Should there be a penalty for competative festival activities deserters?

[Eramonster.2718]

As per title, should deserters for festival activities be penalized timer (eg. Snowball Mayhem, Dragonball Arena, Reaper's Rumble etc.) to prevent system abuse?Players on the losing team can drop anytime, this will cause the game to trigger "autobalance" which will randomly select a player from the opposite team to be forced (if there's no volunteer) to join the other. A form of punishment for the victim usually :frown: (losing team).

As for why currently its bad :

1. Most of the time, team's number will still not be balanced after the reassignment, where the losing team will still have a shortage of 1 player.
2. Cause the reassigned player to drop the game as well, feeling unjust. Cycle continues.
3. Worse, the "deserter" re-joined the game and is placed into the WINNING team instead, since there's now a vacancy after a player was reassigned.

Thoughts :smile: ? Feel free to drop any suggestions or ideas to help/solve the issues.

[kharmin.7683]

What is your solution/penalty suggestion?

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

Replace the win with participate. Good rewards and achievements are often granted for wins of your team only. That sort of makes sense in a competition, but plenty of players just want to get the achievement/dailies done. They do not care about being the best. All that matters are loot and AP.

If the achievements would be changed from "win x rounds of dragonball/snowball-mayhem/... etc." to "participate in x rounds of dragonball/snowball-mayhem/...etc." the pressure would be removed. They can still list the ranking, as in Winter Wonderland. But it gives neither achievements nor bonus-loot. If you care about it, you can boost your ego. But that is it.

This would probably not prevent people from leaving those events early. But it would eradicate the impact of those actions. It would no longer matter. Those who stay till the end will get the +1 round participation trigger. Those who leave early have to start over if they want to get the participation rewarded.

The farmers would just join a game, go afk and return when the event is over. To prevent that, we could set the afk-timer to 30 seconds. Then they would lock their arrow-key with a piece of folded paper and run into a wall for the time being ... but those guys do not really care about the gameplay anyway. We cannot prevent that. But we can remove the negative consequences for the other people in the team. If your team is afk, you still get the participation.

[Mithos.9023]

I don't think that any kind of punishment will help with this issue. I think a restructuring of rewards will help far more. Because if you get punished for leaving, any kind of disconnect will be a problem even if it is not in your hand. Next point is, then going afk will be the next best tactic to avoid punishment. So overall the fights will not improve.My idea is the following:As example I will use the dragon arena from luna new year. Loosing a game means nothing here. You want the 10 wins. That is the aim. Any loose is a waste of time therefore it is best to leave to search for a more favorable match. It doesn't matter if you loose 480:500, and leave the game with 20 kills. Your effort still goes to waste. Even if you pull your wight, fight till the last minute it means nothing. And that is the underlying problem.Now my idea is instead of 10 wins change the achievement to 1000 victory points. Each match win will give you 100 points. So far not much changed. But you would also gain 10 points for each kill. Therefore, even if you loose, but you fought till the last second you might leave the place with more points than someone who was just thrown into the winning team last minute. This way the fight is the reward. Staying and fighting till the end will lead to the greatest reward. Positive effect of this is that leaches will more or less loose out on every game as staying afk will give you nothing. Also, it is far better than any participation system as for example in events. Once you did your one kill you get the gold medal and you can leave, not so here.As for the winters-day event for example you could give out more points for fulfilling objects. Like getting additional points for rescuing presents. For other activities I would suggest a similar achievement, but the achievement would give you the reward instead of winning. So instead of getting presents each win you would get a cumulative amount of presents once the achievement is filled. So with 1000 points achievement and 100 points per win you would get 10 times the reward for finishing the achievement compared to the old reward per win.

Edit: fixed smal writing error

[SoulGuardian.6203]

I don't think I've ever played it. Not once.

But in GW1, in Jade Quary, if you quit too many times, you were unable to enter any match for aprox 45 minutes, I think... as a penalty for quiting.

The same rule could be applied here.Not that it bothers me in any way, as I don't pvp.Only WvW occasionally.

[DaFishBob.6518]

Make the volunteer option actually do what it says it's supposed to (award win prize regardless of result).

[Etria.3642]

Either award for participation or as above--volunteer receives win prize regardless of result.

[Taygus.4571]

award for participation. these matches sometimes start out numbered, which is just awful.

I never understood why festival pvp achieves were for wins only..or why the rewards are sooo much better for a win. Its not like there's any kond of accurate ranking, making the matches often lopsided in skill anyway. (Which is never fun)

[XatraZaytrax.2601]

It is demoralizing when you are on your fifth match loss, you basically haven't received any rewards -- not even participation achieves because you finished those a long the ago -- and you roll a new match where you are losing even before you get to the field of play. Honestly, I would rather hunt down orphans or play music, at least you are guaranteed to earn something for your effort.

[ElderNewt.5840]

Yes.
Banned with a time out based system of ingame time not real time time.But nothing will happen naturally.

[Frostfang.5109]

Chill, it's a game. To make ppl rage less, reward both teams, the winning more, the loosing less.

[Funky.4861]

If things start to go south but you know your team can recover, having someone bail sabotages all of your effort and wastes your time; i don't believe that should go unpunished. If matches start with uneven numbers and the winning team has more members than the losing team, rewards should be the same for both teams. At the end of the day, the pvp festival matches are completely optional and just for fun (if you like that sort of thing). If you want to remove the randomness of achievements, don't rely on other people.

[Shaaba.5672]

Don't penalize - incentivize completion. And, as others have said, reward participation, not wins. If a person AFKs and doesn't work towards the goal, they get bare minimum - credit for the achieve. Get a few points ... presents. Get a lot of points? More presents. An active participant on the losing team should get more than someone on the winning team that runs in circles.