If you must protect yourself and your happy gaming experience from the most nasty, evil, ultimate bad-guys that humanity has ever experienced in ALL of humanities collective recorded history, then YOU NEED TO CHOOSE WHO YOU PLAY WITH. :eek:
Take responsibility for yourself. Take responsibility for your own enjoyment of the game.
There's this little lesson that every human being should have learned back in kindergarten or by 1st grade - if you can't play nicely with someone THEN DON'T PLAY WITH THEM! :P
Gah. I hate it when people do that, I can't rebut what you said very easily because you embedded it inside my own quote, making it unquotable.
Stop talking about "obtaining unauthorised access to the service" I didn't bold that bit for a reason. There is an "or" word after that.
(l) Using or exploiting any bugs, errors, or design flaws to obtain unauthorized access to the Service or to gain an unfair advantage over other players
Nor is it expressly stated that it is allowed. I would highly doubt they consider people AFK griefing matches "good for the community".
For sure, it's all pedantry.
The TOS doesn't go over what you're allowed to do, only vague guidelines for what you can't do. It's all nitpicking and semantics.
The bottom line is, the TOS is liberal enough to allow the wording to cover AFKers. You can interpret however you like, they're intended to be vague for that very reason. So that PWE can exercise some common sense and apply it however they see fit.
Gah. I hate it when people do that, I can't rebut what you said very easily because you embedded it inside my own quote, making it unquotable.
Stop talking about "obtaining unauthorised access to the service" I didn't bold that bit for a reason. There is an "or" word after that.
(l) Using or exploiting any bugs, errors, or design flaws to obtain unauthorized access to the Service or to gain an unfair advantage over other players
OR. Meaning not the bit that came before it.
Part 10 Subsection (n) - as mentioned is the most approriate section that applies. The rest is to grey.
(n) Take any action that disrupts the Service or that negatively affects or may prohibit other users from enjoying the Website, the Games or any other aspect of the Service.
Part 10 Subsection (n) - as mentioned is the most approriate section that applies. The rest is to grey.
(n) Take any action that disrupts the Service or that negatively affects or may prohibit other users from enjoying the Website, the Games or any other aspect of the Service.
people that send me angry tells becasue I am not 'doing it their way' and report me just because I am sitting in my ship minding my own business affects my gameplay negatively as well......
this is a whole "who is right?" he-said / she-said debate.
.
_______________________
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
Gah. I hate it when people do that, I can't rebut what you said very easily because you embedded it inside my own quote, making it unquotable.
Stop talking about "obtaining unauthorised access to the service" I didn't bold that bit for a reason. There is an "or" word after that.
(l) Using or exploiting any bugs, errors, or design flaws to obtain unauthorized access to the Service or to gain an unfair advantage over other players
OR. Meaning not the bit that came before it.
Using or exploiting any bugs, errors, or design flaws to obtain unauthorized access to the Service or to gain an unfair advantage over other players
Just because you bolded what you wanted in yellow does not mean all of a sudden the other stuff does not apply, it does not work that way, they all go together, and they talk about unauthorized access.
Nothing about leaving a character idle for a long time, or multiple times....it means using bugs, hacks or exploits to cheat in the game, or go to places you're not meant to access in the game, or use other means to get on the game.
I don't see how sitting there with your thumb up your *** means you have an advantage over anyone.
I don't disagree. I would bet that were Brandon or one of the Devs to reply on the subject, they would tell you that intentionally AFK farming the public queues for free rewards is not something they find acceptable or want to encourage.
"Definitely not working-as-intended."
"It's an exploit."
Two hugely over-used phrases by the developers, which seem actually apt in this situation.
The rules prohibit actions that purposefully hinders progress in the game, but nothing, not a single word, about purposefully prolonging a mission.
If you are prolonging a mission, or trying to get the optional to fail or just not contributing as you are supposed to in match aren't you "purposefully hindering progress in game"?
You are none the less purposefully obstructing the team from completing their objectives whether they eventually complete them or not.
Just because you bolded what you wanted in yellow does not mean all of a sudden the other stuff does not apply, it does not work that way, they all go together, and they talk about unauthorized access.
I'm sorry, do you know what the word "OR" means?
If I said to you, "It is against the rules if you throw an orange at me or throw a rock at me".
You then throw a rock at me and say "No, it can't be against the rules because I didn't throw an orange at you".
Seriously, that's so stupid. They talk about unauthorized access OR to gain an unfair advantage. Neither are allowed. Do you finally comprehend what I'm saying? If not, then I give up.
I don't see how sitting there with your thumb up your *** means you have an advantage over anyone.
Because you're getting rewards without doing anything, how is that not an advantage? Everyone else can't do it, because if they did, nobody would get a reward.
I don't disagree. I would bet that were Brandon or one of the Devs to reply on the subject, they would tell you that intentionally AFK farming the public queues for free rewards is not something they find acceptable or want to encourage.
you would think they would come online and say this yes?
but these are the people that said that a few patches ago the orion slavers had their chance to steal increased 300%.. *rolls eyes*
[12:35] Vessel Two of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 225232 (271723) Plasma Damage to you with Plasma Lance.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
Let's say I join a 5 man pug, we play for a minute or so and wait for everyone to login, etc . ... I all of the sudden have to go potty in real life .... I run quick to go.....and go..and gooo..... it really is a tummy bug kinda thing..... I need to spend about 15 minutes in the head.
when I come back ( not knowing that it would take 15 minutes in the first place mind you ) I have multiple threatening and hateful tells from people in the pug ( random people I have never played with before mind you, and for the first minute or two I was in the pug with them no-one said a word anyway...no hi..no nothin.... people usually don't talk much at all in pug's ). I get told that I am being reported for leeching and get more expletives.
so....
can you get banned for things in life that come up ?
how do you know the guy is leeching ? .... or maybe he ate some bad chili.....
you don't know.... therefore you have no case against him unless you have proof...and there is absolutely no way in the game to gain 'proof' of why someone is AFK in STO.
.:rolleyes::cool:
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---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
Ideas are always good - and I think it's clear there is at least some problem here that could be either relieved or solved systematically. With any system like this, there are conflicting goals to consider: We want to improve the play experience of people who unfortunately get saddled with an AFK player, but we don't want to enable cliques of partly-premade players to bully another player for creating their own playstyle. We want to reward players for being good group participants and for helping other players, but we want to avoid any positive reinforcement tool we hypothetically create being exploited by friends or premade groups. We want to foster social interaction between players - that's kind of the purpose of a queue system, after all! - but we don't want to force it on people who really just want to play by themselves. So, there are a lot of variables to consider, and we'd have to be careful to make sure that we didn't just create more problems than we solved with any given implementation.
Pardon my rambling, but those are my thoughts on the matter. They're still pretty abstract at the moment, but I do agree there is both a collective action problem and an optimal rewards per minute problem here, where optimizing one's actions for personal gain per effort doesn't create a good collective experience, and society's normal controls for that sort of thing (reputation, word of mouth) are very much weakened by a random matchmaking system (our queue system).
So there you go. The Devs recognize that AFK is a problem, and they are thinking about how to address it without breaking the general user experience.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
Just because you bolded what you wanted in yellow does not mean all of a sudden the other stuff does not apply, it does not work that way, they all go together, and they talk about unauthorized access.
Nothing about leaving a character idle for a long time, or multiple times....it means using bugs, hacks or exploits to cheat in the game, or go to places you're not meant to access in the game, or use other means to get on the game.
I don't see how sitting there with your thumb up your *** means you have an advantage over anyone.
Not true - look at common defintion for the use of "or" in a sentence:
Coordinating conjunctions:
"or" presents an alternative item or idea not necessarily related to what comes before it.
So there you go. The Devs recognize that AFK is a problem, and they are thinking about how to address it without breaking the general user experience.
Yes, but the problem is they have been saying this for 6+ months now! It really doesn't seem to be much, if any, of a priority.
I don't know why I'm being so vocal in this thread, it never affects me because I never pug. I never use public queues ever (with the exception of occasionally a crystaline elite and I usually team with a couple of people that could carry the AFKers anyway) so I honestly couldn't care how quickly it gets fixed.
I imagine that it's also not extremely easy to implement a solution they are satisfied with. They seem to have a general concept. Getting it to work right takes time.
The cynic in me also wants to say "there's no money in it", but I'll gag him for the meantime.
or such a huge problem that some are making it out to be.
Said by someone who clearly never pugs and only ever does premades, like myself.
But, I hear people ******** about it day-in day-out on the forums, in zone chat and in fleet chat.
If we're getting a new one of these threads every other day, I think it's a fair enough assumption that it's a pretty big problem for a lot of people. A lot of these people have very low post counts and it looks like some of them even actively make a forum account just so they can talk about this issue.
I'd say that's pretty important!
EDIT: apparently I can't use that word haha. Lets go with "moaning" instead.
the fact of the matter is we all can complain about this ( and yes I know I have to) but until we get some sort of answer from cryptic/PWE one way or the other as far as I am concerned my impression is they just don't care and we as a community need to come up with solutions.
I know of all the other games I have played this is the only one that really allows leaching/afking (not to be confused with RL afking) and people have set up boards for thoes people that try.
also I know of no company that will let you know that have banned someone for an infraction due to privacy issues
Yes, but the problem is they have been saying this for 6+ months now! It really doesn't seem to be much, if any, of a priority.
I don't know why I'm being so vocal in this thread, it never affects me because I never pug. I never use public queues ever (with the exception of occasionally a crystaline elite and I usually team with a couple of people that could carry the AFKers anyway) so I honestly couldn't care how quickly it gets fixed.
I imagine that it's also not extremely easy to implement a solution they are satisfied with. They seem to have a general concept. Getting it to work right takes time.
Quite possibly this is not a big priority. But if we know nothing else, we know that Cryptic is driven by metrics. So for those who consider this to be a significant problem, reporting players is perhaps the most useful action to take, because it'll show up in their metrics.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
Quite possibly this is not a big priority. But if we know nothing else, we know that Cryptic is driven by metrics. So for those who consider this to be a significant problem, reporting players is perhaps the most useful action to take, because it'll show up in their metrics.
Valid point, that - and something I hadn't thought off. Keep doing it until you get a warning I guess
It's a free game, lameness is to be expected. I go ahead and win the mission despite, and don't think twice about who actually participated in the action. Other players are just in my way anyways.
A feature where people can kick afkers could easily be used to enforce elitism. Don't have the best setup or ship? Kicked. Have to quickly get up for a second because of real life events? Kicked. Accidentally mind lapse and do the wrong thing? Kicked.
None of those things are actually worthy of being kicked, but I assure you, there will be lots of people who believe so. History shows that people like to abuse any form of power they get.
Plus, I really don't think leaching is as bad as this board makes it out. I can't recall it ever happening to me, and I've been playing this game for a decent amount of time.
Comments
Take responsibility for yourself. Take responsibility for your own enjoyment of the game.
There's this little lesson that every human being should have learned back in kindergarten or by 1st grade - if you can't play nicely with someone THEN DON'T PLAY WITH THEM! :P
Gah. I hate it when people do that, I can't rebut what you said very easily because you embedded it inside my own quote, making it unquotable.
Stop talking about "obtaining unauthorised access to the service" I didn't bold that bit for a reason. There is an "or" word after that.
(l) Using or exploiting any bugs, errors, or design flaws to obtain unauthorized access to the Service or to gain an unfair advantage over other players
OR. Meaning not the bit that came before it.
Kirk's Protege.
For sure, it's all pedantry.
The TOS doesn't go over what you're allowed to do, only vague guidelines for what you can't do. It's all nitpicking and semantics.
The bottom line is, the TOS is liberal enough to allow the wording to cover AFKers. You can interpret however you like, they're intended to be vague for that very reason. So that PWE can exercise some common sense and apply it however they see fit.
Kirk's Protege.
Part 10 Subsection (n) - as mentioned is the most approriate section that applies. The rest is to grey.
(n) Take any action that disrupts the Service or that negatively affects or may prohibit other users from enjoying the Website, the Games or any other aspect of the Service.
.
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
people that send me angry tells becasue I am not 'doing it their way' and report me just because I am sitting in my ship minding my own business affects my gameplay negatively as well......
this is a whole "who is right?" he-said / she-said debate.
.
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
Just because you bolded what you wanted in yellow does not mean all of a sudden the other stuff does not apply, it does not work that way, they all go together, and they talk about unauthorized access.
Nothing about leaving a character idle for a long time, or multiple times....it means using bugs, hacks or exploits to cheat in the game, or go to places you're not meant to access in the game, or use other means to get on the game.
I don't see how sitting there with your thumb up your *** means you have an advantage over anyone.
"Definitely not working-as-intended."
"It's an exploit."
Two hugely over-used phrases by the developers, which seem actually apt in this situation.
Kirk's Protege.
Yeah they can ban people for anything, does not mean they have or will ban people for AFKing.
If you are prolonging a mission, or trying to get the optional to fail or just not contributing as you are supposed to in match aren't you "purposefully hindering progress in game"?
You are none the less purposefully obstructing the team from completing their objectives whether they eventually complete them or not.
I'm sorry, do you know what the word "OR" means?
If I said to you, "It is against the rules if you throw an orange at me or throw a rock at me".
You then throw a rock at me and say "No, it can't be against the rules because I didn't throw an orange at you".
Seriously, that's so stupid. They talk about unauthorized access OR to gain an unfair advantage. Neither are allowed. Do you finally comprehend what I'm saying? If not, then I give up.
Because you're getting rewards without doing anything, how is that not an advantage? Everyone else can't do it, because if they did, nobody would get a reward.
Kirk's Protege.
you would think they would come online and say this yes?
but these are the people that said that a few patches ago the orion slavers had their chance to steal increased 300%.. *rolls eyes*
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
Let's say I join a 5 man pug, we play for a minute or so and wait for everyone to login, etc . ... I all of the sudden have to go potty in real life .... I run quick to go.....and go..and gooo..... it really is a tummy bug kinda thing..... I need to spend about 15 minutes in the head.
when I come back ( not knowing that it would take 15 minutes in the first place mind you ) I have multiple threatening and hateful tells from people in the pug ( random people I have never played with before mind you, and for the first minute or two I was in the pug with them no-one said a word anyway...no hi..no nothin.... people usually don't talk much at all in pug's ). I get told that I am being reported for leeching and get more expletives.
so....
can you get banned for things in life that come up ?
how do you know the guy is leeching ? .... or maybe he ate some bad chili.....
you don't know.... therefore you have no case against him unless you have proof...and there is absolutely no way in the game to gain 'proof' of why someone is AFK in STO.
.:rolleyes::cool:
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
Already been over this, as have many other people.
No, in order to get banned (or even warned) you would need to be a repeat offender.
5 times = 1st warning, another 5 = second warning, another 5 = 24h ban, or something similar.
Or alternatively, just find a way to not give these TRIBBLE any credit.
When I say "24h ban" I do mean only from public queues, if these people want to set up a private game by all means go for it.
Kirk's Protege.
So there you go. The Devs recognize that AFK is a problem, and they are thinking about how to address it without breaking the general user experience.
Not true - look at common defintion for the use of "or" in a sentence:
Coordinating conjunctions:
"or" presents an alternative item or idea not necessarily related to what comes before it.
Yes, but the problem is they have been saying this for 6+ months now! It really doesn't seem to be much, if any, of a priority.
I don't know why I'm being so vocal in this thread, it never affects me because I never pug. I never use public queues ever (with the exception of occasionally a crystaline elite and I usually team with a couple of people that could carry the AFKers anyway) so I honestly couldn't care how quickly it gets fixed.
Kirk's Protege.
ty your "ME" I have this on my mine ty
oh and people gaming is like life and life's not fair get used to it
or such a huge problem that some are making it out to be.
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
The cynic in me also wants to say "there's no money in it", but I'll gag him for the meantime.
Kirk's Protege.
Said by someone who clearly never pugs and only ever does premades, like myself.
But, I hear people ******** about it day-in day-out on the forums, in zone chat and in fleet chat.
If we're getting a new one of these threads every other day, I think it's a fair enough assumption that it's a pretty big problem for a lot of people. A lot of these people have very low post counts and it looks like some of them even actively make a forum account just so they can talk about this issue.
I'd say that's pretty important!
EDIT: apparently I can't use that word haha. Lets go with "moaning" instead.
Kirk's Protege.
I know of all the other games I have played this is the only one that really allows leaching/afking (not to be confused with RL afking) and people have set up boards for thoes people that try.
also I know of no company that will let you know that have banned someone for an infraction due to privacy issues
Quite possibly this is not a big priority. But if we know nothing else, we know that Cryptic is driven by metrics. So for those who consider this to be a significant problem, reporting players is perhaps the most useful action to take, because it'll show up in their metrics.
Valid point, that - and something I hadn't thought off. Keep doing it until you get a warning I guess
Kirk's Protege.
It's a free game, lameness is to be expected. I go ahead and win the mission despite, and don't think twice about who actually participated in the action. Other players are just in my way anyways.
None of those things are actually worthy of being kicked, but I assure you, there will be lots of people who believe so. History shows that people like to abuse any form of power they get.
Plus, I really don't think leaching is as bad as this board makes it out. I can't recall it ever happening to me, and I've been playing this game for a decent amount of time.