Guild Wars 2

Id like to know the stance on going afk in the Snowball Mayhem activity. At the moment its getting kinda bothersome with on occasion half the team afk. If this was PvP they would be auto kicked within two mins. Toyappocalypse has a more severe afk kick timer but is pve!

It’s what you would expect from those trying to max the infinite achievement and not wanting to actively play 150 matches. Just report them as you would in sPvP.

Report wont do much.

“Report them” is the only stance they would take if they ever decided to publicly take one. After all, it is your responsibility as the player to put up with and do something about other people who aren’t behaving the way you want them to behave, and not the responsibility of the designers of the game who built the game to encourage that behavior.

There will be no change to Mayhem in this regard, not just for now, but forever. It will be left as it is not because ANet is on holiday, but because ANet does not care about activities.

I would encourage you and others to play the system as you have seen others do and as ANet has designed it: get a couple points from any source (which is the minimum effort necessary to earn credit for the match) and then go AFK and let one of the teams finish the rest of the game for you. Remember to circumvent the AFK-detection that will kick you for being idle for 120 seconds by performing some non-important action such as making your character take a step forwards/backwards/sideways or use a skill without a target.

I’ve done 30 games of this so far for the first 3AP. If I want to max out the APs for this it means another 120 games.
Those 30 games took over 5 hours.
By comparison in the same time on the other repeatable activities I have done:
All 20AP of bell ringing in 5 hours.
The JP 15 times in 2.5 hours.
6o rounds of Toypocalypse in 5 hours.

Personally going AFK occasionally does sound attractive and I can fully understand why they do it although it is impractical as I believe that Snowball Mayhem has a very short inactivity timer.
the only way I see to speed up Snowball Mayhem is if one side stayed at their spawn which would cut the game time by more than half and bring it closer into line with the durations of the other activities.

But what harm are they doing by going AFK? – the rewards aren’t particularly high win or lose. It’s a mini game with no ranking, and as far as I’m aware going AFK in PvE is not a reportable offence.

Nidome.1365:

Personally going AFK occasionally does sound attractive and I can fully understand why they do it although it is impractical as I believe that Snowball Mayhem has a very short inactivity timer.
But what harm are they doing by going AFK? – the rewards aren’t particularly high win or lose. It’s a mini game with no ranking, and as far as I’m aware going AFK in PvE is not a reportable offence.

There is a main objective to every game that a player can fulfill in order to win. In the case of Mayhem, the objective is to raise your team’s score to 500 points before the other team reaches 500 points. If you do that, you win, and if your opponent does it first, you lose. The instinct in that scenario is to play to reach that objective.

However, there are also other objectives related to that game that work outside that main objective. In this case, the achievement track that asks you to complete 150 games of Mayhem to get all of the achievement points that track offers does not ask you to win games of Mayhem. It simply asks you to be around for the end result 150 times. The fastest way to reach that objective is not for your team to win, but for any team to win.

Another more popular way to look at it is that since the only requirement for you to get credit for the achievement is to be in the room when the match ends, you have basically met that objective by already being there. You can get the progress on your achievement track without lifting a single snowball, though you may need to take a tiny step to the right every minute or so. It’s the least amount of effort for the greatest reward.

Of course, the biggest detail I’m leaving out is that for many people, the goal of pursuing progress in the achievement track is important while the outcomes of individual matches of Mayhem are not. Part of this is how little players are being asked to do to be rewarded (just show up to get your achievement credit, just get carried by good players if you’re awful), part of it is how little of a difference there is between how much more stuff the winning side gets than the losing side, part of it is how little the rewards (wintersday boxes, silver, other loot) from Mayhem are for the time invested, and part of it is because Mayhem itself as a game really sucks. People will still put up with it for those achievement points though, because where you stand on that scoreboard apparently means something to some people.

(Fun little story on that last note, I actually spent some time in a room with <someone at the very, very, very top of the achievement leaderboard> during my Mayhem playing. Not surprisingly, she would typically start the game by being active until she got a kill, then spend the rest of the match AFKing in base as the rest of the team finished the game for her. She only ended up pulling her little-kitty-behind out of base to play the whole game once I made a point of switching sides every time to go against her and make her lose every match!)

What I’m trying to say after all that is, the players who AFK in Mayhem are only harming others in the sense that they are not contributing toward the main objective of Mayhem, though they still get credited like they do. It’s not their fault though; they are simply playing by the rules that ANet have laid out for them. And Mayhem is PvP, by the way.

the only way I see to speed up Snowball Mayhem is if one side stayed at their spawn which would cut the game time by more than half and bring it closer into line with the durations of the other activities.

You could try your best to promote the following phrase: “Red Runs, Blue Bleeds!” Encourage red teams to run gifts and kill players while blue teams sacrifice themselves to the reds camping at their base. With no competition for gift running and lots of point farming from killing blues, the red team could win in lightning fast speeds. Good luck getting randoms to adopt that strategy. Unlikely as it is, a large movement of people doing exactly that in all of the Mayhem rooms could send a strong signal to ANet about how awfully they’ve designed activities.

I think the player has to have actually contributed in the match in some way to get credit for the achievement, was the same for Lunatic Inquisition.

It’s just not worth trying in Snowball Mayhem when you can do your best and it’d mean nothing if the rest of your team are… not very bright. And that’s an understatement to some of the “skill” I’ve seen in this minigame.

I do play properly if there’s actual competition but most games I’ve been in are like 500-100 or even 500-0 once.