Weekly Changes, Why does the genuine player gets punished, but not AFK farmers?

[Manpag.6421]

It would be interesting to know how many AFK farmers are on free accounts and how many have at least EoD. The scavenger protocol chips may be limited to one bag every minute, but they aren’t affected by diminishing returns so as long as you keep killing, you’ll keep getting loot, effectively bypassing the system.

[Danikat.8537]

1 hour ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Well, if diminishing returns drops the loot rate to almost zero, they are still getting something for doing nothing (in the case of true AFKers).  A million pennies adds up over time.

Eventually it drops to zero.

I think it gradually removes tiers or loot types before then. I've not seen it in action often because I don't farm if I can avoid it, but before they removed DR from the Mad King's Labyrinth some people would give up when they were only getting junk items, others would wait until they got nothing (usually because they didn't know about DR). Some people claimed they could tell when it first kicked in and they were getting fewer rare and masterwork items, but I think that requires tracking drop rates in more detail than most players do.

[DeanBB.4268]

16 minutes ago, Manpag.6421 said:

It would be interesting to know how many AFK farmers are on free accounts and how many have at least EoD. The scavenger protocol chips may be limited to one bag every minute, but they aren’t affected by diminishing returns so as long as you keep killing, you’ll keep getting loot, effectively bypassing the system.

Isn't autoloot an essential part of AFK farming? Gotta have masteries for that.

[Noidea Incognito.9607]

If Anet Acknowledges its ok for those people todo their stuff; not much we can do about it. But the line between multibox and bots seems thin... very thin.

That being said: at times it does look really creepy especially when using base model rendering and their all stacked together...

A new enemy type discovered: Stackius Farmicus Blobatron.

https://imgur.com/a/OCcCS9I

Edited March 13 by Noidea Incognito.9607

[kiroho.4738]

45 minutes ago, DeanBB.4268 said:

Isn't autoloot an essential part of AFK farming? Gotta have masteries for that.

People can just use a macro for that.
Macros are used by some of them for spaming skill 1  as well.

 

59 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Eventually it drops to zero.

The scavenger protocol does not have and DR, so with that one afk farmers and botters will always make profit.

As for normal loot, it takes very long until you won't get anything. And hopping to another spot after a day or two no problem.

[Sweetbread.3678]

There's just too many holes in the DR system to stop it from happening atm. Things like Scavenger Protocol and Karmic Retribution aren't affected by it, it's too easy to reset, and it doesn't seem to track long-term at an account level but even if it did Anet steadfastly refuses to ban anyone in this game so there'd be no repercussions anyway. Honestly though, the main reason this is happening is because of how pet classes work in this game. Everybody wants to pretend that 0 APM builds are like democratizing MMOs or something, but this is inevitably what happens when you chase after that audience; it's just too easy to abuse.

[Labjax.2465]

On 3/10/2024 at 9:42 AM, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

As the old adage says, "You encourage that which you tolerate". Anet has done this to themselves because they don't want to do anything about it, so it must be A-OK in their book.

The AFK Farming problem was solvable years ago. In case you've ever wandered away from your computer long enough and left GW2 running you know that if you stand there long enough you'll be warned that if you don't move or use a skill, you'll be kicked. There are already tools against idling. All we need is one more. A somewhat shorter timer in the background that counts down and if you don't move or use a skill in X time, you stop getting drops. NOW, that easily takes care of necro farmers, but what about turret farmers? They use scripts to constantly drop turrets, which would reset that timer. Fair point. Alternately, we could simply make a different timer that says after killing X number of the same enemy, reduce the drops. No normal player is going through and killing hundreds to thousands of the same thing. A hundred, tops, if you wanted to do your WV weekly all in one go (which I have done when I was desperate). So say after 100 bandits, you just stop getting drops. BAM! Instantly farming is done. Now this can be circumvented by simply logging a new character in or jumping to a new farming spot but now we're at the point where Anet has to actually DO something. They're like alcoholics. We can set everything up for them, we can make their enviroment the safest and healthiest we can, but if they refuse to stop drinking....well, sooner or later GW2 ends up in liver failure. And that's their choice.

Edit: All confused emojis are AFK farmers.

The problem is and has always been that if you build a reward system around doing boring stuff over and over to get rewards, only the most conscientious and/or afraid of consequences people will do it the intended way; the rest will find ways to game the system, in less obvious (paying for multiple accounts, for example, and milking login rewards) or more obvious ("afk" farming) ways.

Attempting to get really involved in punishing people who try to game the system is whack-a-mole and does nothing to address the underlying problem of expecting people be ok with boredom in order to get the carrot on the stick. Or in other words, it's a form of treating the symptoms of a problem that they created and perpetuate with their design choices.

I don't have any great insights off-hand for how MMOs can do better on the boredom/carrot problem, but I am fairly confident that expending a lot of energy toward treating the symptoms won't help with player retention. Partly just because attempts to treat the symptoms often have side effects; like inadvertently making the experience worse for the ones who are trying to play "legit."

[EphemeralWallaby.7643]

I've been assuming the stationary farmers I've spotted are after spirit shards via xp, more than item drops, but I wouldn't dismiss it being both.  The diminishing returns link posted on the 2nd page mentions under open world that DR gets applied to loot from enemies, and not mentioning xp except event xp... which they're not generally participating in anyways. Going for spirit shards would also explain my experience of seeing those peeps with lotsa mastery progression, as opposed to barely progressed throw-away alt accounts: they're veterans after crafting more legendaries.  But, that's just my subjective observations and assumptions.

In regards to them farming loot, under basic mechanics it mentions the estimated triggers for open world (non-event) loot DR is defeating more than 5 enemies in a minute... most of the stationary farmers I've seen aren't at a spawn point producing that fast. So, that's why I could see it as both, and also why I think loot DR isn't getting applied as much as many peeps seem to claim whenever this topic comes up before thread locks.

Next time I go actively farm charged lodestones, I'll pay more attention to the xp I usually ignore, and see how much it reduces if at all.  I do know I usually see some spirit shards from xp. Now I'm curious how many.

~EpWa

tl;dr: Possibly spirit shards, not loot. But, also possibly both.  I admit I don't know with any certainty 🤷🏽‍♂️

Edited March 14 by EphemeralWallaby.7643

[Mell.4873]

On 3/12/2024 at 5:37 AM, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

it's not about the bandits. I didn't even go kill bandits, I did the other things, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm sure AFK farming was going on and even if not there I can promise you you can visit practically any map and find at least one bot there.

it's funny because I had no idea that that mechanic was even in the game, and on the wiki it even acknowledges that it's an anti-botting measure. One that's clearly not working since it continues to this day utterly unabated. Instead, it seems a problem of scale. If you cut down the rewards down to 10% of what they were, then the botters and multi-boxers just need to run 9 additional characters to get the same reward, which obviously they'll have no hesitation to do. So clearly it's not enough. DR needs to go down to 0 if there's going to be any disincentive for people to do it, and then they need to be targetted and removed from the game entirely. But again, this all requires the will to act, which no one has.

And yes, all confused emojis are still AFK farmers.

Ask them if they are AFK...... Did you ever farm areas in other MMOs I don't see much difference here besides the lack mouse or WASD movement they still push their skills.

[Sobx.1758]

On 3/14/2024 at 1:34 AM, Labjax.2465 said:

The problem is and has always been that if you build a reward system around doing boring stuff over and over to get rewards, only the most conscientious and/or afraid of consequences people will do it the intended way; the rest will find ways to game the system, in less obvious (paying for multiple accounts, for example, and milking login rewards) or more obvious ("afk" farming) ways.

And the only realistic solution to that is... to stop playing games that are meant to have a long term gameplay loop? In other words, if someone isn't interested in replaying the content many times, they should probably move on to single player games, play them once or twice and buy a new one. Or... [quote 3]

On 3/14/2024 at 1:34 AM, Labjax.2465 said:

Attempting to get really involved in punishing people who try to game the system is whack-a-mole

The same way any set of rules or laws is a "whack-a-mole", which doesn't mean it's wrong or shouldn't be done anyways.

On 3/14/2024 at 1:34 AM, Labjax.2465 said:

and does nothing to address the underlying problem of expecting people be ok with boredom in order to get the carrot on the stick.

[quote 3] The actual underlying problem: some players fixating on rewards over having fun ingame, so they force themselves into doing what they don't want to, just to complain that "they are bored doing stuff".

On 3/14/2024 at 1:34 AM, Labjax.2465 said:

but I am fairly confident that expending a lot of energy toward treating the symptoms won't help with player retention

Oh no, not the afk farmer "player" retention! Player retention is good, agreed, but you seem to be using it here as a type of out of context boogeyman. Not like afk farmers provide much of value for the other players' experience, often quite the opposite.

[Derktarlms.6213]

The magician's vault has nothing to do with it, just report that they are easy to identify by spamming the same ability at the same point