In patch 2.2, Blizzard introduced a reporting system to help players tackle the issue of teammates going AFK in battlegrounds, especially Alterac Valley. While this was a good start, it has several major flaws, and players have been worrying that the system may not see any improvements. Fortunately, Nethaera has confirmed that in fact, Blizzard is studying the performance of the new reporting feature very closely. So far, the system has not been operating consistently, and the issue continues to be evaluated. With any luck, we'll see some changes soon.
What exactly are the current limitations and problems with the reporting feature? Here is a quick summary:
- A reported player is merely unable to gain honor, and not removed from the battleground itself. This is meant to deter players from willfully entering AV with the sole intent of going AFK and gaining honor without doing any work. Unfortunately, any players who end up AFK, whether on purpose or not, stay in the game. The remaining team members are still short-handed.
- Players need to physically report AFKers. This takes time, effort, and is considered by some an annoyance. After all, a battleground is for battling, and not for running around trying to find AFK players.
- Many of the AFKers are bots that can be programmed to keep the character in the battleground, by moving enough to avoid going AFK, or other such maneuvers.
As you can imagine, many people strongly oppose the idea of an extended deserter label, and I can't personally see Blizzard implementing it. While it is important that we try to avoid ignoring "real life" tasks to the point that we are called upon to do them in the middle of a battleground, "real life" does happen, and it's simply more important than a battleground match.
Important phone calls, minor to severe emergencies with one's children, a parent absolutely insisting that a child do something, bathroom emergencies, a knock on the door, and other such spontaneous events hardly warrant such punishment as banishment from a battleground for hours or days. Even if the duration of the deserter effect depended on frequency of the transgression, I think the threshold to receive such a strong effect would have to be awfully high before I'd condone it. It simply isn't reasonable to punish a person for dealing with "real life" issues, say, four times a week, by saying "well now you just can't play in a battleground for a week!'
One get-around that has been suggested is that, upon an emergency, a responsible player should /afk themselves out, accepting the minor 15 minute deserter status. While this should certainly be practiced anyway, as it's only fair to your teammates, you could still forget to do so, or suffer an emergency that understandably drags you away before you type it. I don't believe one's entire day for battlegrounding should then be shot.
At the very least, I think we can all agree that having to report a player as AFK is probably redundant, and that some automatic system could be implemented so that a) players can actually play and b) all AFKers are caught. Whether the result should be a removal from combat, a boot from the battleground + deserter, an extended deserter, or some other punishment remains unclear.
Are you satisfied with the current reporting system? What changes would you have Blizzard make, if any?
Subscribe
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
11-26-2007 @ 6:09PM
Ugkul said...
If you see a bot, you should report it to the GM. Using a bot is a bannable offense.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 6:10PM
HamOnRye said...
Part of the issue why this is not working fool proof is you have to hunt the person down, target them, and report them as AFK from the drop down menu (unless there is another way I am not aware of).
This is a bit of a problem for 2 reasons. Most AFK'ers are in the cave which means someone has to go into the cave and do the above method for reporting them. Thats wasnt so much of an issue before but now people no longer spawn in the cave and few people want to take time flag them. Second is some dirt bags are immediately going to some out of the way place, banking on the fact that nobody mid battle is going to drop what they are doing, hunt them down and flag them.
However with this being said I still think the current system is an improvement. I do notice ALOT less people abusing the battlegrounds then before.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 7:26PM
Dan said...
you can target any member of your faction in the bg with /target <player>
11-26-2007 @ 6:12PM
jr said...
So long as [a] all punishments are known before they are used on anyone and [b] you don't get punished for doing the /afk yourself (you shouldn't be punished when RL happens) or when you get DCed from the game then I don't think any penalty spoken about is unduly harsh.
Also, the author seems to suggest that wwe have absolutley no control over when we enter a BG. While I understand that RL is more important, one shouldn't be getting into a BG when they should be doing other things or when you know that you are likley to have to leave at any moment. Is a week ban too harsh perhaps, though I really doubt the people these flakes are always grouped with think so.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 6:25PM
Cruumash said...
You can simply right-click the dots on the mini battle map to bring up the Report AFK option. You can report people in the cave from the Aid Station.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 6:32PM
Epiny said...
@2
Try opening the map and right clicking.
I think patch 2.2 solved the majority of the problems and no system will be perfect. AV is working very good now so just leave it alone.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 6:39PM
Matthew Rossi said...
Also, I've seen several cases of people reporting folks guarding towers or flags as AFK. (The AB I was just in, as a matter of fact.) So any system that depends on players to implement it can't have so harsh a penalty, because players WILL abuse it.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 6:40PM
Archaic said...
On Shadowburn, AB is the new AV for AFKers and botters. Most seem to stay active by pinging the map, which has been discovered to remove the AFK debuff. It's a bloody nightmare, when you've got 5 AFKers in an average match. I've lost count of how often Horde has been 5 capped because of it.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 6:45PM
Matthew Rossi said...
Hey, I'm on Shadowburn too! You playing Horde or Alliance? On Horde it really seems hit and miss to me, I win and then I immediately lose the next two matches, then win one, lose one, win two, lose again. Can't figure it out - if it's botters/afkers I can't tell.
11-27-2007 @ 6:59AM
Archaic said...
Horde. Tomoyo of Emerald Dream, GM of .
I'm an Oceanic player, so I'm usually on late night and early morning server time. There's a lot more bot activity there, I expect simply from people leaving their bots on while they sleep.
11-26-2007 @ 6:54PM
Malachi154 said...
As was stated, you can simply right click on the dots in the cave off your mini map or the main map and choose report all the above. Or, you can type /target name and you can right click their portrait and chose report afk. One question I have tho, Are folks with the AFK debuff getting credit for completing the Daily BG quests? If so, the AFK debuf is not the deterrent it should be, those folks should not get credit for a win that they did not participate in...
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 6:59PM
John said...
The way i report AFK'ers:
Everytime I die, I bring up the BG stats page (or whatever it is called) I look at damage and healing. If it is more than a few minutes in to the BG, and they show 0 for both damage and healing I i find them on the mini-map. If they are sitting in a cave or out of the way place i report them AFK.
Reply
11-27-2007 @ 2:02AM
spinninnzen said...
@11 problem with that is that if someone just got on recently because someone else left how can you be sure that they are afk or just new. I had this one guy in BG @ AB who who sat there while we were trying to hold the mines. Never did anything for about 5 minutes other then hit the space key to make his mount rein in. A couple of us reported him and then about 5 minutes later I saw him fighting on the field. I cant blame blizz. Its hard to tell who is really afk or who is on a emergency take that trash out right now or else. Or the baby is crying he needs a bottle. I have seen a huge decrease tho.
11-27-2007 @ 8:24AM
Sloane said...
You don't have to find them on the mini-map. You can report them directly from the BG stats page by just right-clicking on their names.
However, this is still a bad system. Even if it is only 5 players AFK, it requires even more players to effectively stop playing in order to report them. I think they should instead implement minimum thresholds for damage/healing/node capture/node defense. If someone is showing 0 across the board, it doesn't matter if they're at their computer or not. They're doing nothing and effectively hindering their team.
11-26-2007 @ 7:01PM
anonymoose said...
I think having some sort of AFK ability at all is an improvement over nothing. That said, I think the reporting system could use some improvements, including consequences.
For starters, I think when someone is reported as AFK, they should have a very limited time limit to engage in combat in some way, shape or form. (For AV, 90 seconds; EotS 30 second; AB 30 seconds, WSG 15 seconds.) Once the time limit has expired, they should then flag in such a way that they can be killed by both factions, and qualify as an HK. When AFKers rez, they should be auto ported to a hive in Silithus, with their hearthstone auto banked.
Additionally, these AFKers should receive absolutely no honor, and a 1 hour deserter debuff that begins once they arrive back in any city or locale where they could feasibly queue for another BG. Repeat offenders should see the deserter debuff double each time (2 hours for next offense, 4 hours for next offense, 16 hours for next offense, and so on...). This penalty is cumulative over the lifetime of a character, and does not reset on a daily basis.
Bots on the other hand will require a far more creative solution. We are all familiar with locks, mages, etc who park in a "choice" location and aoe, or in locations where opposing faction will be guarranteed to kill them (making them appear to be in combat).
I think a separate "Suspected Bot" status should be available, alongside AFK status. When someone is reported as a suspected bot, they should have 5-10 seconds (depending upon the BG) to dramatically change their actions or location. Any suspected bots who communicate in BG chat or dramatically change location or activity can have their suspected bot status downgraded to AFK status--with the same potential fate awaiting them if they fail to do so.
Failure to respond quickly to a suspected bot report would result in the same consequences for AFKers, however the deserter debuffs would be double. Additionally, suspected bots would auto generate a report sent to Bliz alerting them of the activity, so the account can be flagged for possible ban.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 7:04PM
MichaC said...
I think the battlegrounds should be redesigned to be real-time reverse turing tests, and if you fail them at any point you will be reported to your local government as a rogue synthetic.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 7:20PM
Poormojo said...
I like to pull down the stats menu for the BG and sort by "damage done." I then right click on each name with 0 damage or healing, or a very low amount, and report them.
I do this every time I die or when I'm guarding a bunker in AV. I can keep my eye on my tracking radar (Hunter!) and report at the same time.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 7:29PM
Green Armadillo said...
Here's the thing - if your cat sets the house on fire and you run to go deal with that, you will automatically go AFK and be removed from the BG within a few minutes. Unless this happened before the match began and people were super attentive at reporting the moment they noticed you were still at the start point, your unattended character will almost certainly not be noticed, reported, and actually gain the inactive debuff during that time. The only time that penalties for being inactive are going to affect you is if you actively take steps (whether it's tapping the space bar to keep from being AFK, running into combat to remove the inactive debuff, or using a bot that could get your account banned) to remain in a match that you're not contributing to.
I play defense in BG's and I'm as wary of being wrongfully accused (e.g. by these new mods that auto-report you if you fall too far down the damage meter, which CAN legitimately happen if you're defending something that doesn't happen to get attacked) and subsequently penalized as anyone. But there is zero excuse for people remaining in battlegrounds WITH the inactive buff for 30 minutes at a time because they couldn't even be bothered to clear it and it was better for them to stay and not get the honor than be prevented from joining their next AFK match for 15 minutes. Something has to be done, and the current system does so little to prevent AFK'ers that it's hardly even worth the time it takes to report them.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 7:37PM
batgrl said...
Though still new to bg I don't think I'll ever report someone simply because I like to think there is some justifiable reason someone might be afk - and I'm certainly not going to stick around to find out or waste my time /w to see what's going on. I've got too much to do in bg and too little time to do it in - and I really don't feel qualified to play bg policeman. I'm also not going to remember people's names and then notice if anyone's consistantly afk - I have too much to do just figuring out how my priest can help/dps/live long enough to achieve a goal. I'm frankly just waiting for people to start abusing the afk report function - like when I need to sit and drink after buffing everyone in sight as they res in the graveyard until I'm oom. I'd be really against any harsh penalty until we can have some assurance it won't be abused. But I also can't see that it would be in Blizz' best interest to have an actual GM monitor each bg - would be hit or miss trying to spot behavior even then. So while I don't like the idea that the players are supposed to police the bg, I really can't think of another option.
Reply
11-26-2007 @ 7:40PM
Buckaroo said...
Anyone flagged as AFK should be removed from the BG after a short period of time (30 secs?) if they don't then engage in combat and have a combined damage and healing of less than 50% of the average damage and healing done by all of the other raid members. Anyone waiting within 10 yards of a tower/graveyard would be exempt while such tower/graveyard was favorably contested (4 min), but would be subject to AFK flagging and removal once such tower/graveyard was capped or recaptured. Anyone removed would receive a 30 min debuff, preventing them from entering another BG for the first offense per day, and 1 hour for future offenses that day. This balances RL needs with preventing AFKers from diminishing their faction's ability to win in the BG.
Reply