There needs to be better detection for behaviour like this. Something like “not gaining EXP from minion/heroes/nuetral creeps for 5 minutes” would solve this because he sure as hell was sitting in base for more than five minutes. We should also have a difference between early game abandonment and late game abandonment, because for early game within the first five minutes if you have something to do then fair enough, I think it isn’t as much of a waste to quit then, before first blood at least. If an abandon is detected after first blood or after five minutes they should be punished.
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I would welcome this but as many have stated before the fear of false positives is too big.
Selling your entire build should be a flag too.
Death without notable damage a flag too.
Your suggestion a flag too.
Standing still as a flag too.
Hit too many flags and you are registered as AFK.
I think there would be a way to approach this in moderation.
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Selling your entire build - if a match is surrendered early - before five minutes, let’s say, then I think it is reasonable for someone to not have items in their build. I don’t know why you’d sell everything in the first five minutes or not buy anything at the start of the game, but finishing a game that is over five minutes long without items in your inventory is a pretty obvious mark of toxic play.
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Death without notable damage - yes, this is a tricky one to tackle. Captains job aren’t really to deal out damage. However, they would have to deal some damage, right? to minions. To Jungle creeps. To the Dragon. To Heroes. To Turrets. I think this cap would have to be very low, and not relied on.
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My Suggestion - I think the early game/late game abandonment is a solution to prevent AFK/Abandon detection being abused. Early game, before first blood or before five minutes, it is obvious the player is absent in for the early game. As only five minutes has passed, I feel it would be okay for the match to be surrendered, and a lighter punishment handed out to the abandon-er. However after first blood has happened, or after five minutes, it is very obvious that player is just standing around doing nothing. They need to be punished.
I believe this AFK system/ abandon/anti-toxicity system is necessary. Sometimes you get some teammates that are doing well for the first half of the game but then they decide to stand in base (and may even smiley face through the rest of the game - it’s happened to me) or just start intentionally feeding turrets. Their lack of active EXP gained would show through this. If you are captain, you will be gaining EXP from assists or farming. At least having a flag for lack of active EXP gained in five minutes would mitigate players that just stand around doing nothing halfway through a match.
Obviously, these conditions are more important for ranked matches than other modes, but there’s no reason they can’t be applied to them, or just tweaked so some conditions don’t have to be met in casual modes.
you’re being very generous. If it was up 2 me… anyone still standing at base after 30 seconds gets overtaken by A.I. and will get afk punishment.
But that’s just me. I’m a little biased. Snowballs happen so fast that good players will take advantage of having 1 less player to deal with. Games are over in under 15 minutes.
30 seconds is the spawn time for minions. So if you’re slower than a minion, you deserve to go back to LPQ.
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I had discussed this on SEMC’s zendesk support site with them before, although I didn’t get any definitive response:
"I believe that the current AFK system, with the bot taking over, is not enough compensation for a teammate leaving the game. Currently, the bot is just set on “easy” mode and just gives the enemy team Gold and EXP when they inevitably get killed by them. giving the bot a higher difficulty would just throw the game out of balance as well, as they’d just be too smart for human players.
The problem is further exacerbated when the player leaves early game. Because there is this early game surrender timer, the whole team is forced to sit through to the 15 minute mark if a teammate leaves in the first 15 minutes. This may not be a problem if they leave at maybe ten minutes in, but if they leave at five minutes it just becomes torture to be forced to play with a handicap for a further ten minutes, with the feeding bot adding salt to the wounds."
replacing the abandoned player with AI is not the answer. If you look at DotA as an example, other teammates are allowed to control an abandoned hero (they become a “free control” hero), and that at least doesn’t allow a bot to feed once a player has abandoned.
Are you freaking kidding me? “too difficult” ??? “too smart” ???
Omg. Honestly, My blind, intelectually disabled, one armed, finger trembling Grandma could defeat bots on “very hard”.
if anything they need to make “very hard” the standard “easy” and make bots harder. ALOT harder.
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I don’t mean to sound snarky, but I think that’s your ego talking there. If they had a very hard AI bot take over in lower tiers, then it would surely be a higher skill level than actual players.
So maybe we could come to a compromise here, in lower tiers like tier 1- 3 maybe it would be suitable to have the “hard” difficulty bot or the “normal” one take over, but above those tiers the “very hard” bot will take over.
Even so, I don’t think having a bot take over a player would be the right way to go. You are arguing that the bot is too easy. I have already said in my message to SEMC (this was when they replaced afk/abandoned players with bots) that they just feed and actually give the opposite team an advantage, when I am looking for balance. the truth is, their AI is horrible when it comes to heroes.
n.b. if they made the bots “A lot” harder than the “Very Hard” mode bots, how hard would you put make this in terms of having a balanced AI take over an abandoned player? Would it be so hard that the bot’s skill level is greater than the whole allied teams, thus giving them an advantage (abusable)? I am certain that they have tried to find a “sweet spot” in terms of difficulty with AI but I don’t think that is SEMC’s main field of work. If they decide to delve into the field of neural networking, I’m sure they would stretch their resources even more.
I’d like to see afk timers scale into the late game. Say post 20 mins it becomes 30s? Late game if you lose a single teamfight you’re pretty much done.
Also selling your build/having no items for more than say 30s should be counted as an AFK.
yeh, It’s my way of describing it using over - the - top - words.
Balance is the key. Anyway. Back on topic. This has been discussed many times before and as @Xaldarian said, the fear of false positives is what is keeping such a system from working properly.
The exp gain idea could work, maybe. Program it right, I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
yes, that is what I said in reply to Xaldarian, but I think it would be pretty hard to detect during an ongoing game. Sure yes it is quite obvious when someone sells their whole build after first blood or mid game that they intend to throw the match, but logistically speaking that is interfering with the player’s freedom to play. Never mind them trying to get round it by leaving one item in their inventory.
I believe it is should be best calculated at the end of the match. Sure, it sucks that you would have to go through the whole match or at least until you surrender, but then that, coupled with player reports, would pretty much say that this person is definitely purposefully trolling and be punished accordingly.
I wonder if there’s a flaw in their “Evil Engine” that doesn’t allow recording or algorithms to carry out these seamlessly simple tasks.
It has been suggested so many times. Even Video recording of the match isn’t a new concept, it’s been around for a long time. I can’t help to think there’s some kind of technical reason as to why it hasn’t been implemented.
I’d gasp to think if the reason is just simply incompetence. I truly hope not.
On that subject, here is a message I sent to them regarding capturing instructions from the evil engine per game in order to provide telemetry, movement reproduction, hits, etc. so that it can be replayed in the evil engine:
"VG really needs a way for us to persistently save or replay data. After a particularly sour mood caused by this issue, I wrote this Reddit post:
For clarification, I am not talking about recording the replays in video format. I am talking about the replay data that we can run with the Evil Engine after a match.
First of all, I think Vainglory is missing out on social and marketing aspects by not letting us persistently access replay data. As this game is on mobile, it is easy (easier than DotA or LoL) to show off your matches to friends. Just providing a file that has the replay data and they can play it in game, and adjust the camera and see player statistics, it sounds amazing. But for some reason, we can only see this after we finish a match.
Secondly, webcasters/analysts who want to broadcast matches, unless they have special tools, do not have a convenient way of replaying matches. The an opportunity to showcase a player’s epic previous match is missed without this functionality.
My problem is that while we have the option to see replay data after a match, why can we not access this data persistently? Technically, if a player finished a match and just stayed on the results screen forever, that means the space reserved on your servers for the replay data would be “In hold” forever, right? So I think it would make sense to open this storage space for us to access permanently. I won’t go too much into the details, since I wrote about it extensively on the Reddit post and discussed it in the discord, but a user on the Reddit did mention that a good compromise would be to still let us access this data persistently (what I mean by that, is to let us view the replay after we have exited the match results screen) but to overwrite it whenever we finish a new match. That way, you will not have to reserve enough server space for each accounts entire match history.
But I am also an advocate of letting the user have enough choices too. If you really are concerned about server space, then another option would be to let the user save the replay data locally, and then delete it from the server when it has downloaded. This has a good point that the user can then just save multiple replays (or as many as the app allows) they want. I would like to re-iterate that I am not talking about saving the replay as video, but saving the set of instructions to be fed to the evil engine in order to view a replay in client. Letting the user manage it locally will take the burden of reserving server space off your hands.
Anyway, I hope you give this feature some thought. There are some amazing VG matches (apart from eSports events) that are just lost in the flow of time due to there not being any way to save it, except by having it immediately available after a match, which is not always convenient. It will help spread the social aspect of VG (and can even be innovated with methods not available currently like share to facebook/twitter/etc.). Please make the replay data files available!"
Chumbawumbanana’s response:
"Hi PointOfGravity!
Thanks for contacting us, and thank you for sending us this feedback about game replays.
Vainglory is a game driven by the community, and we’re always looking for input from the players about what can make it even more awesome!
I can’t personally comment on the feasibility of your suggestions, but I’ll send this straight to the devs so that they can take a good look at it.
Once again, thanks, and see you in the Halcyon Fold and on the Sovereign Rise!
ChumbaWamBanana"
So at the moment, it does look like it’s true that the evil engine somehow cannot record instructions taken into the game for analytical purposes.
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Let’s hope your words have some kind of impact at the SEMC lair.
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Freedom to play? Selling your whole build will create a deficit in stats that doesn’t help at all.
So unless you have several k gold lying around at full build to completely rebuild without losing out on stats rebuilding is a trolls idea.
Selling and rebuying a single item is done often and is okay. A whole build is trolling.
On top of all of this I want an AFK counter that stacks when people do intermittent AFK because that shit costs you games too…
I’m not sure about death without notable damage, as with the current state of matchmaker, anything can happen. But the others yeah. Also 5 min seems almost a little long. Often an ally goes AFK for just 2 or 3 minutes, and while they do come back after, those few minutes can lose you the game.
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That’s why I want afk time to stack. Every 30 seconds of no action, no camera action no shop should count as a strike. Those strikes will be deducted from the time needed to register as AFK.
Death with skills on CD etc is okay too…
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That is actually a very good idea. Cumulative AFG flags will be a measure of providing a “buffer” zone just in case that person really did have trouble for a minute but can resume playing normally.
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