Give it the normal honor gain rules, but hand it out only if a certain distance is traveled within the course of the bg. (Afk-ers mostly don't run around, and thus don't travel much)

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Im unfamilar with the AV battleground, so I may not be the best to comment on this.

It seems like Blizz could add a certain area on the map a player must visit to be "marked" to receive honor. After that the player must do X amount of damage to recieve full honors for the map. Im not sure if that would even be possible but it looks good on paper. :)

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Well, how about adding a minimum healing and damage threshold which players must surpass in order to gain honor points.

The system would work like this:

Player A gains honor throughout the match by leeching but he recieves no honor because he has not reached the minimum damage/healing threshold.

Player B, our dashing pvper, gains honor throughout the match smashing faces and such and passes the minimum damage/healing threshold, and so gets to keep his honor at the end of the match.

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I wonder if this will be the post the finally get AV honor nerfed. Look, I understand how broken the current system is, but for people like me with a limited amount of time to play AV is really the only way for me to gear up fast enough to keep up.

Personally, I think that the other BGs should award more honor. A 20 minute AV loss still nets me much more honor than a 30 minute AB win. Just as a comparison, I needed 40 AB marks for my PVP belt, which means that I had to PUG about 20 AB games. After playing about 8 matches I had netted around 1100 honor. If I had devoted the same amount of time to AV I would have come out with around 3k. Yes AV sucks, and yes it's PVE that awards honor, but I have a feeling that instead of increasing the honor that you get from the other BGs, Blizzard will just nerf AV honor like they did in 2005.

Personally, I love the other BGs and would love an excuse to play them, but right now AV is just too sweet to ignore.

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Honor should be awarded based on the amount of damage/healing done by your char and by capturing/defending objectives (towers, graveyards, npcs).

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OOOOOO mememememe!!

Allow players in a match to vote off a player. It would show us as a ready check asking to boot a player, also showing their stats for the fight. We all know the afkers... the ones that have 0 across the board. You would only have 10 seconds to vote and if a majority of the voters (50%), not players, said yes then the game would kick the player, deserter and all. If 50% sounds too low, make it 75%. I'm not sure of exact numbers.

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I agree totally with #4. You really cant get the honor you need in a reasonable ammount of time running the other bg's.

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Leave the current honor system the way it is, where everyone in the map gets a certain amount of honor points, then on top of that, add in a "bonus" honor system, which encourages pvp and player interaction.


For instance:
Increase the honor givin by killing enemy players. And take away the deminishing returns - this is an epic battle and deaths should be a frequent occurance. You should get honor for killing your enemy in a Battle Ground, even if you have done in 4 times over. This would encourage PVP in AV while at the same time making people more involved. To help healers and support classes, you could recieve honor by being in the immediate area of the action. Yes, you could go afk in this area too I suppose, but at least the AFK people near the battle may serve as a meat sheild for those playing.

Another idea I have is for a corpse looting system where every player drops an item that can be turned in for honor points. This item would remain on the corpse for everyone in the area to loot it. But, you have to manually loot it. This way everyone can get extra honor points by looting fallen enemies so that both healers and DPS can get honor for killing the enemy, but people who are AFK will not.

Just some thoughts. If you notice, most of my ideas focus around having players kill each other..,. this requires interaction and insures that you at least have to be near a pvp battle to recieve the bonus honor.

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a) Reduce the AFK auto-timer down to like a minute or two.
b) Pedometer. A player must move X amount of distance, and must get at least X distance from entrance
c) zero damage/healing = zero honor.


If AFKers are going to do nothing, they get nothing... even if they do the bare minimum, at least they are moving. Even cannon fodder has a use... hiding in the cave is worse.

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A Coward Reporting system. Like a Report Spam, a Battleground group can report people they believe is AFK. If a majority of a team reports them in a run (say 60%) they get auto-booted from the BG.

If someone keeps getting "Coward" reported, then Blizz can have them on a watch list, so the next time they enter a battleground they can inspect them closer. If the reports are fair, and the GMs witness this in action, they can bann the person from BGs with something stonger like a 24 hour Deserter Flag.

Also if someone keeps making false reports of "Coward" Blizz could also punish them. That way it keeps the system honest at least.

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More on topic, the problem with most of the solutions mentioned is that for the most part, any measures they try to take to prevent people from AFKing will most likely be ineffectual or even worse penalize players who are actually making an effort.

For instance, let's take the idea of having to do a certain amount of damage or healing. Most matches, I guard towers while they cap. I play a very important role in my team's victory but lots of matches I don't see much action. I could end up not getting any honor even though I was filling one of the least desired but also critical roles in the BG.

At the same time, if something like this was put in place, eventually AFKers from boths sides would find an area where they could just meet up and do damange/healing to each other while not participating in the BG's objectives. The main problem is that most of the people who are AFKing are doing so because of the inordinate amount of honor that AV awards, coupled with the fact that most of the have played thousands of AV matches since the BG was released, getting exalted in 1.0 and then grinding again after the honor system change.

Bottom line is that the other BGs need to be made more attractive, which will lure people away from AV and into a BG where individual effort counts for more.

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[1] Add a debuff to the starting caves, so that if you are in there longer than a certain period of time [not counting while respawning at spirit guide] you will be kicked out. Yes, people can just run outside and afk somewhere, but at least they can't bot and if they get killed they end up right back in the cave.

[2] Vote/kick option, as some other people have said.

[3] Points based on performance, e.g. if you have 0 damage / 0 healing / 0 flags you get squat. This one would seriously motivate people if you earned more points based on how well you did compared to others.

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@8

While I like your idea of awarding more honor for kills and removing diminishing returns there is one problem with that solution. Both sides farming each other indefinitely, with the objectives left alone.

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In response to the vote/kick system, imagine the propensity for griefing. I'm not trying to be a dick I'm just saying, a system like that screams abuse.

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I still say no honor in the starting cave. Sure they could idle elsewhere, but nowhere else in AV is safe from enemy attacks. If they learn to idle elsewhere, where they're attackable, we'll just have teams going to kill the Honor Leechers for easy kills. Their only way to escape is to be constantly moving between areas to idle/leech, and thus they'll be "playing". And there's nothing wrong with that. If they're gonna leech, they're gonna risk dying, or risk playing.

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The best/worse case I had in AV though. 28 people fighting, 12 afkers... it was one of those 2 hours AVs really bad. One of the AFKers got on the BG channel and started to bitch about how long it was taking. WTF the gaul of an AFKer to say AV is too slow.

It errupted on the chat channel in abuse. Most of the AFKers who were still sitting at thier computers (but still in the cave) were trying to defend thier actions of doing "nothing for honor". Like a battle of wits with unarmed opponents.

1 Alliance Player said "Next time I see you AFKers, your dead" and left the battleground. About 20 minutes later... his Horde rogue snuck into the cave, killed all the Alliance AFKers, repeatadly. :P

Thats what to do... if you hate AFKers, level a Horde, kill them when your angry at them :P

I think AFKers should lose honor.
They wouldnt do it if they got less honor at the end.

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Yea, good point about the abuse for vote/kicks. I used to understand afks in games back when they were 8-12 hours long per game, but now that games are so quick, afkers really have no legit reason. I still can't believe Blizz has not tried to do something about it. There are a million ideas floating around, just use one.

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Send GM's in to look at the afk'ers. Do a full on assault across all BG's, focusing on a couple of BG's for a specified amount of time, say 24 or 48 hours. Ban anyone they find afk'ing in the starting areas for, say, 30 days, or whatever. Flag their account as well, and in the future, if they are caught again, they are perma-banned. Take GM's off of other things, or whatever. It'll hurt customer service, but then again, some of the GM's seem barely able to understand the game anyway, so telling them to look for players not doing anything in a BG should be simple enough even for them.

Why so harsh? Blizzard does not have the resources to constantly monitor these nitwits and slap them on the wrist with little bans, so their best option is to do the equivalent of what law enforcement does in problem crime or traffic areas--focus on the area for a specific amount of time with extra resources from wherever you can get them. Blizzard has an extra luxury though in that people they bust can be gone forever, or at least until they can get another account.

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You people do know that you can get around your little rules if you are a healer by riding 10 feet down the path and jumping off the cliff to the GY then healing yourself to full and going AFK after that, right?

I have seen many people do that, just to hide the fact that they are AFK, so people don't report them...

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As for voting players out of a BG, that is a great idea. Except that what will happen is that BG premades will get in, decide they don't like someone--maybe that someone deserves it, maybe not. They'll vote the guy out. Hell, you won't even need premades. You could just have a random group of people decide that they don't like someone, for whatever the reason, and out they go. Never going to work, I'm afraid. I saw a twink pally one time refuse to heal a guy carrying the WSG flag because he didn't like the guy's gear. Now, imagine that pally, times 6, decide that not only is the guy's gear inferior, he just needs to be removed from the BG entirely. Level 10-19 WSG's would be unplayable--twinks would group together and vote out people who were non-twinks until they got a mix they wanted.

Plus, people have been known to argue and fight in BG's over...whatever. Well, you throw in a vote option to remove someone, and all that is going to happen is people are going to spend all their time trying to get others to vote out whoever they're arguing with.

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There will always be AFKers as long as people are lazy, which will be forever. Even if we colonize the moon there will be people who go through all the effort to live on the moon but for some reason they are too lazy to go cap a dang tower in AV.

The solution lies within the question: WHY are people AFKaving?

It's too profitable.

I think a big part of the problem is that AV is worth more honor per minute if you afk than the other BGs often give when you are actually playing. I remember pre-BC when they nerfed the honor gains from the NPC kills in AV. I think they should do that again. GO back to 10 or 12 honor points per NPC zone-wide reward and instead increase the amount of honor rewarded from player kills.

In conjunction i'd like to see the bonus honor rewards for the other battlegrounds be increased. If the other BGs awarded equivalent honor then i'm sure more people would be content to play some of the other ones instead of playing AV 20x and getting bored and afk-ing a few. I would be much less bored and less likely to AFK if I could hit ANY bg I wanted and get AV level honor per minute.


Basically, through a couple different angles, make AFK-ing less profitable. Restructure the honor rewards so that its not worth near as much - or maybe bring in some new gear via REP (mainly for AB, WSG, and EotS) so that they will have to play the other BGs to get those items and can't earn them by sitting in a cave. Let's be honest, any person who is a regular in AV (player or AFKaver) probably already has exalted with AV so no big rewards need to be added, maybe something small geared for only the PLAYERS in AV.

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