Rewards Not Given Do To Inactivity

[Slaviar]

AFK penalty sucks because it wasn't designed to punish leechers but to make farming harder

[KirukaChan]

People should have the option to opt out of this feature via the menu. With said option, if every player in a given session has opted out, the AFK penalty is then disabled for that session.

I don't want to be punished for being AFK nor do I want my squad punished, because I typically only play with one other person. He and I cover for each other whenever something comes up, be it a bathroom break or anything else.

[DaftMeat]

1) The AFK system we have is readily exploitable, as noted by a few here. It's not hard to set up auto-movement even if you're not actively playing.

2) There is no in-game warning that you are approaching an AFK penalty. Forum readers are generally aware, but the average person in-game may not even realize they are losing rewards until after the mission.

3) One minute is too short in my opinion. While I want a harsher penalty for leechers, but this setup creates a lot of false positives due to actual real life interference.

4) We need some form of votekick. I know the concerns about trolling with it are valid, and we'd be trading one problem for another. But I'd rather we have the ability to police ourselves and leave problems that arise to support. Yes there will be those that take advantage of it, but those instances can be submitted to support and players with a pattern of excessive kicking can be dealt with by devs/mods/admins.

[Stratego89]

1 hour ago, (PS4)Romulus93 said:

Uh, no. Get rid of the stupid afk timer and the system in general.

Why? So people can go back to setting up a macro to press 4 on draco and walk away? No thx. There is no issue with the current system. Period. 0 Downsides. Lots of benefits for people who actually play the game and got tired of people constantly leeching them and taking up a spot on the team that could have been helping them.

[Stratego89]

17 minutes ago, DaftMeat said:

1) The AFK system we have is readily exploitable, as noted by a few here. It's not hard to set up auto-movement even if you're not actively playing.

2) There is no in-game warning that you are approaching an AFK penalty. Forum readers are generally aware, but the average person in-game may not even realize they are losing rewards until after the mission.

3) One minute is too short in my opinion. While I want a harsher penalty for leechers, but this setup creates a lot of false positives due to actual real life interference.

4) We need some form of votekick. I know the concerns about trolling with it are valid, and we'd be trading one problem for another. But I'd rather we have the ability to police ourselves and leave problems that arise to support. Yes there will be those that take advantage of it, but those instances can be submitted to support and players with a pattern of excessive kicking can be dealt with by devs/mods/admins.

Exploitable yes- but there's a report function for a reason. If someone is clearly and intentionally leeching your game, you have that option. (not to mention macros for that reason are against the rules so if they're obviously using a macro it's even all the more assuring when reporting- knowing you're fully justified).

I agree with this. There should be an in game warning of sort when you hit the AFK timer. It should be small but noticable somewhere off towards the side of the screen.

It's not one minute, actually. It was raised to 2 minutes shortly after it was introduced for this exact reason- people need time when nature calls and DE respected that and added more time. Any more lenient and it's not helping much at that point since most games are so short.

No. GOD NO. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. NOPE. NUH UH. Have I said no yet? Votekick is NOT ok. Period. PERIOD. It will NEVER work. This is the internet. 90% of people will abuse it. Again no. Yes I may seem like I'm over-reacting, but I am not. That's how bad a votekick would be. I cannot even approve of the ability for a SQUAD LEADER to remove someone from squad OUTSIDE of games (sitting in liset/relay before a match starts). Know why? Key shares. 3 dudes get together- say they're doing key share, lure someone in. They run that key- kick them, repeat with the next poor sucker. It WILL happen. Vote kicking creates nothing but cancer in every game ever.

EDIT: quick little addition. You also said "abusers of a kick system could be reported"- well yeah, so can MUCH less harmful trolls and afkers. Besides. If you want to moderate- LEAVE THE SQUAD and form a new one. it's an option. You don't need a vote kick option when you're not forced to play with someone.

Edited March 5, 2016 by Stratego89

[KirukaChan]

23 minutes ago, Stratego89 said:

Why? So people can go back to setting up a macro to press 4 on draco and walk away? No thx. There is no issue with the current system. Period. 0 Downsides. Lots of benefits for people who actually play the game and got tired of people constantly leeching them and taking up a spot on the team that could have been helping them.

Zero downsides? Then why does anyone at all have a problem with it?

[Stratego89]

2 minutes ago, KirukaChan said:

Zero downsides? Then why does anyone at all have a problem with it?

Because they either consider the non-issue of nature calling at horrible times as a problem, when they could avoid it by planning ahead (life interference shouldn't be taken into account. NOONE can account for that- and it can happen at any moment for any duration. If something is happening in real life that requires you to walk away from a game for any reason, it's clearly more important than the game and should be treated as such- losing items in a game is incomparable to something going on in real life; it's just a game).

OR the other non-issue of them wanting to be able to literally NOT PLAY the game and still pull in rewards. If you're going to play a game- you should be playing it, not having some program play it for you or mindlessly smashing a button. I've heard the argument of "people have fun in different ways" more times than I can count but I CANNOT accept that people actually have fun by pressing 1 button and not actually interacting at all past that. I just cannot see how it is humanly possible. That's a flaw on my part, but it's my view regardless. Besides- afk players is bad for business. Everyone getting everything free without ACTUALLY having to work for it means less purchases from people who otherwise would have paid to get it quickly and easily. DE loses out too if there's a ton of people sitting in a corner somewhere for extended periods of time not actually playing the game and getting obscene amounts of rewar- wait a minute... I've seen this before... *gazes at draco*

[DaftMeat]

1 minute ago, Stratego89 said:

Exploitable yes- but there's a report function for a reason. If someone is clearly and intentionally leeching your game, you have that option. (not to mention macros for that reason are against the rules so if they're obviously using a macro it's even all the more assuring when reporting- knowing you're fully justified).

I agree with this. There should be an in game warning of sort when you hit the AFK timer. It should be small but noticable somewhere off towards the side of the screen.

It's not one minute, actually. It was raised to 2 minutes shortly after it was introduced for this exact reason- people need time when nature calls and DE respected that and added more time. Any more lenient and it's not helping much at that point since most games are so short.

No. GOD NO. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. NOPE. NUH UH. Have I said no yet? Votekick is NOT ok. Period. PERIOD. It will NEVER work. This is the internet. 90% of people will abuse it. Again no. Yes I may seem like I'm over-reacting, but I am not. That's how bad a votekick would be. I cannot approve of the ability for a SQUAD LEADER to remove someone from squad OUTSIDE of games (sitting in liset/relay before a match starts). Know why? Key shares. 3 dudes get together- say they're doing key share, lure someone in. They run that key- kick them, repeat with the next poor sucker. It WILL happen. Vote kicking creates nothing but cancer in every game ever.

1 I do report leeches every time I come across one. But it is time consuming to take screenshots, wait for the mission to end, start a support ticket and provide all info. The process could use some streamlining to have a "Report" feature in-game.

2 is no argument.

3 Two minutes would be OK for basic missions like exterm alerts. But for Endless missions that can go 20-40 minutes or more, that is a small fraction of the time you are dedicating.

4 The scenario you provide already happens without votekick. A group of 3 can invite someone for a keyshare, run his key, then all bail. Yes, people can suck. But again, constant use of votekick can be monitored and penalized. You're free to disagree if you like.

[Stratego89]

11 minutes ago, DaftMeat said:

1 I do report leeches every time I come across one. But it is time consuming to take screenshots, wait for the mission to end, start a support ticket and provide all info. The process could use some streamlining to have a "Report" feature in-game.

2 is no argument.

3 Two minutes would be OK for basic missions like exterm alerts. But for Endless missions that can go 20-40 minutes or more, that is a small fraction of the time you are dedicating.

4 The scenario you provide already happens without votekick. A group of 3 can invite someone for a keyshare, run his key, then all bail. Yes, people can suck. But again, constant use of votekick can be monitored and penalized. You're free to disagree if you like.

1. There is an in game report feature. Go to your esc menu, communications, recent players, right click their name, and report. Done. Simple. The problem isn't a lack of that feature- it's the lack of VISIBILITY for that feature.

3. Yes, on endless missions it's a small fraction of the time- but frankly if you're going to be leaving soon anyways you can either hang up on nature for a minute or have your squad hold out for another minute while you do what you need to do- if everyone dies, they can resurrect at once, make a break for it- everyone gets their rewards, everyone is happy. If you wanna use the argument "but what if one of them is outta revives" then my rebuttal is "then they should be running for their lives towards extraction at that point anyways........" Seriously- there's no issue with the timer. Besides- in ENDLESS missions, the afk timer ONLY denies you THAT rotation reward. If you were to say- go for 40 minutes in survival, and in the last 4 minutes of the game before everyone extracted were entirely afk- the afk timer would only hit you for the LAST reward. The rest of the rewards are still given to you. A lot of players seem to believe otherwise. I have heard rare cases of the AFK system breaking and NOT giving players all their other rewards in endless missions, but they are few and far between. (This is all ofc unless something has changed. Maybe I will ask a friend to go with me to a 15 min survival later and I'll afk the last 4 minutes and see what happens to confirm it is still how it was last I checked.

4. Yes, yes it can happen that way. The difference here is that one is an existing problem that votekicks do not fix and only hurt more- and the other (votekicking) also creates problems that DO NOT currently exist; kicking a player from a mission and making them lose their rewards/hard work just because they get into a dispute, or on the other end if it's only allowed out-of-mission just being used as a form of random and unwarranted harassment. EDIT: it can be monitored and penalized? Yeah right. With DE's already insane load on their support team you expect them to dedicate more time to constantly monitoring use of a system that EVERYONE ACKNOWLEDGES will be abused- A LOT. Good luck with that, it makes 0 sense...

Edited March 5, 2016 by Stratego89

[Slaviar]

43 minutes ago, Stratego89 said:

Why? So people can go back to setting up a macro to press 4 on draco and walk away? No thx. There is no issue with the current system. Period. 0 Downsides. Lots of benefits for people who actually play the game and got tired of people constantly leeching them and taking up a spot on the team that could have been helping them.

You are aware that people are banned for macros? Remember these farms at low lvl sabotage with mag? Lot of people doing them was perma banned

[DaftMeat]

2 hours ago, Stratego89 said:

1. There is an in game report feature. Go to your esc menu, communications, recent players, right click their name, and report. Done. Simple. The problem isn't a lack of that feature- it's the lack of VISIBILITY for that feature.

3. Yes, on endless missions it's a small fraction of the time- but frankly if you're going to be leaving soon anyways you can either hang up on nature for a minute or have your squad hold out for another minute while you do what you need to do- if everyone dies, they can resurrect at once, make a break for it- everyone gets their rewards, everyone is happy. If you wanna use the argument "but what if one of them is outta revives" then my rebuttal is "then they should be running for their lives towards extraction at that point anyways........" Seriously- there's no issue with the timer. Besides- in ENDLESS missions, the afk timer ONLY denies you THAT rotation reward. If you were to say- go for 40 minutes in survival, and in the last 4 minutes of the game before everyone extracted were entirely afk- the afk timer would only hit you for the LAST reward. The rest of the rewards are still given to you. A lot of players seem to believe otherwise. I have heard rare cases of the AFK system breaking and NOT giving players all their other rewards in endless missions, but they are few and far between. (This is all ofc unless something has changed. Maybe I will ask a friend to go with me to a 15 min survival later and I'll afk the last 4 minutes and see what happens to confirm it is still how it was last I checked.

4. Yes, yes it can happen that way. The difference here is that one is an existing problem that votekicks do not fix and only hurt more- and the other (votekicking) also creates problems that DO NOT currently exist; kicking a player from a mission and making them lose their rewards/hard work just because they get into a dispute, or on the other end if it's only allowed out-of-mission just being used as a form of random and unwarranted harassment. EDIT: it can be monitored and penalized? Yeah right. With DE's already insane load on their support team you expect them to dedicate more time to constantly monitoring use of a system that EVERYONE ACKNOWLEDGES will be abused- A LOT. Good luck with that, it makes 0 sense...

11

1) The Reporting feature is severely limited. Reporting without screenshots showing chat and timestamps and a player position not moving throughout the course of the mission does not supply Support with a lot of evidence of said behavior.  If you're concerned about the heavy Support workload currently, then here is something that could really use another closer look.

3) "There's no issue with the timer" is an opinion and subject to debate. The fact that these threads keep coming up is proof of that. As noted, it was already bumped up once and I honestly think it should be again.

4) You are under the impression that it will become a huge epidemic. Will it be abused? Like everything else that can be abused (Switch Teleport, Bounce, Banish, etc.), there will be instances of it being misused. But even with those examples, does that mean that EVERY Loki, Vauban, and Limbo player you will play with is a troll? No, not at all, it does not. What prevents most people in society from robbing and killing each other? Mutual cooperation. General decency. Empathy. Even fear or reprisal or the law. While there are always going to be players who get childish glee from being jerks for no reason whatsoever, I would safely guess that 90% of the player base just wants to log in and have fun without harassing other people. Every random/public run is a gamble: sometimes you get a new player who has no idea what they're doing, sometimes you get a high MR player who will blaze through the mission and race to the exit, sometimes you will get a troll who is simply there to prevent others from enjoying themselves, but in my experience most of these missions are just smooth runs with no problems whatsoever. This is also another reason why we have Friends lists and Clans as well, so you can regularly play with people you know and trust who would not mistreat you. A vote kick system that works well only seems like an impossible concept if you refuse to even consider it could work.

 

My biggest issue with the current timer is the criteria it uses for "activity", which includes running in circles, or crouch walking into a wall endlessly. Believe what you want, but I think the system could use a lot more refinement. Likewise, there have been times when I left a mission due to in-session harassment or an AFK host, then re-queued only to wind up back in the same session with the same player.

I almost wish DE could go back to researching a Reputation system as well. Give players a chance to either +1 or -1 other players once and only once (as well as keep track of how many upvotes/downvotes they've handed out as well). Again, at this base-level it might be something that can be exploited by clever tools, but something I wish could be explored and refined.

Also: there is NO NEED to write back in CAPS to make EMPHASIS if you DISAGREE with me. I THINK you might be taking this a bit PERSONALLY.

[Stratego89]

2 hours ago, Slaviar said:

You are aware that people are banned for macros? Remember these farms at low lvl sabotage with mag? Lot of people doing them was perma banned

Yes. I am aware- they did it anyways, and they'd try to find a way to do it again without getting caught if the AFK system disappeared.

[HisMeowjesty]

I had this 1 jackass in sorties defense who hid himself and did nothing and only moved on last wave just to get the reward... since 2 other players weren't that strong and basically i did majority of the work... i just wiped it, i hid myself they all died and it failed, i later re-invited the 2 guys who actually played just to do it without that guy... we need vote kick or something...

[Slaviar]

4 hours ago, Stratego89 said:

Yes. I am aware- they did it anyways, and they'd try to find a way to do it again without getting caught if the AFK system disappeared.

You're joking right? AFK system did NOTHING to stop them- their macros moved them from time to time

[Stratego89]

1 hour ago, Slaviar said:

You're joking right? AFK system did NOTHING to stop them- their macros moved them from time to time

I can't tell if you meant to quote the other guy and accidentally quoted me instead- or just misunderstood me. That's my entire point... 

[1hav0ck1]

Current implementation doesn't affect farmers much. They are the guys who knows how it works and it all comes down to minimal input to get their rewards. 1 min, sure, now they just move every 50 secs. These system implementations is hard coded and easily countered when farming.

What you did do with the current implementation, was to catch allot of legit users by surprise by punishing them for doing nothing wrong. I got on this forum because I was running a T4D with some overactive guys. So i was standing by the Core either fighting an overwhelming wave alone, or simply waiting while they took care of the mobs in the other rooms. Then while kinda frustrated after calling them a few times, and having nothing to kill, I get punished. Given this only happened once to me.

There is a reason why most games have a votekick/report AFK. Its the lesser of the evils. Let me votekick the troll, the farmer, the leecher, the pottymouths and pretty much all those that spoils the game for most of us.

In fact, with current implementation, I don't just still have all these pains to deal with, but also, the punishment system. I now move like a farmer would when i find that I'm stationary for a while. And its a pain, more than the issue it didn't solve. For every minute, I'm thinking will i miss the reward, did i move enough. It's spoiling the game more for me than what I experienced with afkers.

[(PSN)Lord_Gremlin]

10 hours ago, Stratego89 said:

Yes. I am aware- they did it anyways, and they'd try to find a way to do it again without getting caught if the AFK system disappeared.

Macros is not a thing on consoles. Why the f did they put afk punishment in console builds?

[Stratego89]

10 hours ago, (PS4)Lord_Gremlin said:

Macros is not a thing on consoles. Why the f did they put afk punishment in console builds?

Uh... because people would afk and reap the rewards of their team on consoles too? Macros are used by people to GET AROUND the afk punishment... that's not why it was added. >_>

[Slaviar]

21 hours ago, Stratego89 said:

I can't tell if you meant to quote the other guy and accidentally quoted me instead- or just misunderstood me. That's my entire point... 

It seems you don't understand because you seem to imply AFK penalty had part in detecting macro users. As far as I'm aware people using macros were banned long before it was introduced

[Stratego89]

15 minutes ago, Slaviar said:

It seems you don't understand because you seem to imply AFK penalty had part in detecting macro users. As far as I'm aware people using macros were banned long before it was introduced

........ I am not implying that- you are misunderstanding something somewhere. All I have said is that there is no issue with the current AFK system other than "IRL happens sometimes" which applies to any online game ever that you cannot pause- and that removing the system will add no positives and will reintroduce players sitting afk the whole mission to leech. Macros are caught by an in-game system and result in a ban. As long as the AFK system is here- people can't afk leech the game in any viable form. Without the AFK system they can get away with afk leeching without even having to use a macro to attempt to do so- meaning NOTHING punishes them. I really do not understand where you're even getting your thoughts from. I went back and read all these comments and I'm just not seeing it.

[Slaviar]

On 5.03.2016 at 5:50 PM, Stratego89 said:

Yes. I am aware- they did it anyways, and they'd try to find a way to do it again without getting caught if the AFK system disappeared.

I got it from here. IF the AFK system. For me this "if" implies AFK system is stopping macro users. Becasue as far as I'm aware only people banned for gp farms were using macros