Adjust AT requirements/situation

Since the ladder reset people are aware that a group of players are tanking guilds to bottom of ladder to farm each other for strongboxes. By product of this is there are even more guilds being entered to forfeit the first round of the AT.

This is annoying enough, but today it created 2 groups each with 3/4 guilds. Meaning instead of 6/7 to face each other each round its only 3.

I can't think of anything other than remove the -25 rating loss for 1st round forfeit but please do something, it's just stupid as is.

And do you think it should be replaced by something, or what? The original rating loss was meant to punish players because it sent them further down the ladder, and it's understandable that with the current strongbox situation, this is making matters worse. However, if and when that is dealt with, we'd be left with an AT system with nothing in place to punish those who enter and then do nothing. Would you like to propose an alternate method of punishing those guilds?

Given a high number of forfeits within a certain span (more than one within a month was the harshest suggested), prevent the guild from entering.

Keep the rating penalty, too.

Maybe make new guilds unable to enter ATs until a week has passed?

You're required to be part of a guild for a week before entering an AT anyway, aren't you?

Yeah, which means that within the first week of a guild being founded, there's no legitimate purpose in entering other than to grief or to tank.

Oh, so you can still enter the guild but are forced to forfeit?

I believe so. I think the system doesn't check to see if you meet the requirements until you are about to enter battle. It is why you can register for a tourney even if you are the only person in your guild.

Honestly a change to the rating penalty isn't needed. I'm going to sound like a broken record here because I said it about the strongbox issue as well, but what they are doing is match manipulation and history has dictated that the penalty for that is a guild/player ban. So all that has to happen is A.Net keep logs of who has forfeited in the first round, and if it happens on multiple occasions, then deem that as proper evidence that they are indeed tanking and ban them. The precedent has already been set in the past for what the punishment is for ladder manipulation. It is time A.Net stopped ignoring it and started enforcing it.

Yeah sorry i didnt have time to think much til next game .

Was thinking along the lines as what lemming said, no legitimate guild enters to forfeit AT's so say 2 forfeits within a week period stop them from being able to enter. 2 since your unlikely to experience a dc, and even less likely to get it twice.

If that's done then keeping the penalties no issue.

Sadly i imagine that it's quite deep inside the games coding to do that.

I also agree with Still on just banning them, but i don't know how persitant they'd be and whether anet would be bothered to maintain banning consequent abuse. The problems been told to anet already and it's quite blatant violation of eula as you've said.

a simple timing of the spawn or such for the strongboxes would result in such till a prerequisite is met or farming strongboxes could take away something the guild worked towards like removing a guild service like the merchant. hell i dont know :/

pcs bsted and i havent been in game for about 2 months so why listen to me :/

No.

Let's not keep cake from making rating 300 smurf guilds and getting +25's from everyone like they do everyday.

Without the rating penalty, there's nothing to stop what used to happen: every single guild registering for every single AT, regardless of whether or not they had people.

We'd have the same problem with American ATs being inflated to five rounds and European ATs being inflated to multiple groups.

make it decide the amount of rounds after the forfeits. The first round would be 1/?, then the 2nd round would be 2/whatever. And make it you actually have to click join so you don't have forfeit guilds winning by forfeit.

Idea for replacing rating loss:

Change the entry fee from tournament tokens to Zkeys. Entry should be 5 zkeys or so. If your guild joins the first match, the register gets 4 (5?) keys back in their inventory. A kind of deposit to ensure you show up.

Maybe add some kind of token collector to get some value out of the old things. TTs were supposed to discourage spurious registering but they were just too cheap for being generated at the time when surplus balth faction had no other value. With HBs kebashed and GvG costing about 5 tokens, simplifying to just using keys (something generated by balth faction but with real market value) seems best. The deposit also allows you to make the no-show punishment quite expensive.

Correct me if i'm wrong but :
- Guilds can already easily get qpts with sec accs/forfeits
- Top guilds that would abuse the system don't care of ladder score do they??
- You aren't penalized anymore for getting less points , considering it's only in order to sync fights

The only way to fix everything like i said few times is to make a minimum ladder points , and 950-975 would be enough good to prevent this situation...

Change the requirement to actually enter your guild into an AT:

For instance, Guilds may not be entered into an AT until they have reached 30 (maybe 50?) victories on the guild wars ladder. Also remove the 7 day rule for participation. Without reaching the set number of victories, you are unable to register your guild.

Having to play and win 30 matches could be a big pain in the ass for syncers and could potentially be a massive deterrent. It might slow the syncers down a lot, as winning 30 games with just urself and a load of henchmen might be quite hard. For more serious guilds, 30 wins could be seen as an improvement on the current 7 day system, as for a somewhat active guild, the requirement to play tournaments could be met in 3-4 days instead of 7. Of course this idea has the added bonus of at least somewhat promoting ladder activity.

What's going to stop them from reaching the 30 required wins by syncing multiple guilds and resigning to each other?

^

Honestly, I have no idea what match data Anet has access to, but there's a lot of things that are extremely suspicious that should ideally be searchable for:

*matches entered with only 2 human players
*abnormally high number of losses (going 2-40 in a two day period is preposterous)
*average match length
*player activity

Theoretically nothing. But then short of banning them repeatedly there is always going to be some way they can get around the system presumably if they try hard enough. And seeing as its fairly certain anet do not care enough to ban them all every 2-3 days, then making their "job" as inconvenient as possible seems to be the only course of action.

At least with my idea if they cannot initially forfeit AT's, its going to be reasonably difficult for them to lose 300-400 rating solely off resigning ladder, as after a short while they are going to be getting -1 every game. Even if syncers could be bothered to go through this process, it would be considerably more time consuming for them than at present.

And if they want to win their 30 games by syncing, then they are going to have resign out of probably over 200 ladder games in order to get their rating low enough which is nothing short of a huge amount of wasted time. I dont think they could sync immediately in a new guild, as at present the ladder does not seem dead enough to allow for syncing at the 1000 base rating level.