Friday June 22nd Alliance Battle downgrade

Update - Friday June 22
Alliance Battles

To encourage active players in Alliance Battles, we have adjusted the faction rewards, increasing the rewards for winning teams and decreasing the rewards for losing teams. The new rewards are as follows:


Two million faction has been transfered on my account.
I did Aliance Battles yesterday, before the downgrade, for about 6 hours. Most of the time was on losing teams. I would play with anyone as long as they participated. I'm not the kind of person that would leave in the middle of a battle.

There was enough progress made toward my next title to keep playing.

Today, after the downgrade, I did two losing battles. There's not enough incentive to continue playing. My faction was cut in half because of inactive players. No one deserves to be treated in this manner.

To encourage active players in Alliance Battles? This active player has been converted to a selective participant. Maybe I'll play when my alliance has an advantage. Maybe.

What happened to sportsmanship? If a football team goes up against a team in that teams home park do they say oh we won't play because they have an advantage, no they play them and do their best to win. Another thing is if they lose they get a loss and no points for it. You still get points for losing just not as much and you get more for winning which is what you should be trying to do. It seems wrong (poor sportsmanship) to me to say until I have an advantage I won't play.

Risky, this isn't gvg. There is no record. There is no penalty for quitting, no penalty for leeching, and the only reason to stay is a handfull of points you might earn after 15 or 20 minutes.

The game is currently intended for you to win only. If you can't win, don't waste the other team's time by trying to put up a fight. And don't waste your own time in the process. It's just not worth it to lose.

yeah, i like the idea of it but i'm not sure how it works in practice. i think it's going to have unintended effects. as it is, there's a pretty big disincentive for faction farmers to play if their team is winning (since enemy territory gives you a disadvantage and more likelihood of losing).

i think it was intended to make leechers feel like they're wasting time however i'd imagine that leechers' time isn't spent leeching...they're doing something else...which is why they're afk.

this was probably a way to attempt to fix a problem by tweaking numbers instead of all the hassle of adding new code. i don't really think it's going to change anything except penalize those of us who are actually playing.

Exactly. The more notorious ones are obviously running macros to autoenter (or to click the ground to move when in the match). These people don't care if they don't get as much faction as they used to. They're at work. They're sleeping. They're doing something other than sitting at the computer while their macro gains them free rewards.

Good move.

Alliance Battles are competitive by nature, if you are not playing to win, don't play at all. This just makes it harder for afk'ers to get by. Also it just might make things a little more fun in there, no more of this half-a**'d attitude about playing well or not when going about these battles.

And losing is normal, if you cant take a loss then get out as well.

If you think AB rewards are now bad if you lose, go to FA. A loss there will only get 100 points or so.

i just done some ab, if u loose, then the reward is pretty pathetic (average 115 from my last few matches).

and you probably lose about half your ab battles... :/

Didn't Anet make other ways to farm factions in another update or something? So it seems fair, AB gives better rewards, but now you have to try a bit harder. Personally I'd say remove all side advantages on maps and keep the current reward as they are now, perfectly fair.

It still doesn't matter to AFKers. They just macro enter and don't care about the reward. There are still getting at least 1 Faction so they're making a profit since they are doing something else.

In that case, remove all reward for losing, and remove all advantages, but some people would see that as unfair for "Casual" PvP.

Just let the players have a report system where they can flag someone for being deadwood (Generic Term for leecher etc). Enough flags and it can be checked by someone who has the power to stop it :P. Yeah, I'm not hot on ideas right now, late an all >_>

These Macroers will never stop =(.

give us an option to enter with specific other teams. This would make it more competitive and make sure those players at leats arent dealing with afkers. Im not saying we must make 12 man teams to enter all the time but having the option would be good.

Even if this was just a weekend it would be cool.

Spoken like a true person that really isn't that great of a player. So many people think they are soooooooo great at ab, but will only play on the side who has the advantage because it's "easier to win". If you really were so great people, then it really wouldn't matter who has the advantage.

QFT. That would get rid of the leecher problem if you actually have enough people you want to play with. If you don't then it'll just be like now where you have to take a chance with leechers.

Because seriously, if you see 5 of 12 people leeching AB or 4 of 8 people leeching FA, you really lose incentive to try hard, and some people I've seen outright just quit the match to join another one (which I really don't blame them for either).

Maybe soon you'll see it in AB...

"...roll?"

/resign

LOL at the above remark, you might indeed see it -_-.


I have not been in yet, and with some loosing strings it will not be wortwhile. I do win pretty often, but for example grentz or even worse, ancenstral lands will just not be played or less. I hope I'm wrong.

Leechers cannot be dealt with in such a way to my opinion, I guess most people leave if they see that they are loosing, which ruins a bit the game.

So we're encouraging leavers now, while fighting leechers? I'm sorry but the people that stick around fighting a losing battle because of leechers/leavers are the ones getting screwed over by this update and not the ones it's supposed to counter.

I mean waiting 20 minutes (and getting killed every few seconds because of a lack of .. teammates) for a measly 100 faction seems like they're punishing the wrong group here.

I predict that we will see in AB what we see in RA now: leavers as soon as there's a first hint of losing. (For example if the enemy alliance has 4 shrines at the start and yours has 3) And unlike RA I can't really diasgree with the leavers in AB because why the hell would you waste your time now?

I agree with the above statement that it should be easier to report leechers (and leavers imo) instead of giving the people that play by the rules less points when they lose due to unsportsmanship behavior from other teammates.

They basically already did that. The reward for losing is now next-to-nothing so much that it might as be nothing since the difference between it and nothing is so small. Note: this post is in regards to both FA and AB.

However, this will not affect leechers at all.

They still use their macro entering just as much after the update as they did before.

They know that despite them leeching, their teams will still win occassionally and get them faction for doing nothing.

They know that the other team also has leechers doing the exact same thing they are, which cancels out the detriment they provide to their own team and thus ensures their leeching faction reward remain incoming at a steady rate with the update having little to no effect on that ill-gotten faction income.

Therefore the only thing trying to counter leechers with this update has actually accomplished is to hurt legitimate players.

That's the whole point! If you just want to farm faction, go do something else, like FFF or kill stuff with bounties. For a lot of people I know AB used to be about having fun as a team, now they're just turning it into a sad faction farm machine.

What's the fun in winning a match that's decided on the basis of your team having fewer leavers than your opponents? All this update will do imho is make the matches shorter, less challenging and lengthen the waiting time to get in (due to more people leaving the match halfway and rejoining another team). For me this has taken away about any incentive I had left to do Alliance Battles.

And a note on leavers: anyone who thinks it's ok to leave a match halfway should seriously consider getting a course in basic human social skills!

Anyway, leechers report from FA at least: they are still there. Still more or less same people whom you meet from game to game. Leeching still pays off because not every time the team members leave, and the side leecher is on can indeed win (especially considering the other side has leechers too).

See the point? If both sides have leecher 1 side will still win! Therefore lower rewards for losing dont stop leechers. And even if leechers lost every single game (which, from experience, they dont), leeching would still pay off because it's free.

This whole thing just confirmed what i thought: No one in ANet is actually aware of leechers, knows what they do, and how they work. They hear talks about some leechers over there, and they think "well maybeee we should make em stop complaining" and then the "fix" they use does absolutely nothing, because it's not based on the knowledge of leeching.

Why mess with the single lump sum reward at the end when trying to discourage leechers and leavers? It's not worked, it's making the game even worse, and it's not solving the problems with the game that were there before the update. AB is about fun, there are plenty more efficient ways just to grind faction for those skills (so much for no grind in Guild Wars). There are loads of ways to solve the leecher and leavers issues without messing with the game. A few I've seen discussed, and some of my own:

Against leavers (or kicked, see below):

• Scale rewards so that unbalanced teams still can do well (e.g. 12 vs 8, the team of 8 gets more points per second, or anything along those lines such that it's balanced)
• Add a penalty to faction for those that map travel (as opposed to lose connection), if they have 0 they have to work it off.
• Add a mark on the character that leaves such that when they join another AB party, the party leader is informed they left the last match.
• Prevent the use of AB for 15 minutes after leaving.
• Allow entire 4-person teams to resign and be replaced from the waiting pool. That way if a team knows it has a problem, it can do the honourable thing and leave gracefully.
• Reduce the map imbalance so that the further maps are still playable.

Against leechers:

• Anti-camping like in FPS games. Stay still for 2-3 minutes and you're kicked, or it says, you appear to be leeching, please enter the displayed numbers to avoid being kicked.
• Add a voting system to kick and/or report obvious bots and leechers.
• Adjust the game so that you have to be close to shrines or kills to receive rewards, like in PvE.
• Faction gain doesn't occur unless you are outsite the spawn area. A risky one, but there is a delay at the end where you can move if your side was victorious.

Leeching is like burglary. All you have to do is make it hard enough that they go burgle someone else's house, not prevent the burglary in total. Make AB hard enough to leech from and the people who do it will find alternatives like FFF more appealing.

In two hours of research, I've managed to find 10 possible improvements. Are we seriously suggesting that ANet and the GW community can't solve this, and the best we can do is to reduce faction reward for the losing team?

yeah, aspenwood is particularly harsh now that there seems to be kurzicks who know how to play it. 100-115, eh? ouch.

and yeah, moacroing ruins the idle-kick thing (too bad...even if i have an emergency at the house, i don't need to be in there idle).

we just need people planting viruses in 3rd-party macro programs that will cause their computers to blow up. that'll get 'em.

I think Anet are well aware of the problem leechers are causing, but they don't know how to come up with a good way to counter them without it being "too much effort". Countering leechers specifically would require a large number of changes, so it is much easier to make leeching in general less profitable.

The sad side-effect of this change is that it encourages people to leave if they do not believe they are going to win (I have seen people leave even from the team that was ahead by a few points - perhaps they were convinced the match would drag on too long, or that the chances of a smashing victory weren't good enough).

And as a result of the larger number of leavers matches are shorter and leechers have less of an impact on the outcome, seeing as a team with a few determined players and 2 leechers could still have an easy victory if the opposing team were to feature a lot of leavers...

Also about the scores of people claiming it is good not to reward people at all for losing, that's utter tripe. Seeing as the rewards are in no way related to the actual number of people still left on the losing side at the end of the match (which is usually about 6 people, if not less), there already is a factor of unfairness there.

Managing to still get 400 points with 6 people is a far bigger achievement than getting 500 points with a full group of 12 people. Those 6 people are the real players and where before they could still get a very decent 800 points for their hard work and determination, sadly now they only get the measly 400 points.
I rest my case...

I'm going to agree to seeing way too many people leaving AB games. Rage quitting, retarded quitting, whatever it's called, I've seen:
Early on quitting when score is like 80 to 75.
The more popular quitters that quit out when it's a bigger gap in score like 50 to 200.
Quitting because person thinks everyone's doing nothing or something stupid.
Then I saw the most stupidest reason for quitting, 1 player was a slow loader and guy explained he's quitting because we're short 1 guy before leaving. We were still waiting for the timer to open gates.

There has to be a big penalty for leaving. I'd make it -1,000 kurzick and/or luxon faction and taken from total. Yes there're saboteurs around and are less mentioned than leechers and leavers. This AB update has created more leavers and saboteurs. Leavers are easy to find. Saboteurs just act dumb or lead their team to disaster, some just plain out say they think [kurz/lux] sucks and start dancing or afk or leave.

Leechers are still around and only careful monitoring can remove them. I'd be as harsh as removing all factions total for a sure leecher. Might as well associate leeching as botting since the work is done by others and not by the leecher.

Edit:
Leavers are becoming a big problem. As soon as one person leave, another follows, then it just encourages more to leave. I've had matches where at the midpoint I was the only remaining member of my team of 4 and my side had a grand total of about 7 players.

Something like that... which could help also in DoA and everywhere where leavers and DC-fakers are common, but that might make too much work for those who would have to check that all the time.

For AB there is an easier solution imo. Make a kick-voting system where any member of the AB team (or a member from the team with the leecher) would be able to start the voting process to kick the leecher, then if the majority of the players from the 12-man team vote in favor of the kick, that player should be sent back to the town (#More options here) and the leader of the 4-man team the leecher was in, would be given the choice to select a NPC from a drop-down list of some NPC types (like you select a hero). These NPCs could be talked to and would follow like Ghostly Hero does (the party member that talks to him when he is not following anybody).

I know that a NPC in most cases is not as good as a player, but it is always better than a leecher or a leaver (the same thing could be available if someone leaves in the middle of AB).

#More options for kick:
if this is kick no. 1 - 3: send him to the AB outpost
if this is kick no. 4+ of the day: do the logout
if this is kick no. 10+ of the day: temp ban for some hours

The numbers could vary. Every day the counts would reset to 0. Why? To prevent abuse and also because all should have the possibility to change and actually start playing the game.

Is abuse possible?
Players could prevent someone to play AB by kicking him over and over again even if he is active --> Since teams are randomly generated it would be very hard to kick a player over and over again (remember you would need at last 6 votes in favor), he could be kicked once but then upon entering a new AB game he would team with different players.

I'm a software programmer and I know that this may not be easy to implement, but it would solve the leechers problem better than faction points penalty. Also detecting leechers in this way would be easier and faster, coz of the community help. As someone already said... some leechers possibly use macros to move their character around and activate random skills so that they won't be detected by an automated software checker and here is where a real person can do better. Real players can tell if a players is not "active", if he only runs around doing nothing but activating skills that don't help the team in any way.

Sometimes I ask myself why the devs spend time to do MORE SMALL changes that don't help but only make the gaming experiance worse for a normal player, instead of spending more time on ONE BIGGER change that would really stop the leechers and give the active players what they want.
Leechers/AFKers in AB would stop doing that if the team would kick them and if they would get a temp ban or account mark if they get kicked too many times.

Yes, I agree. Too many no-reason leavers and rage quitters, but not only in AB, DoA is also a good example. The above system could be used for leavers too. After someone leaves another member could start the voting procedure. Here you will also need the majority of the original team size of the votes in favor for the leaver to get a mark (or flag) for leaving. These would also accumulate, but maybe be reset once per week or something like that. Also upon hovering a mouse over a player in outpost (or upon inviting him to your team) you would see the number of kick marks and the number of leave marks displayed next to his name.

ANet we don't want leechers, leavers, rage quitters... but we also don't want changes that make the gaming experiance worse for a normal player.
If you decide to make a change, please do a change that will not affect the gameplay for those who play the game in the right way... and I think that a voting system or something similar would be the right decision, because it does not affect the gameplay as other changes do.

Indeed, good ideas.

Scaling rewards is possible... but that would be hard to do to be really balanced and fair.
4-man team resigning... well that could be a good idea, but I think that a team with only 1 leecher will rather want to play than leave, so a kick-voting system is better here, imo.
Reduce the map imbalancies... personally I think that the imbalances of the "further" maps are the things that make AB more fun to play... it natural and logical that progressing into enemy territory will make your work harder, so I would leave that as it is.

I don't agree on these two.
First one would reduce faction rewards for players that are capping shrines at the time of a kill far away.
Second one is too risky yeah and not needed if other ideas get implemeted, imo.

As I said before... I don't know what ANet is thinking... doing small fixes that don't help at all... even worse... they hurt all those who would like to play the normal way.

I don't really know what i'm talking about here, since i don't PvP much, but i had a thought. Feel free to ignore me.

Every time combat occurs within spirit range (or whatever), you gain an environmental effect: "Hey, you're not a filthy leecher!". This lasts for a minute. While under the effect, normal faction rewards apply to you.


Are respawn points sufficiently far enough away from the action to make such a method worthwhile? That would require leechers to use bots to move about the field for the entire fight, right?

How would a bot navigate effectively in that situation? Find some important spot on the map (like the mines in FA), and then follow the first player they see? Presumably they'd target the NPCs, navigate by the gate controls, out to the mine itself (i'm using FA as an example, since i don't know many maps lols).

How could that be disrupted? Break the pathing like in House zu Heltzer, so bots invariably keep getting stuck on walls, and can't swing by target points over to the middle of the map? What if the route from the respawn point itself (before the teleporter) was broken like House zu Heltzer and didn't have any signposts; could bots navigate that properly?

That means that some players too far away from the actual combat would not get faction rewards for kills even if they are actively helping by capturing the control points.

Also this does not solve the problem of leavers/rage quitters/saboteurs...

Expand it to beneficial acts for your side then. Capping a control point counts like combat does. Do people spend more than a minute between acts like that and away from combat? (I really don't know). How long would a delay be required?

What beneficial acts are there that can be done by a bot sitting at the spawn point. Heal Party? Aegis? Are there player functions which perform no additional acts that could be used to differentiate the two?

Didn't suggest that it did.


Although if you did want to punish leavers and rage quitters, you could make them pay a deposit on entry, and let them get it back at match completion. It occurs to me that the best thing to make them give up would be the ability to enter PvP games.

Say you can buy a token from an NPC with faction or whatever. This token allows you to join a PvP match. At the end of the fight you're given it back. You can only buy x tokens per period of time. Not a physical token in your inventory obviously, but a flag on your account.

You can still leave mid-fight, but then you can't join another game for X time.


Saboteurs: i have no ideas.

Non transferable tokens bought from a NPC for some faction, yeah that could solve the problem of any type of quitters. I think its a good and simple idea... I'm just too tired to think of any problems with it or possible workarounds for quitters... but it seems that would work.

And for botters/leechers/saboteurs some kind of kick-voting system and we have it solved... or not?

How about instead of getting all the faction at the end in one lump sum, get it everytime that your points go up. Every time that your score goes up, you gain 2 faction for each point. However, you only gain faction if you have a certain effect on you. You could get this by capping a shrine, and it lasts 1-2 minutes. This encourages capping, players still benefit, and leechers get nothing. Anything wrong with this idea?

Edit: This is meant for AB, not FA or Jade

This one won't work, sorry, it's been suggested by others already but it won't work. It's a PvE mechanism, but in PvP it would be a disaster, especially in maps such as Fort Aspenwood.

Actually, it would not. It would require a firm stance that leeching is WRONG and can be a reason for BAN. ANet so far is not ready for that firm stance. And before they declare that, any anti-leecher methods are fluff and won't do anything.

In real life people also leave the battle field when on the loosing side, nothing inhumane about that .

I hardly ever leave, but if I see 6 people standing in the base and my team aint a capping team (i.e. scattered allover), I split as well (this has happened less then 5 times on about 1 M faction). If we are still capping I always stay, as u get still nice points out of it.

With making the loss inefficient they induce leaving, and although I do not like it, I can imagine now more then ever, that it is becoming acceptable due the way stuff counts.

Some else mentioned that Maptravel and disconnect should be differed between for applying penalties. People will just DC then by unplugging their cable. So the discrimination won't work.

Getting the faction in the end could be a good thing but if people decide that they are not getting a big fish they might still leave. There should be reward to stay and loose. Why is this not bad? because a battle, although lost, can be important for aftermath. Scoring as much delay/diversion with a minority group should therefore reap reward (cause of the effect on a bigger scale, I don't know whether they influence the outcome on battlefield shifts).

Bots/players would however just go to shrines by default, just to meet the requirement. Maybe leechers and leavers should just have their armor covered in "tar and feathers", looks funny and prevents them from being picked up ^^. Maybe a large number of negative votes (30+) should induce this armor animation which will remain for a few hours.

I would hate to have a vote kick. that would make people kick others for.....kicks Or 2 man party wouldn't be very effective.

Bots are detectable, therefore easy to ban, which is even better. If AFK'ers sit there to keep running to shrines after they die, will they bother going afk? Don't see much sense in returning to the game every 1-2 minutes to find a shrine thats about to be capped.

This won't effect leavers, because when they leave they get the faction anyway, so if they leave when its 50 to 200, they still get 100 faction. With my idea, they would still get the 100 faction, but if they stay a little longer, they will get a little more. As it is now, why wait 15 minutes for 200 faction? If they were getting faction every few seconds though, they might just stay. Going afk though, they would lose the faction gaining effect.

I say revert it to the old system but after every match, have a button where you accept faction. That way bots don't get anything since they are on macros. Not sure how effective that would be, but I thought it would be a decent feature.

Wouldn't really work. They'd add a few lines of code to the macro so that they're able to accept when a window pops up... though I imagine random game end times (like a Luxon win in FA or a 7-shrine cap in AB) might mess things up.

If the AB code actually tracked who caps and who kills, it would be really easy to stop leechers: deny faction reward to anyone who didn't score a single kill or helped cap a single shrine.

FA leechers would be harder to deal with, considering there are support classes that never set up to score kills, and tracking skill use would just lead to minor code tweaks for the leechers. What might help, however, is asking each inactive party member to enter their party number - the number next to their name that indicates their order in the random party - and kicking them if they fail. Then again, some bots have been known to follow party members and Orison them until killed...

No it is not easy to detect and ban bots, look at how much problems ANet has with it. Besides banning quite a number of bots they ban, many are still again/active, and also false positives are being banned. Its not that u can detect third party programs that enter input on the game or so. AFKers migth start using effective "leechbots" and ANet will have a hard time detecting these, its not like sitting in an outpost and seeing them doing the same thing all time. AB is repetitive like hell so how do u make a difference between a bot and a player? THIS is NOT easy. You could even make an active bot that actually "helps" by fighting (Like the bot model Shyft is talking about).

People shouldn't get any faction until all (or a majority) resigns, or until end of match. This would favor staying over leaving.

A bot that fights, how is that any worse than a bot that stands in the base the whole battle? I'd say a bot that atleast follows the leader and auto attacks is probably better than atleast 50% of the regular AB'ers. Even if they are all just programmed to run to the shrine outside the front of the base, atleast they will maybe help cap something as opposed to just standing in the base.

I don't see how what I said would effect leavers much at all, except there would be less leechers, since not all of the leechers will switch over to bots, so less people would leave due to leechers.

This would just make it harder to leech because you would have to do SOMETHING to get anything. Having the reward spread out over the battle would get rid of the odd chance that you might miss out on getting the reward. Also, more encouragement for people to cap instead of charging solo into the mob.

All this update made me do is cease all ABing and go straight FFF. Cheers ANET for subjecting me to the boredom that is FFF for hours on end!