This discussion aside it's amazing how unbalanced CCP treat people on these forums.

If I suggested a CCP, ISD or pro-CCP forumite was lower than a child molester you could expect me to be drummed out of here in moments.

However, when you want to say something that is pro-CCP you can obviously say it any way you like.

congrats you are right below child molesters on my list of the worst types of people.

how was that pro ccp? that was anti *******. you farm WP, you hurt the community. **** every WP farmer in the *******. Is this ccps problem? yes they ****** up on that ****, but any one who does that **** deserves to be force fed a bucket of dicks.

maybe people don't want to spend 10 hours a week just to gain the minimum requirements to progress in the game. the SP is what people are after. why bother equipping level 1 crap when T2 is what you want and need to actually be effective.

What makes it worst is that you are forced to go through that in order to gain your weekly allotment of SP.

Interesting topic, which seems to come back in any online xp (sp) based game...

Here are the questions that I think are relevant to this subject:

1. Why do people AFK farm?
2. Is AFK farming actually a problem?
3. How could you prevent AFK farming?

1 Because this game has gotten really boring. People either red line or get red lined. There is no clear incentive to play pubs right now. Corp matches dont give you SP.

2 No

3 Make the game more interesting and playable

Interesting topic, which seems to come back in any online xp (sp) based game...

Here are the questions that I think are relevant to this subject:

1. Why do people AFK farm?
2. Is AFK farming actually a problem?
3. How could you prevent AFK farming?

1 is easy: because they can. Anything based on "gain" will lead people to want gain as much as they can as fast as they can. People feel they are missing out if they don't.

2 is rather difficult... you could argue that it's "not playing the game as intended", but you could also argue "in real life you can be a slacker too". My biggest issue with it is that you will have people doing it not because they think it's right, or fun, but because they feel obliged to, just to keep up. That is potentially lessening the experience for others.

3 is easy again: there are lots of ways. However which way is good/best, that's not so easy. The first thing that springs to mind would be to not count a player in the MCC or redzone as "participating", so it would only register the time spent in an area where you can be killed by enemies. Sure, you could still hide somewhere, but it would be much harder.

Other options include friendly fire (though that opens up loads of other abuse issues, even though I think it would make sense), input requirements (easily circumvented with auto fire controllers, programmable keyboards or even a rubber band), only reward actual accomplishment (which leads to certain types of player having a hard time gaining SP) and of course the good old "report, check, penalize" option (which is not full proof, is a lot of work for CCP and will be abused as well).

Conclusion: if it were up to me, I'd go with the "MCC and Redzone are not counted as participating". Would also prevent redzone snipers (I don't mind snipers at all... as long as I can find them and kill them). The only real problem I see is for a redzoned team, but the chances of that happening might be less with no AFK players :D