Guild Wars 2

I hate that ban and suspension has become interchangeable. If you are banned, you are gone. Everything short of that is a suspension.

Mightybird.6034:

I’ve seen you so called afk reapers. (most?) of you are totally using some kind of script to recast minions. That is botting.

I’ve also seen them use GS 4, timed out to a T, at perfect intervals with their minions.

Doggie.3184:

It’s a false flag so he wasn’t exploiting or doing anything wrong. The person who reported him was abusing the system.

Ridiculous. The one abusing the system is the AFKer not the guy angry to see a leeching player.

It is clearly an abusive conduct to take server space if you aren’t even there playing yourself to contribute meaningfully to the map experience. Too many like that is why meta events can fail even when a map is full.

There is now an official statement. In short: Everything the “anti afk farming” people have said is correct, and everything the “but I was just using game mechanics that ANet provided” people said was wrong. Do afk farming and you will get suspended when caught. And if you still keep doing it, worse things are likely to happen.

Here is the link to the post of someone who got suspended and posted the official answer. Link -> Afk farming is not allowed

I see a very simple solution to this problem of understanding.

1.) arenanet ups the suspension to 1 month or even permaban
2.) we let some time pass
3.) a certain amount of people get to leave the game they are not interested in actively playing
4.) …
5.) the community profits

I’ve never seen this much of nonsense about afk farming in a MMO ever. Literally every single MMO I’ve played has been very clear on afk farming with no active inputs from the player to be against TOS (even if the TOS were more vague than here). Only GW2 players once again need an extra piece of cake.

Shikigami.4013:

There is now an official statement. In short: Everything the “anti afk farming” people have said is correct, and everything the “but I was just using game mechanics that ANet provided” people said was wrong. Do afk farming and you will get suspended when caught. And if you still keep doing it, worse things are likely to happen.

Here is the link to the post of someone who got suspended and posted the official answer. Link -> Afk farming is not allowed

Well good sir I believe my post from the lead support trumps yours.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ranger-Pet-Botting/page/3

Don’t AFK farm with or without macros. It’s against the rules. You’ll be suspended for it and if you keep at it eventually you’ll get a ban.

It’s in the EULA.

Common sense dictates that between here and on reddit with the posts by folks crying out they were “banned” for AFK farming it’s… probably not a good idea.

Thinking isn’t that hard, really.

WereDragon.6083:

Well good sir I believe my post from the lead support trumps yours.

It does not. Did you even bother to read the post I linked? It actually even said that the post by the game support lead does NOT mean that afk farming is allowed. Seriously, the ignorance of people who want cheating to be ok seems endless. Read this:

The quote that our Game Support Lead confirmed in that thread states that using Pets and Autoloot to gain gold and experience is fine, but those game mechanics working in conjunction with each other does not give the OK to AFK Farm.

WereDragon.6083:

Shikigami.4013:

There is now an official statement. In short: Everything the “anti afk farming” people have said is correct, and everything the “but I was just using game mechanics that ANet provided” people said was wrong. Do afk farming and you will get suspended when caught. And if you still keep doing it, worse things are likely to happen.

Here is the link to the post of someone who got suspended and posted the official answer. Link -> Afk farming is not allowed

Well good sir I believe my post from the lead support trumps yours.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ranger-Pet-Botting/page/3

And he actually confirmed that it’s not OK to AFK farm. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ranger-Pet-Botting/page/3#post6093187

To translate, EphemeralWallaby said

Tl;dr intentional mechanics that allow pet kills to give experience and loot does not equal permission to afk farm.

And the game lead said

This is absolutely correct……..

The problem it seems is some people don’t realize that the “=/=” symbol EphemeralWallaby used stands for “does not equal”. You take that symbol out of the equation, and it looks like the dev said it was OK to AFK farm, in response to Emphemeral.

Wow, OP, that message looks like it came from GM Hillary Clinton.

It essentially says “we know you didn’t technically do something wrong, but we still don’t like what you did and therefore we are now lying to intimidate you into not doing it again because we can’t make our game work properly”.

Good times…

Charrbeque.8729:

The problem it seems is some people don’t realize that the “=/=” symbol EphemeralWallaby used stands for “does not equal”. You take that symbol out of the equation, and it looks like the dev said it was OK to AFK farm, in response to Emphemeral.

You are probably right. That thought never crossed my mind because even though I would have expected “does not equal” to be expressed as != and not as =/=, it was perfectly clear to me that =/= can mean nothing else than “does not equal” because of the context it stood in. Well, for all the confused people, now you have a translation and may finally see the truth about what others knew all along.

Charrbeque.8729:

The problem it seems is some people don’t realize that the “=/=” symbol EphemeralWallaby used stands for “does not equal”. You take that symbol out of the equation, and it looks like the dev said it was OK to AFK farm, in response to Emphemeral.

If that’s the case, I’m sorry ’bout it. I figured that on the internet it was a pretty widely understood symbol.

Just goes to show when one tries to be succinct, they can accidentally be even more ambiguous.

=/= definitely means “does not equal”

~EW

I think what actually confused a lot of people was Michael’s reply to the opening post:

DragOneve.2359:

I’ve been seeing some rangers camped on a mob spawn letting their pet kill enemies for them, is this considered a form of botting? I know the players are AFK cause they have been there for a couple of hours.

Michael Henninger.7451:

This is allowed behavior; as it was designed to function that way.

This can easily be misunderstood as “AFK farming is allowed behavior; as it was designed to function that way.”. Well, now we got the new answer and all older ones are overwritten…

We can discuss this all we want, but it’s ArenaNets game. They can kick ban suspend you all they want, provided they have a reason.

Just read the EULA and such things before accepting them. If you ignore that and make up your own version of what is, should be or shouldn’t be allowed, then by all means do so. But you will possibly get banned.

Other than that, complaining here doesn’t do much, going to support will. It’s literally yourword against theirs in a situation ArenaNet has all the rights and you don’t. They don’t even have to prove it, unless you want to bring them to court over it.

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

Wow, OP, that message looks like it came from GM Hillary Clinton.

It essentially says “we know you didn’t technically do something wrong, but we still don’t like what you did and therefore we are now lying to intimidate you into not doing it again because we can’t make our game work properly”.

Good times…

Errr…that’s not what it says at all? It says that the AFK farming that they were doing isn’t bannable (which…they weren’t banned) but it is something that gets reported, either through their own internals or by players, and that they should avoid it in the future because if it gets reported again, they can be suspended again.

Basically, OP did do something wrong. They knowingly AFK farmed. They protested their suspension on the grounds that they didn’t use 3rd party software, but they were still doing something that violates Anet policy. The GM response merely points out the fact that, regardless of what the OP thought they were or were not doing, at the very least it mimicked an actionable offense to the point that they took action, as is their right.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

I think what actually confused a lot of people was Michael’s reply to the opening post:

DragOneve.2359:

I’ve been seeing some rangers camped on a mob spawn letting their pet kill enemies for them, is this considered a form of botting? I know the players are AFK cause they have been there for a couple of hours.

Michael Henninger.7451:

This is allowed behavior; as it was designed to function that way.

This can easily be misunderstood as “AFK farming is allowed behavior; as it was designed to function that way.”. Well, now we got the new answer and all older ones are overwritten…

People are just reading the post wrong. The dev was referring to the part about whether the player could use pets to kill for them.

Customer: “Your new titanium bat is very durable and does not break upon impact with the hardest of objects. My angry ex has been hitting me nonstop with it.”

Company: “It was designed to function this way.”

Obviously the company rep is referring to the first part. People are just assuming that an omission means permission.

Batelle.1680:

Errr…that’s not what it says at all? It says that the AFK farming that they were doing isn’t bannable (which…they weren’t banned) but it is something that gets reported, either through their own internals or by players, and that they should avoid it in the future because if it gets reported again, they can be suspended again.

While it isn’t a bannable offense, it is apparently a breach of the Rules of Conduct, or else OP wouldn’t have gotten a 24h suspension.

In GW2 getting reported by internal mechanisms or players is never enough to warrant a ban, suspension or any action against that account by itself.

What about connecting AFK mode to level 1 and downscaling AFK’ers no matter which zone they’re in? It could force people who have to go afk to get to a safe place first or teleport away. Toggle off AFK mode and get scaled back to normal/adjusted to zone.

As always, the dose makes the poison. I’m sure if you AFK farm for 20 mins-1 hour from time to time because you are bringing kids to school, cooking, have stomach disorders… it is OK. But if you spend nights and days camping one spot while AFK farming you engage an alarm in the system which can detect how much you move Vs how much you loot.
Once you got spotted, the autoban must have kicked in and while you are not using third party program you are also not actively playing so a suspension seems right.
As always, it is better to not think of ourselves higher than what we are and extract some GM sentences and transform them so that we can cheat the system. The system will always win.

Actually he did not say it was not a bannable offense. He said it was not an outright bannable offense. An equivalent wording would be “You will not be banned immediately/at once/on first offense”.

From what I remember, if someone is caught committing the same offense again that already got him suspended, the suspension time will increase significantly and eventually be replaced with a permanent ban if he doesn’t stop doing it.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Does doing this really make any money?

Maybe if you are a child and dont have to pay for the power. Its better to save the elctricity and buy gems for the money.

Think its just hyped now a little bit and more people notice rangers and necros which doesnt move , i already got reported while i was waiting for the Dredge Commisar with my minionmaster

HenryChinaski.4732:

Celtic Lady.3729:

Does doing this really make any money?

Maybe if you are a child and dont have to pay for the power. Its better to save the elctricity and buy gems for the money.

Think its just hyped now a little bit and more people notice rangers and necros which doesnt move , i already got reported while i was waiting for the Dredge Commisar with my minionmaster

You get more for your money by AFK farming than if you were to spend the amount of money spent on electricity to convert to gold through the gem store.

Sartharina.3542:

They are fixing it, by suspending violators of the ToS. NONE of the situations you mentioned actually happen, because the game has an automatic inactivity kick (Which they really should fix to kick any lack of keyboard input, instead of counting pet/autoattack inputs)

Currently it doesn’t actually care about keyboard input. -_-

I had the message come up from standing around chatting with my guild but didn’t do anything else.

I guess I should be glad I’ll never have to deal with this. I’m lucky to maintain connected for 10-20 minutes while I’m actively playing.

Ranael.6423:

As always, the dose makes the poison. I’m sure if you AFK farm for 20 mins-1 hour from time to time because you are bringing kids to school, cooking, have stomach disorders… it is OK. But if you spend nights and days camping one spot while AFK farming you engage an alarm in the system which can detect how much you move Vs how much you loot.
.

I have to disagree, if you are AFK to deal with other issues, then go somewhere else (home , lions etc, a camp in the same map ). No problems with that. But, if you are AFK farming, regardless of the excuses (not reasons) farmers make, then let the warnings fall, followed by the escalating bans if the behavior continues.

Blude.6812:

Ranael.6423:

As always, the dose makes the poison. I’m sure if you AFK farm for 20 mins-1 hour from time to time because you are bringing kids to school, cooking, have stomach disorders… it is OK. But if you spend nights and days camping one spot while AFK farming you engage an alarm in the system which can detect how much you move Vs how much you loot.
.

I have to disagree, if you are AFK to deal with other issues, then go somewhere else (home , lions etc, a camp in the same map ). No problems with that. But, if you are AFK farming, regardless of the excuses (not reasons) farmers make, then let the warnings fall, followed by the escalating bans if the behavior continues.

lol no… if I need to run afk I am not going to just leave the map I am in. And if my minions decide to kill kitten while I am off doing whatever I had to do that isn’t my fault.

No sympathy for afk farmers whether (ab)using the mechanics of your class (necro/ranger).

Anet previously said wrt. multi boxing etc that you must actively play on your computer and I think you are in violation of that if you deem it ok to afk while letting something occur in game that passively plays for you.

All these responses along the lines of “But the game mechanics allow me to do this” make me facepalm.

When I play the game, I play it “as intended”. I chat, I complete events, complete achievements, etc. I think there’s a very big grey area somewhere between that, and botting which players seem to think is acceptable and for whatever reason will swear blind that it’s an acceptable and legitimate way to play the game just because it’s not specifically prohibited within the rules.

I have one thing to say to these people.

“Why do you feel like you have to play the game within the rules, but pressed right up against the rules to such a point of obscurity that noone is even sure what is acceptable any more?”

If the answer back is anything other than “I want to Bot but I’m too much of a wimp to actually Bot so I’m going to get as close to it as I can, so long as it’s ‘within’ the rules” then it’s … well, it’s basically a lie, isn’kitten

Dinks.2478:

lol no… if I need to run afk I am not going to just leave the map I am in. And if my minions decide to kill kitten while I am off doing whatever I had to do that isn’t my fault.

It’s a standard mmo practice that if you’re going AFK, you go to a safe-spot… especially if you know you’ll be afk longer than a bio. It doesn’t matter how you choose to do it: going to a waypoint where mobs don’t spawn, porting to your home instance, or even logging out to character select.

Yeah, there’s going to be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions… it’s not the norm nor the expected norm.

If your minions are killing stuff while you’re afk then it IS your fault. You chose to stay where mobs spawn and you chose to have minions out (you can always toggle Flesh of the Master to kill all your minions) FULLY KNOWING how your minions behave.

~EW

Dinks.2478:

Blude.6812:

Ranael.6423:

As always, the dose makes the poison. I’m sure if you AFK farm for 20 mins-1 hour from time to time because you are bringing kids to school, cooking, have stomach disorders… it is OK. But if you spend nights and days camping one spot while AFK farming you engage an alarm in the system which can detect how much you move Vs how much you loot.
.

I have to disagree, if you are AFK to deal with other issues, then go somewhere else (home , lions etc, a camp in the same map ). No problems with that. But, if you are AFK farming, regardless of the excuses (not reasons) farmers make, then let the warnings fall, followed by the escalating bans if the behavior continues.

lol no… if I need to run afk I am not going to just leave the map I am in. And if my minions decide to kill kitten while I am off doing whatever I had to do that isn’t my fault.

Read carefully, I also said a camp in the same map. So it appears to be another excuse from you IF you are farming.
Plenty of places to move to without leaving the map and controlling your minions and pets.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Dinks.2478:

lol no… if I need to run afk I am not going to just leave the map I am in. And if my minions decide to kill kitten while I am off doing whatever I had to do that isn’t my fault.

It’s a standard mmo practice that if you’re going AFK, you go to a safe-spot… especially if you know you’ll be afk longer than a bio. It doesn’t matter how you choose to do it: going to a waypoint where mobs don’t spawn, porting to your home instance, or even logging out to character select.

Yeah, there’s going to be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions… it’s not the norm nor the expected norm.

If your minions are killing stuff while you’re afk then it IS your fault. You chose to stay where mobs spawn and you chose to have minions out (you can always toggle Flesh of the Master to kill all your minions) FULLY KNOWING how your minions behave.

~EW

I think that is a problem with GW2 as a whole, we do not ‘need’ safe spots as there are no real death taxes in the game. Any other class (non-pet) can AFK and die, and when you come back you just WP and run back.

That is where this mentality comes form really.

No corpse runs
no XP Loss
no Item’s becoming permanently damaged, resulting in item loss

I think the other part of the issue is that autoloot allows your character to evade the timeout for AFK. Just forget about pets killing things for you for a min. As far as I am concerned, we are allowed 60mins of AFK time. But the Auto Loot system breaks this functionality.

So there are 2 things you can do here.

1. drop/stow all pets(put your pet on passive for Rangers) and disable auto loot in your options. And then you should be safe to AFK as you are not auto playing in anyway, and the AFK Timer WILL hit

2. Move to a place in the map that wont force your character to interact with anything that constitutes as autoplay, pop the HoM portal, WP to some place else, or just log out back to character select.

I have asked the Devs to do 3 things for us here

1. fix autoloot so it does not reset the AFK timer
2. add in a hotkey to toggle Autoloot on/off
3. add in game warnings when autoloot is enabled that using it to auto play your characters is in violation of the ToS/EULA.

I think this will ultimately resolve these issues.

Dondarrion.2748:

No sympathy for afk farmers whether (ab)using the mechanics of your class (necro/ranger).

Anet previously said wrt. multi boxing etc that you must actively play on your computer and I think you are in violation of that if you deem it ok to afk while letting something occur in game that passively plays for you.

yes they did, however they never defined what is ‘playing’.

I posted a response from a GM that kinda touches on this, and it really just means ‘interacting with the game in some way’. So you can be chatting, working on specs, playing the TP, screenshotting…ect. but you have to be using the game in some way, not necessarily playing it.

Dinks.2478:

lol no… if I need to run afk I am not going to just leave the map I am in. And if my minions decide to kill kitten while I am off doing whatever I had to do that isn’t my fault.

It takes two seconds to press escape > log out if there’s an emergency.

Parking yourself next to another AFK farmer ‘by coincidence’ for a few hours is no excuse, even if you’ve been kidnapped by aliens IRL.

sirsquishy.2619:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

It’s a standard mmo practice that if you’re going AFK, you go to a safe-spot… especially if you know you’ll be afk longer than a bio. It doesn’t matter how you choose to do it: going to a waypoint where mobs don’t spawn, porting to your home instance, or even logging out to character select.

Yeah, there’s going to be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions… it’s not the norm nor the expected norm.

If your minions are killing stuff while you’re afk then it IS your fault. You chose to stay where mobs spawn and you chose to have minions out (you can always toggle Flesh of the Master to kill all your minions) FULLY KNOWING how your minions behave.

~EW

I think that is a problem with GW2 as a whole, we do not ‘need’ safe spots as there are no real death taxes in the game. Any other class (non-pet) can AFK and die, and when you come back you just WP and run back.

That is where this mentality comes form really.

No corpse runs
no XP Loss
no Item’s becoming permanently damaged, resulting in item loss

I agree that GW2 is kinda a rare duck in these features… but I intended my response to be focused towards his shifting culpability of his choices to the AI. Such attitudes kitten me off. Even if one does not care about character safety, it’s still a choice to go to a safe spot (heck, I’ll call it an inactive spot from now on)… and the waypoints mean he doesn’t have to leave the map to do so.

~EW

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

sirsquishy.2619:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

It’s a standard mmo practice that if you’re going AFK, you go to a safe-spot… especially if you know you’ll be afk longer than a bio. It doesn’t matter how you choose to do it: going to a waypoint where mobs don’t spawn, porting to your home instance, or even logging out to character select.

Yeah, there’s going to be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions… it’s not the norm nor the expected norm.

If your minions are killing stuff while you’re afk then it IS your fault. You chose to stay where mobs spawn and you chose to have minions out (you can always toggle Flesh of the Master to kill all your minions) FULLY KNOWING how your minions behave.

~EW

I think that is a problem with GW2 as a whole, we do not ‘need’ safe spots as there are no real death taxes in the game. Any other class (non-pet) can AFK and die, and when you come back you just WP and run back.

That is where this mentality comes form really.

No corpse runs
no XP Loss
no Item’s becoming permanently damaged, resulting in item loss

I agree that GW2 is kinda a rare duck in these features… but I intended my response to be focused towards his shifting culpability of his choices to the AI. Such attitudes kitten me off. Even if one does not care about character safety, it’s still a choice to go to a safe spot (heck, I’ll call it an inactive spot from now on)… and the waypoints mean he doesn’t have to leave the map to do so.

~EW

I agree, but right now we have GMs in a meeting looking at the AFK threads discussion this, I think it was valuable to bring those points up as that is part of the issue. GW2 is too safe of a game, and players are not afraid to die. Ganted, to fix that, would completely change the atmosphere of GW2, but maybe they can put it on a back burner for later.

Would be kinda interesting, if your gear breaks in between repairs its lost forever. Thats kinda like a sudo death tax :-)

They could even limit it to PvE open world, just for fun :-)

This basically proves they have zero mechanisms to detect actual 3rd party software and they rely purely on player reports to ban people for botting. Sad.

Esquilax.3491:

This basically proves they have zero mechanisms to detect actual 3rd party software and they rely purely on player reports to ban people for botting. Sad.

It doesn’t prove that at all.

What they could do: after a few minutes of not interacting with the game, you would stop getting loot and EXP from pet/minion kills until you start playing again. This could discourage AFK farming.

Michael Henninger.7451:

Xulie.6201:

(sorry in advance to those of you tired of these threads)

We thank you for your patience. While this isn’t an outright bannable offense, it’s best to be careful while AFKing on your Reaper as sometimes a false flag occurs. While I can’t guarantee or deny if this might happen again in the future it’s always best to be mindful of the Rule of Conduct and also the Breaches & Outcomes.

This is a mistake; and is being addressed (with haste).

Mass confusion incoming with that post in..

3…
2…
1…

Michael Henninger.7451:

“it’s best to be careful while AFKing”

There’s no need to be careful. The criteria between game mechanics and automation are very clear and we can easily tell the difference.

Now we’re cookin’ with gas. Thank you!

forum bug squash..

here have a .gif:

Michael Henninger.7451:

“it’s best to be careful while AFKing”

There’s no need to be careful. The criteria between game mechanics and automation are very clear and we can easily tell the difference.

I imagine it’s not as easy as you make it sound.

My friend’s 70+ yr old mother is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and when she plays GW2 she tends to run in a continuous loop farming resources and killing random critters. It looks very much like botting because of the memory issue. Point in case, she was banned permanently, until he appealed the case and provided medical records proving that she was ill and not botting.

But in your defense, when things like this happen, customer service does at least try to do right by their customers. Not to mention it’s hard, if not impossible, to get it right every time.

Lets ask a philosophical question.
Anet comes up with a method to 100% detect AFK farmers and botters, BUT the fix also requires that legit players will suffer as well.
Should they implement the fix ?
In other words, should everyone take a hit to get rid of of AFK farmers / botters?

mauried.5608:

Lets ask a philosophical question.
Anet comes up with a method to 100% detect AFK farmers and botters, BUT the fix also requires that legit players will suffer as well.
Should they implement the fix ?
In other words, should everyone take a hit to get rid of of AFK farmers / botters?

Set up a pillory in each home city, and for the duration of the suspension have the characters on public display as a friendly reminder to others.

/mistersinister

mauried.5608:

Lets ask a philosophical question.
Anet comes up with a method to 100% detect AFK farmers and botters, BUT the fix also requires that legit players will suffer as well.
Should they implement the fix ?
In other words, should everyone take a hit to get rid of of AFK farmers / botters?

As they said. “Rest assured, we aren’t going to take away auto-loot in the world, or remove your ability to auto-cast. Everything we implement will only impact players who aren’t actually performing actions.”

Full quote below.

Chris Cleary.8017:

I would rather us fix the underlying issue with this rather than band-aid the issue by enforcing rules and punishments that don’t solve the issue at all.

The core issue here is we don’t want to have players feeling that their main source of income is generated while they are not at the computer. We have already started to see the impact of this in-game and within the community. Not only does this behavior impact players in the world when they run across a pack of unattended farmers, but also the players who are performing the unattended farming. Eventually these players spend less and less time actually playing the game, and more time unattended farming.

We see the same trends in players that use bots, macros and cheats. It eventually leads to players falling out of the game (from both encountering the impact in the world, or by participating themselves).

While there is an economic impact of having a large number of players farming like this, I’m more more concerned about behavior trends shifting than anything else.

The 3 rules above aren’t just for your protection, they are for everyone’s protection. GMs have been trained to identify and handle these situations, it’s one of the first things they learn. GMs are overly generous on the amount of time that players are given to respond.

As for how we intend on fixing that, some of us had a meeting today to talk about that. While there are some systems working against each other here, we all agreed that we didn’t want to make any changes that anyone would actually run into unless they were no longer at their keyboard for an extended period.

Rest assured, we aren’t going to take away auto-loot in the world, or remove your ability to auto-cast. Everything we implement will only impact players who aren’t actually performing actions. I’m sure when we do implement something, it’ll be in the patch notes to read about. Until then, follow the 3 rules above. After that, they won’t be relevant anymore.

(Automation is still against the rules, unless you are using it to play music in-game)

mauried.5608:

Lets ask a philosophical question.
Anet comes up with a method to 100% detect AFK farmers and botters, BUT the fix also requires that legit players will suffer as well.
Should they implement the fix ?
In other words, should everyone take a hit to get rid of of AFK farmers / botters?

No, they shouldn’t. Making your rule abiding, desired players suffer because of a few black sheep is never a good idea. That being said: it doesn’t seem to be an issue in this specific case. As soon as the afk timer is fixed, afk farmers will return to character select after 1h of inactivity. Players that move from time to time can be considered semi-afk, which makes it ok to give them some loot imo.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

mauried.5608:

Lets ask a philosophical question.
Anet comes up with a method to 100% detect AFK farmers and botters, BUT the fix also requires that legit players will suffer as well.
Should they implement the fix ?
In other words, should everyone take a hit to get rid of of AFK farmers / botters?

No, they shouldn’t. Making your rule abiding, desired players suffer because of a few black sheep is never a good idea. That being said: it doesn’t seem to be an issue in this specific case. As soon as the afk timer is fixed, afk farmers will return to character select after 1h of inactivity. Players that move from time to time can be considered semi-afk, which makes it ok to give them some loot imo.

The systems they have now and any system they implement will always generate false positives. It will also likely to some degree affect innocent players. Like we now have players sometimes hit with being accused of gold selling when players gift large amounts of gold. And we have the limit on the amount of gold we can remove from mail and from guild banks. Both due to gold sellers.

The question really should be: how much of a hit and what percentage of players should be hit by negatives of systems designed to catch and punish rule breakers?

Seera.5916:

The question really should be: how much of a hit and what percentage of players should be hit by negatives of systems designed to catch and punish rule breakers?

The general answer to that is easy: By however much that allows ANet to retain the most income.

If they do nothing, they lose income. If they’re too heavy handed they lose income. They gotta find the optimum spot somewhere between the two… and it will be likely where they can retain the most income.

The ideal situation is what Chris stated: "Everything we implement will only impact players who aren’t actually performing actions.” Time will tell if it happens. I’m hoping it does.

~EW