New gang of leechers operating in AB since the specific update. Is it beyond remedy?

Hi all,

I am playing GW since may 2005 & am a Defender of the Luxons, I was happy for the new update which concerns AB untill today....

I play on american servers & this happened on international district.

I have been invited by a group of 3 leechers (a ranger + a warrior + an ele) who leeched all along the battle. The weird thing is that they all have pets which means they collect points. Yup !!!! their pets are "playing" & dying. So as usual (when i am the witness) I advertised against them for a while in the main channel. Some ppl know them already & all confirm what happened to me. They work together & do it on purpose.

How is it possible to win when 3 organised leechers among 12 players (-25% of whole fighting power) are spoiling the game. No way......

At least before the specific update, the losers were earning the DOUBLE amount of pts collected during the battle. This means that I was forgeting the leechers (if any...not always ) & was tryin to do my best to increase the final result.

Now u earn the SAME amount of pts collected during the battle & this is the FIRST TIME that I notice an organised gang of leechers. Usualy they act alone.

To sum up : according to me, the number of LEECHERS is gonna INCREASE more & more. Why? just because now when u lose u get NOTHING ===> fairplay players like me will not try to do THEIR BEST anymore to reduce the defeat. This does not mean that I will leech too ....but I will LEAVE asa I notice more than 2 leechers.

This is sad, I am upset & as I am only 300k away from Champion title i really think that after reachin my GOAL, I will AB the MINIMUM.....only to support my guild/alliance. Or we will make a sync team of 12 mates.

FAIRPLAY........what does it mean? ......sorry I cant remember

I already sent a message to Anet explaining my little story....hope they can do something....

I made a search into the forum & saw few topics about AB leeching & how to exterminate those EVIL players

Do you think Anet will be able to find a solution, a REAL & EFFICIENT one?

Your comments & ideas to solve this PLAGUE will be appreciated.


Have fun.....

While I do hate the AFK'ers myself, how were their pets playing and dying if they were stood in the base?

It makes me wonder......but there was 3 pets in the party formation & after dying when I came back to base i could see the life of one decreasing. Very strange isnt it?

Erm, other teams pets show up too, so they could have been on one of the other non-leecher teams.

weird thing is...Anet has so much spare time policing trade-chat...but the ''PvP'' as they called it gets forgotton....

Simple really DvM, the trade chat was an easy one to clear up. Just stick a warning up, ban a few peeps for spamming and hey, all chat sorted.

Leechers are more complicated. Because the reason for them being AFK cannot be said for sure. It may be an emergency in which case you cannot punish them. Lag can also play a part in this, connection losses, err's.

Not defending them, I personally HATE them with a passion cos they ruin the match for the players who wanna have fun and fight.

Perhaps ArenaNet could honour their own EULA by BANNING the leechers for ruining the gaming experience of legitimate players. That is after all what is happening!

AFKing (or leaching) is NOT against the EULA. Otherwise, everyone with the Lucky title via the ticket games during the boardwalks would be violating it.

The only part of AFKing/Leaching that violates the EULA is if they use bots to continuously enter the match.

Doing "nothing" violates no rule.

You CAN use macros to play Guild Wars (ANet endorses the Zboard/Fang after all), you just can't have the game play while you aren't there.

No. There is specifically a section of the EULA that refers to negatively affecting others' gameplay (like harrassing, etc). Leeching is clearly negatively affecting everyone who wants to play as intended. AFKing in town or on a ring to earn tickets isn't affecting anyone. When you enter a competitive arena over and over again just to AFK while everyone else is trying to win - that negatively affects everyone. That's not just AFKing once or twice because you have to piss, or there's a grease fire in the kitchen - leeching is an obvious repeat and intentional offense.

I haven't done as many AB's as I used to when they first introduced it. I would always notice one or two people leeching while everyone else was fighting away. It evens happens in Fort Aspenwood. I remember that one time when I was there, I had about 3 leechers in my team. So I think it's time something was done about the leechers, because they are affecting the game for everyone else. All because they want to get easy faction they decide to leech their way to it

What exactly prevents ANet from stating on login screen: "AFKing in Missions will be penalized?" ..and then PvP missions have x timer, PvE ones y timer...


ps: explain to me how leeching isnt griefing, i mean, see all these frustrate threads here, or, go to FA and some other game district and watch the frustration and hate people have towards greedy no-lifers without any sense of morality. And how is using macros different than botting? Except more difficult to detect i guess, but essentially it's the same. I have bot who does action, and i have macro which makes me enter the mission all the time while in both cases i do nothing. Same.

Why is no-one making the link between the wait times to get into AB and the high prevalence of AFK? People have better things to do than watch the 30 second counter tick down 5-15 times to get into a game. It's no surprise that people go AFK and check back every now and then. The problem then gets compounded as a bunch of people then leave in the first 20-30 secs if there are more than a couple of people that haven't left spawn and taken up position - assuming that they are leeching when in fact they are just doing the washing up and will be back in a minute.

How much AFKing is deliberate leeching and how much is extended trips away from the keyboard due to wait times?

I second that.

So what, spammers are the only bad guys around? Makes me sick the amount of people that complained for them to be banned, compared to the amount of people that agree leeching is bad. Maybe some of them do it too?.. Hypocrisy rules... Anyway...
I vote for a permanent ban on them. They just annoy the hell out of me. They completely ruin the Pvp experience for me in any situation.

Ban and batter them with iron bars.

Remember A.Net, without the intention of being rude, you caused this yourself.
Voicing one side on one particular situation (e.g. the ban-spammer supporters), makes you automatically obliged to recognize similar situations, just like the chain that is created when censorship hits TV, for example. When they start censoring one thing, reasons to censor other stuff constantly come up. It is what's happening here now.

Leechers should be banned and this time I fully agree. I wonder what will be next.

Yes, I think that, by your hands, you will never get rid of the "now-it's-my-time-to-be-heard" syndrome.

I'm pretty sure Anet is aware of this issue.

Stop with the "Anet ignores (insert your problem here)" bullshit. Its counter-productive.

Leeching is a VERY difficult issue to deal with, especially in the PvE/PvP hybrid game modes of Alliance Battle and Jade Quarry/Aspenwood.

The question is what CAN be done? This should be the discussion. Not blaming Anet. -.-

----------------------------------

One basic idea is to have a way to ban players who go AFK in PvP missions. This is fine and dandy....but its got two huge flaws.

1) Legitimate players AFK as well. Wether it be an emergency, a wireless mouse running out of battery, a bathroom run, the phone, the doorbell, or some other real life situation, REAL NON-LEECHING PLAYERS must sometimes go afk.
2) Leechers dont neccesarily just sit there and AFK. Leech Bots have existed since Prophecies, with Random Arena. They follow a random player, spam skills, and look like a legit part of the team. The fact that some REAL players only use auto-target and dont kite/dodge/get out of AOE/not talk at all, alone makes these bots very similar to bad players. The same botting system can be easily used in AB/Quarry/Aspenwood, rendering this idea useless.

Banning players for anything comes with huge backlash when you get false positives, which are inevitable. Just look at mistaken bans for Bot-farmers.

Would such risk outweigh the benefits? How many players are gonna get banned cause they went to get a drink while the match was loading (i know i do that a lot)?

This isn't as simple an issue as people make it out to be. Spamming is VERY easy to ban for because its very easy to log and report. Leeching is not.

You gonna Fraps every match? What if the player just happened to lag? You know you can make a bot so it so it looks like a player is talking right?


I really wanna hear some GOOD ideas about this. My ideas are not going to be popular, so ill wait to post it.

if you gotta go itll only take few minutes MAX if they gone phone ot toilet and the would call. If it is somethin gonna take long tou gotta leave. And of curse someone cant get hardware problem 2-3 in a row. I have those such too and I feel the pain.

I FELT IN NEED OF SAYING A NERMAL PLAYER WONT RUN OUT `ALL GAME` TO DRINK/TOILET/HAVE HARDWARE ISSUES. AND IF SOMEONE DOES IT WOULD REPEAT ALL DAY LONG.BOTS COULD BE EASILY CATCH WITH MODS PMING THEM AND ASKING WHATS THIER NAME. OR WHATS YOUR NICK. BOT CANT ANSWER

If no one makes a kill or contributes to a kill in 1 minute, then that player is logged out and a henchman NPC or hero npc joins. Good?

You're right. I would say many of the supposed "leechers" went afk because they were waiting, and decided to watch TV or something. Other "leechers" may have had to answer the door. Or a phone call. I've seen characters just stop dead in their tracks for several minutes for no reason before. Not because of a disconnect, mind you.

Take screen shot, and keep an eye on them.

If they don't move the entire match, when your done with your games, fire off an violation report to support.guildwars.com w/ screen shot proof.

What bothers me more, leavers thinking there too many lechers, when some players (watch cutscene or have dial up), leave too early. At least wait till the clock hits 00:00 and the warps become active before deciding if there lechers or just slow to start.

What about monks?

y did anet decide to take action against people who spammed trade in local chat? because it was against the eula and everyone, i repeat everyone, was doing it. the fact that there were multiple complaint threads on the fan forums probably helped a bit too. and dont give me this "the programming is easier to implement for temp-banning spammers then detecting anyone afking in ab or fa" if you dont have any experience with coding complicated mmos like guild wars.

now take afk leechers in fa and ab. under what circumstances would anet start taking action? simple... if everyone started doing it. its obviously against the eula and there have been multiple complaint threads about the issue. the only missing factor to the equation is that not enough people seem to be doing it for anet to take any action. so i say, everyone start to afk in both fa and ab and maybe anet will get off their asses and do something about it.

Here's something that probably won't stop em, but it'd be funny: Add a stealth update where being in the starting area in an AB for the whole match will give you 0 faction. It wouldn't stop them, but it sure would be awesome. lol.

I was gonna say that they could be rewarded for amount of healing done, but I don't know how to properly implement that. How about you only are rewarded faction when you heal damage caused by enemy players? This'll prevent gaining faction for healing a necro buddy who just keeps saccing his life. I still don't think it's a great idea on the whole, though.

As i have posted before all we have to do is take names and ss and keep on e-mailing them to Anet in time they get pissed off with all the e-mails they get they are about to do something....

I had the idea that you gain points for CAPPING (which is something even a monk can do)....which is harder to create a bot for.

And if you actually create a bot that can capture points, then thats less leeching. ROFL.

On your first point - Why focus on banning people for this? Instead just make is to that they don't gain anything from leeching - i.e. anyone who is detected as being AFK for long enough gets no points.

This will mean that some people who are AFK for legitimate reasons don't get a reward, but then again, they haven't earned one anyway. So instead of focusing on punishing (i.e. banning) "bad" people ANet would just be saying that a non active player didn't do anything so isn't awarded anything.

On your second point - sure this won't do anything about leech bots, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. Surely its better to do something about some of the leechers instead of doing nothing at all about any of them.

I focused on banning as a solution since that seems to be what people on the first page want, as you might have noticed.

Taking away all rewards for inactive players wont work either, since its based on the same requirement as the banning idea, that idea being that leechers are stationary.

All this will do is cause leechers to use more sophisticated techniques. You can easily program a macro to have a bot just run straight ahead, to their deaths, and that negates the "non-active" requirement.

It seems (not just from this thread) that a fair number of people are very quick to suggest banning as a solution to pretty much anything they don't like (and I'm not referring to you here)!

My thought was that ANet might discourage a reasonable number of leechers doing this. Can the average leecher program a macro for a bot? I have no idea, and I agree that if they can then my suggestion is pretty much a waste of time.

I think it'd be hard to program leeching in an AB, mainly because you don't really need one - roll a monk, accept a random invite, leech your heart away.

I guess you could program it to accept any party invites over 2 people...

Alot of times I either go get a smoke or a drink before a match. Stupid timer sometimes takes up to 5+ minutes before it'll allow me in. I'll be damned if I ever get banned because I needed a drink. =/

Personally the last patch screwed more honest players than leechers, the points for losing were still good with the old patch and now I barely bother playing ab again thanks to the last "anti-leecher" patch, I think i'll stick to repeatable quests now, good game.

just my 2 pennies

- Ganni

I mean people can say they had real life things to do that couldnt wait(reasonable)

But you cant really say that as an excuse for using all chat for trade.

Most leechers aren't that sophisticated. They don't know how to write a macro themselves. And it's not like most bot writers make their bots publicly available. Sure, you might have a small number of [BS] leecher guilds that might share such a macro among themselves if they had one, but a large proportion of leechers would be stopped by any method that picked them out for being inactive. If scanning for prolonged stationary periods and doing something about it would stop 80% or 90% of leechers, isn't that a pretty good start?

Even if the leachers eventually get hold of working leach bots, a temporary stop would be a good thing. I wounder if a bot could be made to play better than the average AB player.

I actually played AB with a bot in my party which did more than quite a large number of bad players out there - all it did was autofollow me, so it didn't run randomly away and die, but contributed to faster capping of shrines. After kicking it from party after the match (won!) I've seen it was able to form its own party by sending random invites to everyone (very easy to be programmed).

That's a very good point. Any anti-leech measures like that would eliminate a great portion of leechers, leaving it only for bots, which can be banned (since banning leechers isn't a great maneuver).

It kind of makes sense if you think about it. If all Luxons were leech bots that autojoined immediately, that would make the Kurzick players able to get into games faster. And they'll win bigger, which means more faction for Kurzick players (which is the only side to play on if you want the titles).

All we need to do is come to an ingame understanding on these things and we'll have a nice system for exploiting this new faction update for everyone's benefit.

We will definitely include these concerns in this week's Community Summary. I can tell you flat out that this isn't a matter of the designers being unaware, or of the designers not caring about the AFK/Leeching matter. You can tell that from the recent update.

I don't have any additional info right now, but will post if it becomes available!

What about the matter of increased amount of leavers since the decreased reward for losing? Perhaps if the devs can include some anti-leeching code, the loss reward can return to its former glory?

Seeing how popular Dolyak Signet is, and Touchers with Minion spells, I do not think it would take much to overcome the average AB player.

imo, the best way to resolve this is to measure player performance with a complex set of equations... of course this equation shouldn't be revealed .
players will be rewarded for their "performance" + small bonus for winning team

Each player would be rewarded differently depending on their performance.

for the winning team,
i am seeing performance being up to 80% of the total earned for the ab and the win bonus being 20%.

individuals from the the losing team would just get their "performance" score faction.

of course the performance equation won't be perfect, but it should be general enough to encompass most effective contributions to the winning team

something like..
performance = [effective dmg contributed] + [effective healing done] + [number of points capped] + [dmg prevented] + [conditions inflicted] + [npc kill or assist of someone killing npc] + [interrupts]... and a couple more factors

I probably missed a lot of things in the above equation but it can be tweaked alot(ie a monk that only heals but does it very well should receive full marks].

Basically, the idea is for a way to measure the amount of "Work" someone put into helping their team win.

People should be compensated for how well and hard they played even if their team loses the AB. The idea could even be adjusted so there are discrete thresholds for low perf, med perf, high perf, godly perf.. etc.

This will definitely solve leechers... as the equation should be designed in a way that the leechers only get good returns if they actively contribute to the ab.

Thanks Gaile to post a reply & the confirmation that Anet is taking care of this PLAGUE.

I keep track of the worst leechers, by adding them to my friend's list LOL & as soon as they r connected I harass them of personnal messages saying to them that I will RUIN their name....

Today I was again in international district & two of them were there. I warned again the other players by spamming the NAMES in the main channel. But I enter a battle & one of them, the ranger with a bear was there.....still leeching.

The funny thing is that I sent a personnal message to one of the leechers & that he answered me in french, insulting me of course....but I am french....so I told him to stop...that I had informed Anet about their dirty trick.

Few minutes ago one of them came back so I harassed him again...& the guy disconnected straight LOL which means they dont feel so secure

In the meantime I suggest u to keep track of the WORST leechers (not the occasional ones) by saving them as friend.

Thats what I do & each time they connect I HARASS them.

So I can confirm u that this gang of three leechers are not BOTS but retard human beings & that they still operate & still leech.