AFK and Crucible Marks (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Wednesday, August 13, 2014, 18:40 (3564 days ago) @ Blue_Blazer_NZ

I think what Cody is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) is that even though there may be a backend system to detect and then punish AFK-ing, there will still be those players who will either not know about said punishment/system or who will try to the AFK-ing strategy anyway. Therefore, we can possibly expect to occasionally come across AFK players on our team (which is frustrating).

The reason that people will attempt to try it in the first place is because of the rewards system that the crucible uses - I.e. you gain a crucible mark even if your team loses and (in the beta at least) the player is not required to actively do anything to continue joining match-made rounds after each one is completed.

Except he didn't say that.

He talked about earning 8 free points a day. He said, "...and since going AFK enables this, then we have a game design in which going AFK for the times you can't play is the optimal way to do things." His premise, as written, was that going AFK would earn you points. It's a premise that goes against the policies and actual gameplay of at least four Halo games even to the point that sometimes false positives caught people who weren't AFK. His premise even seems to possibly go against known gameplay of Destiny itself based on other comments here. Like I said in my first post, he didn't even attempt to check to see if the potential problem was already addressed.

At best, even going from your much much better written argument for Destiny's possible encouragement of AFK abuse, the facts as we suspect them to be don't support anything near "...at the core, something is wrong with the system." Rather, Bungie likely expected AFKers and will remove them from matchmaking quickly and will significantly discourage them from AFK boosting using tools up to complete matchmaking bans.

Ultimately, there is no system except possibly one to one monitoring of players that will stop jerks from having the idea to earn rewards by going AFK. Even if we took away all currency and grinding in Destiny somebody would want the number beside their games played stat to go up or something...