Why isn't afk farming being discouraged with diminishing returns?

[Friday.7864]

If you kill the same mob several times in a row you really should stop getting drops and xp.
It's kinda ridiculous how many afk blobs I saw in Ascalon maps in my last world completion. 
The arguments in map chat about this topic are also something I can live without. 
While your future Steam players might think the game has  a bot problem. 

EDIT: All I'm suggesting is something along the lines of requiring necros/engineers who keep killing the same few respawning mobs over and over again to kill something outside their minion/turret range every 5-10 minutes. Similar principle as in WvW, you actively do something and the game won't touch your rewards for another 10 mins.
It would only affect those camping in one spot, it would be simple to avoid, legit farmers wouldn't even be affected. 
Right now it's just too easy to plop down a dozen engineers to farm spirit shards/drops with 0 player input...
 

Edited June 16, 2022 by Friday.7864

[Taclism.2406]

I mean that'll only harm mono account people "semi afk" farming every now and then
Bigger botters already have tons of accounts for the login rewards, they'd just rotate the accounts farming as soon as the lower rates kicks in
Instead, give us a better source for T4 mats that requires more involvement than afk farming

[Quench.7091]

There is diminishing returns, but it never stops the gains completely. I believe that DR effects karmic retribution now, which a lot of these farmers use. The farmers you're looking at in Ascalon are probably dust farmers, because dust is assigned to ghosts. They should probably intensify the DR for the extreme cases. By extreme, I mean cases where people are logged into a single map for inhuman amounts of time, because their macros are keeping their accounts active from logging out. I've been seeing a lot of macro botters.

[mythical.6315]

This thread will be locked when the mods wake up. A locked thread means the issue doesn’t exist. 

[Faccina.5091]

You don't know because dont do it but theres gms around that check once in a while if someone is afk or just semi-afk,  the afk ones get a ban.

 

And also:

1) count all the "bots" on a map on all maps

2) do the same thing as them then count all the drops you get

3) open the tp and do the math what will happens if they get banned

Edited June 11, 2022 by Faccina.5091

[Friday.7864]

6 minutes ago, Faccina.5091 said:

You don't know because dont do it but theres gms around that check once in a while if someone is afk or just semi-afk,  the afk ones get a ban.

 

And also:

1) count all the "bots" on a map on all maps

2) do the same thing as them then count all the drops you get

3) open the tp and do the math what will happens if they get banned

Why do something manually if you can just discourage such behavior in the first place? 

1) Don't wanna
2) Not worth it with 1 account for sure, but if you stack alt accounts...
3) I don't want anyone to get banned, I want Anet to reward players for doing events, bosses etc, not for farming the same mob for hours with alts

[Hashberry.4510]

Forget it Friday, its Chinatown

[Lucy.3728]

I dislike this DR.

It is fault that I don't get a mystic coin from the ley line anomaly, just because I've 1 char standing in Timberline which I use for that event. Timberline happens when I come home from work and after only a few days that char doesn't get the reward any more.

 

And I bet this DR is too blame that I sometimes don't get rewards from the hologram stampede too.

 

What I don't see the DR doing, is stopping the one-spot-forever farming. Why even bother to see if it's afk/semi-afk or no-afk? A game shouldn't need stupid farming (aka grinding) anyway. No rewards from camping spawning points.

[Labjax.2465]

I thought there was? And anyway, too harsh diminishing returns across the board hurts players who are playing normally. Hearts, for example, can have you killing mobs in the same area on respawn until you get the heart filled. If DR is too harsh, you'll be impacted just doing a heart once. Do want that outcome just so you can stick it to afk farmers?

[TristisOris.2165]

DR works for me at 2nd!!!! kill of events like Rhendak, if i was parked inside. But never for engi farm. A big question for anet which never would answered)

[Khisanth.2948]

The problem is that there are a bunch of different types of DR but people just make blanket statements about all of them.

For the type relevant here I am a bit doubtful about how much it goes into effect. Waaaaay back when John Smith was still working at ANet he mentioned at the time that very few people were affected by it. It is one of those things that are a bit difficult to test unless you are a botter AND the bot is logging all your loot drops but I doubt any of them are going to come around to share their data even if they have it. Personally the only time I've farmed like that was back during the Southsun event that gave a massive amount of magic find and farmed armored scales for several hours but in one spot but there didn't seem to be any sort of DR.

Event and dungeon DR is much easier to notice but that type is irrelevant to this topic.

[Phasma Phasmatis.4305]

The funner solution would be to do what the Witcher 3 did when people were farming the Cows, spawn a legendary enemy there if you kill too many. Make a Legendary Ghost executioner that drops no gear spawn in that spot every 50 kills and wipe out the afk botters, have it port those that die away from the area so their macros can't go back to doing what they were doing. Active farmers and passing through players can run away, the bots will be dead and ported across the map swinging at the air with nothing to hit. 

Alternatively maybe have a hidden debuff that counts up everytime you kill a ghost, kill 50 your body drops and you temporarily become an attackable ghost that can then be killed by all the other players in the area. Let the bots kill themselves off. Something similar already exits with the Class II Rift Stabilizer as it can randomly turn players into an attackable  Leyline anomaly if you hop up and down in a rift long enough with the wrong coordinates.

Edited June 12, 2022 by Phasma Phasmatis.4305

[Taclism.2406]

44 minutes ago, Phasma Phasmatis.4305 said:

spawn a legendary enemy there if you kill too many

I actually love that idea. But it might become the new griefing meta to spawn legendaries at every heart then.
Still it could be refined with some limitations, and turn a problem into something positive, make that a map alert urging to kill it, rewarding [mats or w/e]. Not that its gonna happen but heh funny speculations

[Labjax.2465]

1 hour ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

The problem is that there are a bunch of different types of DR but people just make blanket statements about all of them.

For the type relevant here I am a bit doubtful about how much it goes into effect. Waaaaay back when John Smith was still working at ANet he mentioned at the time that very few people were affected by it. It is one of those things that are a bit difficult to test unless you are a botter AND the bot is logging all your loot drops but I doubt any of them are going to come around to share their data even if they have it. Personally the only time I've farmed like that was back during the Southsun event that gave a massive amount of magic find and farmed armored scales for several hours but in one spot but there didn't seem to be any sort of DR.

Event and dungeon DR is much easier to notice but that type is irrelevant to this topic.

Oh, is he not with Anet anymore? Didn't realize he'd left. I hope they still have an economist on staff, given how important it's been in how they manage loot and whatnot.

[Eekasqueak.7850]

2 hours ago, Taclism.2406 said:

I actually love that idea. But it might become the new griefing meta to spawn legendaries at every heart then.
Still it could be refined with some limitations, and turn a problem into something positive, make that a map alert urging to kill it, rewarding [mats or w/e]. Not that its gonna happen but heh funny speculations

Could just make it a yellow name enemy that gets caught in the afk farmer's aoe, or make minions aggro to it only. I dunno how that'd be to implement though. 

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

DR seems to be not as effective as it used to be. Else there would be no constantly growing number of afk-farmers. If the method was a total waste of time, as some on this board keep claiming, no one would do it.

We have not seen any important changes to the system so far. After 10 years and countless of layoffs, I fear the amount of programmers who are familiar with the old code is rather small. Touching old stuff always comes with a risk of making it unusable. In most cases it is better to re-write the whole thing and replace the old version. But maybe they lack the resources,?

If they they overdo it, we may have a chance. ANet will only act in this matter if the afk-farmers threaten their business model. If they clog up the map-instances, cause server issues or the RMT issue boils up. We are still far away from that.

Will it ever happen? MMORPGs always have limits with objects and NPCs. I think if you open the resource-monitor, you can easily spot the maps filled with afk-farmers just by watching at the ram values. A server crash caused by exceeding capacities is possible.

[Blue D Phoenix.7260]

There used to be adk farming in verdant brink, now its taken care of. But not with DR but with changes in map, weird. 

[Danikat.8537]

I think DR does kick in when you kill the same enemies over and over (or even the same type) but as I understand it there's two problems which would affect this situation:

1) DR starts by removing the rewards the game considers to be more desirable, which is not necessarily the ones farmers want. When it used to affect the Mad Kings Labyrinth I'd know it was kicking in because the only drops I got were dust and bones and junk (no equipment or trick-or-treat bags) and it would take a while after that to stop dropping the crafting materials so I was only getting junk.

2) A genuine bot isn't going to stop farming because they're being affected by DR, because they won't know. A bot is just a script set to repeat the same actions over and over, it can't check the drops it's getting and decide whether it's worth farming more the way a human can. It certainly can't move to a new area for a while so DR resets. So DR will only affect real bots when the person running them comes to collect what they've farmed, and then only if they notice it's less than they expected and realise the reason for that is DR and not something else, like other players killing the ghosts before their bots get to them.
 

13 hours ago, Lucy.3728 said:

I dislike this DR.

It is fault that I don't get a mystic coin from the ley line anomaly, just because I've 1 char standing in Timberline which I use for that event. Timberline happens when I come home from work and after only a few days that char doesn't get the reward any more.

 

And I bet this DR is too blame that I sometimes don't get rewards from the hologram stampede too.

The simple solution there is after you've done the leyline anomaly event take that character into a different map and do an event there, or just run around for a few minutes killing enemies and gathering materials, then go back to Timberline so they're ready for the next day.

DR is intended to discourage players from sticking to just 1 area, so it resets if you move the character somewhere else.

[alphafert.6730]

I doubt anything is done. I reported 15 on one map with vid evidence. Several groups of 2-3 where they had the same name & also a stack of about 4 asura all repeating the same movements. I was told to report in game so I did. This was well over a week ago. I've been stuck home with covid & these groups have been there all day everyday. I've seen it mostly blazeridge but on a lot of other maps & even in the holo arena. I've decided I just won't spend money till this is at least reduced. 

 

Edit: I also stopped playing my necro pve because several times I've been harassed about botting even while actively moving/replying in chat. Sad part is I don't blame them for being agro. 

Edited June 12, 2022 by alphafert.6730

[Khisanth.2948]

8 hours ago, Blue D Phoenix.7260 said:

There used to be adk farming in verdant brink, now its taken care of. But not with DR but with changes in map, weird. 

Same as Bitterfrost Frontier

[Danikat.8537]

On 6/12/2022 at 4:56 PM, alphafert.6730 said:

Edit: I also stopped playing my necro pve because several times I've been harassed about botting even while actively moving/replying in chat. Sad part is I don't blame them for being agro. 

I know it's annoying when people have a go at you for it, but just in case: you don't need to worry about them reporting you. Reporting, even for bots, isn't an automated process, all it does is alert Anet that they need to look into what's happening, then someone from Anet will investigate and make a decision on what action (if any) they need to take, so if you're not botting nothing will happen.

I've had the same when I've been playing my ranger. Sometimes I genuinely was afk, but only for a few minutes because something distracted me from the game. Other times I was there and playing and someone still decided to call me a bot. I don't know if they thought I was playing like a bot, or just assumed all rangers in the map were bots.

Oh also, if they're going too far you can report them for verbal abuse. Again it's not automatic, so nothing will happen right away, but if Anet decides they've crossed a line they can act on it.

[Dami.5046]

I always find it a  hard knock that a normal 'doing nothing wrong player' should get 'punished' because a company won't deal with the people who do indeed 'break the rules' Aion was the same and you think there is a bot problem here😁. They did have diminishing returns in that game but it seemed that once the bots hit cap they went else where. (in game)

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by Dami.5046

[costepj.5120]

Why would anyone bother sending an in game message berating a suspected bot? Either
(i) it's a real player that receives it, not a bot, so the complaint is invalid; or
(ii) it's really a bot that receives it, so it will be unseen by human eyes!

[Danikat.8537]

15 minutes ago, costepj.5120 said:

Why would anyone bother sending an in game message berating a suspected bot? Either
(i) it's a real player that receives it, not a bot, so the complaint is invalid; or
(ii) it's really a bot that receives it, so it will be unseen by human eyes!

I thought much the same when it happened to me.

They usually just whisper to say they "know" I'm a bot and they've reported me, so I assume they think people who run bots check chat periodically. I've heard Anet will whisper suspected bots to check if anyone's there, but these players weren't pretending to be Anet, just announcing the report. My best guess is either they think the person running the bots will see they've been reported, panic and stop without Anet having to do anything, or they know I'm not really a bot and were just trolling.

The one I reported for verbal abuse followed up the initial whisper with a series of increasingly angry and detailed descriptions of what they think of bots and what should be done to botters. I was afk when they sent the first message, then carried on playing so I guess they thought they'd found a bot which was being monitored and took the opportunity to vent. I agree botters should all be banned, but there was no call for the rest of it.

(Also I realise this makes it sound like this happens to me a lot, but it's been about 4 or 5 times in total. At least 2 of those I went afk for a few minutes because something in real life needed my attention and I forgot to log out first, then came back to find my pet had killed something. The other times I was doing a heart and/or gathering and I suppose they thought I was moving like a bot or something.)

[Dante.1508]

Just stand at expensive nodes long enough and you see the botters appear farm and disappear like clockwork.. if players can see these things why can't the developers?