A note on AFKing in battlegrounds

[Hedon]

"Apparently he didn't get the hint the last time, and I assure you he won't have the opportunity to make the same mistake again"

I plainly disbelief you on this one.

1. A GM will never ever discuss with you an account action taken against a third party. He won't be GM for long otherwise.
2. GMs don't have the power to issue perma bans. Anything that goes beyond a three hour account suspension has to be issued by a seperate department: the account administration. These are people that specifically investigate accounts for TOS violations and take appropate steps.


Oh btw, I fish for Nightfins in AV. The developers put them in there, so logic dictates that it is fair game to fish for them. If developers implement a harvestable ressource in the AV, it is there to be, well, harvested, otherwise it would be removed. At least something useful to do in AV;)

[Concillian]

I plainly disbelief you on this one.

1. A GM will never ever discuss with you an account action taken against a third party. He won't be GM for long otherwise.
2. GMs don't have the power to issue perma bans. Anything that goes beyond a three hour account suspension has to be issued by a seperate department: the account administration. These are people that specifically investigate accounts for TOS violations and take appropate steps.

Believe what you wish.

How can I make this stuff up? I was as surprised as you at his response. Perhaps he was a special GM, I don't know. He certainly didn't speak like any of the other GMs I've spoken to. And when I PvP, I speak to 2 or 3 a day reporting AFKers, so I have some experience with how GMs 'usually' act. Anyone from a different department is still tagged as a GM... did you ever see the thread one the guys who were using glider bots getting banned. The guy who was banning them had a GM tag, and apparently he was:
1) rather creative with his pre-ban discussions
2) almost always it was the same GM

I know what was said to me and I repeated it to GG as it was happening. I literally cannot understand how you would think I could possibly make up those comments... or that I would make them up and post them here.

[Monkey]

Oh btw, I fish for Nightfins in AV. The developers put them in there, so logic dictates that it is fair game to fish for them. If developers implement a harvestable ressource in the AV, it is there to be, well, harvested, otherwise it would be removed. At least something useful to do in AV;)

Well, the GM didn't say you couldn't fish. And the ToS just says that you can't avoid the AFK monitor (as I understand it). Still, it's important to understand that AV's current design is loaded with cruft. Remember siege weapons, etc., being described in pre-WoW articles? Quoting Tom Chilton:

When we originally started designing Alterac Valley, we weren't thinking of it as an instanced zone. We thought that you might cross a portal to get into it, but everybody would be going to the same place. The portal would only be there to kind of indicate to you that you're going to be PvP flagged in here and people will be able to attack you. That was really the only reason for that. So we designed Alterac Valley thinking that it was going to be much more like just a normal WoW zone with different quests to do, and you would go there just to try to get some of the rewards out of the zone that you couldn't get anywhere else.

But we headed toward more of the instance concept because we realized that we just weren't going to be able to effectively control how many players showed up and whether there'd be too many or too few, or anywhere in between. We realized that we were just going to have to instance the battlegrounds and turn them into a mini-game of their own. But at the same time, we've found that during that process you have to make sure that everything in a battleground goes toward that final objective.

(from http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/insider/09/interview.xml )

So AV had to be patched up and (shock!) not all the cruft was eliminated along the way. The developers probably aren't bothering with fixing it because there's more money for the money bin* in producing new content, not fixing crufty old content. I.e., Eye of the Storm is worth more than Alterac Valley, Zangarmarsh is worth more than Aszhara. That leads us into murky ethical territory if we're acting based solely on game design.

While I sympathize with OMD (my first trip to exalted was before the rep buff...<shudder>), my guiding principle in AV is: My faction's other players. They're there, ostensibly, to win. Not contributing to that effort is disrespect to my fellow players, not the game designers. So if I don't want to contribute (And sometimes my fellow players are dumb enough to waste any contribution I make), I /afk out. This doesn't make running-against-a-wall or hiding-and-tapping-the-spacebar definitively cheats, it's just what I feel is the ethical choice.



*visible from up to 5 Nautical Miles (and also from space), the Money Bin is much like Scrooge McDuck's, except in place of "$", it says cryptically, "LOL PWNT U"

[Watto44]

*visible from up to 5 Nautical Miles (and also from space), the Money Bin is much like Scrooge McDuck's, except in place of "$", it says cryptically, "LOL PWNT U"

That rofled my waffles.:)

The discussion at hand aside, it's clear that AV needs a critical redesign. As it stands now I can barely see the place for the bandaids. While it has it's moments of fun, most of the time the place is a boring as bat.... Although it is quite interesting the track the various changes that have been made to the place from concept to current day.