I posted this in The New AV thread as well, but this is a fairly large change that folks who haven't been keeping up with that thread and who don't frequent the official forums will want to know about.

WoW Forums -> Battleground Non-participation Account Action

Anyone who encounters this new policy first hand is welcome to fill us in on what exactly seems to be the threshold for punishment.

Best news yet. Although the issue of "why we afk" is still there. People would do it even if got them half the honor.

Wow.

This really makes those automated afk reporting tools silly powerful / overpowered / downright dangerous all depending on thresholds.

I can also see a certain abuse potential, there's no better way to properly grief someone then getting them suspended AND loosing gear, better yet both at the same time.

My gut tells me we'll see far fewer cavemen and a lot more gliders out of this. All in all a good thing I guess, the gliders don't appear to be AFK and people don't really focus that much on them and play the damn game instead.

(Which, totally off topic and all, is beyond me how glider still works)

edit; and yes, this is just the kind of band-aid that I'm fairly certain Drysc was posting about them not wanting to use, instead they wanted to make it fun and fix the whole "why". Ah well. Still a good move.

Yeah, there's definitely some potential for abuse, but I imagine detecting griefing is just about as complicated as detecting bots via the AFK report mechanism. Blizzard has complete records of who reports whom. If they can detect a pattern for those having been reported and reasonably conclude that bots were used, they could just as easily (or not-so-easily) detect a pattern of reporting that indicates misuse or griefing with the AFK mechanism.

I suspect if a player is reported AFK Blizzard will either monitor them for a few days, or go back and view their history in Battlegrounds, if they see a player who has a decent amount of damage and/or healing, there won't be a problem, if they see a player that comes out of every Battleground with no damage or healing, they'll know it's an AFKer.

In theory, yes.

However, I somehow believe it's probably a bit like this over at where ever the GM's work;

Manager / team leader / whatever: "Alright team, we're looking at HUGE backlogs now. Upper management fear this will lead to churn rates. We need some overtime to get the backlogs down ASAP. Make haste for the ban machines!"

CSRs: "SIR YES SIR!"

These sort of situations are basically whatever happens when a customer service center of any kind gets a backlog. Now I have no idea how Blizz does things, but every customer relations job I've ever had or managed has used raw numbers as their reporting-up benchmark. This in turn leads to a quantitative focus rather then a qualitative focus which, in this very case, can lead to successful abuse .

I'm sure it'll be fine for the most of us though. Really does depend on threshold. There's no real reason anyone would be reported by 10 people 7 days in a row for being afk.

I think they're mostly avoiding the term "afk" because it's an in-game status, and therefore can be wrangled out of with semantic arguements. Especially considering that anyone in a battleground at all is, by game terms, not technically afk. Afk is, after all, a player-made term to describe the problem. "Non-participation" is not defined, and therefore arbitrarily enforceable.

I am assuming (hoping?) that there is at some point a human audit before any action is actually taken. My suspicion is, the policy has been in effect on the back-end for a while (a week to a month) and they're only unveiling it now that they're taking action on it. In short, I don't think there's a 'backlog' yet.

I think a small number of highly visible bannings will go a really long way to removing most of the casual 'non-participation'.

Obviously there's a lot of stuff wrong with BGs/honor and they've definitely made it known they're looking at it, but this should make it a little more bearable at least till they're able to overhaul the system.


[e] I've idly wondered what would happen if everyone in a BG was afk/botting. Would the game last forever? The closest I've seen has been 4 active players in a WSG game (including both sides). Bliz taking intermediate action on something like this is probably an indication of just how broken it has become.

They most certainly are taking action against players, I was actually alt tabbed in queue for arena (5+ minute 2v2 queues...) when I read the post, I came back and was disconnected from server, tried to log in and...

http://mikebro.org/illmissyou.jpg

I never AFK'd on my warrior since I've always been 'caught up' so to speak, if you've been PVPing since season 1 it is easy to stay caught up. When my friends asked me to level up a character with them horde side, I went with them there and put together a little spreadsheet (Google Docs - Druid Gear) to see what I wanted and how much honor it would take. Pretty much I decided right then and there I was going to AFK bot for honor items. Getting dominated for weeks because and only because of gear is extremely frustrating. I know because the first few times we played I had +400 healing and 1/2 cloth and feral items, we still managed to break 1500 in 3's.

Yes, that's right. 236,461 honor just to be competitive in arenas. Even then I still wasn't fully competitive, our 3v3 was in the low to mid 1700s and we were up against half s2 half s3 team regularly which was quite a gear disadvantage.

But as Turik said, they're not changing anything about the "why we afk." If my druid was the only character on that account I'd honestly rather have them permaban it over taking away all of my honor items. I pretty much made that character strictly to PVP with friends on a seperate realm, it's just not worth the time investment to get to the point where I can start having fun in arenas and not getting gibbed by rogues in a single CS/KS stun lock.

I think it's pretty crappy that they're banning people retroactively for something that was not against ToS and something that they'd already explicitly defined a penalty (being flagged afk).

Its pretty standard for Blizzard, they retroactively banned people for "exploiting" the economy by killing Jaina Proudmore (and the bannings went down right after the said customers' purchase of TBC, quite a hilarious fact itself). They banned people the last 3 hours before S2 ended for win-trading, when it had gone on for months with posts contrary to their reasoning for suspension.

The difference being that bots were always illegal, the time difference between using the bot and the ban doesn't matter.

I don't think they're retroactively permanently banning people for exploiting, too many people were doing it. Maybe if they're on their "Final warning of account closure."

Hopefully they don't take away too many of my druid's honor items

I think it's retarded. As posted above, 285k honor to get on par for arena. Even if you bot that will still take weeks given the token requirement too. What frustrates me the most is that you have to bot or play a ridiculous amount of hours yourself to get this gear. You can't do instances because they are obsolete and the itemization sucks. I bot, but I hate botting. I'd be more than happy to 5 man for my gear but I can't. I'll be damned if I log in 4-5 days played on top of the 17 days played to get to 70 just so I can arena. It's completely retarded. 20 played days so you get to finally play the game the way you envisioned when you put down 50$ and 20$ a month.

I PvP for both factions and I honestly could not care less how many are AFK because I know there is an Alliance character for every Horde player in the cave. It just incenses me that in order to participate competitively in arena (where I consider real PvP to take place), players are pretty much required to grind away literally hundreds of hours in Battlegrounds. Even if you obtain 100% of your gear with arena points, you have to use honor points to purchase items for the other slots. Instead of spending the very small amount of time it takes each week to participate in arena, PvP'ers are once again thrust back into a mind-numbing grind in which we are forced to complete objectives with our utterly inept teammates while we wipe the drool from their chins.

I'd much rather be tabbed out reading the forums.

Use of add-ons, "mods", external hardware, or any unapproved third party software to automate gameplay.
*Abuse of game mechanics or "bugs".
*Any behavior that has been found to be outside the intent of these Player versus Player matches.


Read #1 isn't that basically just botting?

The only people they banned were heavy offenders

It's a MMRPG, gear has always been time invested, that level of gear has to be time invested. This .. "It's completely retarded. 20 played days so you get to finally play the game the way you envisioned when you put down 50$ and 20$ a month" .. seems to be you saying that you want to really be playing a different game, one with instant gratification, perhaps a first person shooter would be more your thing.

As far as the time investment in getting to be competitive in arena's goes, possibly it might need tweaked is a fair point, but it's a point you need to make to Blizzard.

Fucking over the gameplay experience of people actually playing because you "must" have the gear and would rather watch TV while you get it, knowing that your making it harder for the people playing while you watch your movies and scratch your arse or whatever it is you do, is not the way to make that point.

I have zero sympathy for those banned over this, you chose to make things worse for the rest of us so you could get some gear a bit faster.

Let me clarify real quick what 'retroactive banning' means.

Botting has been against the rules since day one. If you have ever botted at any time, you knew it was against the rules and that you risked being caught. So even if you botted once and then 6 months later received a permaban, that is in no way a retroactive ban. You commit a crime and then receive the punishment. The time between those two events is immaterial.

However, yesterday, and every day before that, it was not against the rules to stand around in the cave not participating. As long as you were not using third-party programs (such as a program to automate jumping to prevent auto-afk'ing) you could stand there all day long reaping honor and not be violating policy. You were arguably being a douchebag by not helping your team win, and leeching off their efforts to earn honor points, but you weren't breaking any rules.

Today however, doing that *is* against the rules. And getting banned today for something you did yesterday that wasn't against the rules is a retroactive ban.

Personally, I don't have a problem with habitual afk'ers getting a retroactive 72-hour ban. I think it lets everyone know that Blizzard is serious about this and that if you afk, it's only a matter of time before you're banned and you lose items. But I can't say that retroactive banning is particularly fair.

I usually manage to leech AV while raiding in BT/MH. I just right click the battlemaster(screen color changes so I usually notice even when healing, I just don't bother if we're on a boss), which queues me, then automaton addon accepts queue when it pops(it's an ACE2 addon so nothing illegal here). Then I press my autorun bind on my mouse, since I'm an orc female I don't get stuck in the lamp. Once game starts, I click another mouse button which is trinket1(AV trinket) and then I just wait at the base, pressing mouse buttons everynow and then. No need to bot or anything for me at least, I do it since my warrior just hit 70 and I need a few pieces, I don't really plan to pvp, but some of the S1 gear is actually decent anyway.

With their afk report changes, I often get the inactive debuff nowadays tho, it's not that profitable anymore. But well it beats actually playing my char and dieing in 4hits by anyone that farmed more than me. 8k hp and no resilience on a warrior isn't that fun to pvp with. If they're on a banning spree I might stop doing it tho, if they remove my pvp gear I lose my weapons which would suck since I use my warrior to do my daillies as resto, and a fury without weapons isn't that hot anymore.

I think 200,000+ honour for a fresh 70 is a perfectly reasonable price to pay, considering you'll come out better geared than someone who's done the entire instances -> heroics -> kara -> gruul / mag progression. It's part and parcel of rolling an alt, you have to level and then gear up.

I'm sorry, but those people who are in full S3 or S2/S3 have already put in the hard work, and you can't just level a character to 70 and suddenly expect to be able to compete with them on an equal level. S1 arena gear for honour was a HUGE boost to new characters who want to start arena / PvP.

I recently rerolled and grinded my arse off to become as competitive as possible, but I knew that that's what it would entail. If I didn't have the stomach to sit through another few weeks of honour grinding I wouldn't have done it.

Moving back to the topic at hand, I think this is, on the whole, a very good move. From a personal standpoint more than anything else I've always had a problem with lazy people letting others do their work for them. You can come up with as many excuses as you like, but at the end of the day you're just exploiting people who aren't as selfish as you. Retroactive action doesn't bother me in the slightest, I don't think there was ever any question in the minds of people doing this that it was wrong.

As far as treating the symptons not the illness, though, I'm not entirely convinced. "Fun" is subjective, but ultimately anything that you do regularly enough is going to lose its appeal. I still have fun in some BGs. Others I ragequit. I know people who refuse to PvP because they hate BGs so much and others who can simply log on and BG for 4-12 hours a day, out of the sheer love of it (mostly hunters :P). The only way they could guarantee that the honour grind would be more enjoyable would be to simply increase honour / hour. Still, I find that BGs themselves can be a lot of fun. Some sort of competitive BG ladder would be something I'd enjoy. I think the amount of time required to get full honour gear is already an excellent deal considering how good it is, and really I don't think there's all that much that needs to be changed.

What's stopping you doing some arena to get a piece or two of S2 gear while also doing this? your not required to wear full PvP set to start arenas, and having a mediocre 1400-1600 rating for a few weeks wont kill you.
Heck I know some people who have used alts with very few S1 pieces, not been even in full blues and still ended up quite well in a couple of S3 pieces and progressing their characters fairly well, sure they wont be a 2100+ team yet but...

WoW isn't shipped off as a "come to WoW and enjoy the arena...", its just one of the areas it branches off to, characters are ment to take time to develop which is why you dont have the option of premades (akin to Guild Wars if they still have that) to do it.


Im quite glad at the stance they are taking regarding the BG bots/afk, it really has become a problem which is not soley from the mechanics of the BGs themselves.
They give us better gear from doing these places as an incentive to keep at them, and then its used as an excuse to abuse them because 'I need the gear so badly' in order to play. These people are the ones who really sully the situation into the 'wellfare' state that its become so commonly known as and they deserve every penalty thats possible.

Regardless I doubt they will ban or suspend an account without checking logs and other sources of information they have available in order to confirm the need for it, those that get banned deserve it, and if they are being retroactive on this then all the better.

Now if only they could work a way to disable the spam-bots from this :P

I hate this generalization. Just because it is an MMO doesn't mean it should be some painful unenjoyable severeal hundred hour venture that only the biggest of masochists can enjoy to get anything done. If anything Blizzard is one of the first to try and change the generalizations with arenas, badge rewards and what not. The problem isn't so much the time required to get the gear (although it does feel quite excessive for months-and-months behind gear, look how fast you can get the new T5+ and in some cases best-in-slot badge items if you're capable of clearing Karazhan) it's that the battleground experience is horrible. You don't have to look to far around these forums to find double digit page threads about problems in battlegrounds. Perhaps a more time sink focused mmo like Everquest would be more your thing.