Guild Wars 2

This question is presented to Anet directly:

Why are you allowing player to intentionally, directly, and pointlessly troll, leech, and negatively impact players who make an effort during these events? I’m so tired of watching people go into tonic form, afk in the “safe corner”, or run around doing nothing and talking about it in map chat to be trolly. Every time I do this Scarlet event there are numerous people trolling in chat about how the map needs to pick up the pace because their afking is becoming boring and they want their “free” loot. So again, as a player who bought your game and has paid, and continues to pay, for gems, I demand to know why this isn’t being dealt with? Players shouldn’t be able to reap the rewards of an event from the work of others.

How do you automatically distinguish between a troll / leecher and someone who just spilled his soda over his keyboard / a father who has to look why his kids are crying / s/o who just has to answer natures call?

Report for harassment maybe if they are trolling general chat?

Ceph because someone who went to answer life’s call, doesn’t go on and on in map chat about how they want their free loot, or they don’t go into quaggan form and run around the platform telling people in say chat to hurry up.

How do you automatically detect the leeching players? And how do you verify this behaviour?

It’s quite easy to agree that it should be prevented, but how do you actually do this? It’s really not all that easy. The last thing you want to do is false-positive someone for leeching.

Carighan – IMO it should be a report option. Then Anet can go back and watch their activity from the past couple of events. If they went into tonic form each time, they are leeching. If they stood in one spot each time, same thing. Anet has the ability to go back and see these things. Just as they have the ability to go back and see chat. Its my understanding that in GW1 it was a bannable offensive to leech ( I didn’t play but I’ve heard from Vet. players) so I’m so curious as to why its not still such in GW2.

I don’t know what you expect of a.net.

It’s just people being… people. Whatever they do there will always be people who will find a way to troll and annoy others, there’s nothing on earth you can do. just ignore em and report if it gets out of hand.

Any sort of automatic troll/leecher kick system would probably cause more problems than it would solve.

Zmaj, I never implied that it should be automatic. Like any reporting system in this game, they would have to VERIFY the leeching activity. However, I strongly feel that once it was verified, action should be taken against the offender.

AlphaWolf.2709:

Zmaj, I never implied that it should be automatic. Like any reporting system in this game, they would have to VERIFY the leeching activity. However, I strongly feel that once it was verified, action should be taken against the offender.

I’m just imagining the scenario of ANet employees trying to verify each and every report regarding leeching activity manually/semi-automatic, going through logs all day long.

I don’t think this is (ever) going to happen. Especially because every individual player has a different perception when it comes to severity and importance of an offense – there are justified reports for sure, but there are also lots of nonsense reports the team has to dig through before even finding a justified one. If you consider the total amount of players on NA and EU servers → even if there is just a small percentage of those players actively reporting such things I highly doubt there is enough staff to go through all that, all day long…

So it’s just natural that people in this thread are asking how you intend to tell leechers apart from “normal” players automatically.

Regarding the importance of these leechers: I for my part would rather have ANet work on further methods to identify and remove botters and teleport hackers before they ban someone for “using tonic form in battle”… I guess the impact of those on the ingame economy is much more severe.

AlphaWolf.2709:

Carighan – IMO it should be a report option.

I don’t even want to imagine how many troll/grief/spite reports they’d get. Probably 99 to 1 serious one

They need leaderboards for major events, detailing how much damage was dealt, how many people were revived, healing, etc. In Gw2, everyone is supposed to carry their own weight by being a hybrid, so making contribution based mostly on damage done is rather fair. Those who sacrifice survivability and succeed would be rewarded with having an easier time at securing contribution, whereas those who constantly die or do low damage would be at risk.

At the end, everyone is given a contribution score which is calculated by taking a percentage of the damage done, revives, etc. Leechers are going to have a very low contribution due to not really doing anything or just auto attacking, which in the current system is enough for full credit. Anyone not within a certain percentage of the average contribution shouldn’t get any rewards. To further discourage leeching, any player that doesn’t meet the contribution requirements, but was active the entire event (remained within the event radius and has tagged the event), should be given a penalty, much like the dishonorable debuff.

The issue is, “contribution” scores are hard to calculate.

Especially as evidenced by how only a few people got champ loot before one update last year.

Ultimately, this is an issue with ANet’s “open world” design decision.

If they focused on having multi-party instances instead… (like, say, 25 man raids that group parties together randomly… with the ability for parties to kick “leecher” parties and kick leechers within their own party)
Then I think they could make more balanced (and more fun) encounters.

cephiroth.6182:

How do you automatically distinguish between a troll / leecher and someone who just spilled his soda over his keyboard / a father who has to look why his kids are crying / s/o who just has to answer natures call?

The length of time spent in the corner. Not a single person needs to be in the corner from start to finish. If you can’t contribute to the event, log out. You don’t get the rewards.

I found one user during the “Escape From Lion’s Arch” event consistently hiding out in a nook during by the ramp going from Trader’s Forum to the Grand Piazza.
Considering we would get kicked every hour, finding her there event after event means she was running back in and getting credit awarded for at least 3 events every hour.

That was a pretty obvious one, but it is difficult to tell now if AFK or Leeching unless they are gone long enough to be kicked, and return again to the same spot.

Sankofa Jimiyu.1567:

I found one user during the “Escape From Lion’s Arch” event consistently hiding out in a nook during by the ramp going from Trader’s Forum to the Grand Piazza.
Considering we would get kicked every hour, finding her there event after event means she was running back in and getting credit awarded for at least 3 events every hour.

That was a pretty obvious one, but it is difficult to tell now if AFK or Leeching unless they are gone long enough to be kicked, and return again to the same spot.

What Anet needs to do is the usual afk-breaking device…if the map has enough for an overflow, you must move every 5-10 minutes or get kicked. Somebody in the same spot for 30? They’re probably leeching.

I wish there was a way to make a system that could handle it, but I think its close to impossible. Anet has said that you should report anything you find suspicious, making it easier to make such reports will result in an endless stream of reports, wich in turn will make a lot of work for Anet. As mentioned above.
In different posts around the forum, it does seems that some people really like to take upon themselves to “fix” such things, by reporting, pulling mobs to kill players that dont “play as intended” and so on.
Lets say you have to go afk for a sec, some noble player comes by, hah an afk’er-report!, and moves on. You come back, continue with whatever youre doing, change zone and you have to answer the phone. Another noble comes by, and.. hah an afk’er-report!
No-one has done anything wrong, still you are at risk to get a few reports against you, wich, I assume, will maybe make Anet to not put a lot of effort in study your behaviour. After all, several people have made notes about you.
Not to mention organized afk hunting. Theres already people who find joy in trolling with the tools we have today, why should it be any different with more tools?

I have a question regarding the reporting for leeching suggestion. Where does it say that leeching is even reportable or breaks rules? I don’t remember ever seeing it. I personal dislike leeching but you can’t really do anything about it since it’s not against the rules.

Have you never played an online game before?

Get used to it.. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it.

Healix.5819:

They need leaderboards for major events, detailing how much damage was dealt, how many people were revived, healing, etc. In Gw2, everyone is supposed to carry their own weight by being a hybrid, so making contribution based mostly on damage done is rather fair. Those who sacrifice survivability and succeed would be rewarded with having an easier time at securing contribution, whereas those who constantly die or do low damage would be at risk.

At the end, everyone is given a contribution score which is calculated by taking a percentage of the damage done, revives, etc. Leechers are going to have a very low contribution due to not really doing anything or just auto attacking, which in the current system is enough for full credit. Anyone not within a certain percentage of the average contribution shouldn’t get any rewards. To further discourage leeching, any player that doesn’t meet the contribution requirements, but was active the entire event (remained within the event radius and has tagged the event), should be given a penalty, much like the dishonorable debuff.

Measuring contribution could be difficult in fights like the Assault Knight fights, however. Any condition damage build will be doing far less damage (even having swapped some traits, weapons and utilities around – let’s face it, a Necro’s DPS will never match a Warrior’s, for example, no matter how you build them) despite maybe having been there contributing 100% effort throughout the whole fight. I still only ever get a silver medal at these events, despite having changed to a power build and only using conditions during the burn phases. I am restricted mostly to using skill 1 only on the staff, which severely limits my “contribution”, but it’s not something I can control like being AFK half the fight is. So, though what you suggest isn’t a bad idea in general, I think in practice it wouldn’t work.

You are letting them win because they are succeeding at annoying you.

Have rewards dps-bound instead of “I entered an instance and I’ll be rewarded”. I’m sorry. Either that and have people who deserve loot not getting it or have a bunch of leechers. I see no other way.

Vikkela.7261:

Have rewards dps-bound instead of “I entered an instance and I’ll be rewarded”. I’m sorry. Either that and have people who deserve loot not getting it or have a bunch of leechers. I see no other way.

It is DPS bound though. The thing is that the threshold is so low that you only need a few hits to get credit.

Ayrilana.1396:

Vikkela.7261:

Have rewards dps-bound instead of “I entered an instance and I’ll be rewarded”. I’m sorry. Either that and have people who deserve loot not getting it or have a bunch of leechers. I see no other way.

It is DPS bound though. The thing is that the threshold is so low that you only need a few hits to get credit.

It’s a very strange notion to imagine someone going through the trouble of hitting a boss a few times and then hiding in a corner somewhere.

It’s nothing new in Guild Wars, though, or any other MMO like was mentioned. Everyone who played Ft. Aspenwood, Jade Quarry or Alliance Battles got their share of leechers and AFK’ers, and there it was all the more aggravating since they directly caused your team grief. Here’s it’s more of an annoyance – why should you benefit for doing nothing for my hard work?

Can ANet answer that?

Can’t you say the bottom 5% or even 10% DPS dealers of those in the event area actually receive the reward for certain large zergy type events? You could then do a minimum requirement exception.

Any person that is AFK or leeching for an extended period of time would not get credit or reward for it.

The Knights, for example, have 50 people participating in the event. That would mean roughly the bottom 2-5 people don’t get the reward unless they hit a minimum requirement of damage to the knight.

I am not a coder. That doesn’t seem too difficult to accomplish though. They are already tracking damage dealt by people.

AFKing at least keeps up daily concurrency numbers:
“We had 1000 people playing the knights simultaneously EVERY DAY.”
(but half of them were AFK… exaggeration, I know)

Their apparent solution to holo afkers was to place a fast laser that could scratch the dynamic holo’s backside and another laser that made it a constant struggle to revive someone at the very start of the fight. Given that, I’m not sure I want them to fix this issue. I suspect it’ll be worse than the problem it’s trying to solve!

Fenrina.2954:

Their apparent solution to holo afkers was to place a fast laser that could scratch the dynamic holo’s backside and another laser that made it a constant struggle to revive someone at the very start of the fight. Given that, I’m not sure I want them to fix this issue. I suspect it’ll be worse than the problem it’s trying to solve!

Easy fix. Dead for 60 seconds without waypointing, or not moving or doing anything for 2 minutes? You lose all event credit. Raise the DPS requirement for credit for the timed bosses as well.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Easy fix. Dead for 60 seconds without waypointing, or not moving or doing anything for 2 minutes? You lose all event credit. Raise the DPS requirement for credit for the timed bosses as well.

Easy fix? Given the situation where I revived that player, she would not have been revived by the npcs in a minute’s time. The npcs either never responded or were half way across the room or more. In addition, the holo fight flat out tells people they may not be able to come back. A dead player isn’t going to wp back after seeing that message. So loose credit because of bad positioning, bad timing or lag at the start? Not good.

Fenrina.2954:

RyuDragnier.9476:

Easy fix. Dead for 60 seconds without waypointing, or not moving or doing anything for 2 minutes? You lose all event credit. Raise the DPS requirement for credit for the timed bosses as well.

Easy fix? Given the situation where I revived that player, she would not have been revived by the npcs in a minute’s time. The npcs either never responded or were half way across the room or more. In addition, the holo fight flat out tells people they may not be able to come back. A dead player isn’t going to wp back after seeing that message. So loose credit because of bad positioning, bad timing or lag at the start? Not good.

I meant for the knights, but point well made.

But if someone hit the boss and then went afk off somewhere they still contributed to the boss’s demise. That single shot could of been enough dmg to destroy the boss just in time.

Drew Blood.1586:

Can’t you say the bottom 5% or even 10% DPS dealers of those in the event area actually receive the reward for certain large zergy type events? You could then do a minimum requirement exception.

Any person that is AFK or leeching for an extended period of time would not get credit or reward for it.

The Knights, for example, have 50 people participating in the event. That would mean roughly the bottom 2-5 people don’t get the reward unless they hit a minimum requirement of damage to the knight.

I am not a coder. That doesn’t seem too difficult to accomplish though. They are already tracking damage dealt by people.

Problem with this is that even if you had an event where literally everyone was contributing, you would still have people at the bottom. They were there, they were playing, they were helping, yet they did less damage than others. There will always be people who are missing out, regardless. Which isn’t fair to those people, and ends up in very competitive and often nasty behaviour and reactions from players which is the sort of competitiveness ANet wanted to avoid – like getting rid of node stealing and kill stealing. They don’t want people rushing to deal the most damage etc.

In another thread there was this idea of WP’ing people who are being AFK or died and just kept laying around for loot to occur/event to finish more then “X” time …sounds briljant to me.
My addition would be:
With simple calculations it must be doable to sent them to the farthest WP possible; preferrably to another map => home instance for example
(free of charge of course..we dont want to penalize those afk leeching SOB’s too much :P )

CrossedHorse.4261:

Drew Blood.1586:

Can’t you say the bottom 5% or even 10% DPS dealers of those in the event area actually receive the reward for certain large zergy type events? You could then do a minimum requirement exception.

Any person that is AFK or leeching for an extended period of time would not get credit or reward for it.

The Knights, for example, have 50 people participating in the event. That would mean roughly the bottom 2-5 people don’t get the reward unless they hit a minimum requirement of damage to the knight.

I am not a coder. That doesn’t seem too difficult to accomplish though. They are already tracking damage dealt by people.

Problem with this is that even if you had an event where literally everyone was contributing, you would still have people at the bottom. They were there, they were playing, they were helping, yet they did less damage than others. There will always be people who are missing out, regardless. Which isn’t fair to those people, and ends up in very competitive and often nasty behaviour and reactions from players which is the sort of competitiveness ANet wanted to avoid – like getting rid of node stealing and kill stealing. They don’t want people rushing to deal the most damage etc.

Okay do the bottom 3% or something small. I am not talking about a large number or node/kill/reward stealing. If you are the worst person out of 150 people, do you really deserve the same reward as the top 25% people? It is incentive to try hard and do better. I would also argue it would be extremely difficult to be one of the bottom 5 people in the knights event while being present and trying your hardest for the entire event, especially if you have afk’ers and leechers hanging around.

I also said to put in place a minimum requirement to counteract what you said. The event designers and have an internal discuss about what is considered a good honest effort by the player. If player x shows up halfway through an event, dies one or two times, WPs, runs back, and finishes the event; they should still be able to do “z” amount of damage. If player x is in the bottom % below the threshold but still does “z” amount of damage they get the reward.

As I am typing this, I am reminded that they already do this, don’t they? How come for some events it is successful but I only get a silver medal instead of a gold medal? My coin, karma, and exp isn’t the full amount as others. Why can’t this be done for these large meta events? If you get a silver, you get slightly less coin, karma, exp, and 3 bags instead of 6.

I agree that it’s frustrating when you’re trying to do an event that requires many players in order to complete, or to get the achievement. I get frustrated too when players are afk, or not waypointing when they die, or over crowd a single knight so they aren’t doing damage, but won’t go to another knight.

Saying that, though, Anet made the game playable to how the player wants to enjoy the content, except for being afk, that’s not enjoying the content, the player isn’t even there. For all the rest, if a player wants to run in circles around the event and talk about that in map chat, he/she has that right. On the other hand, during the last living story update I did see a couple anet devs kicking afk people, standing by the waypoints, off the map. So they have at least some what approached the problem.

I think the main problem is that the event is taking place in an open world area, where not every player is going to be interested in doing the living story updates. Still, it does challenge a server to work together, and I’ve seen servers do quite well in that aspect, and still others simply resort to name calling.

Sankofa Jimiyu.1567:

I found one user during the “Escape From Lion’s Arch” event consistently hiding out in a nook during by the ramp going from Trader’s Forum to the Grand Piazza.
Considering we would get kicked every hour, finding her there event after event means she was running back in and getting credit awarded for at least 3 events every hour.

That was a pretty obvious one, but it is difficult to tell now if AFK or Leeching unless they are gone long enough to be kicked, and return again to the same spot.

It is much more likely that they logged out after receiving the awards (there’s a simple timer there) and logged back in after the map reopened (ditto) — that would have saved the effort of running to the same hiding space. If you map was full enough to generate overflows, then this is rude; if not, it’s harmless to you, and an inefficient way for them to get rewards (the rewards weren’t that good compared with the time spent due to interrupts).

The thing I found frustrating about the event is that my timeframe for contribution wasn’t always until the end of the hour — so I’m left with the choice of leaving my character AFK until the hour to a reward that I’ve at least partially earned, or logging out and forgoing that (I dislike forgoing rewards that I think I’ve earned, even when actually receiving them takes more effort than their worth — the fallacy of sunk cost). For full maps trying to maximize their score, I did the latter; otherwise I did the former.

Could part of the problem be that some of the events achievements may be most easily obtained by not doing anything at all while inside fighting Scarlet, except maybe dodging?
Kind of says this type of activity is ok.