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A couple of ideas to handle AFK players in PUG PvEs.
oneunrivaled
Member Posts: 5 Arc User
I don't know if this is a growing issue or something that's been around for sometime and simply not addressed, but I've noticed lately that at least one player in a random PvE refuses to participate and you cannot manually remove them from pick up groups. They remain idle, claim rewards and leave as the mission ends.
I'd like the Devs to consider a couple of alternatives-
A 40 second or 1 minute countdown for idle players to engage and participate in the objectives or be forcibly removed from the instance once the timer expires and perhaps, if possible, be replaced by a player in queue. (As a bonus to this, trigger the 2 hour afk ban with the auto kick from the instance).
OR
A 40 second or 1 minute countdown on the idle player and when that expires they earn a debuff that prohibits them from receiving any rewards (marks, items, BNR's, crafting materials). If the idle player decides to participate then the debuff would expire after a number of minutes (I'd suggest 3 to 5 minutes). Should they still have the debuff by the end of the mission, have a 20 minute ban on queueing for PvE's.
The whole point of these are to team up and contribute in completing the objectives. When one person decides not to do so, that leaves the remainder to pick up that person's slack and that will often leave the team unable to complete the optionals (which are required in Advanced challenges). And even if the team does complete the mission and/or optional, a non-participant should not receive rewards.
I'd like the Devs to consider a couple of alternatives-
A 40 second or 1 minute countdown for idle players to engage and participate in the objectives or be forcibly removed from the instance once the timer expires and perhaps, if possible, be replaced by a player in queue. (As a bonus to this, trigger the 2 hour afk ban with the auto kick from the instance).
OR
A 40 second or 1 minute countdown on the idle player and when that expires they earn a debuff that prohibits them from receiving any rewards (marks, items, BNR's, crafting materials). If the idle player decides to participate then the debuff would expire after a number of minutes (I'd suggest 3 to 5 minutes). Should they still have the debuff by the end of the mission, have a 20 minute ban on queueing for PvE's.
The whole point of these are to team up and contribute in completing the objectives. When one person decides not to do so, that leaves the remainder to pick up that person's slack and that will often leave the team unable to complete the optionals (which are required in Advanced challenges). And even if the team does complete the mission and/or optional, a non-participant should not receive rewards.
Post edited by oneunrivaled on
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normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
That usually boils down to user/player error and, not actual fault of the penalty systems programming.
Roughly 1% of the teams total dps, is usually sufficient to prevent this from happening and, if a player cannot provide that little, than they should have not been there at all in the first place and, might as well been afk the whole time IMO.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
lol you speak as if you can play a game wrong..
this will be the death of STO..
i myself dont want to or care about spending every waking our of my life grinding up my ship so i can play missions "correctly"
yes ive been hit with this 2 hour timer, and what do i do?? go play another game..
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
You take a group of folks sitting down with a PnP RPG to run something, they know that they're going to have to work as a team to get it done. The content requires it. There's no AFKing.
You take somebody sitting down with a single player RPG to run something, they know that they're going to have to do something and possibly put together a party of NPCs together to get it done. The content requires it. There's no AFKing.
Enter Star Trek Online...where folks know they can sit back and AFK or leech, because the content simply doesn't require that they don't. There's all sorts of AFKing and the like.
So to address the AFKing, you have to eliminate it as a potential means of reward. Design content at various tiers that will require the party work together to accomplish it. With the wide range of potential "power" that exists with players, that could also include capping players.
There is the scaling down to 50.
There is the scaling up to 60.
There is the required 60.
I'd change that.
Implement a new scales to 60 Training tier, which is capped at a certain level - gear is dropped down to a certain Rarity/Mark, things like Traits/Specializations are limited or excluded. Create content that requires five people at that level to do it...no time limits, no optionals.
Start the actual endgame at 60.
Cap Normal at a certain level akin to what was just mentioned. Introduce optionals. But again, create the content that will actually require five folks at that level to do it.
Cap Advanced at a certain level as well. Introduce failure and more optionals. Still though, create content that will actually require five folks at that level to do it.
With Elite, there would be no cap on anything. Create dynamic content that scales to the players. The better they're doing, the harder it will become.
Right now, Cryptic has created the rather unreasonable but reasonable expectation amongst the players that they can AFK or leech content...because the content is too easy and doesn't actually require folks to contribute.
edit: With that mind you, I'd put the Normal rewards in Training, Advanced in Normal, Elite in Advanced, and create a new tier of rewards for Elite. They deserve it. I say "They", cause I sure as Hell wouldn't be playing at that level...lol.
They really need to provide the additional Elite queues for those folks, eh? Maybe look at adjusting Elite rewards, etc, etc, etc...cause it doesn't really take 100k to throw stuff off even in Advanced - the actual content requires for Advanced since they were nerfed compared to what folks can do...meh.
That sounds like GM/DM failure...but different groups would do different things. Heck, it's where the munchkin/powergaming stuff came from and even some parody games.
Which also gets into that "FUN" aspect - different folks have fun in different ways. Some folks can't have fun if they fail or lose. Some folks can still have fun even if they lose. Reminds me of a bugged Fleet Defense where all the spawns were tripled...heh, and with the attack being Feds - that was so much Phaser and Torp spam, we were getting slaughtered. Couple of folks complained, I was having a blast...heh.
See, that's going to get into matters of opinion...and allowing such a range to exist in the first place. Which, imho, is along the lines of the problem that Cryptic has created...to me, they're bad GMs. Back when I did PnP RPGs, none of the GMs/DMs that ran games would have allowed anything like this to have happened. They wouldn't have allowed players within the same group to get so far apart.
I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one seeing this same guy....was he/she in a shuttle?
If so then.....I dunno I have no witty remark right now.....
In that case, there needs to be a better queue setup. Stop teaming players with mk xii gear with players with mk vii gear to start. Also, take into account a players current success ratio, and their average score, and match them with similar players. At the very least, prohibit lvl 60 players from entering the normal queues.
The system doesn't measure everything...there are things not tracked by the log. A group of players that plays together, testing things, can determine the performance that various changes they make to their setups because of how the runs go - but that's a human element that is simply lacking from the system - that kind of analysis. It might be able to say something went faster, but it couldn't say why it went faster. STO's a very complex system.
Even if Cryptic were to implement a gear scoring system, how much would it change? You could give me one of Ryan's builds and I'd probably find a way to blow myself up within a few seconds as I fatfingered something...could put him in one of my failgasms of a build and just have my jaw hit the ground never knowing that it could have actually performed as well as he made it perform.
With the way things are setup, a brand new player could throw money at the game - never touch a single queue, and show up after a period of time as if they had been running queues for years.
The AFK stuff has been discussed for years upon years...upon years. Heh, it didn't just start earlier today. Almost everything would leave itself either open to somebody gaming the system or somebody griefing the system.
Could some kind of internal (non-public) gear scoring system perhaps reduce some of it? Sure...but folks shouldn't expect it to be a solution.
If these people cannot get off their butts and, at least throw out some actual dmg, be it like 1% or, roughly 1.5-2k worth of dps, than they might as well be afk for all it matters.
People all too often fly around aimlessly not knowing wth they are doing, let alone how to even contribute anything worthy to the team, I see it way to often as all I ever do is PUG.
I can watch the level of stupidity, when it comes to PUG stategy and, player(s) not only trolling matches but, also not knowing wth they are even doing in a mission, to so much as not even really knowing how to play a game for that matter it seems.
So, no I do not feel sorry for them, I have tried countless times to duplicate their dilemma and, yet it never grants me the penalty, why?
Because I actually know wth I am doing, I actually engage enemies asap, I actually actively contribute and, what I do not know, I adapt easily and learn quickly.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
My character Tsin'xing
Cryptic isn't going to change anything about this, They put the Punishment Timers in a while ago and that was that.
<shrug>
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
That's basically the thing, AFKing is something new...games have been attempting to deal with it for well over a decade. Same players using cheat codes before that...same players hitting up various third party sites. It's not a system issue. It's a player issue. They can try to implement all the things other games have to try to curb it...with all the spectacular results other games have had.
This, indubitably.
I always think of THIS when I hear that word...
(1:50 mark)
:cool:
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
ISA currently requires a team dps of 35k not to fail the timer, and either a higher spike or crowd control not to fail the nanite optional. Other ASTF's require ships that parse higher than that in ISA, because of more hp, movement, or the like.
So, if we break that down to a team component of 7k, let's assume that our noob is being all good, and does 7k in the ISA he's in. His 4 teammates are Wizards, and all parse 100k that run. He's now done 7/407 of the dps, or 1%, as it turns out.
Even in that, which is a laughably hard situation to believe (4 wizards pugging and hitting 100k in the same run?), even though he did the bare minimum for the queue, he's still at 1%. If you get AFK'd it's because you didn't bring the bare minimum. Simple enough.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
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