NCsoft Support response to AFKers and bots in new random PvP missions

Anyone who has played the Fort Aspenwood or Jade Quarry missions has probably encountered a player, that went AFK during the round, ruined the round for other players, yet still got faction rewards at the end. I came across such a cheater yesterday, and decided to report that person. Here is my report, and the replies from NCsoft customer support.

My initial report:
05/13/2006 07:11 AM
Standard NC Soft auto-reponse:
05/13/2006 07:21 AM
Here's a response I've never seen before in my previous reports, which seems to suggest, they won't do anything about this behavior. I've italicised the disturbing part of this reply.
05/13/2006 05:36 PM
My final reply:
So what do you all think? Am I over-reacting or does that second reply from Support suggest they won't do anything about this, and we'll just have to wait from a fix from the developers?

What do you expect them to do? Monitor every second of every group?

Do not use NCSoft support, they do nothing. *They have no connection to AN at all* and will do nothing but help on misc windows or NC soft account issues.

The support issue is huge, we have no-where legit to place bugs, exploit information, gold sellers or other EULA violators and such. They keep saying post it on a local fan forum, yeah... thats professional.

I expect Support to have an appropriate stance on game-breaking behavior, and when such behavior is reported the offenders are punished. I also expect the developers to implement a fix to make this very difficult for people to exploit. Is that too much to ask?

Well if you lose you only gain a puny amount of faction, running is so much more efficient if you are after good bang for your time.

I completely agree. The new missions are great and very fun to play. I know a lot of dishonorable gamers wouldn't mind waking up after a nights sleep with 10k faction (equivelant to about 30 platinum right now) with a bot that would be incredibly easy to set up. For anyone not understanding how easy this is all you need to do is position your mouse on the screen and have a program (or pecking bird if you've seen that Simpsons )auto-click your mouse.

It's like griefing in any form of PvP, running when your entire team is dead, so as to annoy the people you're fighting against. Or ruining a mission for your group in PvM. It's going to happen, and you can't get banned for it because it's not breaking the rules. Really, you should learn to accept that a lot of people are idiots, and get over it.

The key difference being that someone running in a PvP match is at their computer actually playing the game.

I don't know how I could make this any more clear how faulty this all is. Did everyone drink their coffee this morning?

Well I don't see how they can enforce it, these games do take quite a while to setup since so often you just get that no opposing party message... very often I just go off to do something else only to come back and find that it is already over

It's probably hard to stop, however they could change the reward system. As it is now the losing side gets 200-400 faction and the winners 600 faction. Make the rewards for winning 750 and for losing 100-200 faction. That would make slow down faction farming bots at least.

This isn't about idiots. It is about a lack of honor and the horrendously bad manner in which Factions is set up. The entire faction concept is wrong. The creatinon of faction taxes and selling to the highest bidder is wrong. The elimination of access except thru permission by other players is wrong. The attempted destruction of personal autonomy in game by trying to coerce people to destroy their guilds and logos and join a mega-faction farming corps is wrong. These bots/AFK positions will become the standard way of playing Factions with the reapers of the benefits excluding ALL players that do not farm for them. With the gold and faction they receive in ALL chapters already made and those as yet unmade they will control all Guild Wars play and eliminate the fan base.

Power does not corrupt, it attracts the corruptible. Guild Wars has merely created a system to attract the corruptible to an evil life faster. The result of the new system is to teach players all persons they encounter are merely marks to be used in any manner for personal gain (power/wealth). It is in every principle anathema to light side capitalism.

Fitz

When info on these missions was released (and before Factions even came out) I had mentioned that unless greater rewards were given to the PvE crowd for those repeatable quests, there would be some putz that would simply enter the mission and sit there to farm faction.
Unfortunatly, people like the above mentioned give us PvEers a bad name as whiners and cheaters.
There's really no way to stop this as it's "free" faction for them. But it would be possible to curb the behavior slightly.

Reduce rewards for the losing side or make the rewards for the repeatable quests twice that amount the losing side gets. This would make mooching the missions less inviting too them. Doing this of course, makes those missions less appealing to those who are likely to lose or feel they may lose and thus fewer people would consider them... at least in my way of thinking.

Edit: or allow teams to choose people before entering the missions.

Disconnect people who idle.

What they need to do is to make reporting people a lot easier. As in making it ingame instead of the craphole system where you have to go through the website and filling out a form.

It should be a system where if enough different people report the same account/person, then that account will be investigated. That way it ensures that people arent wrongly accused and that repeat offenders will be punished and that it won't wasted NCSoft's time investigating every non repeat offender incident.

Yes, there really isnt anything you can do so a thicker skin is needed but those saying to just "suck it up" are adding to the problem too. With that attitude nothing would ever get fixed.

That's not true at all. NCSoft support is the support department for all of their games. They have a total connection With Arena Net. NCI owns ANet. Arena Net is just the subsidiary company of NC Interactive that develops Guild Wars.

OP ~ At best they will mark this on the players account record. If this player recieves enough independent reports of abusive or disruptive behaviour they will probably recieve a temp ban and eventually a permanent ban.

The problem is with support and the fact that they answer all the game issues. They obviously don't play the games or have very good communication with the game development companies/teams. So in any given report you never know if you're going to get someone who know when to wield the ban stick and when to just record the situation. This is an irritation that people who play many of their games face (eg: Lineage, Lin 2, Guild Wars, etc.).

This is a pretty good solution, either that or just give nothing to a player who doesn't contribute a minimum amount.

The AFK bot problem is rampant in any competitive location where there is an appropriate reward of some kind, and I can especially see why they'd wish to do it in the competitive faction missions.

But it's also a problem in the arenas. If you go in for a good part of a day, you almost certainly WILL see 1-2 people per day in the arena again, and again, and again, who go AFK. They rely on their teams to either win, or to lose but kill a few enemies anyway, to max out their faction for the day.

I would hope that it's not all that hard to see that a player simply clicks the 'enter mission' button again, and again, and again, throughout the day and nothing else for many consecutive hours after being reported, unless the logs don't give very detailed information at all.

But the AFK-bot problem is truly a downer no matter where you're trying to play.

They should have to be active within X seconds before a faction gain to actually gain the faction. Of course then the bots will move every X seconds...

I've never seen this range. Every time I've done Aspenwood (still haven't been able to start a mission in Jade: No people) Winners always got 600 and losers always got 400.

Now I've never gone AFK, and I always monk to the best of my ability, but I admit I hardly care if my team wins or loses. I'd rather have 200 extra faction than not have it, but whatever.

I'm not really sure if it's time or enemies killed that counts for faction points, but you get max 400 when you lose, minimum might be even lower than 200. Lower the points for the loser side and there will be less faction bots.