I’ve been working on a massive web project that requires several consecutive hours of tedious work. So I did a little something that I thought might help the time go by a little faster: I decided to AFK gold farm in Red Dead Online.
This all started when I noticed an AFK gold farmer in the Dead of Night seasonal event in Red Dead Online. I kept getting paired with some random person who never moved, and never fired a single shot. I was in the same lobby as this person for five or six matches, and I never once saw any signs of movement.
So I tried it myself. The very first limitation I ran into was that the game auto-logs you out after 15 minutes of inactivity. This makes me wonder how that one player managed to stay in so many games. I’ve heard of people rubber-banding their controllers in weird ways to prevent things like this, but I saw the person’s character in game. No random spinning, no signs that they’d rigged their controller.
So I guess this person probably just made sure to flick a joystick every 14 minutes or so. I tried this, but as I got deeper into my work, I kept forgetting to check back in (even though the TV was sitting just outside my peripheral vision).
Eventually, I started feeling bad. How many poor folks had to fight the uphill battle of trying to win Dead of Night with an inactive teammate? So I would occasionally jump in and enjoy a match or two. But this meant I wasn’t getting my work done, so I eventually just shut down Red Dead Online for the night.
I think in total I might have come away with maybe four Gold Bars? Considering I have more than 400 at this point (550 hours of Red Dead Online, remember), four Gold Bars seems like a paltry earning for the hassle. I guess I’d rather just log in and earn my gold the old fashioned way: by actually playing the game.
When it works, of course. Only when it works.
