Guild Wars 2

Its not only for Tequatl, but any map with scheduled big events for that matter. May I suggest that ANet automatically log out all players who are immobile or do not using any skills for 5 minutes or longer (ie similar to what they do in WvW). And to prevent ppl from clogging servers by going AFK, may I suggest that they may be banned from a further 15-30mins from re-logging on again.

Not the ban. Definitely the kick. Maybe 10 minutes, though. Some people have to deal with kiddos, or worse.

While I am sympathetic that people have real life issues to deal with while playing, that’s not a real valid excuse for them to inconvenient/burden others on a map requiring teamwork to get an event done. I may have a bad day at the office, but I don’t road rage on the way home. As for 10 mins, have 20 ppl afk for 10 mins could affect the outcome, so 10 mins may be too long still.

If teq is a 15 minute timer, I would suggest 5 minutes.

Anything higher than that wastes hundreds of players time, every hour. You make the fight worth it in words, then you should have people who care to play available.

If someone goes afk to take dog for walk, go take shower or do homework, they are not playing the game. They should be put to the back of the bus.

To put it in context, I do not get paid from my job – with out putting in work. I earn my spot on the rooster of a sports team. If I want to succeed I will try, but letting afk’ers go hit a boss once or twice, then autoheal or go afk (hurts many players experience).

Horus Nightlight.1276:

While I am sympathetic that people have real life issues to deal with while playing, that’s not a real valid excuse for them to inconvenient/burden others on a map requiring teamwork to get an event done. I may have a bad day at the office, but I don’t road rage on the way home. As for 10 mins, have 20 ppl afk for 10 mins could affect the outcome, so 10 mins may be too long still.

IRL issues are not an excuse, I fully agree. We are playing a game. Not jumping online and going shopping, have to take a dump, or run to store to buy something. Walk the dog, bake cake … those are all things you do *when you are not playing a virtual game, and are IRL.

Feed your kids, cook dinner, don’t sit in main maps.

/from a father, working full time with kids … who is sick and tired of people using irl excuses in a virtual world. We don’t care, its virtual, go live irl or come play together, but trains do not wait at stations until you are ready. Why should logic change anywhere else (its like we need to account for feel gooders, and sympathize for what if situations.) Hey let’s open up more avenues to let afkers and farmers or bots come in but reducing the rules and timers… that makes sense right?

Teq and future popular world bosses should get a ready check put in place, say 5 minutes prior to the event beginning. Much like the queue timer is now, if you don’t respond as ready before it expires, you’re moved into overflow or outside of the map. So you’re not starting the event with 30 AFK people and clogging up a zone, forcing others who want to do the event into overflows.

Tequatl should have a 5 minute pre-event consisting of nothing more than 3 announcements, 2.5 minutes apart, and perhaps some eye candy and NPC dialogue.

First call: Tequatl sighted!
To let people know things are about to get interesting. Also issue an active play warning.

Second call: Tequatl is about to attack!
Have a tidal wave wash over the entire event area. At this point, kick everyone who hasn’t moved/acted since the first call.

Third call: Tequatl is here!
Kick off the boss fight. The 2.5 idle minutes between the second call and the third call allow for people to get on the server and replace all the kicked AFK-ers.

Tradewind.6913:

Teq and future popular world bosses should get a ready check put in place, say 5 minutes prior to the event beginning. Much like the queue timer is now, if you don’t respond as ready before it expires, you’re moved into overflow or outside of the map. So you’re not starting the event with 30 AFK people and clogging up a zone, forcing others who want to do the event into overflows.

This seems like a good idea. But like most good ideas I doubt it will ever happen.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Tequatl should have a 5 minute pre-event consisting of nothing more than 3 announcements, 2.5 minutes apart, and perhaps some eye candy and NPC dialogue.

First call: Tequatl sighted!
To let people know things are about to get interesting. Also issue an active play warning.

Second call: Tequatl is about to attack!
Have a tidal wave wash over the entire event area. At this point, kick everyone who hasn’t moved/acted since the first call.

Third call: Tequatl is here!
Kick off the boss fight. The 2.5 idle minutes between the second call and the third call allow for people to get on the server and replace all the kicked AFK-ers.

I second this suggestion. It would solve the problem for all involved.

I would also like to add that the current event structure is actually encouraging people to park their character in Sparkfly Fen and go afk. After every unsuccesful attempt, some players may decide to wait for the next one, but since it is over an hour away, they will do other things in the meantime that do not involve Guild Wars 2. And they will miss the next event, because they haven’t been waiting attentively enough.

This content encourages players to sit around waiting and doing nothing for hours at a time!

easy solution: 5 minutes before the event starts, the system should pop a “ready check” for everyone in the map, that would get rid of 90% of the AFKers

I don’t want players kicked or logged out if they are afk, that’s highly annoying. In between attempts many commanders go for a smoke or a drink, and they need to stay in the overflow.

What we need is a way to select our overflow, and see who is afk. Just give players an icon above their head if they are afk. If an overflow is filled with afk icons, everyone can simply switch to a different overflow voluntarily. This is why the logistic nightmare that are overflows, need to be sorted out. Allow us to select overflows, like with GW1’s districts.

To prevent commanders from being kicked and such, what I have previously suggested is that during the event itself, you have a very short kick timer. I had initially suggested 20 seconds, but since that does not account for people who need to WP, I think a minute is fair, that’s six percent of the total event time. Anyone who isn’t active once per minute during the event itself is kicked to Lion’s Arch or similar. Let’s say they have 50 seconds then a ten second ready prompt. This would prevent fights where half the map is Akitten

IT: And no, I don’t have sympathy for people with RL problems while the event is on. It’s on a timer and requires active participation and teamwork. Last night the internet connection for my three GW-playing housemates and I dropped speed massively for no obvious reason. I got downed – I could watch the fight and watch chat and everything else, but I could not res at the WP or type anything in chat. My housemates were totally immobile but could also watch the fight happen and could not tell anyone what happened. While I would have appreciated it if people hadn’t stood over my corpse yelling at me to “res n00b”, I would have preferred to have been kicked at that point regardless of whether or not the problem was beyond my control. It would have made it easier for everyone, since I was in the zerg and people were downed and needed help around me.

If real life or random doom happens while the event timer is ticking, tough cookies.

I don’t think they should allow “GUESTING” during these big events. We can not even get into our server event except on overflow. “GUESTS” should not be allowed onto a server if it is going to push the actual players on that server into overflow. That just is NOT FAIR!

I think selecting overflows is the best solution because any AFK kick system thats automated will result in ppl going AFK with heal on autocast. Let the good ppl work around the bad, if you try to punish the bad they tend to think of escapes.

The “guesting” issue is an over-exaggeration of a problem.

I’m a guest. On my server we were lucky to get 50 or more at the event on launch day. Second day I counted 20 at peak hour. It’s not that we don’t have dedicated players. Myself and many of my friends have researched the event and know how to complete it. But there aren’t enough likeminded people online on our servers to muster together to defeat the kitten lizard, and I feel cheated if I have to pay $20 just to transfer to a higher population server to complete a living world event.

Guesting has helped us a lot. When BG defeated Teq, people from the battle guested elsewhere to instruct others. When I knew what I was doing, I did the same. Last night Deso guested on my homeserver to help us fight the dragon because we didn’t stand a chance with the population problem.

While I think that, before the event starts, it’s fair that players from a server be prioritized to enter the main instance for that same server, I do not think it fair to kick guests after the event starts. Some of us are dedicated players who are working hard to help you and will do everything right, our only flaw is that our server population means there aren’t enough people like us back home to launch a successful assault.

Want to know who hogs up main instance space? AFKers. Deso last night had 60 of them. 60 places that could have been taken up by others who would actually contribute.

Still support a 1 minute timer that kicks AFKers after the event starts.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Tequatl should have a 5 minute pre-event consisting of nothing more than 3 announcements, 2.5 minutes apart, and perhaps some eye candy and NPC dialogue.

First call: Tequatl sighted!
To let people know things are about to get interesting. Also issue an active play warning.

Second call: Tequatl is about to attack!
Have a tidal wave wash over the entire event area. At this point, kick everyone who hasn’t moved/acted since the first call.

Third call: Tequatl is here!
Kick off the boss fight. The 2.5 idle minutes between the second call and the third call allow for people to get on the server and replace all the kicked AFK-ers.

+1 to this, why let people aren’t even present ruin the event for everyone else. They go AFK by the turrets, scale up the event, die, and keep staying there for sometimes 5 or 6 minutes into the event. Turrets get over run, the dps zerg dies, Teq wins. I think people should just fill up the AFKers mailboxes with anti-AFK propaganda.

5 min AFK kick to non event overflow is too short.

10 min AFK is long eighth to do things like go to restroom. But is still 2/3 of the dragon fight and won’t make a difference.

Anyone has right to play other content on the map. Anet should not expect everyone to participate in the dragon fight.

if teq (or any world boss) is up, the zone should change to spvp afk rules.

Afk-ers are a big problem, but there is already a system in place for that. If you are idle for an hour, the game will kick you out to the character select screen. So the people who are going idle are botting or something to spam skills to keep them from getting kicked out. That’s another part that needs to be addressed. I’ve reported all the bots I’ve come across, hopefully they will be punished properly.

Lyana Evrilow.8102:

Not the ban. Definitely the kick. Maybe 10 minutes, though. Some people have to deal with kiddos, or worse.

I get it, but when you afk during a popular event you’re making everyone else deal with your kiddos too. Not just the people who are relying on you to be there, pulling your weight…but those waiting in the queue as well. I’m not saying you should jump out of the map every time you have to get up to deal with something (kiddos or otherwise), but there comes a point where one’s personal distractions become a detriment to everyone else.

That said, I’m more than willing to bet that most of the AFKers at Tequatl are AFK because of short attention spans. A few people AFK because they’ve got to deal with important issues, we all get. A mass of people (as I’ve seen time and time again) AFK because they can’t be bothered to pay attention…that’s not cool.

Hekka.8730:

The “guesting” issue is an over-exaggeration of a problem.

No, it’s not. It’s not at all overstated. I’m a Blackgate resident, and I haven’t been able to get into Sparkfly Fen on my own server since Tuesday. And in that time I’ve spent hours and hours in overflows where the bad players and those who are afk start to finish far outweigh those willing or able to work together. Knowing my server is good enough to get the event done, but not being able to join them because of guesting, is high frustrating.

darkace.8925:

Hekka.8730:

The “guesting” issue is an over-exaggeration of a problem.

No, it’s not. It’s not at all overstated. I’m a Blackgate resident, and I haven’t been able to get into Sparkfly Fen on my own server since Tuesday. And in that time I’ve spent hours and hours in overflows where the bad players and those who are afk start to finish far outweigh those willing or able to work together. Knowing my server is good enough to get the event done, but not being able to join them because of guesting, is high frustrating.

Tarnished Coast agrees.

You folks complaining about guesting – you’re aware that it’s mostly your OWN server’s people who are taking slots in the main map, right?

Guests are the last ones out of overflow, and (afaik) don’t have the “join party member” option. The system ALWAYS pulls server residents from overflow before it pulls guests.

Now, go back to bashing things you don’t understand…

Remember, everyone, that there are thousands on a server and a single map cannot hold but a small fraction of that. Everyone on your own server is fighting you for those same positions.

If you’re a native and really want it then you should join your server’s voice chat and see if there is someone in the non-overflow that you can join in party and try to join their instance. You’ll need to try repeatedly, but you should be able to get in within half-an-hour or so if you just keep spamming it. I know it works this way on TC (that’s how I always get in) and I can only assume it’d work just as well on Blackgate or any other server that uses voice comms.

SynfulChaot.3169:

Remember, everyone, that there are thousands on a server and a single map cannot hold but a small fraction of that. Everyone on your own server is fighting you for those same positions.

If you’re a native and really want it then you should join your server’s voice chat and see if there is someone in the non-overflow that you can join in party and try to join their instance. You’ll need to try repeatedly, but you should be able to get in within half-an-hour or so if you just keep spamming it. I know it works this way on TC (that’s how I always get in) and I can only assume it’d work just as well on Blackgate or any other server that uses voice comms.

You left out how it still can take a long time even with spamming join in…

And if you are going to go AFK. Don’t do it near the kittenING TURRETS!!! YOu scake up the event, you die cause you are AFK while you are dying people are trying to rez you cause they dont know you were AFK, your dead body keeps scaling up the event. If you are going to go AFK, the are plenty of safe waypoints and vistas all over the maps. I climb up on the roof of that structure north of Teq when I do. Like that if I am late to the party, I haven’t been making harder for the people there while I was gone.

Aberrant.6749:

SynfulChaot.3169:

— snip —

You left out how it still can take a long time even with spamming join in…

No I didn’t. I’ve never not gotten in to TC proper within half-an-hour if I truly was spamming the button as often as I could.

Julie Yann.5379:

And if you are going to go AFK. Don’t do it near the kittenING TURRETS!!! YOu scake up the event, you die cause you are AFK while you are dying people are trying to rez you cause they dont know you were AFK, your dead body keeps scaling up the event. If you are going to go AFK, the are plenty of safe waypoints and vistas all over the maps. I climb up on the roof of that structure north of Teq when I do. Like that if I am late to the party, I haven’t been making harder for the people there while I was gone.

This. Please. I understand going AFK while waiting. But if you are going to, move back from the event so you don’t scale it up for those doing it. This tends to always make the south turret defense far, far harder than it should be.

Honestly, I think the map should pulse a single 60 second AFK kick warning about five minutes prior to the event starting. That way it would clear out the people not active and do it with enough time for people in overflow to get in and ready.

korelg.7862:

easy solution: 5 minutes before the event starts, the system should pop a “ready check” for everyone in the map, that would get rid of 90% of the AFKers

Err no it won’t because the system can still be abused. You are better off putting a debuff on the afkers, or just simply get transferred to the nearest WP that isn’t contested.

eyelogix.1654:

korelg.7862:

easy solution: 5 minutes before the event starts, the system should pop a “ready check” for everyone in the map, that would get rid of 90% of the AFKers

Err no it won’t because the system can still be abused. You are better off putting a debuff on the afkers, or just simply get transferred to the nearest WP that isn’t contested.

They need to be gone from the map entirely to allow more active players to zone in. Any other solution is a half measure at best.

As someone who has only one achievement left to do the only thing I can really do is AFK some of the battles since I can’t be around all day to be active. Flawless Victory is hard to get since it is all about how your group does and not what you are doing as a player.

I agree wholeheartedly. Implementing something like this would encourage better play and active participation. I’ve seen fully dead players (not downed) sit for a long time (7-10 min) at Teq, so a system like those above, especially dodgycookies.4562’s idea, would encourage the dead to WP and run back. As it is, too many people sit and wait for a rez, even while laying in a poison cloud. Not everyone reads these forums (sadly), and many do not understand how badly they hurt the chance of success at the event by laying there dead. If, after laying dead for a period of time, they got a warning that they’ll be kicked, you bet they’d WP and run back. If they’re AFK and get kicked, all the better for those fighting hard to win.