Arena For Profit and Power leveling, a growing trend? - Page 11

Puffypaladin · 08/28/07, 10:34 AM

My proposal was to fix the grand sellers. If one person do it twice a season, its not a big deal. But if someone do it every week, he will be found out pretty soon, and wont be able to do it.

The punishment should be, you cant change your team for the coming month, or so. Nothing serious, so even if someone got this punishment by mistake, it won't hurt him too badly.

Mugorim · 08/28/07, 2:20 PM

Originally Posted by Puffypaladin

I think that most of the automatic system will fail, due to the fact, that human beings will always find ways to out smart the machine. At least without super, crazy, complicated system to hold them off.

I like the Gold sellers and AV (future) system. Let the players right click on the teams, and say they are power levelers. If enough complains will pop up for the GM, he will go and check for himself the history of the player and ban/prevent him from arena.

This will use more human power from blizzard, but it will give, in a long term, a much better solution. If they managed to kill some 90% of the gold farmer, they sure can kill this problem. Just issue one GM per arena, per battle group, and you will get, in my humble opinion, a much better results.

It seems like you misunderstand the AV "solution". You report people in AV, if enough report them, then they get a debuff that will prevent them from getting honor. However, if they enter combat (apparently with any NPC), then the debuff is cleared, and the rest of the battle ground must report you again to reapply the debuff. There's no GM involvement whatsoever. It would be great if this fixed the problem, but i severely doubt it will, as it sounds far too easy to circumvent.

This is a horrible system, I would like to play the game, not have to run around policing their stupid game for them. Especially if they can easily clear their "punisment" and go back to what they were doing.

But you are not necessarily correct about "people will always find a way to beat the system". Yes, that may be true to some degree, but you've got to account for the fact that the "system" in this game can and will change to adapt to people who are abusing it. This is an MMO, and will (provided Blizz has the desire) change. Besides, if you leave it up to human judgement, it's not necessarily fair, as the GM gets to make the decision. If the system is designed to solve the problem, then everyone gets treated the same way. Not to mention, the desire isn't necessarily to fix the problem entirely (as a "perfect" fix to all problems is not likely possible), but to limit and reduce the problem so it's not worthwhile to most of the people doing it.

Amera · 08/29/07, 12:31 AM

Would something as simple as adding a gold cost to joining teams reduce the problem? I mean it would be a monkey sink along the lines of respeccing, and maybe enough to raise the cost of team swapping enough to reduce its frequency.

Puffypaladin · 08/29/07, 2:02 AM

Since people are ready to pay 1k and more for this power leveling, and on the other hand, no one will agree to pay 300g just to replace a friendly (and lawful) member in the group, its obvious that this solution will not work.

Sartuk · 08/29/07, 2:15 PM

Originally Posted by Zure

I can't see any way to prevent *some* abuse without changing the current system.

If a player has to play a certain number of games or a certain percentage of a team's games to get points/drake/etc, then the purchaser can just play as many games as they like at a 1500 rating, then sit while 2/3/5 people power level the team to the top of the brackets.

But how it plays out from here differs based on what people want:

Drake/title:

Strategy: I think the strategy is to just hold the team where it, playing as little as possible after the PL. Here, counting only the last 100 games is the proposed solution by Mr. Kaplan. But a 1500 team can be PL'd to a 2400 rating in 70 or so games (100-30 starter games played by the purchaser), so I don't see this working perfectly. Additionally, 1500-1800 (and beyond) could simply be played with the purchaser on the team, just contributing as best he can.

Proposed Solution: Penalize teams for lying dormant. This can be done in many different ways, such as charging 100 points if the team doesn't play the minimum number of games (which could be less than 10). There is collateral damage with this solution though. Legit teams that just can't get all 5 people on for the final weeks of the season could lose their mounts. In the end there may be no fair way to avoid people buying nether drakes. But really, I'm not sure I see a huge problem here both in terms of competitive impact and number of occurrences.

Points/gear:

Strategy: I think the strategy is to get PL'd to a very high level and then put in 3 games a week during peak times when you know you won't lose 30 points in a game, then queue leave for the next 7 games.

Proposed solution: Have the team have to actually *play* a full 10 games a week to get points, which should cost about 150 points a week, and likely more. Seems like an easy fix, am I misunderstanding something?

Basic math: You purchase a 2200 team -- You'd have a week at 2200, then 2050, 1900, 1750. Say you could have sustained 1500 on your own. 1202+1070+894+692+432 - (376*5) = 2410 net points "earned" from purchasing a team, which isn't a game breaking amount in my opinion.

Under the current system you'd earn about 4800 points net in the first 5 weeks of purchase, and about 6000 over the lifetime of the investment.

Pretty sure that the "queue leave" technique does NOT work any longer, nor has it worked for at least around a month.