Cetus Bounties - Non-contributing party members

[Ptylerdactyl]

The most frustrating & annoying thing is running bounty content for other people while they are just sitting at the beginning and do absolutely nothing. Typically I catch on early and just leave the group but it's rather annoying to get to the final wave of the bounty and check that 1 or 2 people have 0% all across their current mission stats, meaning that me and the 1 or 2 other people doing the bounty are doing it FOR them while they sit back and AFK, which isn't cool. I know bounties aren't terribly difficult in the first place, but this is so annoying.

Is there any possible way to add in not getting rewards for contributing absolutely nothing to a bounty run? Especially since Venus content is coming around soon so I'm sure there will be even more people that are going to be doing it then as well. An added report function for just being AFK during them? Some kind of deterrent that makes someone have to ACTUALLY do something so instead of wasting the other peoples time doing it for them they waste their own time by getting no reward at the end?

I'm sure it's been a big issue since the introduction of the Plains, but seeing as how Venus is going to be added sometime as well I'd rather not continue doing the content for other people who are bored of doing the activities but want it done still so they resort to just AFK'ing the whole time.

[Chewarette]

They should have added a criteria "Be in the bounty area to get the reward", but I guess that would have been a problem with the quick ones. Like "Killing 25 mobs" or 15mobs+boss, if it spawns 1km away and someone goes there in 2seconds with Nova/Archwing and you don't have any Archwing charges, you're screwed.

Maybe without Archwings, this could be added in Venus.

Hopefully, there will not be fishing activities in Venus (one can hope), so maybe they can simply go back to the good ol' AFK penalties (AFK = no lewt). But I doubt.

[BrazilianJoe]

You know, this is a social problem, not a technical one. 
When playing random, the occasional idler will happen. 

There could also be many causes for it.

An uber-fast high level rusher can do away the mission before the others have the chance to reach it.

Matchmaking make a late join. 

A contributing player could do an opportunistic mining just because it's on the direct path, and you happen to look at him/her when it's mining, and unfairly accuse the player of idling, but the progress screen tells the player did the most damage/kills.

I am against calling for reward sanctions because it's just too hard to figure out what really transpired. 

An elegant system would be a temporary "I don't want to play with this person anymore" which expires after some time (e.g. 2 weeks), and has a limit on the number of players you opt-out of, with no other lasting consequences. 

 

But the real solution is, play with friends so you can actually strategize. Way simpler to do. Best way is to enter a clan which you like the rules and people. 

[ZodiacShinryu]

5 minutes ago, BrazilianJoe said:

You know, this is a social problem, not a technical one. 
When playing random, the occasional idler will happen. 

I can certainly agree and I personally haven't had problems frequently with "non-participation" in bounties but this is a unique problem that will likely rear its head more often when Fortuna is released. It is a problem that isn't quite under the umbrella of "AFK" because they are still doing regular inputs but they are just doing "solo" activities during a "mission" while overtly ignoring the main objective. It is similar to joining a squad for an Assassination mission on Earth only to scan plants (its fine to scan plants on the way but this is something you could do on your own). Some people don't even try to hide it like watching people fish during a bounty (and even sometimes they are the Host, meaning they actively picked the bounty).

While limiting the rewards directly (any more than the AFK timer) is not advisable because of the number of frames that are able to rush bounties without others even if they try to reach the zone, something should be done to halt rewarding people for intentionally doing nothing. For this particular cause, the best solution I have run across was to deactivate mining/fishing nodes during Bounties. If you want to do these activities you can do them in Free Roam mode (where public matchmaking still works if you want random company).

[BrazilianJoe]

1 minute ago, ZodiacShinryu said:

While limiting the rewards directly (any more than the AFK timer) is not advisable because of the number of frames that are able to rush bounties without others even if they try to reach the zone, something should be done to halt rewarding people for intentionally doing nothing. For this particular cause, the best solution I have run across was to deactivate mining/fishing nodes during Bounties. If you want to do these activities you can do them in Free Roam mode (where public matchmaking still works if you want random company).

From a pragmatic point of view, blocking fishing/mining when a bounty is active is an effective solution. That is a relatively simple technical discouragement against "not playing/riding the coattails of the bounty". I can stand behind this idea.