ANET, fix 12v12

While I was doing 12v12 this was making me so frustrated and it ruined the gaming experience for everyone on my team and even the other team without much challenge.

People used some type of necros to sacrifice themselves and destroy our team with Edge of Extinction for the whole minute before the match started and not many monks join the 12v12 so it was difficult to heal up from it. Very unfair, the other team got points before the match even began and they continued to do so while we were battling. I'm not sure what you can do to EoE but surley there must be a way from stopping this.

BTW, I think the setup for 12v12 is genius, 4 man group or alone and get randomly placed with others, to avoid IWAY or Spiking teams to make the game fair, that's why it was so much fun. But this EoE thing, it happened alot so people helped the Kurcziks I believe. Ridiculous!

I only had one experience like that, where this idiot suicide necro died 6 TIMES before the match started (the monk rezzed him quickly...). We ended up losing, he ended up being the 2nd leaver...

yes intentional sabootage is now rife, i have screenshots of people in the kurzick missions saying "go luxons" then leaving the team to intentionally give them a player advantage, these people are back in the outpost waiting to join and repeat.
kurzick, luxon AND balthazar faction penatlies for all leavers, and give all the non-leavers a share of what the leaver would have gained had they stayed.

I've got a simple solution to the leavers - reward those who stay behind (as now), but reward them based upon the number of people left in the team:

During the FPE, the victory bonus on faction has been a 1.5 multiplier - first to 500, each member of the team gets 750.
Losing team members get 1xpoints.

So, total points pool on a full 12 player victorious team is 9000 (12x1.5x500)

Now, if you said - thats the total points pool, and it will be split evenly depending upon the number of people left in the team at the end (and this works for both winning and losing team), then suddenly, if you quit out becuase you team was down to 6 players, and you had 250 points on the board just before it was about to end, you'd be missing out on 500 faction. (250*12/6)

More than that, by dropping out you'd be gifting the remaining players on your team your share of the pot, so they'd get 600 faction rather than 500.
(250*12/5)

Suddenly you've given a people a huge competitive dissincentive to quit - other people get rewarded for you dropping out - they'll get 15k armour sooner.

I agree ANET must do something about these quitter. It really does bring down the gaming experience. 12 vs 12 don't know how many times. once we start losing everyone quits and we are left with less then 50% of the team. Then it takes forever for the other team to get to 500.

Could you at the very least reaplace them with henchies so it can be fair. I'm tired of the quitters

yea it needs to be sorted but from my experience at least its been a lot less 2day then it was on friday.. i think out of all the games i played today only one was ruined by leavers (maybe 2) the others everyone stayed...

My main issue with the alliance battles is how easy it is to stay ahead once you're winning: I played 8 games yesterday, and only in 2 of them did the losing team break 300 points, and the team that was second to 100 points only won twice.

I had one great game that fit in both those categories. The enemy team had 5 monks, all heavy on healing. They balled up and pushed around the map, taking each point in turn, and crushing us whenever we tried to fight them head-on. We finally left about 5 people who could hold their own to fight them and sent 3 off to take all the shrines, since they were pretty easy pickings when they split up. We slowly caught up and hit 400 points around the same time as them, and they had 450 points or so when we finally won.

Compare that to something like Jade Quarry where a focus on strategy and teamwork really pays off and it's fairly hard to truly dominate. I had one game there where my team almost lost despite controlling 2 of the 3 quarries the whole game, simply because the other team was managing to take out most of our jade carriers with well-timed suicide attacks.

Thats a pretty good idea actually. I find mass leaving usually happens when one guy leaves, or fails to log, and then another leaves due to that etc etc etc. Eventually it gets to the point where there is one guy left. Thats idea stops this snowball effect by giving players who stay a extra incentive for every person lost. It almost rewards honour when facing a army of 12 people plus minions plus a dragon on your tod, like i did.

I think a system that rewards players that stay in the event of a leaver are good, but i think it is wise to have a punishment for leaving as well. Carrot and the Stick if you see what i mean. This needs to be something fairly substantial, but not too harsh as leaving could be for honest reasons, such as internet cut out. I wonder if they can tell if u have mapped or logged of rather than just lagging out etc. I doubt they can anyway.

On the whole though, this was essentially a beta event. 12v12, while the concept is strong, it needs some fixing to make it work well. I couldnt play the competitive missions, for example, because there was no opposing team. This, i hope, will fix itself, but Alliance battles need to be improved especially in regards to leavers.

Yes, but that's how traditional Battlefield type games are. You must work with your team to capture bases in the beginning and hold it for as long as you can or capture as many as you can. It's not fair if people can magically get all 4 bases later out of like 7 just because they're down alot of points. That's their fault in the start of the war. That's how war goes. Once someone starts losing, it's only a matter of time before they lose the entire war.

One solution is get together with your 3 other buddies on TS or whatever it is you communicate with on and go Base hunting far out in the countryside and Blitzkreig some abandoned bases. That usually works.

Wow, okay this is so far the best solution I've seen. Good job.

Mind if I post your suggestion in another forum? With your name of course.

There are way too many double agents...most just quit though.

8v12 or even 4v12 is a hard match...

Please do, the more it gets re-posted the more chance Anet will see it.

ahaha, I wish I went in with a me.mo mark of protection and LoD, a R/W with 55 hp + full dmg eoe + 2 55 necros saccing... you could take your own team out so fast, ahaha..

too bad the event is over.

How sad. Posting that just to get people riled up. Try again.

Instead of just not rewarding quiters, punish them more. I say remove any unspent faction a player has, including balthazar points. That would certainly deter most quiters.

Obviously it would be unfair to players with crappy connections, but it's not hard to detect whether it was a rage quit where they teleport to an outpost or if the connection is lost.

But a trully dedicated rage quitting asshole could just disconnect his network cable to simulate a connection error. Atleast it would deter most people I think.

I was thinking the same thing. Besides, a person with a crappy connection is probably having enough trouble in 12v12 as it is. Guild wars was not designed for people with 56k.

I would be nice to punish leavers, but I think rewarding the stayers is a better idea.

Its just that I do wonder, as you say about people who get disconected through no fault of their own.

Even if ANET was able to make the distinction between someone leaving and someone being disconnected, its easy to just goto desktop and *click* disconnect.

I played matches where depsite having 2/3 quitters we held our own very well.. surly that is worthy of reward.

I do like the posters suggestion, if I see quitters under this system.. I would be more motivated just to get that one more kill.. and maybe people left are more likley to cooperate a bit more.

If the quitters are in fact Kurzick spies.. then they arnt wanting the faction points anyway.. so any punishment wouldnt really be appropriate

/signed

What a great idea! Like another poster said. This should help to alleviate the snowball effect of more leavers/quitters.
Now the only other problem that the OP mentioned is the necros that sac themselves to death for the other team/faction. Something needs to be done about that.

These approaches are not helpful. If there is a penalty for leaving, they can just stand around and be AFK: if someone doesn't want to play, they won't. What would be better is a rule that makes sure you don't randomly group with anyone on your "ignore" list. So, they go AFK on you once, you ignore them; and you never have to play with them again.

A related problem is drawing on the map, there should be a color next to every player in the 12v12; and when someone draws on the screen (say a penis), you should be able to tell who it is by their color. Further, if they are on your ignore list, you shouldn't see any drawings that they do. I'm really really sick of seeing pornography on my map. I'd also like to extend the "ignore list" so that if 3+ guild members are ignoring someone, I've got the ability to "auto-ignore" them.

I'd like to see the ability to reconnect to a game in-progress if I get disconnected; not everyone has a perfect ISP. I've usually got anywhere from 5-30 minutes of play between a "hiccup" in my service provider. I can usually get right-back on in that case: but as it currently works I'm barred from reconnecting.

Reconnecting doesn't need to be gameable; if you disconnect mid-battle, your toon should stay "live" and the other team should be able to kill him/her. When you reconnect, you inherit the current status of your toon (dead or whatever). It sucks if you keep getting rezzed and killed; but that's the breaks: someone could stay on and be afk for the same effect. Ideally an icon should show up next to your character (for teammates only) indicating that you are "headless", perhaps giving your toon some basic AI, like running and wanding, using self-heals and an occasional attack skill if you have one.

So, perhaps what you do is (a) prevent anyone from "leaving" to play in another part of the game till the match is over, (b) if they disconnect and then log back into the system, reconnect them!
(c) let me see who is drawing on the map, (d) let me share my ignore lists /w guild members, and (e) fix the paring system to not group you with people on your ignore list.

no no no no. If you dont punish the quitters they will continue to do it no matter what. Dont allow them to join back in for 15 minutes and you'll stop most of it. I'd rather have a full team that tries than a half team that tries and gets more faction per kill. Most of the time you will still end up with little faction anyway. Those 500-28 battles are still not giving you much faction even if its increased.

Please remember that this was a preview weekend. 50% of people playing suicidal assassins with skills randomly picked a few minutes before the fight is not going to give an accurate view of what it will be like for real. Firstly, Alliance Battles are not going to be filled with 12 random 2 day old chars, but most likely carefully co-ordinated 4 man teams. Think of it more as a new challenge for Team Arenas fans rather than the latest Wammo holiday resort.

As for leavers, it was definitely a problem over the weekend (mostly see above at this point), but with the whole faction vs faction thing, there is potential for the 'spy' abuse that was rumoured over the weekend. I can only hope that Anet puts in sufficient controls to keep out most of them. Perhaps a good solution would be for it to cost faction to enter, that way you have to stay to the end (win or lose) to at least stay even. It would also prevent people with no interest in earning faction for that Faction from entering (i.e. evil Luxon spies!)

If your guild is allied with Kurzick then you should not be able to fight for luxon. If your characters has a certain percent (say 30%) more faction of one side or the other, then you should not be able to fight for the other side.

Reward those that stay. Tally up, in some way or another, how many disconnections happen during a match. (Player is in Keys - disconnected - Player has a total of 174 disconnects during matches over the last month).
This should affect the faction they do have, of whatever side they are allied with. Possibly even guild standing. Earning that standing is worth it and takes some time. I am sure that if guild leaders found out that 1337 Wammo is the one lowering their standing (Armies dont like deserters!) they would do something to fix that.

People who are allied to a certain side should have their names in a certain color. All Kurzick can be black, or all Luxon can be red. (Does not have to be THOSE colors) You will be able to identify people sitting in Saltspray as a high probability of quitting due to the color of their name.

Just throwing those out there. There needs to be a solution.

From this thread, two things should be implemented, and one should not.

1.) Brokenkey's excellent honor system. What people fail to realize is that, even now, people who just lost an Alliance battle gain Allied Faction equal to the number of points their team had when they lost. One battle I was in was fought down to the wire; Kurzicks ended up winning, but I got 453 Faction of out the deal. Works for me, especially if that honor system is installed.

2.) Luxon names are Red, Kurzick names are Blue. This is based first on Guild allegiance and secondly on account Allied Faction history not current levels. Someone with a history of 200k Kurzick Faction and 2k Luxon Faction who has simply spent himself down to that 2k being higher than his current Kurzick Faction is fairly obviously a spy. And if he's just a guy switching sides naturally, he can join a Luxon Guild in order to balance out/work off his Faction history.

3.) No punishments. Reward those who stick it to the end and ignore those who do not. Leveling punishments against them would likely just be incentive to many - "I don't care if Anet slaps me, I fight for the Cause!" Ignoring them altogether negates this reverse psychology angsty-teen crap and instead focuses on what's truly important - the players who fight to the end even in a vicious snowballing mess of a match.

4.) (My idea) implement a no-points rule for suicides. Do not give the enemy points for any death which fits the profile of a suicide kill (more than 80% damage was self-inflicted, death happened in such-and-such a time frame). If a team suffers deaths from suicide spies, then I say it should not be held against them. Suicide Deaths Are Worth No Points.

One thing to note. There is nothing Anet can implement that can work perfectly. No matter what, there will be out-Faction spies trying to wreck the battles in hopes of winning the fight for their preferred side through deceit and treachery. There will be people who think they have better things to do than to finish a losing battle, holed up in their base and unable to even entertain the notion of victory.