WTB spam = ban; leeching = promote?!

Am i the only one not seeing logic here? Why is leeching OK for ANet, and as Gaile said "we dont see a problem with it", and on the other hand WTB WTS spam isn't ok?

Let's put it this way, if people in some PvP maps spammed local and ALL channels like hell, if they flooded it like there was no tomorrow, it would be 3x better than leeching. I mean, you can still turn the chats off. Whereas with leeching, well you just can't kick leechers.

Just don't tell me how it's difficult to discover leechers unlike WTB spammers. Yea right, it's a perfect excuse, it's like fixing corruption and crime in my country. Everyone can cover eyes and say "oooh we can't find anyone" while suprisingly enough everyone else can.

Moral of the Story: This attitude is immoral.

/signed to the power of 9834926354786589899837 i despise leechers to all holy hell.

There, i just ran into GUILDIES leeching. Great. Let's promote town ownership mechanism and skills linked to leeching titles. That will surely solve the issue. At the same time let's announce in public that leeching is OK but WTB spamming is not.

I don't recall A-net ever saying that leeching was ok and not punishable. One difference between the two things for better or worse, however, is that it's easier to catch spammers than leechers. How do you know that some emergency didn't just pop up after someone entered a battle? When you see someone spam in chat, you know they did it on purpose.

100% agree. Leeching actually hurts players who want to play the game normally. Spamming hurts players who simply don't want to turn off chat or move to a different city/dist.

Anet, this is for you:

i think maybe not banning them from first or second offenses since yes....real life sometimes may get in the way and unexpected things happen. But typical leechers will do it many many times in a row so if a character is being reported several times by several people on different instances then action should be taken. only way i can see that being feasible.

Kali rolls: 50000
Kali scores a critical hit on: Nail

They also don't do jack shit to scammers, either.

oooh wait what about...if a player isnt actively moving in a match of any kind (moving attack healing casting) they wont receive any faction towards balth, lux, or kurz. it would be kinda hard to implement ide imagine but if it worked the way i think it should work it would do away with power lvlers and leechers. also...also...make it so if someone disconnects but doesnt reconnect till 90% of the way through they still have the ability to earn faction. what im thinkin, in a short way of putting it, is a percentage of the time that your actually on the map is required to gain the faction at the end. and i mean somethin like 5 or 10%...and since some matches may be longer than others its impossible to really gauge what the 10% is and then just stop. just an idea *whistles*

Gaile said it herself, on GWO website last year. It was a widely known quote.

How do you know spammer did it on purpose? Maybe he turned the ALL chan off and didnt see his own messages, so he thought his internet connection is lagging and thus he kept spamming it. Sounds as a good excuse? Yea, as much as your excuse of leeching.

We've beaten to death these "emergencies" which happen in PvP. Yes, even i can be afk for 1-2min sometimes. But suprisingly enough, there are people who have emergencies 3days straight, or more. I'm sure you can think of an excuse for them too.

Can you tell me, when you watch GvG matches on observer mode, how often do you see these emergencies emerging? I've played this game for 2yrs. I don't remember a SINGLE emergency in GvG nor HA. A single one. Im not saying there wasn't, but in 2yrs i have not seen any, in my team, or in opposing team, or in any team in Obs.
For comparison, we see 2+ of these "emergencies" in Fort Aspenwood in every game. Maybe because of global warming sun hit their heads and they need to see doctor, urgently. Oh wait, they are playing comp games indoors.

I would perma ban people who consistently leech, and i would give 3 day ban for 'emergencies'. I mean, if they do have an emergency, it's good to pay attention to the emergency instead of playing comp games. Right?

If unexpected things happen, a 3 day ban will help them solve those issues.

On a more serious note, an average wait time in FA in the evening is 30sec-1,5min. That's nothing. Are you telling me that people press enter mission button and in 30sec there's some emergency which takes 5+ min to solve? But, when people GvG or HA or TA, suprisingly enough these emergencies are non existent.

There's always a PvE or offline games where you can press Pause.

Sadly, it wouldn't be hard to implement. Actually, if im not wrong, a similiar system is in the game ALREADY, and based on that system a lot of people mistakenly got banned once on Nine Rings game. But it's used against bots in PvE.

Seriously, there are zillion of ways to deal with leechers. Here's one:
ANet employee logins to Fort Aspenwood once a week on average for ....20min or so. Really not much, if Gaile can play PvE all day long, im sure someone can play PvP. Then, upon seeing people who stand idle for 5+ min, ANet RESETS their Kurzick/Luxon track and bans em for 3days as well. Trust me, just few bans a week would scare the **** out of leechers. Instead of the situation we have now, when leechers are 'not a problem'.

Unfortunately, it is significantly harder to nail leechers. To be sure someone is leeching and not lagging/sucking/heart attack, you have to follow individual players over a series of matches. If they stand around and do nothing in several matches consecutively, you know they're leeching. This requires a fairly large time investment, so it's not really practical.

For spammers, you can just look at a chat log and see who posted the same message 1000 times in 5 minutes. Takes a few seconds at most with the help of a computer.

One thing that I have found out, is that Anet has implemented measures to try and stop leechers from somethings...i.e. remember the snowball fights from wintersday....it did not take them too long to figure out everyone and their brother was trying to leech...It will happen no matter what in any game, there will always be scammers, leechers, bots, annoying people that make the game less enjoyable for others!

I don't see a problem with it. If they added consequences for so-called "leeching," it will make Alliance Battles very unpopular as we'll all be afraid we'll lag or something and get hit with anti-leeching consequences. There is no way to differentiate between players truly leeching and those who are away for a legitimate reason. Honestly I think the number of players who truly leech is extremely small, seems to me pretty much anyone who takes more than 5 seconds to move gets labeled a leecher, sometimes.

Furthermore, who cares? Think about it... its one loss. In Alliance battles, you have control over the three other people who enter your group, and past that, it is 100% luck. You're going to lose a lot of them regardless of how many people "leech" or not, so just start a new one and hope for the best. More often than not, people use leeching as an excuse for their losses, when in reality they need to just suck up and deal with it, take their 300-500 Faction points and try again.

If they tried to detect leeching, somebody would just make a better bot to get around it. It's not worth the trouble.

Quitting, on the other hand, can easily be handled automatically with a variety of consequences of varying magnitude and there's really no excuse why they don't have such a thing.

OK, let's say someone had to go away for 20min. Just disable his access to random arenas (RA FA AB JQ) for a month. Problem solved :>

That's just BS. What kind of lag keeps you standing still for 5min? You can always close the game and quit if you lag too much. Quitting is better than leeching.

And? That's great actually, because bot can get them permabanned.

Besides, come on, let's be realistic. How many people know how to run bot, find a bot, or dare use one? Leeching on the other hand is piece of cake. Bots only pay off when they earn enough money to repay for themselves. You're not gonna do that with leeching.


Anyway, im going to stop replying. Whenever i see people defending leeching and promoting AFKing in ***PvP*** it makes me very sad. As if those people leech themselves so have to defend it.

Granted, but again it would suck pretty bad if your PC crashed or you had net problems. These are the kind of things that can kill AB's for the rest of us.

Well, there's been times I've been stuck in one place for several minutes with 45,000+ ping. It happens. And please don't accuse me of defending leeching, you're pulling that out of your @ss. I've AB'd for well over a year and would never leave a game even if I were the last one standing on my team, let alone leech.

Maybe instead of banning people, just throw in a code that kicks inactive people after they don't move for 2 minutes or so. Then temp ban repeat offenders.

OK, what i dont understand is -

- If you lag for several minutes
- If you have an emergency
- If you feel like making an excuse for leeching


.. why not just close GW? And restart? How often does someone have such an emergency that he doesn't have a time to close GW in 20min? Perhaps, here and there, but it's the same chance that someone got wrongly banned for WTB WTS spam.

Then quit FA. Restart GW. Problem solved. The worse you can do is stand there idle for several minutes, not doing anything for your team, and just demoralizing them because they have to watch you do nothing while they are trying to do their best to win.
And if your lag doesnt go away, play PvE. It's not like ur going to do much if u lag for several minutes. The battle can be over by then.

No one said they had to permaban you for quitting. They can prevent you from playing in that area for 10 minutes or something like that. Sure, every once in a while you'll have a net hiccup, reconnect fails, and you get hit "unfairly". Guess what? Your crappy net connection ruined other players' gameplay experience. Suck up the consequences and get over it.

Yep. Thats right, punish people for leaving. Then they wont leave and will instead just be pushed towards leeching instead, since leeching would have no penalties. Logic ftw.

Most people don't leave because they want more rewards. Leaving and rejoining for the purposes of getting rewards faster is only at all useful if you're trying to farm Gladiator points and it's highly unlikely that you'll successfully leech those. They leave because they don't like the people in their party, think they're going to lose, or because they just like griefing. If these types can't do the leave/rejoin cycle, the most likely negative thing to result is that they stop playing the game, in which case the rest of us that are left have that much more fun without them.

WTB spamin all chat interfere's with people trying to find a group, trying to find a guild, trying to ask a question etc..... when peope are forced to turn off all chat, these players are no longer capibile of geting the help they need. it screws with everyone walking around a town.

leaching, while bad, only affects people who are doing a mission/PvP area.. the group can always kick the player next time their in a town.

forceing entire towns of people who are going about their own buisness > screwing a grou out of one player for the one map.


- however, it would be nice of A-Net to gives the option to kick vote leachers in the mission map's to make sure they no longer profit from it.

I understand that, but what you're proposing would crate the following scenario~

Leecher: These players, suck, i want to leave, but if i leave, ill get penalised. My other option is to leech and get a benefit regardless, whist not wasting time fighting with these idiots.

Random Ally: Leecha n00b!

That's somethin that gets brought up when it comes to trying to catch leeches - what if they just had to go afk to do something?

One thing about leechers is, they don't afk a match only once....they leech for multiple rounds and on a few occasions, they leech for months. I rarely AB, but I do Fort aspenwood very often which is somewhat similar to it. It's much easier to keep track of the people on your team there since it has a smaller team-setup so it's easier to find the leeches since they sit right there at the spawn point for everyone to see when they res.

Some leech for so long that that there names become known and that's when the players start becoming frustrated and quit....you team with a leech one round, and think "1 leech alone won't cost us the match"...then the next match starts and the same leech is there again. As I said before, some of them leech for months. From what I remember, there's 2 leeches that keep coming back to Aspenwood. Ask a few people there if they can remember some of the leeches and I'm pretty sure you'll get a few names.

The only way I can think of right now to stop leeches without reporting an innocent person is by taking multiple screenshots and reporting them. Someone from anet themselves would have to go investigate to make sure it's legit.....if they continue going afk and someone from anet sees it, then they're busted.

But then again, I really doubt anet would even go out of there way to do somethin like that.

I am glad they are doing something about the local chat WTB crap that has been going on. Forcing people to the trade channel with bans is good. Lions Arch D1 was impossible to follow local chat because it scrolled by so fast.

Leeching is a pain, just like bad/annoying/stupid players in a PUG are a problem. But that only impacts the immediate group, and you can always leave if you don't like it.

Learn to /resign...regroup when leechers are encountered. fight back the passive way. Make their name know in a polite way (to outpost) they are there to leech..

spamming has nothing to do with leeching. (other than the fact they are annoying.)

if alot of the retards who do/did spam realized that all they really have to do is EXTEND/EXPAND their chat window there prolly would never even be a problem.(other than the machine-gun spammers)

I know I hate lechers myself, but I think if we continue down the path of banning people for doing these idiotic things; soon there will be no one left in GW. There are other methods to be done, instead of permanent banning people for being idiotic.

Are you sure they just aren't lagging? I personally think all chat spamming is worst than leeching.

So, by your logic, if I were in an RA battle, and the opposing team has an E/D tank, a Restoration Rit, and two monks, and the battle has been going on for ten minutes, I should be punished for quitting a battle that will never end?

First, if that's your worst case, then the system is a net gain because the worst case isn't any worse than having nothing in place (i.e. the player leaves).

Second, if you have people like that in large numbers, then the game is not fun to play when losing and there is something wrong with it. Of course, nobody likes to be utterly crushed and everybody prefers to win. But most games should be fun regardless of the side you're on.

EDIT:
I didn't mention specific conditions. You could only hit people that leave in the first two minutes of the match, which is not significantly more complex and catch 99% of the people leaving in RA.

The probable reason why Anet don't see leeching as a problem is that it occurs only in Fort Apenwood, which is played by a fairly small GW population.

And leeching works in Fort Aspenwood because there is a reward for losing and there is no repercussion.

RA - teams with leechers usually lose, and quitters are so common that a leecher will probably end up 1v4 and won't even get any balt faction.
TA, HA, GvG - organized team, any leechers or even afkers will get kicked.
AB - team of 4, leechers get kicked unless the whole team leeches which is very rare.

Banning someone for 3 days when they have a problem in real life is just plain wrong. I know that I will occasionally have a problem when I am playing FA while the timer is going to start a match. When I finally get back(usually within a couple mins of the match) I will say I am sorry.

The reason you don't see things like this happening in GvG and HA is people make sure they have nothing to stop them from playing before they start.

Hmmm... could you show it to me, please? To my very best knowledge, I've never said that leeching is "ok" or that "we don't see a problem with it," because that is not something that I think, and it's not something that ArenaNet thinks, either. We don't like it at all. It's difficult to combat though, and we don't feel that player reports is a good system for doing so, because it would be difficult if not impossible to verify or it would take a lot of time to catch just one person.

I'm more than willing to listen to your ideas about how to combat leeching and AFKing. I've been told that "vote to kick" has been rejected by the designers, and "remove after X time without movement" was considered ineffective because the worst offenders obviously bot a lot of processes, including movement, when they're not there. Also, the real life issues mentioned above could bring action on a person who had no intention of leeching or going AFK at all.

In the recent weekend, the rewards system was changed. Do you think that's an effective anti-leeching measure? Do you have other suggestions?

Well, I remember someone posting something where in FA you would get extra faction points per Luxon Squad/Gate Repair you did.

So it wouldn't fix leeching, it would just give extra faction for those who participate.

Hm , how do you mean? The only rewards system upgrade that i was aware of is the factuion donation (double towards title for faction spent, eg. donate 5k to alliance, get 10k towards your title).

Unless i missed something

Fort Aspenwood is the only place where leeching is a problem. A simple solution is to remove the reward for losing.

Yea! Teach all those kids that WINNING IS EVERYTHING! YOU SUCK IF YOU LOOSE. YOU SUCK!...*ahem*

The weekend I was talking about was the one on June 8th. It greatly increased the rewards for winning but didn't increase the rewards for losing, so I thought it might give an incentive to, you know, play instead of loll around? Extra faction to those who participate, like Puebert said, exactly.

Fine life lesson there, Pwny Ride.

Unfortunately i can't think of better solution to combat bot leechers and a penalty for afkers is even worst. People however will stop leeching when there is no reward.

On a side note, the bugfix on 7th June on Fort Apenwood Luxon Warriors is terrible, please revert the bugfix if no better solution can be found.

1 - The luxon warriors are running back and forth most of the time and not attacking anything.
2 - They glitch by themselves at one corner and prevent respawn when the turtle dies, saving the kurzicks the trouble of luring them.

It's really likely that most of the aspenwood leeches are using a mouse macro to click the enter button every time it comes on screen - no amount of incentive is going to get them to do something they can do without any work at all.

Here's how I'd handle those guys: look at the data stream received from the client, cache it for some period of time and analyze that data set for very high repetition of patterns. Kick people who send nothing but repeated patterns over a large-ish time interval, keep them from relogging in for ~5 minutes or so.

Here's another option - allow people to flag others within the game itself. Yes, you're going to have griefers abusing this, however if you temp-ban griefers as well as leeches you've fixed both problems