I'm not suggesting this out of spite, ...

Didn't think you were, bud! I was referring solely to my own character flaws.

I shall leave your bank-robbery analogy be, not because it is inapt, but rather for fear of launching myself on a pages-long rant about the SEC and Wall Street. ;)

I am curious, what are the unwanted side effects you see in dropping the SP-per-time thing? I don't really see it that way. I'd still get my SP for supporting my boys, and even occasionally for killing someone; my boys would still get theirs for killing your boys; you and your boys would still get your for killing my dumb ass, etc. The only thing is we'd all get that couple thousand fewer per game, unless they adjusted the rate of WP to SP. (which I think would almost have to go hand-in-hand with losing or reducing the SP-per-seconds thing)

The AFKers annoy me, too. I must confess, removing their ill-gotten SP ex post facto would amuse me, if for no reason other than spite. But I'm doubtful that CCP will implement this, and if they did, I suspect there would be an orgy of complaining, ranting, threats, et cetera. Hell, there might be just in response to your suggestion.

I think perhaps a better solution would be to remove the WP rewarded for time in game, or at least reduce it dramatically.

WP are recorded for time in game? i don't think so. Now, SP and ISK are, and this should be rectified in some way.

I'm against AFK SP farming, too, but how would CCP detect this?
Don't assume they're wizards.

Announcing a date for retroactive AFK SP removal is fine. The point is any idle detector is going to have some holes, and CCP needs to be able to close them retroactively if it wants to have an effectve deterrent. Otherwise people will be constantly hacking it and CCP would have to create a full time team dedicated to the project.

Having said that, people know that AFK SP farming is against the spirit of the game right now. It's rather disengenuous to claim that you had no idea CCP didn't want you doing it when they changed from a daily to a weekly cap to stop it last time and they announced that they were working on the detector.

Stop this witch hunt for AFK farmers. It's not cheating in any way and thus shouldn't be punished in any way.

Maybe CCP didn't intended this to happen, but that doesn't make it cheating. If it was cheating CCP would have said so from the beginning.

So stop this.

You have a valid point, but good luck on any detector or enforcement. With rapid fire controllers, smart keyboards, just holding down the run button, shooting a few people then holding down the run button. There are alot of ways to avoid detection.

The problem I see if the way the game is made, its big, technical and has snipers. How would you detect an AFKer vs a Sniper sitting just off a remote base on overwatch? Both of them will probably have very long periods of complete inactivity.

Option #3 - Don't have the primary source of SP awards be time spent in match. You had [u]zero]/u] AFK'ers until CCP introduced that mechanic.

At minimum invert it so that WP earn 5 SP and seconds in match are on a 1:1 ratio. Make that simple change and there will be a substantial drop in the AFK'ing (tho it will likely continue as long as there's "free SP" to be had simply for spawning.

0.02 ISK
Cross

You have two options:

1) PreventAFK rewards in real time when you can and let the rest go
2) Prevent what you can in real time and get the rest after the fact

The first option will lead to an arms race with CCP constantly playing catch up to the hackers. That will result in significant effort just to stay behind.

The second option will dramatically discourage hacking as all the time and effort spent to circumvent the control may be lost at any time.

wow. hacking, huh?

I'll go with option 3- Ignore your two options.

FWIW- I've spend my time MCC AFK when I get put into a half in the bag match. Why should I keep wasting time bouncing out of matches? Why should I play in a match full of people who have no chance of winning, and put themselves in that place before I even got into the match? Fix that first. Amongst other way more important sorely needed bug fixes.

Someone with pocketrocket in their name tried to nade me in the MCC- only to repeatedly die when i moved at the last second. Was pretty hilarious to see their KD go from 0/5 to 0/11 trying to kill me :D And that right there is the crux of AFK QQers. They tend to be on the bottom of the team and out of frustration with their own shortcomings project it onto the AFKs. Same with people who mess with me when I redline snipe. I'm redline sniping to take out all of their snipers. I'll be #1 or 2 on the team... and here I am getting pestered by some berry with a 1/11 KD. I have never had a top performer mess with me in an MCC or in the redline. Probably because they are too busy killing reds to care. It is always ****** players.

I'm against AFK SP farming, too, but how would CCP detect this?
Don't assume they're wizards.

The problem I see if the way the game is made, its big, technical and has snipers. How would you detect an AFKer vs a Sniper sitting just off a remote base on overwatch? Both of them will probably have very long periods of complete inactivity.

I've stated my opinion that a detector will be dificult to build. It would be nearly impossible to keep up with the AFK hackers, hence the requirement to be able to post process battles when new hacks are identified.

That said, there are probably whole classes of actions that will take care of themselves, such as anything that exposes you to enemy fire (or team killing). For the most part it will probably concentrate on the MCC and your redline.

After a certain point a person manipulating the keyboard or controler will be spending enough attention to the game that they might as well be playing.

Stop this witch hunt for AFK farmers. It's not cheating in any way and thus shouldn't be punished in any way.

Maybe CCP didn't intended this to happen, but that doesn't make it cheating. If it was cheating CCP would have said so from the beginning.

So stop this.

True, it is not cheating. However it is also not fair, and also not sporting.I have never gone AFK to farm isk. And I battle with myself every day knowing there are players out there doing it, and it will put me at a severe disadvantage come PC when I can't afford thousands of protofits to go up against players who have done (such as yourself I assume).

One thing they could do is have a post- game review system for players on you team. Players could either upvote or downvote their teammates, and if a player got a certain aggregate score or lower t hey would forfeit their sp, loot, and isk.

Just a starting point, tweaks could obviously be allowed.

Hackers... you keep saying that word but I do not think it means what you think it means...

People who are afk are not hacking cheating intentionally losing to **** you off.

They are just accruing sp. Using the system that ccp put into place after the community whined endlessly about the daily cap.

They are in no way hacking into ccps server and telling them hey I'm getting sp.

Nor are they hacking their systems to do anything.... they are just sitting their omnomnoming up tasty sp while doing other things.

I find mining in eve and afking while working so I cqn ya know buy more booster or doing college coursework so I can earn more money to buy even more boosters...

Ask me make it more like eve with wp giving a boost to gains.

Your idea ranks up there on the hell no scale with V2K.

Ill admit it there are players I would downvote into oblivion for giggles...

Once we get six man squads say you get put with a guy you can't stand or was kicked/quit your corp... this would be a huge issue and would **** people off like no other...

I know its not perfect but it is an idea. And its meant to catxh AFK farmers, so say if someone gets a net score of -5 (10 down, 5 up) then their score and wp for the game would be saved with their vote tally and sent to ccp for consideration. If ccp looks at this and realizes someone was playing if they accomplished anything at all, then no further action would be taken. That protexts players from frivolous and petty downvotes. But if the guy is 0-0, or 0-1 or 0-10 and/or consistently comes in with scores like that ccp could remove isk/sp/loot obtained from that game.

You have two options:

1) PreventAFK rewards in real time when you can and let the rest go
2) Prevent what you can in real time and get the rest after the fact

The first option will lead to an arms race with CCP constantly playing catch up to the hackers. That will result in significant effort just to stay behind.

The second option will dramatically discourage hacking as all the time and effort spent to circumvent the control may be lost at any time.

It's the same approach used in the real world when prevention is too difficult or costly. Rather than lock up everything in the store we use security cameras to detect theft and prosecute after the offense. Detection and prosecution is often far cheaper and more effective than prevention.

I'm against AFK SP farming, too, but how would CCP detect this?
Don't assume they're wizards.

"From the folks who brought you the 18 hour boss fight, comes this: mass bannings! Square Enix has nixed a large number of players from online game Final Fantasy XI".

According to Square Enix, the company "discovered an issue that allowed players to create multiple items for certain treasures and rewards in areas such as Salvage and Assault by exploiting the game system."

This "issue" was apparently a bug GÇö and a bug that many players had long known about before Square Enix handled.

During an emergency maintenance on November 26, 2008, Square Enix fixed this "issue" and discovered that players had already taken advantage of it before, in Square Enix's words, "it was addressed."

The company investigated a year's worth of logs throughout all areas of the games and then put the game's terms of use to, err, use.

"As a result of the investigation, approximately 400 players were temporarily suspended based on evidence gathered," Square Enix stated. "Approximately 550 players who committed more serious misconduct had their accounts banned."

Word has it that many of the damned and banned were long time FFXI players GÇö perma banned, apparently.

TL;DR: Hundreds of players found an exploit where you could duplicate this game's equivalent of officer weapons+1 items in a loot pool at will and knowingly exploited it for almost an entire year with what seemed like no repercussion in sight. SE spent that time to accurately go through the server logs and permabanned every single player that used this exploit by tracking chatlogs, the coding on the duped items, and server data. Goes to show you that everything you do is watched.

Going 0/0 with 0 WP for extended periods of time should be easy to track.

[FEEDBACK] AFK SP Farming
Update: We are looking at implementing an anti-idle system to solve this.

Trust me, they know:
http://kotaku.com/5137673/hundreds-of-players-banned-in-final-fantasy-xi

TL;DR: Hundreds of players found an exploit where you could duplicate this game's equivalent of officer weapons+1 items in a loot pool at will and knowingly exploited it for almost an entire year with what seemed like no repercussion in sight. SE spent that time to accurately go through the server logs and permabanned every single player that used this exploit by tracking chatlogs, the coding on the duped items, and server data. Goes to show you that everything you do is watched.
Going 0/0 with 0 WP for extended periods of time should be easy to track.

Guys, my OP wasn't a request to implement the anti-idle system. CCP already stated they were working on one.

My post was a suggestion to CCP that they not try to play catchup with AFK players, but rather prosecute after the fact to keep their development costs down. So far I haven't read any arguments against that reasoning.

What I do read is a side argument about some folks feeling entitled to AFK because CCP knows about the problem. In my mind that's akin to claiming a store owner knows you can shoplift and doesn't put every bit of merchandise under lock and key, so you are entitled to walk off with it. The owner doesn't do that because it would be a pain in the ass for everyone. What he does do is install cameras to record theft so he can prosecute once you leave the store.

It's disengenuous to claim that it's "Working as Intended". Everyone knows it hurts the quality of play when some don't bother to participate. You can claim that "Well, gameplay sucks anyway so I'm not doing much additional harm.", but that's merely a rationalization. People AFK because they want the rewards but do not want to pay CCP for them with their active participation.

Your example is bad. It does not even correlate at all with the issue. SP is earned per second in battle....in fact the majority of SP is earned based on time in battle. Your example woudl correlate if you had a fictional shop that gave things away for free based on the amount of time you spend in the shop. Your fictional shop owner does this to try to get people to purchase his inventory but some people just go there and hang out at the store so that they can get the free stuff based on the amount of time they spend in the store. AFKers arent stealing they are just taking advantage of getting the free stuff CCP is offering. This doesnt mean they have to buy anything.

I dont know where you learned your hypothetical situations but you need to go relearn them. Your example in no way resembles what you are hypothesizing about.

The only other fix (no SP for time in match) has unwanted side effects.

Guys, my OP wasn't a request to implement the anti-idle system. CCP already stated they were working on one.

My post was a suggestion to CCP that they not try to play catchup with AFK players, but rather prosecute after the fact to keep their development costs down. So far I haven't read any arguments against that reasoning.

What I do read is a side argument about some folks feeling entitled to AFK because CCP knows about the problem. In my mind that's akin to claiming a store owner knows you can shoplift and doesn't put every bit of merchandise under lock and key, so you are entitled to walk off with it. The owner doesn't do that because it would be a pain in the ass for everyone. What he does do is install cameras to record theft so he can prosecute once you leave the store.

People AFK because they want the rewards but do not want to pay CCP for them with their active participation.

How does CCP go about prosecute AFK'ers after the fact? Do they remove SP from anyone that did really poorly in a match? Do they just target individuals with 0 kills in a match? I'm curious as to how you envision this would work.




What is the use of the rewards if they're not going to play? If someone is interested only in CB's that should be viable, but in the current build that is not the case, thus AFK to fund their preferred style of play.

You mention widening gap between newberries and vets. I agree, however, a more apt solution would be to increase the amount of SP gained through passive accumulation and leave WP = SP as is.

thus the reward for breathing is what you want to make up 99% of all sp. I hate that and I hate games the enforce that, breathing should not have more rewards than actually doing something.

just look at every fps with skills system in them, CoD is a great example, yes you get exp per match but the amount of exp you get is about = to a 5 kills(last time I checked could be wrong). in skirmish you would have get over 5000 warpoints. just to give you an example 5,000 war point = 100 kills, that 2/3 of the enemy clone count. and that's to break even with the breathing sp you would get for just sitting there. I dunno about you but I very rarely see people break 3,000 warpoint mark in an match. there are plenty of CoD shooter who max out so that point is invalid. look at battlefield if you want another example, its per match reward is actually even smaller.

the massive chunk of sp should slowly go away from passive and go to active sp. sure give newer players help to the weekly cap, the vets shouldn't need the cookie for breathing a whole match like someone who just came to the game and if it stays the cookie will keep coming to those who want it which will drop off when they no longer want to play the game and there goes the player base. to go witch hunting would also cause a big drop in player base

Thats why I gave my thought on what the SP system should look like if we are still going to be so concerned with newer players not earning enough SP at the beginning.


Regarding the entertainer example. The problem is that CCP has not really made any statements regarding AFKing. They are looking into it and making some kind of anti afk system. This would be like the town upon realizing the performer is not performing checks their contract and realizes that the contract itself does not specify that the performer has to perform only that the performer be downtown. By the performer being downtown he is fulfilling his duty set out by the contract. The only way to change this is if the contract is changed to state that the performer must perform or they will have certain punishments as described in the contract. If CCP comes back and says yes we are going to consider AFKing as improper and bann people for afking (assuming they can even do something like this without getting it wrong at least 15-20% of the time) then people will know that AFKing is now allowed. Right now AFKing is allowed because CCP wants to reward time in game more than performance in game. This leads to top performers not performing as well as they could because the risk vs reward is too great for them. Bad players have low risk and high reward but good player have high risk and low reward. Who in their right mind accepts a high risk investment knowing that your reward is going to be very low in comparison. Noone.....at least noone with any money sense that is.

how can they tell who is AFK and who isn't

i have AFKed numerious times. but because i killed a guy or a couple guys i end up better than 50% of the team who die numerious times.

i guess you are right we should remove all the new player's SP retroactively. that will teach them to try out a new game.

In that event you were active at least part of the time.

I don't know precisely how CC will define idling, but to paraphrase the famous quote, "I know idling when I see it."

They obviously want to give the players the most leeway possible and give them the benefit of the doubt. That's likely why they are being reluctantly pushed into building a detector. They wouldn't bother if the players didn't force their hand.

Would you sit by if you wrote a game and your players live streamed AFK?

they should probably fix the reason people do this. there isn't enough reward to actually go out and fight.

I suppose you could say that he contract only stipulates that the performer be downtown and only assumed he would be actively performing, but a judge in court might uphold that as a reasonable expectation. Especially if the town had stated they were putting measures in place to detect sleeping on the job. Either way it would be imprudent for said performer to live stream his nap for the benefit of the town council. Does someone really have to spell out that intention is that you actively perform? After all you already get another support payment for being a registered town resident.

I understand your indignation at being rewarded at nearly the same rate as a less accomplished performer. FPS players are a competitive lot and want to distinguish themselves in every way possible. That's not a problem in a standard FPS with no skill system and little difference in gear. There the rank beginners are segregated and everyone else is on an even footing.

However an MMOFPS presents true play differences at different skill levels. Each skill point matters and progression must be carefully managed to fall within an acceptable range. Too fast or too slow both cause problems. Thus CCP seeks a way to compress the range for those less personally skilled (not necessarily just beginners) and those elite players.

If you accept the basic premise that you have to limit the earnings gap for the long term health of the game you are immediately confronted with the difficulty of rewarding solely on performance. The range is simply too large.

You can play with the formula all you want, but if it serves to limit the range disparity it won't reward performance to the degree the competitive player desires. They not only want to win, they want all the loot too.

So what can you do? Well, you can offer other forms of recognition such as stats leader boards and content like PC that only reward performance and hope that it satisfies your elite players.

OK a quick reminder regarding what you said with the judge and everything.......you gotta remember with hypotheticals eventually they fail. You could give all kinds of contract law but we arent in a contract with CCP when we play the game. There is no contractual obligation for us to play the game to the best of our abilities. Heck AFKers very often play the game better than some others who are playing the game.

Regarding the skill earnings the weekly cap would keep that running. If you are no lifing enough to get a ton of SP from the 1000 WP soft cap then more power to you but those players will be few and far between. If CCP rewarded good players appropriately then the good player would stop playing and running over noobs sooner and start working on CBs (or the upcoming PC). I never realy care about stat recognition but being recognized at the end of the match by getting alot of SP/ISK is where its at for me. Carrying the team on my back by going 40-0 in a skirmish and getting only maybe 1000 or so more SP than the person who barely did anything is hardly rewarding enough to make it worthwhile. Kinda goes back to the risk/reward gap.

[quote=semperfi1999]
I don't believe you understand the basic progression problem CCP has. We aren't talking about the post cap bonus, we are talking about the basic pre-cap reward.

If you get ten times the SP for 2000 WP than the other guy who managed 200 WP you will progress your character at a rate ten times faster.

If it takes you a mere two months to max out a character for one role it will take the other guy nearly two years.

He's not likely to stick around long enough to get competitive.

If CCP scales rewards so the other guy can get competitive in one role in six months, you run through the entire skill tree in a year.

You simply can't reward progression on a pure performance based measure and not break something.

you could just give passive SP. or make the sit and spin SP for grinding missions faster so rather than AFKing for 25 missions you only AFK for 5.

the grind of the game is why people AFK. i hate being forced to go through a bunch of dumb pointless matches when i could be earning loads of isk doing missions in EVE.