Reset inactivity timer when an attack is blocked

[Malong]

As a preface, prior to 0.3.7 nearly four years ago, items were distributed only to the player that lands the killing strike to a bot. This means that for longer than not in NI, it has been considered that distribution of items should not be determined by killing strikes, and contributions can be made independently of damage. With 1.0.2, the activity tracker was implemented seemingly with the intent to prevent non-contributing players from receiving XP and items. Also, commandos holding shields are necessary to success of higher difficulty servers and games, and it's not necessarily an equivalence that players holding shields and blocking attacks are inactive.

There are also cases where shielders die past the last spawn, and can only get resurrected for the final wave. At this point, it's difficult to deal damage without slashing and shielding on wave 20, which in turn endangers the success of the up to 20 other players. Corner case or not, the spirit of the change seems not to be to exclude these players, nor discount their contributions simply because they don't deal damage.

Given the above considerations, it's logical to consider blocking a hit as being active, or maybe rename the feature to "contribution timer." While some could argue that players could exploit this loophole by inattentively holding their shields up, being inactive for long periods of time would cause their shield to break and them to die shortly thereafter. Changes made out of this fear of players exploiting any loophole penalizes the players that are genuinely actively blocking, and inadvertently punishes a large group of players for a miniscule portion of the player base. This outcome is likely not the intention of the change. The principles of jurisprudence include not overzealously dealing with people for fear of incorrectly penalizing innocents.

Before anyone makes any suggestion that this request is principally for me, it is not. I can certainly play other classes, or simply heal, pick up a weapon and slash, or various other solutions. But that's not the point, discouraging people from playing necessary classes is undesirable, and seems against the intention of the change anyway. It just seems like a change that was made without all forms of contribution being taken into consideration, with significant unintended consequences.

Please provide feedback whether you agree or not. Thanks all for reading.