AFK Timer in PvE
Actually, AFK players do not scale events.
Actually, AFK players do not scale events.
Ever been to Tequatl when there’s a horde of afk players standing around the south turrets?
Instead of adjusting the amount of time before you’re kicked, they need to adjust what is considered "participating"in an event, so that it’s harder to passively “participate”, and therefore passively scale the event up, and passively get credit.
I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers nearly every day and that has never been an issue. As I just said, afk payers (and dead players too while we are at it) do not scale events.
I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers and that have never been an issue. As I just said, afk payers (and dead players too while) do not scale events.
Kind of strange that you haven’t ever seen the mobs scale up when too many people are near their spawn points since that is exactly what happens. That’s why one of the defense teams will suddenly get two+ champs in their groups of mobs instead of the normal group compositions.
But yes, you are correct about dead players not scaling up the events once they’ve been inactive a certain amount of time.
(edited by RoseofGilead.8907)
I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers nearly every day and that has never been an issue. As I just said, afk payers (and dead players too while we are at it) do not scale events.
It’s different with drytop events as the ones not in the beginning area are typical done by small groups of people and those events do get scaled by players whether AFK or not. I have also noticed SW defend events get scaled by “AFK” players such as at Amber. It does make the defend event more difficult to do.
Could be other factors scaling it up such as players from the zerg getting too close (after all the south turrets are fairly close to where the zerg fights at) or just the afk’ers not really being fully afk thus not counting as afk (in which case a afk kick timer wouldn’t get rid of them anyway).
It’s been stated by devs multiple times before that players who haven’t done anything for a certain amount of time are not contributing to event scaling.
@Elden Arnaas why should active players be forced to play with no active considering there is a map size?
And it may or may not scale the event but! what it dose do is move active players to ressing inactive players hence making the event alot harder.
edit:- Either way in my mind the DC timer needs to be reduced dramatically.
Is there really any reason why it should be 30 mins to 1 hr?
(edited by Cornish.8472)
I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers nearly every day and that has never been an issue. As I just said, afk payers (and dead players too while we are at it) do not scale events.
It’s different with drytop events as the ones not in the beginning area are typical done by small groups of people and those events do get scaled by players whether AFK or not. I have also noticed SW defend events get scaled by “AFK” players such as at Amber. It does make the defend event more difficult to do.
Don’t see why drytop would be any different. I’ll leave the same argument here, other factors might scale the event such as other neaby events, other players doing whatever around the event or said afk’ers not actually being fully afk (again, in which case nothing can be done about them).
Think its wise to differentiate between afk players, who get called away for a short periods, and those players who have placed themselves at event locations to essentially afk farm for extended periods of time.
Nothing wrong with the first category as life happens etc. However, I have seen the latter myself over a period of several hours. I wont go into detail as to how they do it, as it will only encourage a certain element to copy their actions.
The best way to deal with this, is to type into the chat bar /ip to bring up the servers ip, take a screen shot and submit it to the devs with a short explanation of whats going on.
@ Shadey Dancer like I said 10 or 15 mins is enough, tbh 5 mins is enough to have a Huge kitten, after that you are doing something else hence afk and no need to be in a map blocking active players playing with active players.!
Vincent is correct in that afk players do not scale events up.
The problem is in “when and how” the game detects and flags afk players. Unlike waypointing away or entering the area, this is not instant. Meaning a player who goes afk can take a considerable amount of time before the game recognizes him as afk. Eve if this was only 1-2 minutes that can severly affect events (assuming the player went afk shortly befor/after the event started).
Also this does not account for players intentionally going afk but still wanting event rewards. This should be dealt with swift and mercilessly.
what would be your approach Cyninja?
If someone is AFKing at an event that isn’t in a safe area like a camp, chances are they’re intentionally leeching. It doesn’t matter what the kick timer is set to because they’ll simply use a macro to keep themselves active.
The default timer is oddly long however, which is almost an hour.
Actually, AFK players do not scale events.
This was true originally, but during season 1 they changed how scaling worked. Back then, you basically only counted towards scaling if you were in combat. The problem with that however was that zerging was popular and bosses could be zerged down before they actually scaled. To fix that, they changed scaling to factor everyone within the event’s area, regardless of it they were participating or not, dead or alive. If you want an easy example, look at the defense event next to AC. All those waiting at the dungeon’s entrance cause it to upscale. That event only lasts ~5 minutes however, so at the very least, AFK players count for that long.
So am I right in thinking no 1 objects to reducing the timer of afk’s just my reason’s
If this is the case maybe just maybe some 1 will read it who needs to.
Kitten dout it!!! but you never know.
(edited by Cornish.8472)
I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers nearly every day and that has never been an issue. As I just said, afk payers (and dead players too while we are at it) do not scale events.
It’s different with drytop events as the ones not in the beginning area are typical done by small groups of people and those events do get scaled by players whether AFK or not. I have also noticed SW defend events get scaled by “AFK” players such as at Amber. It does make the defend event more difficult to do.
Don’t see why drytop would be any different. I’ll leave the same argument here, other factors might scale the event such as other neaby events, other players doing whatever around the event or said afk’ers not actually being fully afk (again, in which case nothing can be done about them).
It’s different. Try doing dry top events on the special teams when you have additional people who run by and scale up the event. I’ve personally done the beetle event on challenger cliffs which requires 6 of the event items to complete. I’ve had it scale up with someone just running by (not having any aggro) and even by someone who has been AFK since before the event started and had no aggro from anything. They were within the event circle.
I’ve done the defend Amber event in SW where people AFK at the safe spot on the ledge in the corner. The enemies took significantly longer to kill and they were scaled up to about to like 82 or 83 when there were only 5 of us around the entire fort.
(edited by Ayrilana.1396)
The problem isn’t scaling. They are taking up space for players who would otherwise be active and actually helping. With the new limits on maps, it’s even worse now.
I was actually surprised at how long the AFK timer is in this game. I left one time, went to the kitchen to get a snack, get distracted by the TV, thought oh yeah forgot to log and came back to find myself still logged on and actually getting xp from events I did not participate in. I’ll be honest. That’s screwed up. I didn’t hit any mobs, do anything at all and still got rewarded for it. They really do need to look at what is considered participation in an event. I don’t know if maybe hitting the world boss, doing a certain amount of damage, etc would help with the issue at hand as there are different types of events.
This was true originally, but during season 1 they changed how scaling worked. Back then, you basically only counted towards scaling if you were in combat. The problem with that however was that zerging was popular and bosses could be zerged down before they actually scaled. To fix that, they changed scaling to factor everyone within the event’s area, regardless of it they were participating or not, dead or alive. If you want an easy example, look at the defense event next to AC. All those waiting at the dungeon’s entrance cause it to upscale. That event only lasts ~5 minutes however, so at the very least, AFK players count for that long.
It’s actually still true today. What they changed it to is that now anyone active in the event area scales the event. Afk or dead players don’t count as active players thus don’t scale the event. The flaw with your exemple is that the people around the AC entrance aren’t generally afk for long enough to be flagged as afk by the game because they only have been sitting around for a few minutes (just came in and started looking for a group, waiting for people to open the dungeon, just came out from the dungeon, are still moving around, etc).
The OP complains about people being afk for 20-30, not people who have been afk for less than 5. People who are afk for 20-30 minutes like the OP suggests are most definitely flagged as afk thus don’t scale events and are not being much of a problem. The people in your exemple have been afk for short period of times and while they may hinder a nearby event, you can’t just kick people for being afk for like 5 minutes so there really isn’t much of a solution to that.
It’s different. Try doing dry top events on the special teams when you have additional people who run by and scale up the event. I’ve personally done the beetle event on challenger cliffs which requires 6 of the event items to complete. I’ve had it scale up with someone just running by (not having any aggro) and even by someone who has been AFK since before the event started and had no aggro from anything. They were within the event circle.
It’s really hard to debate with anecdotal situations like this and it can hardly serve as proof for anything because it’s just an individual’s point of view and his own interpretation of what’s happening rather than an actual global view of the whole situation and what is really happening.
What’s telling me that the event is really being scalled by afk players (who haven’t moved in 20+ minutes) rather than people passing by or doing stuff around, other populated events and area with active players nearby or by afk players who really aren’t actually afk (not afk long enough to be flagged as afk or still actually doing certain things which prevents them from being flagged).
Now I’m not saying there isn’t anything wrong with the way the events scale sometimes but the issue isn’t people that have been afk for 20+ minutes like the OP suggests.
So am I right in thinking no 1 objects to reducing the timer of afk’s just my reason’s
If this is the case maybe just maybe some 1 will read it who needs to.
Kitten dout it!!! but you never know.
I actually object because your solution really doesn’t fix the actual issue and only ends up hindering people who have legitimate reasons to afk. It’s not really helping and it’s creating more problems instead. Even if you were to make it as short as 10 minutes, leechers would still find a way around it and keep leeching while people with legitimate reasons to afk would be punished.
The only good argument I see against afk players is that they take player slots that could be filled with active players but honestly, there really aren’t enough afk players for it to be a real issue (remember I am talking about actual afk players here, not leechers who will find ways around afk timers even if they were really short anyway).
It’s different. Try doing dry top events on the special teams when you have additional people who run by and scale up the event. I’ve personally done the beetle event on challenger cliffs which requires 6 of the event items to complete. I’ve had it scale up with someone just running by (not having any aggro) and even by someone who has been AFK since before the event started and had no aggro from anything. They were within the event circle.
It’s really hard to debate with anecdotal situations like this and it can hardly serve as proof for anything because it’s just an individual’s point of view and his own interpretation of what’s happening rather than an actual global view of the whole situation and what is really happening.
What’s telling me that the event is really being scalled by afk players (who haven’t moved in 20+ minutes) rather than people passing by or doing stuff around, other populated events and area with active players nearby or by afk players who really aren’t actually afk (not afk long enough to be flagged as afk or still actually doing certain things which prevents them from being flagged).
Now I’m not saying there isn’t anything wrong with the way the events scale sometimes but the issue isn’t people that have been afk for 20+ minutes like the OP suggests.
Hardly anecdotal when it occurs every time and is easily verifiable. It’s not that difficult to go to DryTop and test out the scaling of the particular event that I used as an example. It’s also far better evidence than “I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers nearly every day and that has never been an issue”. Since it’s a collection event, you can easily see when turning in the beetle remains how easily it can get scaled. It takes 6 beetle remains for one person to complete the event if nobody is around.
My example was actually two instances. One time there was someone that was AFK since before the event started and still scaled it and another time was someone who ran. IN challenger cliffs, you normally have a group of five people at most to do the ones there. You can have someone escort rusty and do the beetles while the rest focus on defending supplies from the skritt. There are no other events nearby. The skritt event is far enough that those doing it will not scale it.
Before passing off something as anecdotal and lacking proof, especially when it happens to actually be quantifiable, it may be best to go to the actual event and test it out yourself.
Could be other factors scaling it up such as players from the zerg getting too close (after all the south turrets are fairly close to where the zerg fights at) or just the afk’ers not really being fully afk thus not counting as afk (in which case a afk kick timer wouldn’t get rid of them anyway).
It’s been stated by devs multiple times before that players who haven’t done anything for a certain amount of time are not contributing to event scaling.
I highlighted your statement that negates your AFKer’s don’t scale events, what actually happens is the event first scales up based on the number of players present, then as some of those players do not contribute by either being AFK or dead…after a certain amount of time the event will then downscale. That’s how it actually works, therefore, AFKer’s do scale up events, except they will downscale after a certain amount of time…only we don’t know what that time frame is and events in places like SW aren’t very long, ranging from 3 – 5 minutes so potentially never downscale at all.
People keep confusing the solution for the problem. The OP states that there’s a problem with people being AFK, which begs a solution to limit how long someone can be AFK.
However, restating the issue as one of scaling and credit, and other solutions are possible, some that have other benefits as well:
- A new formula for determining “participation,” which then can affect:
- An updated algorithm for scaling (since that needs help in lowbie zones as well as DT/DW).
- An updated rubric for determining rewards, maybe one in which healing critical NPCs counts, too.
Personally, as others have stated, it’s very rare to see AFKers have any significant impact on the results in the current game. A few locations cause champs to spawn in icky spots during Tequatl, but I’ve never seen it when I arrived less than 20 minutes ahead of the hour (it’s much more common in maps that start organizing 30+ minutes ahead). Similarly, in s/w or d/t, it’s much more common for unfamiliarity with the mechanics to affect the outcome; AFKer haven’t for any fight I’ve participated in.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
I highlighted your statement that negates your AFKer’s don’t scale events, what actually happens is the event first scales up based on the number of players present, then as some of those players do not contribute by either being AFK or dead…after a certain amount of time the event will then downscale. That’s how it actually works, therefore, AFKer’s do scale up events, except they will downscale after a certain amount of time…only we don’t know what that time frame is and events in places like SW aren’t very long, ranging from 3 – 5 minutes so potentially never downscale at all.
Even if this is true, since events are made to scale dynamically, it probably checks fairly often. I’d be surprised if it took anything more than 15-20 seconds, otherwise it really wouldn’t be very dynamic. However since I don’t have evidence on this I won’t try to prove it myself but I’m sure anet know and scaled it in a way that afk players aren’t being an issue (especially considering the amount of complain there has been about it in the past and how they remade the scaling system).
Hardly anecdotal when it occurs every time and is easily verifiable. It’s not that difficult to go to DryTop and test out the scaling of the particular event that I used as an example. It’s also far better evidence than “I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers nearly every day and that has never been an issue”. Since it’s a collection event, you can easily see when turning in the beetle remains how easily it can get scaled. It takes 6 beetle remains for one person to complete the event if nobody is around.
My example was actually two instances. One time there was someone that was AFK since before the event started and still scaled it and another time was someone who ran. IN challenger cliffs, you normally have a group of five people at most to do the ones there. You can have someone escort rusty and do the beetles while the rest focus on defending supplies from the skritt. There are no other events nearby. The skritt event is far enough that those doing it will not scale it.
Before passing off something as anecdotal and lacking proof, especially when it happens to actually be quantifiable, it may be best to go to the actual event and test it out yourself.
What I said about Tequatl wasn’t to serve as evidence to back up my claims. It was because I was directly asked about it in the same way that you are currently asking me to go to Dry Top.
Granted I never go to Dry Top, only did when it was new, but I don’t see why rules would be different there. Even if I go there and make my own conclusions, that would also be anecdotal and I could very well be missing something.
Based on the other post I quoted, try waiting a minute or so before turning in your beetles and see if that helps.
re: @Elden Arnaas why should active players be forced to play with no active considering there is a map size? – Once Anet has found a reasonable and accurate way of determining who is not actively participating, then if the map starts to fill up they can start culling “inactives”. So determining who is “inactive” would be very helpful if they would use it properly.
re: what it dose do is move active players to ressing inactive players hence making the event alot harder. – Players ought to have the sense to not rez AFK’s.
re: So am I right in thinking no 1 objects to reducing the timer of afk’s just my reason’s – You seem to think of it as a complete and total solution, which it really doesn’t seem to be.
1) Find a good way to determine if a player is inactive.
2) Make it so inactive players don’t count towards the event in any way, and get no credit if inactive for the whole event.
3) Cull inactive players if the map starts to fill up.
4) AFK timer isn’t so critical if 1, 2 & 3 happen.(But all in all, an hour is an oddly long time.)
I highlighted your statement that negates your AFKer’s don’t scale events, what actually happens is the event first scales up based on the number of players present, then as some of those players do not contribute by either being AFK or dead…after a certain amount of time the event will then downscale. That’s how it actually works, therefore, AFKer’s do scale up events, except they will downscale after a certain amount of time…only we don’t know what that time frame is and events in places like SW aren’t very long, ranging from 3 – 5 minutes so potentially never downscale at all.
Even if this is true, since events are made to scale dynamically, it probably checks fairly often. I’d be surprised if it took anything more than 15-20 seconds, otherwise it really wouldn’t be very dynamic. However since I don’t have evidence on this I won’t try to prove it myself but I’m sure Anet know and scaled it in a way that AFK players aren’t being an issue (especially considering the amount of complain there has been about it in the past and how they remade the scaling system).
~Snip~
Perhaps so, but I can almost guarantee it’s more than 15 – 20 seconds, and the reasoning behind this is skill usage and the affects of lag…I’d put the laps between checks at anywhere from 45 -60 seconds…which is why it’s important for dead people to WP out, the game will notice them leaving the event area long before it will notice they’re no longer participating by staying dead on the ground in the event area(and some events with short duration’s, less than to 2 minutes, that if they stay the entire time the event never scales down).
Hardly anecdotal when it occurs every time and is easily verifiable. It’s not that difficult to go to DryTop and test out the scaling of the particular event that I used as an example. It’s also far better evidence than “I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers nearly every day and that has never been an issue”. Since it’s a collection event, you can easily see when turning in the beetle remains how easily it can get scaled. It takes 6 beetle remains for one person to complete the event if nobody is around.
My example was actually two instances. One time there was someone that was AFK since before the event started and still scaled it and another time was someone who ran. IN challenger cliffs, you normally have a group of five people at most to do the ones there. You can have someone escort rusty and do the beetles while the rest focus on defending supplies from the skritt. There are no other events nearby. The skritt event is far enough that those doing it will not scale it.
Before passing off something as anecdotal and lacking proof, especially when it happens to actually be quantifiable, it may be best to go to the actual event and test it out yourself.
What I said about Tequatl wasn’t to serve as evidence to back up my claims. It was because I was directly asked about it in the same way that you are currently asking me to go to Dry Top.
Granted I never go to Dry Top, only did when it was new, but I don’t see why rules would be different there. Even if I go there and make my own conclusions, that would also be anecdotal and I could very well be missing something.
Based on the other post I quoted, try waiting a minute or so before turning in your beetles and see if that helps.
The problem with just waiting is that many events have timers. Simply waiting for someone to not count, or to get out of the event circle, isn’t an option a lot of the time. That person who was AFK still caused the event to scale well over 3 minutes past when it started so who knows how much longer it would have taken assuming them counting would cease at all.
It’s also not something as simple as making your own conclusion as if you personally perceive something to be more difficult. The beetle event requires exactly six beetle remains in order to complete it if you’re completely alone each and every time. No more, no less. You can easily determine, based on that, exactly how far the progress bar will go when a single beetle is turned in as well. This is a solid fact and based off that, you can easily determine if something is scaled or not.
(edited by Ayrilana.1396)
Perhaps so, but I can almost guarantee it’s more than 15 – 20 seconds, and the reasoning behind this is skill usage and the affects of lag…I’d put the laps between checks at anywhere from 45 -60 seconds…which is why it’s important for dead people to WP out, the game will notice them leaving the event area long before it will notice they’re no longer participating by staying dead on the ground in the event area(and some events with short duration’s, less than to 2 minutes, that if they stay the entire time the event never scales down).
Since we’re being hypothetical, there’s really not much to debate here. I might be right or you might be or we could both be wrong, it’s hard to say or prove either way. For all we know different events scale differently (such a quicker scaling checks on shorter events). We’d need to actually know how it’s coded to debate this any further.
Now say you are right and short events actually don’t scale within a reasonable amount of time, do you think the better solution is to add a really short kick timer and hinder players who have legitimate reasons to afk or to actually fix the events to scale properly (such as running at least the first afk check early on instead of much later)?
The problem with just waiting is that many events have timers. Simply waiting for someone to not count, or to get out of the event circle, isn’t an option a lot of the time. That person who was AFK still caused the event to scale well over 3 minutes past when it started so who knows how much longer it would have taken assuming them counting would cease at all.
It’s also not something as simple as making your own conclusion as if you personally perceive something to be more difficult. The beetle event requires exactly six beetle remains in order to complete it if you’re completely alone each and every time. No more, no less. You can easily determine, based on that, exactly how far the progress bar will go when a single beetle is turned in as well. This is a solid fact and based off that, you can easily determine if something is scaled or not.
I am not debating the fact that it scales, I am debating what is actually causing it to scale. The anecdotal conclusion I am talking about is blaming that one guy who is standing there for the scaling when it could be other factors that are possible to miss. It could be someone else who is actually active that still is or was recently in the general area. It could even be that afk player not actually being fully afk because he did something to unflag himself from being afk (slightly moving his character, using a skill or whatever else that sets the flag off).
Also same question to you: Now say you are right and short events actually don’t scale within a reasonable amount of time, do you think the better solution is to add a really short kick timer and hinder players who have legitimate reasons to afk or to actually fix the events to scale properly (such as running at least the first afk check early on instead of much later)?
I do Tequatl every day, beat him at least over 200 times. I see plenty of afk’ers nearly every day and that has never been an issue. As I just said, afk payers (and dead players too while we are at it) do not scale events.
It’s different with drytop events as the ones not in the beginning area are typical done by small groups of people and those events do get scaled by players whether AFK or not. I have also noticed SW defend events get scaled by “AFK” players such as at Amber. It does make the defend event more difficult to do.
Don’t see why drytop would be any different. I’ll leave the same argument here, other factors might scale the event such as other neaby events, other players doing whatever around the event or said afk’ers not actually being fully afk (again, in which case nothing can be done about them).
It’s different. Try doing dry top events on the special teams when you have additional people who run by and scale up the event. I’ve personally done the beetle event on challenger cliffs which requires 6 of the event items to complete. I’ve had it scale up with someone just running by (not having any aggro) and even by someone who has been AFK since before the event started and had no aggro from anything. They were within the event circle.
I’ve done the defend Amber event in SW where people AFK at the safe spot on the ledge in the corner. The enemies took significantly longer to kill and they were scaled up to about to like 82 or 83 when there were only 5 of us around the entire fort.
Then we have the event in Brisban where you have to take out the 3 camps (one of each bandit, inquest and nightmare court). I’ve seen it scaled to such a stupid level combined with the non-scaling spawn rate that it took around 30 minutes to complete.
[QUOTE]Event scaling[edit]
Events scale both up and down according to the number of players who are currently participating. 3 Events can scale in a number of ways:
Enemy stats can be increased
Enemies can gain new abilities
New enemy types may appear, including veterans, elites, or even champion versions
Enemy count can be increased
Objective requirements may increase
Most events scale for up to 10 players.4 Group events and large scale events such as the finale for meta events will scale much higher. For example, The Shatterer scales up to 100 players.5 Events can detect that players have not performed any actions relating to the event within a period of time and will scale down the event accordingly.[/QUOTE]
SOURCE: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_event#Event_participation
instead of throwing wild accusations about scaling, read first then discuss.
What I’ve found particularly annoying about AFK people is when others are trying to taxi the ones who want to participate, those that are AFK are filling up the map. This makes events like SW that much harder because players are thinly spread out. I’ve found a few maps where there were only a few in each event area, but the map was full. When I WP back to the main camp, it was full of people just stood there not even moving.
I think ANET should at least consider reducing the AFK timers when there are boss events and in the SW/DT maps.
Reducing afk timers…. right….
Sure it will work wonders in maps such as “Silver wastes” etc. But what about events like teq which requires people to be on the map around half an hour before it spawns in order to get a decent map? It is common knowledge that almost everyone afks there, since waiting for at least half an hour for the big dragon to show up isn’t really that exciting…
If they are there for Teq and want to stay on the map, they can move or talk to others and get coordinated. There’s plenty of players who do neither.
It doesn’t take much to hit a space bar every couple of minutes.
Kitta the Conjurer, Guardian- At Your Service- Yak’s Bend
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