(edited by sirsquishy.2619)
how about the auto loot mastery is ONLY active in dungeons,fractals,WvW,raids and disabled in open world. problem solved
Autoloot is not the problem, the issue is that player activity is not needed to farm events/mobs
apparently it is. just disable autoloot mastery like i said in open world. and this problem will be resolved. or make it so if your pet kills things without you hitting it your self u wont get credit
Disabling autoloot in open world would just anger the majority of people who dont engage in this behavior. Changing game mechanics to where actual player involvement is necessary to gain loot and exp would be a better alternative to discouraging and preventing this kind of behavior. Allowing people to tag an enemy and sit out the rest of an event and still get full credit is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is allowing people to gain loot and exp from their pets/minions while they do nothing at all.
I have always felt this way. But the issue is, damage = participation. And some things die so fast that forcing everyone to do 1% damage as a min (could be 40,000 damage) can be hard for a lot of players.
But, there has to be a better way to fix that issue. Too bad its unrelated to the AFK macro issue we are focusing on right now.
I think the ‘tagging an enemy and sitting out the rest of the event’ issue has started being addressed…. with the recent changes of incremental rewards for some events instead of a lump-sum at the end of the event. I’d like to see this change become even more wide-spread… it may not be the perfect solution for some, but it does mean a player has to keep paying attention to what’s going on if they want a reward… they can’t tag and go afk…. or tag and run off.
~EW
I seriously hope so, I miss the good old days where everyone was working together at their peak ability for a common goal, but right now we have ‘stand in one spot, 1, 1, 1, heal, 1, 1, 1, move off fire, heal, 1,1,1’. and then we have players that auto attack and then just leave their character running (you see them cause they are STILL dead after that poison cloud!).
I am not asking for it to be harder, but make players have to do more then basic functionality to get credit isn’t asking too much I think.
Ahh the good old days of open World Everquest dragons :-)
how about the auto loot mastery is ONLY active in dungeons,fractals,WvW,raids and disabled in open world. problem solved
Autoloot is not the problem, the issue is that player activity is not needed to farm events/mobs
apparently it is. just disable autoloot mastery like i said in open world. and this problem will be resolved. or make it so if your pet kills things without you hitting it your self u wont get credit
Disabling autoloot in open world would just anger the majority of people who dont engage in this behavior. Changing game mechanics to where actual player involvement is necessary to gain loot and exp would be a better alternative to discouraging and preventing this kind of behavior. Allowing people to tag an enemy and sit out the rest of an event and still get full credit is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is allowing people to gain loot and exp from their pets/minions while they do nothing at all.
I have always felt this way. But the issue is, damage = participation. And some things die so fast that forcing everyone to do 1% damage as a min (could be 40,000 damage) can be hard for a lot of players.
But, there has to be a better way to fix that issue. Too bad its unrelated to the AFK macro issue we are focusing on right now.
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 lossI 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 :-)
Anet’s Repsonse – If your pets are doing the killing and your mastery is doing the looting; you’re okay as far as GMs are concerned. This does not mean design can’t/won’t/should/shouldn’t update the system as it works today.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ranger-Pet-Botting/page/3#post6093187
This remains true. We (Design and Support) are meeting to discuss whether a change should be made. Hang tight. In the meantime; come WvW with me?
so my accounts that I play on are suspended for another 12 days…else I would. Unless you wanna do something about that :-)
In your meeting can you be sure that the following 3 things are discussed?
1. Fixing Auto Loot so that the AFK timer is not reset
2. adding in a Auto Loot Hot key that we can bind with
3. adding in an in game warning about using Auto Loot to auto play the game while AFK and how its against the TOS/EULA.I did pass this through another Channel (one of my tickets) but since you are having a meeting, figured I would touch on it here and ask for you to make sure it gets brought up. as it is a hot issue :-)
Can you toss me a ticket number so I can look at your feedback? I also want to look at your suspensions and make sure that ALL of my GMs are understanding how we’re handling this particular situation.
It would be advisable to also post that information to the players so we know what to expect from the GMs. Maybe a good after meeting summary?
What is preventing the AFK detection from working? Is it auto-cast, auto-run, and/or auto-loot? If so, just make the AFK detection system ignore those things for purposes of checking “are you there?”.
I can confirm it is autoloot.
i think the problem can be solved just by deactivating the Advanced Logistics mastery ( auto-loot ) after a few minutes of inactivity of your character ( not your pet/summons ) . This way you can’t loot while AFKing , and if you simulate any form of activity while AKFing you become bannable for using third-party programs.
I think this would be the best, but disabled internally not via the ingame options (F12). I hate how Minis are disabled, so that players have to enable them again. Makes it annoying, and lets not have it do this for auto loot too.
Anet’s Repsonse – If your pets are doing the killing and your mastery is doing the looting; you’re okay as far as GMs are concerned. This does not mean design can’t/won’t/should/shouldn’t update the system as it works today.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ranger-Pet-Botting/page/3#post6093187
This remains true. We (Design and Support) are meeting to discuss whether a change should be made. Hang tight. In the meantime; come WvW with me?
so my accounts that I play on are suspended for another 12 days…else I would. Unless you wanna do something about that :-)
In your meeting can you be sure that the following 3 things are discussed?
1. Fixing Auto Loot so that the AFK timer is not reset
2. adding in a Auto Loot Hot key that we can bind with
3. adding in an in game warning about using Auto Loot to auto play the game while AFK and how its against the TOS/EULA.I did pass this through another Channel (one of my tickets) but since you are having a meeting, figured I would touch on it here and ask for you to make sure it gets brought up. as it is a hot issue :-)
Can you toss me a ticket number so I can look at your feedback? I also want to look at your suspensions and make sure that ALL of my GMs are understanding how we’re handling this particular situation.
With pleasure – Notice the title of the Ticket and what the suspension was classified as.
2202985:Guild Wars 2: Account action for unauthorized use of third party software
Anet’s Repsonse – If your pets are doing the killing and your mastery is doing the looting; you’re okay as far as GMs are concerned. This does not mean design can’t/won’t/should/shouldn’t update the system as it works today.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ranger-Pet-Botting/page/3#post6093187
This remains true. We (Design and Support) are meeting to discuss whether a change should be made. Hang tight. In the meantime; come WvW with me?
That part isn’t the issue. The issue is can you do that and be afk. That’s what we need a very direct clear statement that is not easy to misinterpret.
Can we get a clear statement on what the situation is now so more people don’t interpret what’s already been said wrong and get punished when they thought they were fine?
This is the clear message that I am passing to you from a GM directly,
Your accounts were temporarily suspended for AFK Macroing. This means that the actions of your character were being automated while you were not actively interacting with the game. This does not have to include the usage of third-party programs, but it most certainly can. Attempts by our GMs were made to contact you in-game to see if you were actively playing but there was no response. With that, we must assume that the actions were being automated while away from the computer.
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.
Essentially, if you are able to monitor your game, take actions yourself, and respond to inquiries that may arise, you are more than welcome too use the game functions to kill and loot for you. However, if you are not at your computer or actively monitoring the game, you may be subject to action for AFK Macroing.
per my post 5-6 messages above this.
Anet’s Repsonse – If your pets are doing the killing and your mastery is doing the looting; you’re okay as far as GMs are concerned. This does not mean design can’t/won’t/should/shouldn’t update the system as it works today.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ranger-Pet-Botting/page/3#post6093187
This remains true. We (Design and Support) are meeting to discuss whether a change should be made. Hang tight. In the meantime; come WvW with me?
so my accounts that I play on are suspended for another 12 days…else I would. Unless you wanna do something about that :-)
In your meeting can you be sure that the following 3 things are discussed?
1. Fixing Auto Loot so that the AFK timer is not reset
2. adding in a Auto Loot Hot key that we can bind with
3. adding in an in game warning about using Auto Loot to auto play the game while AFK and how its against the TOS/EULA.
I did pass this through another Channel (one of my tickets) but since you are having a meeting, figured I would touch on it here and ask for you to make sure it gets brought up. as it is a hot issue :-)
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.
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.
That would be nice, but now here come the pages and pages of posts explaining why they feel that the GM is unclear or flat out wrong.
Well if they cannot comprehend this now, then I guess there is just no helping those users. It cannot be anymore clear then it is right now.
Its not like the other GM messages we have on the forum, this is extremely clear and cut to the point of what is OK and what is not. and it’s done in a single response instead of broken responses.
But, anyone who AFK farms is going to be suspended, or even Banned if they do it enough. So, the problem will solve itself with due time :-)
I’m quite impressed that a GM takes the time and trouble to try to contact you in-game. That is not the sign of a company that is wanting to ban innocent players.
So this is kinda loaded.
I launch GW2 via -noui and passing my username/password through console for a faster load. This bypasses the launcher entirely.
When my account got kicked I think I probably got an 8hour suspension first. But I might have not been at the PC for 10 hours, so never got the warning about it. So went back in, rinse repeat…ect. The only way I knew I was suspended was that the game client was crashing to desktop, in the crash log I saw ‘Failed to connect to network’ Then I loaded the launcher to see the suspended message.
I think that was part of the issue with my 331 hour suspension. They need another way to alert you of suspension other then just the launcher.
I did get an email, the following day after the launcher said i was suspended. But I did not get one for the other 2 times i was reported by a GM for Afk farming, confirmed in the ticket as well. so there are some inconsistencies with their system there.
In my ticket I requested that the GMs also send an in game email alerting of temporary short suspensions due to this, so I hope they take that suggestion to heart as I really had to way of knowing that i was being kicked while my client was AFK since there was 0 communication about it until the final suspension.
I think this can sound kinda confusing, but remember I was leaving my game clients running for 24×7 farming, and checking in on them every 2-3 hours when I had time. And I did see my game client kicked back to character select and sometimes just the gray screen of death. But not until I got an actual suspension message and the Crash to Desktop did I know what was really going on.
So if I understand this right… You are allowed to afk farm with pets, as long as you return to your pc every so often and tap “W” to move forward a little to prevent you being kicked out and that’s ok?
You cannot be Away from the Keyboard (AFK) and using the ingame systems to automate play.
that is what the GM is saying in my Quote there.
You have to be on your PC, consoled into GW2 while your pets are doing the killing/autoloot doing its thing. You can be chatting in Guild, Chat, Map…ect, you can be playing the TP or reworking character builds, taking screenshots…ect but you MUST be interacting with the game in some way while your pets are killing and autoloot is working.
that IS THE ONLY MESSAGE as far as ‘what IS allowed’.
But to simply set your character, engage pet, and auto loot, then walk away from your PC? that will get you suspended.
I do not know how much more clearer that message can be.
This game is very single thread locked in regards to performance. There is 1 master thread that controls everything in the game, and that IS the bottleneck and why DX12 will not do anything for the game in regards to performance.
This is not a graphical API issue, its not a worker thread issue, its the main control thread. And this was explained on Reddit some months back by an Anet Game Engine Dev.
I have an offical response on this subject finally, after many hours and emails to get a senior level GM to respond. That GM gave me permission to Copy/Paste his response in this thread as my own so that I can try and clear this up for everyone (My only goal in all of this, btw)
They may push an offical notice on this per my request, I really hope they do.
Your accounts were temporarily suspended for AFK Macroing. This means that the actions of your character were being automated while you were not actively interacting with the game. This does not have to include the usage of third-party programs, but it most certainly can. Attempts by our GMs were made to contact you in-game to see if you were actively playing but there was no response. With that, we must assume that the actions were being automated while away from the computer.
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.
Essentially, if you are able to monitor your game, take actions yourself, and respond to inquiries that may arise, you are more than welcome too use the game functions to kill and loot for you. However, if you are not at your computer or actively monitoring the game, you may be subject to action for AFK Macroing.
So there we have it, once and for all.
Now we can all put this to bed.
so i guess doing the 9 rings game in guild wars 1 was botting!
Guild Wars 1 didn’t have an idle timer and as I recall, 9 rings only required you to have an item in your inventory so really no comparison.
Actually it does. The AFK timer in GW1 is 10 hours.
There really is no comparison though. The 9 rings game on the Shin Jea boardwalk during certain annual festivals was actually designed to AFK. All you needed to do was make sure you had tickets in your inventory, pick a circle, then stand in it.
Ranger pets and necro minions weren’t designed for players to AFK while using them to farm with for extended periods of time. They were designed to give you loot (with auto loot) and EXP when killing stuff even though you never attacked what they killed. If you do it for 15 minutes or so once in a while you’re probably fine. It’s when you do it for hours on end, day in day out, it becomes a problem. It doesn’t matter if the AFK timer logs you out of the game, then you log back in, and walk away, every time you get kicked.
The problem is people aren’t using common sense.
Just because you can AFK farm by using game mechanics designed to function a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s OK to do it.
What would happen if you told a judge “My car was designed to go 150 miles per hour, therefore I should be able to drive that fast wherever I want”? Your fine for speeding would probably be increased and/or you’d serve jail time for your arrogance.
There’s a difference between going 5mph over the speed limit on the highway (which is generally allowed) and going 50mph over the limit just because your car is capable of it.
except that AFK farming wont kill you, and others around you, if you were to get in a head on collision at 150MPH. Apples and Oranges.
Laws are written for a reason. Rules in a game are different, and when the system the company makes violates the rules, is it truly the players that need to suffer due to it? No.
Instead, said company needs to address the rules or fix the broken system. Targeting players for it at this point is not the correct path. There are no 3rd party programs/tools in use, there are no ‘tricks’ being used to violate the game, game files, or servers. Its all built in. And that IS the point.
If they release another Exp in 2016, that means this game moves into a sudo subscription model of about 4.30/month, to stay current with content.
Currently, this game is not worth an upkeep like that, let alone another ‘expansion’ so soon (sorry 12months is not long enough between releases).
So, i really hope they are not planning on pushing another paid expansion this soon else they are no better then EA with CoD releases.
Honestly, we do not know what they learned. we only know what we learned.
For all we know, they are the read headed kittened step child and wont learn anything….
and that kid is stuck in their room with no more allowance until the chores they promised to do, get done.
The problem is with the system itself.
For one, anyone who has HoT + Mastery unlocked for ‘Auto loot’ is grandfathered into an ‘AFK Farming’ situation whether they know it or not. There certainly is no in game warning that these 2 in game functions break the ToS/EULA when the player is not 100% active at the keyboard.
Now add in play styles, those that manually attack but let auto heal do its thing. Or those that have pets (or Privateer Runes for the 30second Parrot Proc – Which is how my ranger is specked – dual Birds) on top of that.
and now you have a real AFK farming issue. Whether its intended by the player or not.
Those that are doing this intended, its pretty obvious when they are there for hours and hours and never move or interact with the game where another player can see. But what about those that dont intend to do it for more then 15-20mins while they are doing something else (IE GW2 is in a windowed-Full screen mode and your other stuff is running on top…you ARE there at the keyboard on that very same system…I do that all the time and have been for YEARS, and didn’t run into ANY issues with it until this last week)
And now, we have split messages from the company behind all of this. the only thing we have for certain is in game actions taken by those in control of this broken system.
Personally, I think Anet needs to do 3 things with this.
1. Clear offline message/Blog that focuses around this to settle on everything with all the aspects around it.
2. in game popup warnings, and an in game toggle to force logout when idle for X.
3. come to terms that this is going to be a ‘forever’ on going issue and just make it acceptable to do for X to Y periods during Z. So say 4 hours in a 24hour period is ok to AFK farm, and be done with it.
Or, fix the obvious ‘intended’ exploit that they built themselves, autoloot resetting the idle timeout timer. I’m sorry, but that is a bit beyond the player and to hold the player at fault for that..is just completely stupid.
and for the record, saying that AFK farming is pointless is not true. In a 24hour solid period one can get 350-400 bags + other scraps, that yields about 40G-65G with out touching the game in its current state, per account. That is the truth behind this here.