It is not destroying the game, but it is destroying normal people's morale to play legitimately when others can just afk and get more money then you get by actively playing the content you enjoy.
you should try it by yourself, you won't get more money through some afk farming, multibox afk farming with 20+ accounts funneling the income into one that's another discussion, but still doesn't affect anyone. I mean that guy farming 100k gold a day won't beat you on anything so I don't understand karens complaining about
@@HyperLink666 Look no need to name call here, I personally feel it should not be allowed and it definitely ruined my time grinding gold, or even buying gold if we will explore that route, when buying say, 10 accounts for 75$ will yeald say 10 gold per account per hour of doing nothing. That brings us to 100 gold an hour of you sitting there working, and when you get a whisper from GM you just move the characters and continue grinding. You do it for a month straight at 4 hours a day and I just earned myself more gold then I do in years, by not even playing, while working at my job making actual living. And after that I get to just relax and play the game without the gold ever being a bottleneck to anything I want to do. Yes it is a problem when you devalue your currency, and while few afk farmers don't hurt the economy, the gold value is hurt when you consider spending money and investing your time and effort into the game that allows such blatant abuse of the rules.
@@HyperLink666 look at lake doric. Those bots actually stop the map instance from being closed for at least a day. Maybe multiple days. So you can't mine some of the stuff for aurora more times a day (random drop from crystals or something), thus those bots actively hurting my gameplay. No joke.
They did something recently in the 16 july update. Entering combat now shorten your AFK logout timer to 5 minutes. So you can AFK a while in a safe spot like a city, but not AFK farming.
Did everyone think the same I did: "One evening I'm going to go to that quaggan village, sip some wine or tea, listen to some podcast or good music and farm together with those AFK farmers"? I guess I'd make more gold than doing my WvW dailies.
@@lcZahark A GM will sometime TP but if you respond to them then they wont ban you. Happened to me a few times and I'm still all good. Basically we can afk farm until they update their ToS which you can only blame them
It's that classic "Its not affecting me or the game" thing. Players like myself got called out in the past as being petty for even reporting these people and now the prices of mats have rocketed it is clearly going to have an affect on the economy. That 29 account user is making over 4.5k gold per half day, ANET have to take this seriously as with Homesteads driving mat prices for years to come this will have a bigger impact in the future. Or you know, lets just dismiss this as fear-mongering and "not having much of an impact".
If the game has operated this way essentially since Istan released what makes you think the game will change drastically all of a sudden were they to vanish? The economy has stabilized under this norm and, just like in runescape, if a ban wave were to happen the only real impact would be a spike in prices for the t6s they farm. That could be seen as a positive for players but there is no way to farm t6s directly... besides essentially afk farming lol, and most non afk farmers are better served using their t6s anyways to avoid TP tax. I think just mathematically the whole problem is kind of a wash either way, but both ways require a lot of dev time to deal with so I don't see anything happening
@@theBEATdude I guess you missed the part where Teapot and Jaffa spoke about rising prices of mats and just how much these players are making. In addition you're ignoring hoarders- those farming these mats and storing them, filtering them onto the TP keeping prices high or those that trade farmed mats for other items in order to sell. Using the excuse of 'dev time is valuable' is lazy. If ANET think there's an issue and it's affecting the game in a negtive way then they will have to deal with it at some point.
@@Avenrise The demand is what makes the prices go up. The supply going up or the demand going down will make the prices go down. If Anet gave more of these mats to active players, the AFK farmers wouldn't profit as much. IDK why you seem to be suggesting the AFK farmers are making the prices go up as if anything they are keeping them lower by supplying the stock of items people don't bother farming. If Anet gave those mats for cheaper prices in the Wizard's Vault for example that would help keep the price way lower and the farmers AFKing would be making even less.
@@Avenrise I didn't miss anything, I think you miss the part where adding supply of something to an economic system alone can not possibly raise the price of it. Doesn't matter if some of them are portioning it or whatever, because no matter what supply is being added to sate the relatively static demand. My point is if you built a car and by an unintended quirk it starts running off of rats powering one of the pistons, and you just remove the rats because you don't like rats, your engine is still going to be affected, maybe even adversely. Wasting anets time fighting a pointless battle that can at best only negatively impact the game is ultimately a waste imo. The economy is insanely well designed in this game and it can handle stuff like this, and as it stands unless you're doing the same boring garbage these afk farmers are doing, they're saving you gold. The only valid argument is saying it is unfair other people with the resources to do this have an advantage, but gold advantage really doesn't matter in this game, so that seems petty. Maybe if istan was popular and farming trophy caches was viable gold/hour it'd be different too, but I don't think anyone wants to do that anyways.
@@theBEATdude Not being rude, being honest here... I have literally no idea what you're talking about the first half of your reply. The second half I can answer- at the end of the day my opinion aside if ANET think it's going to negatively impact the game they'll do something about it. I can state my opinion, you can state yours. THEY know facts and I'll always defer to their decision one of which is that they recommend always reporting. With regards to demand, hoarding is really easy in this game. You see it with Infusions, you see it with T6's, you see it with MCs and they're drip-fed onto the TP. I personally don't care much, this isn't personal for me as I'm relatively well off in game due to not wanting Legendarys but to assume these farmers are just dumping onto the TP ASAP is flat out wrong. The price is not only tied to supply and demand, time plays a part.
wish they could random-spawn the enemies better, half the problem is that there are definitive spawn spots that these guys can camp on. It always annoys me when I see them.
I would make it, so that minions, mechs, pets, etc despawn/get stowed after 10ish mins of non activity. This would minimally impact normal players but would be quite annoying for multiboxers without using botting scrips. Would also declutter cities a bit as a nice side effect.
ngl I had the thought after Jaffas video to make another account just to afk farm 24/7 and find out how long it takes to get banned but then I realized I'm not that bored.
33:33 Right or wrong, I think you're right. If any of these people actually go to the forum or reddit to complain about it, they're not gonna get any sympathy. "Oh no, the consequences of your actions. Anyway."
There's a lot of mobile games, some ported to pc that are made specifically for AFK, mmorpg games, in 3D, with decent graphics, that will let you just watch the game playing itself for you. I suggest AFK farmers go "play" those games and let gw2 for people who actually interact with the game.
@@MightyTeapot Although I want to bully a videogame as much as the next guy. GW2 is sadly NOT like those games. 😅 For MMOs like HIT2, afk farming is the ONLY way of progressing and means of "playing" the game. The thing you're doing in-game during this entire interview? Doing the bare mininum actions your class can do? That's more activity than those mobile games at their maximum. 😂 I want to make fun of GW2 I really do, but this ain't it chief.
@@MightyTeapot Bruh fuckin istan and kourna any map with bonuses mob density and the jade bot has pockets of these little afk bastards ruining the economy lol. Ive been reporting the same afk botting dude for over a month theyre still there anet plz.
"interact with the game" being "fetch useless shit" and watch too big hitboxes go down like loading bars because there is no challenge, for eternity. This game deserves to be afk farmed, NCSOFT is milking the community hard and this is the answer. And they want people to farm, because they sell a lot more accounts with them having it both ways pretending to care and soft banning some a little, but just not too much so ppl keep buying new accounts.
By that definition, a lot of multiboxing is not allowed either. Like those Auric Basin runs where people just autoattack the octovine. MacroBots were kinda popular on US servers, mostly engineers but some staff necros too Aren't SPEARS possibly going to make AFK farming available to more professions?
to me, its so obvious this could be fixed in code (such as the movement requirement) that they either must be ok with it to boost account numbers or borderline incompetent. there's also the possibility that these bots actually provide a vital service to the economy because there's obviously a market for the materials - if that's the case, they could compensate by lowering the cost of trophy boxes or similar methods. maybe a fair way would be some trade for spirit shards, so its expansion agnostic.
Realistically it's none of that, I think afk farming is a bit of a non issue for GW2, in that it's not super impactful to the game one way or another. ArenaNet would have already fixed it if it was actually damaging to the game, but the main consequence right now is that the game looks a bit scuffed when people take screenshots of the crazy minion blobs, but most people won't really encounter them very often in the game.
@@MightyTeapot its not the case for the most common place i farm. its a route and the bots park in the best place, so it lowers profit by about 20% and ruins respawn timers. sure i could stand on them and steal kills and lower my own profits by 80%, thats not a solution though.
@@MightyTeapotread some of whst ive said they actually msy need this warning before stashes of infinite wealth get built up then u cant stop them without banning individusl accounts where there could be very very many especially if they could repeat a process such as leveling rewards vault rewards etc
interesting conversation but numbers are way off, i no longer play GW2 not ever did AFK farm but i used to multibox 15 accounts on auric basin, i got to know a lot of people with multiple accounts, only one dude had more than 60 accounts spread all over every map, theres full guilds of alt accounts farming non stop, 600 ish account estimation is way way way off, if you asctually go and stay in maps for long enough until you get kicked to a more populated instance you can actually sometimes get to full instances of afk farmers, they are ocupiyn all of the map slots, thats why no one sees them, but linger for long enough and you will get to this instances.
Right. Get rid of the multiboxers. Especially the WV exploiters. Than you can begin to worry about in game scripting. Unemployable uneducated nitwits dominate the gw2 elite.
@@hanneskarlbom6644 its really difficult, this game rewards participation , not % participation but just being there and doing anything, you can get full tequatl rewards by hitting him once in third phase, you can get full rewards by tagging a mob in the pre event of tarir and then hitting once the octovine... the game rewards being lazy and afk farming is the direct product of that mentality
It would be nice if some sorta change was made. They definitely tried to reduce “free AFK gold” when they made the Daily logins & Wizard Vault changes with SotO, so its not necessarily impossible that they’d anything about AFK farmers; it just takes more effort and consideration of the ToS (assuming they dont do a loot DR idea)
Easiest way to fix this is diminishing returns on the mobs in that area and there, you got it fixed. Put 10min FFA loot and call it a day for the day - once the timer hit 10 min mark you don't get loot anymore from that area. Not on an hour, for the day. It's gonna kill the idle farm literally in secs.
Good luck for people farming maps like Silverwastes, Drizzlewood and Dragonfall. Those maps can be farmed on repeat for those who struggle with gold. Or people doing longer metas or SotO rifts.
@@Vietcongster This doesn't make any sense. No one does idle farm in Silverwastes. Also you don't get any bonus loot upon killing mobs in those zones. I was talking about the good spots in LS3/LS4. Also you can't do idle farm in Dragonfall, you have to participate.
While grinding mobs, I've learned it's pretty easy to hit DR already, and honestly pretty frustrating to deal with. It's difficult to figure out what exactly you need to do to avoid or reset it, since nothing about it is relayed to you in-game besides how many drops you're getting. Rather than making DR more severe, I'd prefer Anet just crack down harder, and dole out longer and longer bans to offending players. Any "easy fix" you come up with will either punish legitimate players, or be trivial to avoid.
Something that gets me about AFK farms is GW2 isn't an open-world mob farming game in the first place. There are plenty of MMOs where people will set up shop, say where those choya spawn for example, and run in circles clearing choya for a few hours. In those games those choya would provide the best source of something- xp, mats, whatever- for the level. That doesn't happen in GW2. Maybe open world event farms, but not random mob farms. Obviously ANet could use a super heavy-handed approach and catch innocent gamers in the crossfire, but I feel like there are so many differences between these accounts and any even slightly active player on the same map that ANet has plenty of room to find a solution without risk of collateral damage.
I don't think the solution is actually DR, I think it's a change to autocast mechanics. At present, every single auto-attack skill (default 1) in the game will _stop autocasting_ if you don't have an enemy target within range of the skill. If they changed every _other_ skill in the game to behave the same way when set as your autocast, the vast majority of players wouldn't even notice. But Nightfall and Electro-Whirl and other PBAOE's would become unusable for AFK farming. After that, they should make it so that pets/summons/turrets/etc don't attack if there hasn't been a skill activation, _any_ skill activation, even an autocast, within the past, say, twenty seconds (3APM, which is basically nothing). Again, any honest player wouldn't even notice, because they never _go_ that long without activating something (like an auto-attack) in a fight anyway. But AFK farmers who rely on pets would be kind of screwed. Twenty seconds after their auto-cast turned off automatically, their pets would turn pacifist and stop farming too. Finally, herald auras should get the same treatment as pets, if you haven't activated _something_ else in the past twenty seconds, pause the pulsing. Again, most real players won't even _notice._ But AFK farmers are hosed.
This entire solution is circumvented by a macro that presses 1 every few seconds. Without automatic detection (not happening) or fixing of the core issue it's not gonna change.
@@theBEATdude It is, that's true, but it _does_ present that barrier to entry. People argue, a lot, about what constitutes "actively playing". That's something that Teapot and Jaffa discuss in the video. But _no one_ argues about whether using macros to press buttons in combat for extended periods of time is allowed by the ToS. So it would eliminate all the people who argue "Well, if the game mechanics support it, obviously it's allowed." It would clear away the chaff and make it _much_ more obvious who's a bad actor. Once that chaff is cleared away, it becomes much easier to implement an automatic detection mechanism that doesn't catch innocent players. The autodetect could just flag the behavior for GM's to take a look, and with all the chaff cleared away, they won't just be flooded with false positives.
@@Rathmun Again, unfortunately, autodetection is not happening, or if it ever was going to it would've been done already. As much as this topic keeps coming up over and over again, it really doesn't impact the game very much, and if Anet already can barely squeak out a stripped down Alliance system after over 5 years, I don't see them dedicating time to making a whole new system in a 20+ year old engine to make a GM's job 10% easier.
@@theBEATdude Even without autodetection, just copying the "stop autocasting" logic that's already _in_ dozens of skills (All the 1 skills) to the _rest of them_ is not something that should take much effort. The necessary pet changes are mostly already available in code from Ferocious Symbiosis. Sure, that trait gives you or your pet a buff when the other hits, but the important part is the "The master did something, so the pet does too" logic. Copy that logic, make it "activates a skill" instead of "hits an enemy" for the trigger, and "Continues fighting" instead of "gets a buff" for the effect.
@@Rathmun They already did all this before, which is why engi turrets die after 5 minutes now. I think they've already realized it is pointless and making changes will only move the goalposts or change the optimal afk class and potentially cause other issues in the game. Right now you aren't even banned for autocasting, you're banned if you aren't present at the pc while you're doing it. There is already a 1 hour log out system, so only people using a wake up macro (space bar every 10 mins or something) while afk will be punished as is, which seems to be their goal.
Ideally the vast majority of you would either be moving or not killing anything, therefore not affected by the system. Additionally the multiple events involved in the Tequatl encounter should be counted against your "afk score". Finally most actual "afk farming" seems to focus on killing respawning mobs, so the DR need only apply to loot gained from actual drops and kill-related procs (VM, Jade bot etc.) - meanwhile pretty much all the loot from Tequatl and other meta bosses comes from chest objects or bouncy chests which need not be affected by this anti-afk system. "Afk" leeching big meta events is a separate problem, most of which I'd wager does not actually fall under "unattended" play but rather just being a lazy jerk which (sadly) is not against ToS.
@@Photoloss that makes sense, I thought it was just the "waiting" part that they were saying would cause DR to kick in, Since you have to get to TEQ like 30 minutes early I often use that wait time to afk and do dishes which I don't think should count for DR because the game is kinda forcing people to wait around for the event to get into a good server.
Not moving AND getting loot would be the factor for getting the extreme DR. What loot are you getting at Tequito when just waiting? Nothing but bog shit explosions killing you sometimes and the only loot there is being humbled by Tequito's shit killing you. (IDK what those things are in lore, but they are Tequito's dung piles in my headcanon)
@KawsMeCal dead fish heads. I believe it's like when you throw dynamite into a pond and it kills all the fish. Teq kills them all if he wins... I don't understand why they explode though...
@@boyscout399 They're actually Zhaitan-corrupted fish from Orr and the surrounding oceans. They appear in several maps and don't always explode, sometimes serving as event objectives or ambient poison turrets, with one variety being a whole fish body laying on its side at the shore. Not sure whether they qualify as full-on Risen though. As far as the Tequatl fight goes IIRC they were added with the rework, and mainly serve as an environmental effect to mark the fight's failure state.
It comes down to anet deciding how they want to handle it and the potential unintended breaking of the game that comes with it, and how fast they feel they can fix what they broke. Like the change to AB hero chest stopped the multiboxers from free loot, wether it was intentional or a side bonus from bringing HoT metas hero chests up to new current standards. If they add dr if u dont move after certain time for example that has the potential of breaking certain metas (like teq or td wall) specially if unintended event participation gets removed. I feel the only true way for anet to handle this is tougher gms like we used to have. I remember a forum post of a guy being suspended for using the games auto cast and the gm said it was for using their auto cast in an unintended way. Bottom line is the gms need to be on the same page and have consistent answers. Like we shouldn't have one saying doing house chores or showering and being afk farming ok where another says watching gw2 on a second monitor but still at the pc is ok. At the end of the day though its mainly lws4 that are bad but go unnoticeable since theyre pretty empty maps at this point and dont have a big enough impact as a whole like the botters did back in 2012.
What puzzles me is the purpose. Maybe the little farmers, those having up to 2-3 accounts at most, could be actually doing it to get gold to play the game but what about the bigger ones, like that multiboxer with 20+ acc? I don't feel like someone like that person is actually interested in the game per se. They stay all day there with the maximum number of accounts possible, maybe even using multiple computers. Such an investment imho is only explainable with RMT stuff and if that's so, then Anet should be very interested in them. I wonder if these behaviours are tolerated just because following the trail of money/items could lead Anet to a bigger fish. Like that guild banned few days ago.
It's called diminishing returns and it is already implemented in the game. And it affects you even if you farm legitimely. And this is one of the reasons because of which people start to farm AFK. Because the more you actually play the less you get.
honestly if you dont really wanna play gw2 and still earn money you can always flipp tradingpost, craft or go fishing. There is no need for afk farming.
Alternative idea to catching ONLY afk farmers and banning them: make an invincible monster that roams a certain area of the map, doesn’t fight back, and that gives you a mark that refreshes for the duration of you attacking it (or for the duration of you giving it heals or boons). If the mark lasts for an X amount, get another mark that ensures you won’t get drops whatsoever for its duration OR make it worse and ban players that maintain the mark for a certain period of time. If you combine this with criteria like a player not moving or repeating the same limited amount of skills over and over, you can ensure regular players won’t get caught in the net. Also, having an NPC that won’t die nor give loot should give regular players the hint that they shouldn’t waste their hours attacking or healing it. Right?
Even if after 10 seconds of not moving you would stop getting loot there would be bots doing little step to left and right every 9 seconds. Unless ArenaNet will start enforcing their ToS nothing will change.
Diminishing returns would IMO be the best way to tackle this. Make it unappealing to farm (afk) for long times because regular players would probably hate farming that long anyway. Also, make it an account-wide so they don’t just change character and continue afk farming on there. Maybe even make it worse if the player continues farming anyway and prevent them from getting any drops on any map and in any character of that account for a certain time. Then maybe take it even further if they continue afk farming and make it a penalty-timer that only runs down while you’re logged in and actively playing the game (like the infinite TP2F) so they have to actually play the game to remove the timer and it simultaneously acts as a shame stamp to show other players you’ve been naughty 😂
Well, in 2017 the dust farm in Iron March was a thing, i couldn't hold my self thinking i could left my toon farming while working, i did and got banned for a week. GMs back then would move your toon away from the spot and check if you were afk, the second ban would be a 30 days or something, never heard of a third... we know why right? Arena net just don't care anymore, if they do it, they will prob remove a % of their inc somehow...
It was an interesting conversation... and then you dished on people that has the computer up 24hs a day... and I felt attacked... my poor computer only goes down for updates..
@@fabiocroce1355 Nope. At least if we talk about desktop with the adequate cooling. When i talk "adequate" i mean adequate, not something crazy or pricey.
My solution: On Monster kill:Record player coordinants. If Player coordinants = last coordinants {dubuff counter ++} If (Debuff counter > 15) {Debuff for 0exp and 0item drops for 24 hours} LastCoordinants = PlayerCoordinants Else Debuff counter == 0 LastCoordinants = PlayerCoordinants In other words the game checks your very precisise longitude, latitude location for a number and if its the same as the last time you killed a creature it starts a counter that will initiate the debuff after so many kills because there are times in events things where a ranged character might not move and rack up kills, but it shouldn't be much and would have to be adjusted.
As a tempest i often kill 10+ mobs just standing in one place and casting the skills and not moving anywhere at all. Same with the guardian for example. Should your debuff affect me? On the other side mobs can push/pull player. So precise coordinates can be not so constant even for AFK farmer.
so great to get a shoutout to jaffas :) saw his video about afk farming some time ago and I am glad that all the work he put in is paying of :) kind of you @mightyteapot
Most AFK farmers are probably using macros to address the issue of needing to half-heartedly tap skills for several hours. It's unnatural for players to do something this boring for so long. I think two things should be done: One is to change the automated AFK flagging system to be based on the difference between past and present coordinates, rather than activity that can be spoofed with macros or even autorunning into walls. Actually moving between coordinates using macros for AFKing is undesirable, as it can accidentally move characters away from the farming spot and into something dangerous. Give a character a flag for being AFK every 30 seconds the difference between present and past coordinates is nearly 0. After 10 or so flags are collected, boot them to the character selection screen. If they pass the flag check once, wipe their flags clean and keep them in the game. It's a lot simpler to do in practice than it sounds and it doesn't do anything odd like banning innocent players. All it does is boot AFK players from the game. The other is to give game moderators tools that actually help them identify AFK players. You know that game Canach Says? That would work as a perfect way to test AFK players. Lock their action bar with that minigame until they do a simple 3 rounds. I bet most of the AFK farmers wouldn't be able to pass it. If they fail so many rounds, have it tell the GM in a whisper. Maybe have the character being tested whisper the GM a funny message like "I've failed stage 3 of Canach Says 25 times! Something is wrong with me."
I'd like to see minions do more damage but require health sacrifice to maintain them. Engi turreets could do with a buff incluing critical hits but lower the duration to 60 seconds (with a lower recharge) These would generally make these more fun to use and making them more active and helping with AFK farmers would just be a bonus. I wonder how much these skills suffer right now just because they're overused by AFKers
you know one idea they could do tie necro pets, ranger pets and engi bots to a resource, you can only either summon it (necro minions cost life force to maintain like revnant), ranger pets lose stamina (i think wow used to have a this with food for the pet) and engineer turrets and mech cost upkeep
I refuse to believe arena cant pull a destiny 1 or witcher 3 and once someone farms x in one spot the game spawns a legendary raid boss that will walk around the farming area kill anyone in that place
Personally I think this is not something you can address well enough with ToS alone - probably what needs to be done would be altering how auto-cast and pets work to prevent it from being able to clear a fight without additional player inputs. And/or tweak diminishing returns. System was supposed to be there since vanilla.
I did actually get a 48hour ban once for farming Choya. I was always at the machine, ussing skills but not moving. There was no GM and no message or warning, just booted from the game without explination. Don't risk it. Keep moving.
The plot twist is that the 29-account afk farm was actually just teapot. Now that daily login rewards got nerfed he's gotta get that value somehow. (this is satire btw, if that wasn't clear)
Could change the rule to something like, "Idling ingame and circumventing the afk idle kicker whether intentionally or unintentionally". FF14 kicks people to avoid large queue times and Anet could adopt to same rule without even bothering with the whole gold farming aspect. Give mods tools to mark players like ticket men do with chalk on car tires and come back later and see if players are still there.
I was just thinking... Has Anet changed their policy on multiboxing? I remember there was a time where you'd always see at least one person multiboxing at every meta event, but I don't remember seeing them for a while
@@TheTH-camExpert not really more work unless they add achievements for the afk killing legendary mobs. The mob can just be copy paste champ from that map with increased hp/att to make it legendary, only the pathing would be a slight work. The real problem is what they'll end up breaking if they were to add a new mob. It's the same issues with teapot and Jaffas solutions, is that with current devs they will break something which will make game virtually unplayable for 1-30 or more days lol
The best way to catch afk farmers in my experience is just moving the player and seeing how much time it takes for the character to become active. Teleport them 300 meters to the left and see if they will react at the moment or it will take them 10-20 minutes and that will be the best indication if it's active play or not.
The DR wouldnt make a bit of difference you can just setup to run in a circle in place basically at the bare minimum and if you look at old school runescape you will see actual botting is not stoppable. The solution is to remove auto casting from AoE skills and minions/turrets and make minions not fight for you unless you actively fight something aka if you dont auto attack the minions never attack.
Honestly I think the devil is in the details on this. If the policy is "using auto-attack and not player input to farm", then the way I read that is, so long as you are using skills in your farm, you're okay. This would make engineer farms (who need to re-deploy their turrets every minute or so) 100% legal as I see it, but necromancer farms basically totally illegal. And if someone wants to just sit their mindlessly and deploy turrets every minute while watching TH-cam or whatever... I see that as fully complying with a super-broad policy. Now, we could definitely talk about how to change the policy to make it more effective relative to certain goals, but as currently written? I wouldn't even say farming with an engineer is a grey area. It simply is legal, but is close enough to the line to leave a bad taste in some people's mouths. Edit: Also I actually have several friends I've made "lazy" farming as a mech, and we party up, chat, watch TH-cam etc. And we all do, in fact, just reload our turrets manually every minute or so. Perfectly legal. Honestly the same amount of effort as fishing it feels. But I know for a fact there are a number of us who do it legitimately, and if Anet changed their policy, I'd stop immediately. Anyway, just food for thought. A carpet ban definitely could hurt real players.
Ad nightfall (necro greatsword 4) - it can be auto casted even out of combat, so you dont have to press it every "19" seconds which is implied at 33:50. (The only? skill that can be casted automatically by fhe game outside of combat and without player actively playing besides setting it up)
they need to have a debuff when inactive maybe after 5 min of not moving and casting your turrets, minions do no damage. It wouldn't solve every instance but maybe some?
People need to get over it, it's just another playstyle. And I think there should be more options for afk farmers. There are game genres dedicated to afk farming like AFK journey. Aren't mmo's supposed to be have many genres in it?
What if my party is doing all the work and i just stay dead in a corner or gathering flowers? is this considered illegal based on the policy? coz that was happening since the beggining of the game to help friends catch up with dungeons or fractals etc
Can you ask whoever runs the CHYA DE run around 10PM est why they randomly kicked me AND blocked me even though I was literally following directions, helping and doing great dps lol Everytime I see that tag I am immediately turned off by that night, it was so weird. I hate people that afk that event and it happened before the event even started. I ended up on the same map anyway and was just on my own trying to give people alac and do what I could on my own lol
I think to a certain extend that is also thanks to the WV, as now all the Log-in reward stashers want some value out of the now rather useless Accounts. These AFK- farm fill the need to gain value out of those otherwise dead ones.
where you said new player wouldnt be able to get into cross fire its false, i was in one guild when i got back into game after few months of break one guy was teaching new player in game maybe for week or two how to afk farm and he was statiing its allowed and you wont have any problems with it
I do AFK farming in-between activities. When I need a break from WvW or fractal runs, I'll set myself up in a spot where I don't think I'm of inconvenience to other players (like on the side of a cliff) and stay there with my minions for a few hours. Of course, it's not really as good as meta events and other activities, but it does allow me time to do other things while I recharge.
My solution to this is actually to just make character abilities that require player input. Minions, turrets, jade mechs, etc would no longer act on their own. It is not the easiest fix but imo it is the most elegant and healthy for the game.
I understand these aren't seriously professional conversations by any means but I'd wish some of the dudes like Jaffa or Silhouette would come a little more concise, I've found these last few conversations very hard to follow.
@Snebzor Of course, but at least in Jaffas case he made his video to kind of inform the public about how bad afk farming has gotten, right? Or to at least better explain how it works in the game. Clarity in your argument always helps there.
What's the point in them spending all their resources chasing down 0.01% of the population that MAY be doing something wrong but is basically like making a police taskforce to crackdown on jaywalking. Don't complain about no content if you want them to spend their time making the game emptier for you.
@@CritiasBG yea well... after the update of the regulation and the ban wave that hit everyone, right after my 10 day ban expired and I didn't read the new terms / didn't realize they changed it to not being allowed to at all use only auto casting skills (even if not afk). So I was like "ok I will only farm when I'm not afk instead of 24/7" (yes you can do this with only ingame mechanics) and then on the 2nd day I got perma banned like half an hour before I wanted to logoff.. The thing is, the farm takes 50% less cpu load when you are in map mode and another 50% less when you minimize the screens (so 25% load insteaqd of 100%). So that saves a lot of electricity, but perhaps I was moved around by the gm and I didn't see it. I have my hud audio on I wasn't pm'd by anyone... but yea.. very unfortunate. Even more so because the mods always start to watch me when I actually actively play and multibox my accounts legitimately, because I have friends that never ever got banned because they are not on Anets radar; It's every time I get reported in wvw they think I cheat on my main, or like I kill bosses in the h'ween lab actively with 6 necro's.. that is when I receive the reports and that's why anet start monitoring me... So yea as said in this vid in the past I didn't get banned because like they ported my mob and I just moved them back etc.. On one hand it's fair I / ppl get banned, on the other, why does Anet have skills that cast forever, why do minions auto retaliate; like they do this ONLY with low dps skills, for example, vengefull hammers on rev. does more dps and it stops dps at like 1 min, even though the skill keeps casting ... So I think there is a hidden agenda, which is selling accounts to farmers. because they could do a lot more, like first ban half year instead of 10 days, communicate more about it etc. but their policy is keep selling accounts as long as it doesn't make non farmers quit the game it's good money.
I don't understand the importance of talking about "in theory AFK farming" (as it could just be one person with their PC on and on the other side they are working or doing something else), if in the endgame it has no impact at all. Whether it buys all the legendaries or not doesn't make her stronger or weaker, and in fact it even moves the market for her gold. So... what's the impact?
Unfortunately a lot of in-game rewards are focused on TP interaction. The relative impact of one individual afk farmer will almost always be small as a result, but almost never will it actually be zero. Everything an afk farmer sells or buys on the TP will be affected as a result of their farming, for better or for worse. And you can completely scrap the "stronger or weaker" aspect, GW2's endgame simply does not revolve around that in the first place so it's an invalid argument.
Here is my 5 cent about it: GM's should check if the person/people are attending their _gameplay._ - *IF* you want to call this bulls##t gameplay. If the person responds.. WELL fine. IF they don't GMs should have a "option" to disable itemdrops, EXP and event rewards for the person in question for a duration. An example would be: _2 hours + the person must fill one more requirement like "play a different piece of content + stand in a city for 10 min"_
Honest opinion. Get over it. If that's what they want to do, that's what they will do. Go on with the way you want to play. Complaining more than the alphabet people about how someone is hurting your feelings by farming something. Please show us where it hurt you. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Just add insane DR per character. Like 5 minutes and you get no loot for an hour. Or remove mob loot entirely. There is no actual gameplay value to it. Buff events a little instead to offset the loss or something.
Of course, AFK/botting/multiboxing is destroying the game. Just because you don't care about the reward system of a game doesn't mean most people don't. This situation creates apathy in the game and demoralizes people who are trying to progress. It scatters people across different instances, reducing connections between players and increasing the failure rate of meta-events. Moreover, most people who engage in these activities have mental disorders and pose a threat to the community. Allowing these individuals to remain in the game is a problem. There are reasons why people go to private Discord servers and avoid interacting with in-game tools: they don't want to interact with piece of shit (look at the comments defending this, could you eat with such "people"?). Can you imagine allowing fuckers to bloat your game with fake accounts, destroying the social experience for your users, increasing your bill to Amazon, and then seeing Amazon use that money to hire your developers and create a competitor? (New World may have failed, but maybe the next one won't.) At this point, this is just amateurism by Anet; they're not smart enough to see it, sadly. The video game industry seems to be the only industry where producers tell their users they don't know what good service is. Goodenoughism.
"[...] increasing the failure rate of meta-events" Ah yes, the incredibly popular meta-events of Istan, Sandswept Isles, Kourna and Lake Doric. Surely this has to be classified as a nationwide tragedy. "Moreover, most people who engage in these activities have mental disorders and pose a threat to the community." Nice shizo rant, go touch grass. It seems like you are the one with multiple mental disorders.
It is not destroying the game, but it is destroying normal people's morale to play legitimately when others can just afk and get more money then you get by actively playing the content you enjoy.
Thus it is destroying the game, the game lives by the enjoyment of people, it's kinda how games work.
doesn't effect my morale what so ever but I can see it hurting others'.
you should try it by yourself, you won't get more money through some afk farming, multibox afk farming with 20+ accounts funneling the income into one that's another discussion, but still doesn't affect anyone. I mean that guy farming 100k gold a day won't beat you on anything so I don't understand karens complaining about
@@HyperLink666 Look no need to name call here, I personally feel it should not be allowed and it definitely ruined my time grinding gold, or even buying gold if we will explore that route, when buying say, 10 accounts for 75$ will yeald say 10 gold per account per hour of doing nothing. That brings us to 100 gold an hour of you sitting there working, and when you get a whisper from GM you just move the characters and continue grinding. You do it for a month straight at 4 hours a day and I just earned myself more gold then I do in years, by not even playing, while working at my job making actual living. And after that I get to just relax and play the game without the gold ever being a bottleneck to anything I want to do. Yes it is a problem when you devalue your currency, and while few afk farmers don't hurt the economy, the gold value is hurt when you consider spending money and investing your time and effort into the game that allows such blatant abuse of the rules.
@@HyperLink666 look at lake doric. Those bots actually stop the map instance from being closed for at least a day. Maybe multiple days. So you can't mine some of the stuff for aurora more times a day (random drop from crystals or something), thus those bots actively hurting my gameplay. No joke.
If only Anet could make it so Dhuum insta kills your character if it doesnt move for 30+ minutes
They did something recently in the 16 july update.
Entering combat now shorten your AFK logout timer to 5 minutes.
So you can AFK a while in a safe spot like a city, but not AFK farming.
Hey, as long as the afk farmers/botters are there, you may as well have a bit of fun with them ;)
What a surprise! If I knew this was going to be a video I probably would have put on some pants first.
so happy for you :) saw your video on afk farming, ty for all the hours you put in to explain and also analyse :D great work
@@xDburnsDx Thankyou my friend. It's amazing what a lack of content and boredom can do to a person :P
Did everyone think the same I did: "One evening I'm going to go to that quaggan village, sip some wine or tea, listen to some podcast or good music and farm together with those AFK farmers"? I guess I'd make more gold than doing my WvW dailies.
I thought that too. I was like "i need totems and dust, maybe i can do that those nights when I'm feeling brain dead" xD
Literally my EXACT thoughts almost verbatim.
Well thats depressing, whats the point of farming and playing the game, if you can stand still and make same money as playing 2 raid wings...
34:30 thats insane, I'm going to non afk farm that spot, 28g per hour for pressing one button seems insane
I report afk farmers in every opportunity I have. :D
Same
@@TheJanissary90 sadly. But I'll keep doing it anyway.
not all hero's wear capes
@@lcZahark A GM will sometime TP but if you respond to them then they wont ban you. Happened to me a few times and I'm still all good. Basically we can afk farm until they update their ToS which you can only blame them
Throw the flower toy at them too if u have it lol
It's that classic "Its not affecting me or the game" thing. Players like myself got called out in the past as being petty for even reporting these people and now the prices of mats have rocketed it is clearly going to have an affect on the economy. That 29 account user is making over 4.5k gold per half day, ANET have to take this seriously as with Homesteads driving mat prices for years to come this will have a bigger impact in the future.
Or you know, lets just dismiss this as fear-mongering and "not having much of an impact".
If the game has operated this way essentially since Istan released what makes you think the game will change drastically all of a sudden were they to vanish? The economy has stabilized under this norm and, just like in runescape, if a ban wave were to happen the only real impact would be a spike in prices for the t6s they farm.
That could be seen as a positive for players but there is no way to farm t6s directly... besides essentially afk farming lol, and most non afk farmers are better served using their t6s anyways to avoid TP tax. I think just mathematically the whole problem is kind of a wash either way, but both ways require a lot of dev time to deal with so I don't see anything happening
@@theBEATdude I guess you missed the part where Teapot and Jaffa spoke about rising prices of mats and just how much these players are making. In addition you're ignoring hoarders- those farming these mats and storing them, filtering them onto the TP keeping prices high or those that trade farmed mats for other items in order to sell.
Using the excuse of 'dev time is valuable' is lazy. If ANET think there's an issue and it's affecting the game in a negtive way then they will have to deal with it at some point.
@@Avenrise The demand is what makes the prices go up. The supply going up or the demand going down will make the prices go down. If Anet gave more of these mats to active players, the AFK farmers wouldn't profit as much. IDK why you seem to be suggesting the AFK farmers are making the prices go up as if anything they are keeping them lower by supplying the stock of items people don't bother farming. If Anet gave those mats for cheaper prices in the Wizard's Vault for example that would help keep the price way lower and the farmers AFKing would be making even less.
@@Avenrise I didn't miss anything, I think you miss the part where adding supply of something to an economic system alone can not possibly raise the price of it. Doesn't matter if some of them are portioning it or whatever, because no matter what supply is being added to sate the relatively static demand.
My point is if you built a car and by an unintended quirk it starts running off of rats powering one of the pistons, and you just remove the rats because you don't like rats, your engine is still going to be affected, maybe even adversely. Wasting anets time fighting a pointless battle that can at best only negatively impact the game is ultimately a waste imo.
The economy is insanely well designed in this game and it can handle stuff like this, and as it stands unless you're doing the same boring garbage these afk farmers are doing, they're saving you gold. The only valid argument is saying it is unfair other people with the resources to do this have an advantage, but gold advantage really doesn't matter in this game, so that seems petty. Maybe if istan was popular and farming trophy caches was viable gold/hour it'd be different too, but I don't think anyone wants to do that anyways.
@@theBEATdude Not being rude, being honest here... I have literally no idea what you're talking about the first half of your reply. The second half I can answer- at the end of the day my opinion aside if ANET think it's going to negatively impact the game they'll do something about it. I can state my opinion, you can state yours. THEY know facts and I'll always defer to their decision one of which is that they recommend always reporting.
With regards to demand, hoarding is really easy in this game. You see it with Infusions, you see it with T6's, you see it with MCs and they're drip-fed onto the TP. I personally don't care much, this isn't personal for me as I'm relatively well off in game due to not wanting Legendarys but to assume these farmers are just dumping onto the TP ASAP is flat out wrong. The price is not only tied to supply and demand, time plays a part.
wish they could random-spawn the enemies better, half the problem is that there are definitive spawn spots that these guys can camp on. It always annoys me when I see them.
I would make it, so that minions, mechs, pets, etc despawn/get stowed after 10ish mins of non activity. This would minimally impact normal players but would be quite annoying for multiboxers without using botting scrips. Would also declutter cities a bit as a nice side effect.
This sounds like a nice way to solve the issue.
But when that's done the AFK farmers will come up with a build that don't depend on those.
Also there are mouse "jigglers" you can buy to get past that anyways.
They can make the program press the attack hotkeys they dont necessarily need pets good idea tho
ngl I had the thought after Jaffas video to make another account just to afk farm 24/7 and find out how long it takes to get banned but then I realized I'm not that bored.
33:33 Right or wrong, I think you're right. If any of these people actually go to the forum or reddit to complain about it, they're not gonna get any sympathy. "Oh no, the consequences of your actions. Anyway."
You can see it when people post that they got banned for doing bannable things like sharing account info or using exploits and wonder what happened.
There's a lot of mobile games, some ported to pc that are made specifically for AFK, mmorpg games, in 3D, with decent graphics, that will let you just watch the game playing itself for you. I suggest AFK farmers go "play" those games and let gw2 for people who actually interact with the game.
The reality is that right now, GW2 is one of those games lmao.
@@MightyTeapot Although I want to bully a videogame as much as the next guy. GW2 is sadly NOT like those games. 😅
For MMOs like HIT2, afk farming is the ONLY way of progressing and means of "playing" the game.
The thing you're doing in-game during this entire interview? Doing the bare mininum actions your class can do? That's more activity than those mobile games at their maximum. 😂
I want to make fun of GW2 I really do, but this ain't it chief.
@@MightyTeapot Bruh fuckin istan and kourna any map with bonuses mob density and the jade bot has pockets of these little afk bastards ruining the economy lol. Ive been reporting the same afk botting dude for over a month theyre still there anet plz.
"interact with the game" being "fetch useless shit" and watch too big hitboxes go down like loading bars because there is no challenge, for eternity. This game deserves to be afk farmed, NCSOFT is milking the community hard and this is the answer. And they want people to farm, because they sell a lot more accounts with them having it both ways pretending to care and soft banning some a little, but just not too much so ppl keep buying new accounts.
@@woof3065 Damn, did you put salt in your coffee instead of sugar this morning?
By that definition, a lot of multiboxing is not allowed either.
Like those Auric Basin runs where people just autoattack the octovine.
MacroBots were kinda popular on US servers, mostly engineers but some staff necros too
Aren't SPEARS possibly going to make AFK farming available to more professions?
what i care about is simple inflation, like half year ago i could buy certain amount of stuff/gems. Now i have to have double gold to even come close.
Yea for real.. Gems are crazy nowdays.. like 170 gold per 400 Gems when new shit stuff hits the Shop..
That would be the opposite of what we view in this video. AFK farmers drive DOWN the price of materials.
yep but they drive up the price of gems
@@induktioliesiso arenanet wins because more people will end up buying the gems instead of earning them
to me, its so obvious this could be fixed in code (such as the movement requirement) that they either must be ok with it to boost account numbers or borderline incompetent. there's also the possibility that these bots actually provide a vital service to the economy because there's obviously a market for the materials - if that's the case, they could compensate by lowering the cost of trophy boxes or similar methods. maybe a fair way would be some trade for spirit shards, so its expansion agnostic.
Realistically it's none of that, I think afk farming is a bit of a non issue for GW2, in that it's not super impactful to the game one way or another. ArenaNet would have already fixed it if it was actually damaging to the game, but the main consequence right now is that the game looks a bit scuffed when people take screenshots of the crazy minion blobs, but most people won't really encounter them very often in the game.
its not a non issue for me. i run into afk farmers all the time at my mat farm spots.
@@jeremycoleman3282 As you can see from the video you can just steal the kills pretty easily in those situations
@@MightyTeapot its not the case for the most common place i farm. its a route and the bots park in the best place, so it lowers profit by about 20% and ruins respawn timers. sure i could stand on them and steal kills and lower my own profits by 80%, thats not a solution though.
@@MightyTeapotread some of whst ive said they actually msy need this warning before stashes of infinite wealth get built up then u cant stop them without banning individusl accounts where there could be very very many especially if they could repeat a process such as leveling rewards vault rewards etc
interesting conversation but numbers are way off, i no longer play GW2 not ever did AFK farm but i used to multibox 15 accounts on auric basin, i got to know a lot of people with multiple accounts, only one dude had more than 60 accounts spread all over every map, theres full guilds of alt accounts farming non stop, 600 ish account estimation is way way way off, if you asctually go and stay in maps for long enough until you get kicked to a more populated instance you can actually sometimes get to full instances of afk farmers, they are ocupiyn all of the map slots, thats why no one sees them, but linger for long enough and you will get to this instances.
Right. Get rid of the multiboxers. Especially the WV exploiters. Than you can begin to worry about in game scripting. Unemployable uneducated nitwits dominate the gw2 elite.
What do you think would be the best way to fix this issue, if he's numbers are that off it means the problem is just a lot bigger.
@@hanneskarlbom6644 its really difficult, this game rewards participation , not % participation but just being there and doing anything, you can get full tequatl rewards by hitting him once in third phase, you can get full rewards by tagging a mob in the pre event of tarir and then hitting once the octovine... the game rewards being lazy and afk farming is the direct product of that mentality
@@hanneskarlbom6644 the issue cant be solved easily, the game rewasrds being lazy in every game mode.
It would be nice if some sorta change was made. They definitely tried to reduce “free AFK gold” when they made the Daily logins & Wizard Vault changes with SotO, so its not necessarily impossible that they’d anything about AFK farmers; it just takes more effort and consideration of the ToS (assuming they dont do a loot DR idea)
Easiest way to fix this is diminishing returns on the mobs in that area and there, you got it fixed. Put 10min FFA loot and call it a day for the day - once the timer hit 10 min mark you don't get loot anymore from that area. Not on an hour, for the day. It's gonna kill the idle farm literally in secs.
the problem is that some people want to actually farm by playing and the DR kills the normal farmers too..
Good luck for people farming maps like Silverwastes, Drizzlewood and Dragonfall. Those maps can be farmed on repeat for those who struggle with gold. Or people doing longer metas or SotO rifts.
Garbage solution from the most arrogant mmo community.
@@Vietcongster This doesn't make any sense. No one does idle farm in Silverwastes. Also you don't get any bonus loot upon killing mobs in those zones. I was talking about the good spots in LS3/LS4. Also you can't do idle farm in Dragonfall, you have to participate.
While grinding mobs, I've learned it's pretty easy to hit DR already, and honestly pretty frustrating to deal with. It's difficult to figure out what exactly you need to do to avoid or reset it, since nothing about it is relayed to you in-game besides how many drops you're getting. Rather than making DR more severe, I'd prefer Anet just crack down harder, and dole out longer and longer bans to offending players. Any "easy fix" you come up with will either punish legitimate players, or be trivial to avoid.
Something that gets me about AFK farms is GW2 isn't an open-world mob farming game in the first place. There are plenty of MMOs where people will set up shop, say where those choya spawn for example, and run in circles clearing choya for a few hours. In those games those choya would provide the best source of something- xp, mats, whatever- for the level. That doesn't happen in GW2. Maybe open world event farms, but not random mob farms. Obviously ANet could use a super heavy-handed approach and catch innocent gamers in the crossfire, but I feel like there are so many differences between these accounts and any even slightly active player on the same map that ANet has plenty of room to find a solution without risk of collateral damage.
I don't think the solution is actually DR, I think it's a change to autocast mechanics. At present, every single auto-attack skill (default 1) in the game will _stop autocasting_ if you don't have an enemy target within range of the skill. If they changed every _other_ skill in the game to behave the same way when set as your autocast, the vast majority of players wouldn't even notice. But Nightfall and Electro-Whirl and other PBAOE's would become unusable for AFK farming.
After that, they should make it so that pets/summons/turrets/etc don't attack if there hasn't been a skill activation, _any_ skill activation, even an autocast, within the past, say, twenty seconds (3APM, which is basically nothing). Again, any honest player wouldn't even notice, because they never _go_ that long without activating something (like an auto-attack) in a fight anyway. But AFK farmers who rely on pets would be kind of screwed. Twenty seconds after their auto-cast turned off automatically, their pets would turn pacifist and stop farming too.
Finally, herald auras should get the same treatment as pets, if you haven't activated _something_ else in the past twenty seconds, pause the pulsing. Again, most real players won't even _notice._ But AFK farmers are hosed.
This entire solution is circumvented by a macro that presses 1 every few seconds. Without automatic detection (not happening) or fixing of the core issue it's not gonna change.
@@theBEATdude It is, that's true, but it _does_ present that barrier to entry. People argue, a lot, about what constitutes "actively playing". That's something that Teapot and Jaffa discuss in the video. But _no one_ argues about whether using macros to press buttons in combat for extended periods of time is allowed by the ToS. So it would eliminate all the people who argue "Well, if the game mechanics support it, obviously it's allowed."
It would clear away the chaff and make it _much_ more obvious who's a bad actor. Once that chaff is cleared away, it becomes much easier to implement an automatic detection mechanism that doesn't catch innocent players. The autodetect could just flag the behavior for GM's to take a look, and with all the chaff cleared away, they won't just be flooded with false positives.
@@Rathmun Again, unfortunately, autodetection is not happening, or if it ever was going to it would've been done already. As much as this topic keeps coming up over and over again, it really doesn't impact the game very much, and if Anet already can barely squeak out a stripped down Alliance system after over 5 years, I don't see them dedicating time to making a whole new system in a 20+ year old engine to make a GM's job 10% easier.
@@theBEATdude Even without autodetection, just copying the "stop autocasting" logic that's already _in_ dozens of skills (All the 1 skills) to the _rest of them_ is not something that should take much effort.
The necessary pet changes are mostly already available in code from Ferocious Symbiosis. Sure, that trait gives you or your pet a buff when the other hits, but the important part is the "The master did something, so the pet does too" logic. Copy that logic, make it "activates a skill" instead of "hits an enemy" for the trigger, and "Continues fighting" instead of "gets a buff" for the effect.
@@Rathmun They already did all this before, which is why engi turrets die after 5 minutes now. I think they've already realized it is pointless and making changes will only move the goalposts or change the optimal afk class and potentially cause other issues in the game.
Right now you aren't even banned for autocasting, you're banned if you aren't present at the pc while you're doing it. There is already a 1 hour log out system, so only people using a wake up macro (space bar every 10 mins or something) while afk will be punished as is, which seems to be their goal.
Extreme DR... then when we're waiting for tequatl to spawn all our loot gets turned off lol
Ideally the vast majority of you would either be moving or not killing anything, therefore not affected by the system. Additionally the multiple events involved in the Tequatl encounter should be counted against your "afk score". Finally most actual "afk farming" seems to focus on killing respawning mobs, so the DR need only apply to loot gained from actual drops and kill-related procs (VM, Jade bot etc.) - meanwhile pretty much all the loot from Tequatl and other meta bosses comes from chest objects or bouncy chests which need not be affected by this anti-afk system. "Afk" leeching big meta events is a separate problem, most of which I'd wager does not actually fall under "unattended" play but rather just being a lazy jerk which (sadly) is not against ToS.
@@Photoloss that makes sense, I thought it was just the "waiting" part that they were saying would cause DR to kick in, Since you have to get to TEQ like 30 minutes early I often use that wait time to afk and do dishes which I don't think should count for DR because the game is kinda forcing people to wait around for the event to get into a good server.
Not moving AND getting loot would be the factor for getting the extreme DR. What loot are you getting at Tequito when just waiting? Nothing but bog shit explosions killing you sometimes and the only loot there is being humbled by Tequito's shit killing you. (IDK what those things are in lore, but they are Tequito's dung piles in my headcanon)
@KawsMeCal dead fish heads. I believe it's like when you throw dynamite into a pond and it kills all the fish. Teq kills them all if he wins... I don't understand why they explode though...
@@boyscout399 They're actually Zhaitan-corrupted fish from Orr and the surrounding oceans. They appear in several maps and don't always explode, sometimes serving as event objectives or ambient poison turrets, with one variety being a whole fish body laying on its side at the shore. Not sure whether they qualify as full-on Risen though. As far as the Tequatl fight goes IIRC they were added with the rework, and mainly serve as an environmental effect to mark the fight's failure state.
It comes down to anet deciding how they want to handle it and the potential unintended breaking of the game that comes with it, and how fast they feel they can fix what they broke. Like the change to AB hero chest stopped the multiboxers from free loot, wether it was intentional or a side bonus from bringing HoT metas hero chests up to new current standards. If they add dr if u dont move after certain time for example that has the potential of breaking certain metas (like teq or td wall) specially if unintended event participation gets removed.
I feel the only true way for anet to handle this is tougher gms like we used to have. I remember a forum post of a guy being suspended for using the games auto cast and the gm said it was for using their auto cast in an unintended way. Bottom line is the gms need to be on the same page and have consistent answers. Like we shouldn't have one saying doing house chores or showering and being afk farming ok where another says watching gw2 on a second monitor but still at the pc is ok. At the end of the day though its mainly lws4 that are bad but go unnoticeable since theyre pretty empty maps at this point and dont have a big enough impact as a whole like the botters did back in 2012.
What puzzles me is the purpose. Maybe the little farmers, those having up to 2-3 accounts at most, could be actually doing it to get gold to play the game but what about the bigger ones, like that multiboxer with 20+ acc? I don't feel like someone like that person is actually interested in the game per se. They stay all day there with the maximum number of accounts possible, maybe even using multiple computers. Such an investment imho is only explainable with RMT stuff and if that's so, then Anet should be very interested in them. I wonder if these behaviours are tolerated just because following the trail of money/items could lead Anet to a bigger fish. Like that guild banned few days ago.
''innactivity of keyboard after a period of time'' detection
and multi box shouldnt be allow . and work to phrase it proprely in ToS
Can't they literally make the adds stop dropping things if a player kills too much of them in a given time period?
It's called diminishing returns and it is already implemented in the game. And it affects you even if you farm legitimely. And this is one of the reasons because of which people start to farm AFK. Because the more you actually play the less you get.
i was banned for afk farming a month ago for 72hrs not worth the risk IMO
you afk farm on your main?
honestly if you dont really wanna play gw2 and still earn money you can always flipp tradingpost, craft or go fishing. There is no need for afk farming.
flipping require knowledge
The only time open world pvp was justifiable was cause I could clear the bots all the time
Alternative idea to catching ONLY afk farmers and banning them: make an invincible monster that roams a certain area of the map, doesn’t fight back, and that gives you a mark that refreshes for the duration of you attacking it (or for the duration of you giving it heals or boons). If the mark lasts for an X amount, get another mark that ensures you won’t get drops whatsoever for its duration OR make it worse and ban players that maintain the mark for a certain period of time. If you combine this with criteria like a player not moving or repeating the same limited amount of skills over and over, you can ensure regular players won’t get caught in the net. Also, having an NPC that won’t die nor give loot should give regular players the hint that they shouldn’t waste their hours attacking or healing it. Right?
Even if after 10 seconds of not moving you would stop getting loot there would be bots doing little step to left and right every 9 seconds. Unless ArenaNet will start enforcing their ToS nothing will change.
Diminishing returns would IMO be the best way to tackle this. Make it unappealing to farm (afk) for long times because regular players would probably hate farming that long anyway. Also, make it an account-wide so they don’t just change character and continue afk farming on there. Maybe even make it worse if the player continues farming anyway and prevent them from getting any drops on any map and in any character of that account for a certain time. Then maybe take it even further if they continue afk farming and make it a penalty-timer that only runs down while you’re logged in and actively playing the game (like the infinite TP2F) so they have to actually play the game to remove the timer and it simultaneously acts as a shame stamp to show other players you’ve been naughty 😂
Well, in 2017 the dust farm in Iron March was a thing, i couldn't hold my self thinking i could left my toon farming while working, i did and got banned for a week.
GMs back then would move your toon away from the spot and check if you were afk, the second ban would be a 30 days or something, never heard of a third... we know why right?
Arena net just don't care anymore, if they do it, they will prob remove a % of their inc somehow...
Honestly, just look at how Runescape does it. Spawn restrictive On-Screen Puzzles or other ways to verify you're actually.
i always loved gw2 economy , it hasn’t become like WoW where it’s overly inflated but AFK farmers will ruin that
don't forget magic trophy jbot array,that's another boost to loot which i doubt gets any diminishing returns
It was an interesting conversation... and then you dished on people that has the computer up 24hs a day... and I felt attacked... my poor computer only goes down for updates..
Honestly I was the same and it greatly reduces your computer speed and longevity
@@fabiocroce1355 Nope. At least if we talk about desktop with the adequate cooling. When i talk "adequate" i mean adequate, not something crazy or pricey.
My solution:
On Monster kill:Record player coordinants.
If Player coordinants = last coordinants {dubuff counter ++}
If (Debuff counter > 15) {Debuff for 0exp and 0item drops for 24 hours}
LastCoordinants = PlayerCoordinants
Else
Debuff counter == 0
LastCoordinants = PlayerCoordinants
In other words the game checks your very precisise longitude, latitude location for a number and if its the same as the last time you killed a creature it starts a counter that will initiate the debuff after so many kills because there are times in events things where a ranged character might not move and rack up kills, but it shouldn't be much and would have to be adjusted.
As a tempest i often kill 10+ mobs just standing in one place and casting the skills and not moving anywhere at all. Same with the guardian for example. Should your debuff affect me?
On the other side mobs can push/pull player. So precise coordinates can be not so constant even for AFK farmer.
so great to get a shoutout to jaffas :) saw his video about afk farming some time ago and I am glad that all the work he put in is paying of :) kind of you @mightyteapot
minions turrets etc should only attack when the character attacks. there is already a necro trait that has this
Most AFK farmers are probably using macros to address the issue of needing to half-heartedly tap skills for several hours. It's unnatural for players to do something this boring for so long. I think two things should be done:
One is to change the automated AFK flagging system to be based on the difference between past and present coordinates, rather than activity that can be spoofed with macros or even autorunning into walls. Actually moving between coordinates using macros for AFKing is undesirable, as it can accidentally move characters away from the farming spot and into something dangerous. Give a character a flag for being AFK every 30 seconds the difference between present and past coordinates is nearly 0. After 10 or so flags are collected, boot them to the character selection screen. If they pass the flag check once, wipe their flags clean and keep them in the game. It's a lot simpler to do in practice than it sounds and it doesn't do anything odd like banning innocent players. All it does is boot AFK players from the game.
The other is to give game moderators tools that actually help them identify AFK players. You know that game Canach Says? That would work as a perfect way to test AFK players. Lock their action bar with that minigame until they do a simple 3 rounds. I bet most of the AFK farmers wouldn't be able to pass it. If they fail so many rounds, have it tell the GM in a whisper. Maybe have the character being tested whisper the GM a funny message like "I've failed stage 3 of Canach Says 25 times! Something is wrong with me."
I'd like to see minions do more damage but require health sacrifice to maintain them.
Engi turreets could do with a buff incluing critical hits but lower the duration to 60 seconds (with a lower recharge)
These would generally make these more fun to use and making them more active and helping with AFK farmers would just be a bonus.
I wonder how much these skills suffer right now just because they're overused by AFKers
you know one idea they could do tie necro pets, ranger pets and engi bots to a resource, you can only either summon it (necro minions cost life force to maintain like revnant), ranger pets lose stamina (i think wow used to have a this with food for the pet) and engineer turrets and mech cost upkeep
I refuse to believe arena cant pull a destiny 1 or witcher 3 and once someone farms x in one spot the game spawns a legendary raid boss that will walk around the farming area kill anyone in that place
Its too eye sore now. Anet need to do something
Personally I think this is not something you can address well enough with ToS alone - probably what needs to be done would be altering how auto-cast and pets work to prevent it from being able to clear a fight without additional player inputs. And/or tweak diminishing returns. System was supposed to be there since vanilla.
I did actually get a 48hour ban once for farming Choya. I was always at the machine, ussing skills but not moving. There was no GM and no message or warning, just booted from the game without explination. Don't risk it. Keep moving.
The plot twist is that the 29-account afk farm was actually just teapot. Now that daily login rewards got nerfed he's gotta get that value somehow.
(this is satire btw, if that wasn't clear)
LIVE AND LET LIVE
If someone is farming the same spot and mobs for an hour already no more loot should drop for them in that area. Heck should be even 30 minutes...
I went to check out that spot in bloodtide coast and there were a person representing a guild called "bottom of the sea social club [SSC]"
Now I'm encouraged to do this myself. Which is sad. They need to fix this.
why ban people that are using game mechanics to their profit?
Could change the rule to something like, "Idling ingame and circumventing the afk idle kicker whether intentionally or unintentionally". FF14 kicks people to avoid large queue times and Anet could adopt to same rule without even bothering with the whole gold farming aspect. Give mods tools to mark players like ticket men do with chalk on car tires and come back later and see if players are still there.
Tpot afkfarming afkfarmers
I was just thinking... Has Anet changed their policy on multiboxing? I remember there was a time where you'd always see at least one person multiboxing at every meta event, but I don't remember seeing them for a while
wow i need to go to those quaggan and join LOL
Anet could have random Legendary creatures added to the areas to slow the afk farming.
Finally. The only viable solution that doesn't require persistent allocation of resources.
Lol there's these type of afk spots in multiple maps.. Good luck with that.. It would take more work than creating an expansion
@@TheTH-camExpert not really more work unless they add achievements for the afk killing legendary mobs. The mob can just be copy paste champ from that map with increased hp/att to make it legendary, only the pathing would be a slight work. The real problem is what they'll end up breaking if they were to add a new mob. It's the same issues with teapot and Jaffas solutions, is that with current devs they will break something which will make game virtually unplayable for 1-30 or more days lol
that last spot is crazy! xD
The best way to catch afk farmers in my experience is just moving the player and seeing how much time it takes for the character to become active. Teleport them 300 meters to the left and see if they will react at the moment or it will take them 10-20 minutes and that will be the best indication if it's active play or not.
The DR wouldnt make a bit of difference you can just setup to run in a circle in place basically at the bare minimum and if you look at old school runescape you will see actual botting is not stoppable. The solution is to remove auto casting from AoE skills and minions/turrets and make minions not fight for you unless you actively fight something aka if you dont auto attack the minions never attack.
Honestly I think the devil is in the details on this. If the policy is "using auto-attack and not player input to farm", then the way I read that is, so long as you are using skills in your farm, you're okay.
This would make engineer farms (who need to re-deploy their turrets every minute or so) 100% legal as I see it, but necromancer farms basically totally illegal.
And if someone wants to just sit their mindlessly and deploy turrets every minute while watching TH-cam or whatever... I see that as fully complying with a super-broad policy.
Now, we could definitely talk about how to change the policy to make it more effective relative to certain goals, but as currently written? I wouldn't even say farming with an engineer is a grey area. It simply is legal, but is close enough to the line to leave a bad taste in some people's mouths.
Edit: Also I actually have several friends I've made "lazy" farming as a mech, and we party up, chat, watch TH-cam etc.
And we all do, in fact, just reload our turrets manually every minute or so.
Perfectly legal. Honestly the same amount of effort as fishing it feels. But I know for a fact there are a number of us who do it legitimately, and if Anet changed their policy, I'd stop immediately.
Anyway, just food for thought. A carpet ban definitely could hurt real players.
If you actually ban them regularly the chance of an innocent getting caught will decrease as the bots themselves will be gone.
Ad nightfall (necro greatsword 4) - it can be auto casted even out of combat, so you dont have to press it every "19" seconds which is implied at 33:50. (The only? skill that can be casted automatically by fhe game outside of combat and without player actively playing besides setting it up)
they need to have a debuff when inactive maybe after 5 min of not moving and casting your turrets, minions do no damage. It wouldn't solve every instance but maybe some?
If player afk 10 min its auto disconnected, no?
42:50 are those generators are made of the same material as Taidha's gate?
Ad same guild, it will probably be to cheaply load off loot to guild bank and get back to your location without any port etc. Fast, cheap, easy.
People need to get over it, it's just another playstyle. And I think there should be more options for afk farmers. There are game genres dedicated to afk farming like AFK journey. Aren't mmo's supposed to be have many genres in it?
AFK farmers gets more gold per hour than the average WvW/PvP player, that's sad
Your video alone added Soo many new people at those spots. You in hand helped create more of the problem at this point
Except with this update they tackled most afk farmers 😂
@@cyriell oh YEA . Go check XD.
What if my party is doing all the work and i just stay dead in a corner or gathering flowers? is this considered illegal based on the policy? coz that was happening since the beggining of the game to help friends catch up with dungeons or fractals etc
Funny thing I saw this 21lvl necro last week
I feel like that that perma mallyx should not be a thing
As a CHYA I find the slaughter of feral choyas to be slanderous!
Can you ask whoever runs the CHYA DE run around 10PM est why they randomly kicked me AND blocked me even though I was literally following directions, helping and doing great dps lol Everytime I see that tag I am immediately turned off by that night, it was so weird. I hate people that afk that event and it happened before the event even started. I ended up on the same map anyway and was just on my own trying to give people alac and do what I could on my own lol
Moving wont be a fix they will teleport with cycles of targets per day based on value written down , numerically ordered etc
I think to a certain extend that is also thanks to the WV, as now all the Log-in reward stashers want some value out of the now rather useless Accounts. These AFK- farm fill the need to gain value out of those otherwise dead ones.
Nah, you can still farm logins for 5AA per day which is about 1.5 gold per account. It's quite similar to pre vault.
where you said new player wouldnt be able to get into cross fire its false, i was in one guild when i got back into game after few months of break one guy was teaching new player in game maybe for week or two how to afk farm and he was statiing its allowed and you wont have any problems with it
dont do the water farm spot i got suspended for doing it for 3 days nonstop yes its good gold per hour but not worth 48h ban
I am afk farming while watching this video.
Turtles are great fun to kidnap the afk farmers and then drop them off to other spots on the map 🤣. Well it was a year ago, i doubt that has changed.
There are places that give much more than choyas and ive seen a famous streamer on it.
I do AFK farming in-between activities. When I need a break from WvW or fractal runs, I'll set myself up in a spot where I don't think I'm of inconvenience to other players (like on the side of a cliff) and stay there with my minions for a few hours.
Of course, it's not really as good as meta events and other activities, but it does allow me time to do other things while I recharge.
My solution to this is actually to just make character abilities that require player input. Minions, turrets, jade mechs, etc would no longer act on their own. It is not the easiest fix but imo it is the most elegant and healthy for the game.
and yet, every large afk farming spot has members of of the hardstuck guild there. Afk farming.... weird.
I understand these aren't seriously professional conversations by any means but I'd wish some of the dudes like Jaffa or Silhouette would come a little more concise, I've found these last few conversations very hard to follow.
Having a live convo in front of a lot of people is actually a lot harder than we think. People like teapot are very skilled/practiced.
@Snebzor Of course, but at least in Jaffas case he made his video to kind of inform the public about how bad afk farming has gotten, right? Or to at least better explain how it works in the game. Clarity in your argument always helps there.
36:00 wow!
What's the point in them spending all their resources chasing down 0.01% of the population that MAY be doing something wrong but is basically like making a police taskforce to crackdown on jaywalking. Don't complain about no content if you want them to spend their time making the game emptier for you.
5 of my accounts got perma banned for afk farming.. and when they got banned I wasn't even afk
you deserved it i hope they get all your other accounts too
You obviously did something else that you are hiding xd. First ban punishment is 72h
@@CritiasBG yea well... after the update of the regulation and the ban wave that hit everyone, right after my 10 day ban expired and I didn't read the new terms / didn't realize they changed it to not being allowed to at all use only auto casting skills (even if not afk). So I was like "ok I will only farm when I'm not afk instead of 24/7" (yes you can do this with only ingame mechanics) and then on the 2nd day I got perma banned like half an hour before I wanted to logoff.. The thing is, the farm takes 50% less cpu load when you are in map mode and another 50% less when you minimize the screens (so 25% load insteaqd of 100%). So that saves a lot of electricity, but perhaps I was moved around by the gm and I didn't see it. I have my hud audio on I wasn't pm'd by anyone... but yea.. very unfortunate. Even more so because the mods always start to watch me when I actually actively play and multibox my accounts legitimately, because I have friends that never ever got banned because they are not on Anets radar; It's every time I get reported in wvw they think I cheat on my main, or like I kill bosses in the h'ween lab actively with 6 necro's.. that is when I receive the reports and that's why anet start monitoring me... So yea as said in this vid in the past I didn't get banned because like they ported my mob and I just moved them back etc.. On one hand it's fair I / ppl get banned, on the other, why does Anet have skills that cast forever, why do minions auto retaliate; like they do this ONLY with low dps skills, for example, vengefull hammers on rev. does more dps and it stops dps at like 1 min, even though the skill keeps casting ... So I think there is a hidden agenda, which is selling accounts to farmers. because they could do a lot more, like first ban half year instead of 10 days, communicate more about it etc. but their policy is keep selling accounts as long as it doesn't make non farmers quit the game it's good money.
I don't understand the importance of talking about "in theory AFK farming" (as it could just be one person with their PC on and on the other side they are working or doing something else), if in the endgame it has no impact at all. Whether it buys all the legendaries or not doesn't make her stronger or weaker, and in fact it even moves the market for her gold. So... what's the impact?
Unfortunately a lot of in-game rewards are focused on TP interaction. The relative impact of one individual afk farmer will almost always be small as a result, but almost never will it actually be zero. Everything an afk farmer sells or buys on the TP will be affected as a result of their farming, for better or for worse.
And you can completely scrap the "stronger or weaker" aspect, GW2's endgame simply does not revolve around that in the first place so it's an invalid argument.
This guy sounds like MauLer.
Here is my 5 cent about it: GM's should check if the person/people are attending their _gameplay._ - *IF* you want to call this bulls##t gameplay.
If the person responds.. WELL fine.
IF they don't GMs should have a "option" to disable itemdrops, EXP and event rewards for the person in question for a duration. An example would be: _2 hours + the person must fill one more requirement like "play a different piece of content + stand in a city for 10 min"_
This is Bloom right? Why is the video title showing a different TH-cam account?
It’s Jaffas, he’s also from Australia!
@@MightyTeapot No way!!! They have the EXACT same voice! I’m not talking about their accent, their voice is IDENTICAL!
Watching Teapot killing AFK farmers with a sand shark is a spectacle on its own.
cant be player movement cuz of blsw lol
Honest opinion. Get over it.
If that's what they want to do, that's what they will do.
Go on with the way you want to play. Complaining more than the alphabet people about how someone is hurting your feelings by farming something.
Please show us where it hurt you.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Really good video, Liked the idea of using DR to combat them i doubt things will change though as this has been the norm for years.
Just add insane DR per character. Like 5 minutes and you get no loot for an hour. Or remove mob loot entirely. There is no actual gameplay value to it. Buff events a little instead to offset the loss or something.
I thought of solution allow player killing 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Of course, AFK/botting/multiboxing is destroying the game. Just because you don't care about the reward system of a game doesn't mean most people don't. This situation creates apathy in the game and demoralizes people who are trying to progress. It scatters people across different instances, reducing connections between players and increasing the failure rate of meta-events.
Moreover, most people who engage in these activities have mental disorders and pose a threat to the community. Allowing these individuals to remain in the game is a problem. There are reasons why people go to private Discord servers and avoid interacting with in-game tools: they don't want to interact with piece of shit (look at the comments defending this, could you eat with such "people"?).
Can you imagine allowing fuckers to bloat your game with fake accounts, destroying the social experience for your users, increasing your bill to Amazon, and then seeing Amazon use that money to hire your developers and create a competitor? (New World may have failed, but maybe the next one won't.)
At this point, this is just amateurism by Anet; they're not smart enough to see it, sadly.
The video game industry seems to be the only industry where producers tell their users they don't know what good service is.
Goodenoughism.
Additional evidence of the gw2 community being the most arrogant and simultaneously inept in the mmo realms.
@@Jay-ft3xh what are you even on about...
"[...] increasing the failure rate of meta-events"
Ah yes, the incredibly popular meta-events of Istan, Sandswept Isles, Kourna and Lake Doric. Surely this has to be classified as a nationwide tragedy.
"Moreover, most people who engage in these activities have mental disorders and pose a threat to the community."
Nice shizo rant, go touch grass. It seems like you are the one with multiple mental disorders.