline. Knowing I had not played her in the previous day, I logged in, worried my account had been hacked. But nothing was missing or seemed amiss. So I kept an eye on her Days Offline status for a few days and the count seemed to be going back up.

 

Today I noticed it said she had last been online 4 days ago. 

 

She is on the second tab of characters I have. Characters I actively play are all on the first tab and I KNOW I have not touched her in the past week...in fact, since that previous time I logged in. But she is the only character I am noticing this weirdness on.

 

Anyone seeing anything strange like this on any of their characters?

[Glacier Peak]

Not what you've described, but anecdotally, sometimes my server order is wrong. The server I play on primarily is Indom, followed by Torch, and finally Excelsior. I've never played on Everlasting or Reunion. But both of those last two have inserted themselves as the top server in the order many times. 

[Apparition]

Yeah, I regularly see this.  Characters that I know for a fact that I have not touched in over a year, even two, will state that they were last on a couple of days ago.  It’s obviously some sort of bug.

[Erratic1]

37 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:

Not what you've described, but anecdotally, sometimes my server order is wrong. The server I play on primarily is Indom, followed by Torch, and finally Excelsior. I've never played on Everlasting or Reunion. But both of those last two have inserted themselves as the top server in the order many times. 

 

I have noticed the order changes if I've logged into the Test Server.

[Erratic1]

29 minutes ago, Apparition said:

Yeah, I regularly see this.  Characters that I know for a fact that I have not touched in over a year, even two, will state that they were last on a couple of days ago.  It’s obviously some sort of bug.

 

Thx. Was really bothering me. Helps to know it is not just me.

[ZemX]

I've seen it too.  I don't imagine the GMs are joyriding our toons when we're not looking so, more likely, there's just some server process that "touches" their records and causes the date to be updated occasionally.

[GM Impervium]

@Erratic1

 

A couple things I know can do this:

 

Copying a character to test,

 

Adding, promoting or demoting them in your SG,

 

Anything else that might cause the database to "ping" the character for info.

 

If you still suspect something is wrong, please change your game and forum passwords. You may also submit a support ticket, and a GM might be able to poke into your account history to see if different I.P.s accessed it.

[Erratic1]

36 minutes ago, ZemX said:

I've seen it too.  I don't imagine the GMs are joyriding our toons when we're not looking so, more likely, there's just some server process that "touches" their records and causes the date to be updated occasionally.

 

Wondering if it has something to do with her being the SG leader since I otherwise do nothing with her, not even copying her to test.

 

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

I've noticed this too, and without any of the things that @GM Impervium notes, so I changed my password.

[Bionic_Flea]

Maybe your character was offline so long he/she got auto-demoted from SG leader and that counted as being logged in as the game interacted with the character (and as stated by Impervium).

[TraumaTrain]

I just figured my characters were playing themselves while I was asleep or at work.

[Doomguide2005]

5 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Maybe your character was offline so long he/she got auto-demoted from SG leader and that counted as being logged in as the game interacted with the character (and as stated by Impervium).

Along these lines ... would the server(s) "ping" a character database simply while establishing sg info to, among other things, establish the current hierarchy of who the leader is?

[DoctorDitko]

12 hours ago, TraumaTrain said:

I just figured my characters were playing themselves while I was asleep or at work.

Yeah, better check your Vet level. And patrol XP. And talk to an NPC named Michael.

 

(To paraphrase Black Widow "Paranoid? No, why, what have you heard?")

[Number Six]

It’s almost always SG rank promotions / demotions or self-inviting an offline alt that causes this.

 

There’s a few other relay commands that can force a character online long enough to run a command to update the character data, but they’re fairly niche situations like logging off while teammates are still on your mission map and they end up completing the mission, taskforce state changes, or a GM doing an offline move to rescue somebody who’s stuck and can’t log back in. The supergroup ranks are by far the most common.

 

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go rant because I know I’ve put in an exception to the timestamp being updated for that kind of load, but it appears to not be working.

[Blackbird71]

I have one character who consistently shows a low "days offline" count; currently at 15 days (which is about the highest I've seen it) even though I haven't logged into it in months.  

 

This character is not in an SG, and never has been, so promotions, etc. would not affect them.

 

The only thing I can think of that sets this character apart is that I am 95% certain it was the first character I made on that account.

[TheOtherTed]

On HC, this happens with the first character I created, but only with that character.  All the rest, including my "big money" characters (big for me, anyway), always show the right number of days offline.  Since your in-game global ID is initially set by your first character's name, I always figured that logging in on any character reset the global ID's offline time to 0, which somehow propagated back to the first character.

 

I could be wrong.  I'm probably wrong.  However, I don't think it's a security issue unless your other characters show 0 days offline when they shouldn't.

[SeraphimKensai]

This reminds me back on live, I was part of a tight knit PvP team and we all had each other's passwords as we'd occasionally power level each other new PvP toons and such but would usually tell each other ahead of time.

 

I went on vacation for a week and came back and noticed that my fire/em blaster had been used 2 days ago, I figured one of the guys must of used it for a PvP match or in zone. I log in and noticed my UI had been shifted which told me who had logged in, then I noticed the toon had been respec'd then I realized some of the IO's we're gone, but we're replaced with different ones.

 

I zoned into my base and my old IOs we're in an enhancement bin. Turns out they logged in while I was gone and revamped the build, which after testing and talking to the guy I realized it actually made the toon just slightly better overall.

 

I had a bit of fear at first but it showed me that some people can be trust worthy. Just glad this game wasn't Eve Online at the time (which is a fun game as well), as we know my account would of been stripped in that game.

[Blackbird71]

23 hours ago, TheOtherTed said:

On HC, this happens with the first character I created, but only with that character.  All the rest, including my "big money" characters (big for me, anyway), always show the right number of days offline.  Since your in-game global ID is initially set by your first character's name, I always figured that logging in on any character reset the global ID's offline time to 0, which somehow propagated back to the first character.

 

I could be wrong.  I'm probably wrong.  However, I don't think it's a security issue unless your other characters show 0 days offline when they shouldn't.

 

In my case, I long ago changed my global chat handle to something unrelated to my first character's name, so I don't know that referencing it would still trigger a call to that character.  Plus, while the days offline for that first character is always recent, it doesn't necessarily match up with my most recent character logged in on that account, so I don't think it's just logging into any character that would reset the days offline for that first character.