Zeylon Rho
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Test Alliance Please Ignore
1793
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Posted - 2013.08.08 06:07:00 -
[1] - Quote
A big part of this is their misunderstanding of the appeal/reward of AFK.
They changed the way the award in this event works to benefit more active play..... but they did it sort of half-assed. Half an ass is useful to no one.
Normal SP gain is 5sp per sec for doing nothing and 1sp per WP. They doubled the latter value. The problem is WP to SP should probably already garner larger rewards.
In my experience: 1 Skirmish AFK: 4k SP, 1 Skirmish Actually playing: 5.5k SP (about 800 SP in that particularly match). So, even with a 2x bonus, AFK is still hugely rewarding. Playing gave you more SP per match before this, and that's still the case. However, AFK is still very efficient. If you can get 1500+ WP a match, hey... that's great SP gain, but as anyone that looks at scoreboard can tell you - that's a fraction of the average players. AFK still makes great efficiency sense for most players.
You can eat, cook, play Shadowrun/Civilization/EVE/Dragon's Dogma/Animal Crossing, watch TV, read a book, do work you get paid for, or whatever... all while collecting SP at a rate that is more or less on par with people that actually play.
If you're burned out on the game, the same old modes, waiting for new content, waiting for fixes, but aren't ready to give up on the game... hey, AFK provides you with a way to keep while doing other things.
So, yeah.. a 2x modifier on the conversion rate of WP to SP doesn't come close to addressing the issue. |
Zeylon Rho
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
1796
|
Posted - 2013.08.08 07:11:00 -
[2] - Quote
xxwhitedevilxx M wrote:castba wrote:xxwhitedevilxx M wrote:don't hate the player hate the game. So because it is possible to do, all players should be absolved of their decision to abuse game mechanics? What a bullshit thought process. CCP didn't make people AFK. People made their own decision to do so. Abuse? It's a game mechanic that allows you gain sp and isk even if you're doing nothing, maybe because ccp wanted to reward ppl unable to be useful for their squad, who knows. ccp is well aware of the problem since closed beta. They changed SP systems many times, but still afk is "permitted" somehow. But, please, understand that I myself posted a solution, even in closed beta i posted that same solution that would solve afking. Still nobody gives a damn. Either players and ccp.
Both players and CCP care I think, but it's a touchy issue to handle.
It would be sensible in some ways to have things completely performance-based, right? Don't give people SP for doing nothing. However, the WP award system in the game is already a bit broken. A dropship pilot that did nothing but act as... well, a dropship? That might be 0 WP for the match. Scanners = O WP. Vehicle Repair = 0 WP. This list goes on. WP accounts for a pretty narrow window of battlefield efforts. Are you killing people or destroying installments? Great! Here's your WP. Everyone else is screwed.
This aside from people that are "trying" to help their team, but failing. That person who puts down droplinks that either never get used or get destroyed before that. That person following a heavy repping that gets killed instead of the heavy. They don't get WP, but they're clearly participating.
Then of course, there are the new players. Pub-stomping can be an opportunity for WP in some ways, but it's often means excessive death, loss of ISK, and the inabilitiy to effectively fight back. This is significant for two reasons:
1. Any fix for AFK (or people doing things/attacking from the redline) has to account for the downtrodden folk that are forced into the redline.
2. New players are going to naturally perform worse than vets, and there'd be a huge SP gap that would only widen more if performance were the only metric by which they rewarded SP.
It gets more complicated still though. People AFK-ing are often vets, right? People get burned out, people aren't sure if they want to keep playing, etc. AFK-ing people are people that for whatever reason have NOT given up on the game. These are often people (I'd guess) that still give money to the devs in the form of boosters both active and passive. The point of AFK-ing is to keep getting SP even if you don't feel like playing. If SP-getting were to suddenly have a higher barrier of entry (only active play), those same vets might just drop from playing until some later date when the game "gets good". That means no more active booster purchases, which means an actual AFK fix might hurt CCP's bottom-line.
That's not to say there aren't ways to fix it, but AFK-ing is both a product of the game's problems and a sort of symbol of the faith people apparently still have in the future of it. If they weren't planning on playing again -at some point-, then there'd be no point in getting SP.
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