User:Auron/RR

I dunno how much you guys have heard about the whole Hero Baddles/Red Resign day thing, but uh... what the hell?

Hero battles was never good. When it was new (i.e., before the ladder existed), it was a relatively exciting arena, even though it was flawed to hell and back. As soon as people figured out that nobody gave a shit about HB, the exploiting began. At first, and for a very long time, it was /rolling that destroyed the game type. Both players enter, do a /roll 100, and the lower roller leaves. Instead of fixing the problem at that point, ArenaNet disables the roll command in HB.

Typical. Skirting around the actual issue while destroying shit that doesn't matter.

But wait, this saga does not end there! At some point, ArenaNet had the bright idea to copy WoW's daily quests with GW's zquests. In theory, it's pretty good - you channel your playerbase at one arena at a time so as to give the impression that people still play. The problem is when people are channeled to Hero Battles, they don't play - they do exactly the opposite. They "manipulate matches" by having the red player resign to speed up the process and allow mass farming of the zquest. Because you can do it on PvP characters, you can just reroll one all day, spend 10 minutes resigning out of matches or winning because the other guy did, and you get 1k and a zkey.

This red resign phenomena has become so popular that HB districts fill up with literally thousands of people. At one point, American districts went up to 70. All the european districts (combined) added up to about 60. Roughly 20 international districts, 20 asian districts, and even gtob was packed (40+ districts of people cashing in for keys/quest rewards). It's sort of ironic that more people gather to not play than they ever do to actually play.

At this point, ArenaNet has realized "wow lol, we fucked up pretty majorly there." What do they do in response? They threaten to ban people for match manipulation. Gaile was even quoted as saying it was ladder manipulation, which actually isn't true, because all of the Red Resign stuff takes place at a rating too low to be on the ladder, but that's just typical anet-not-knowing-jack-shit-about-their-game. But seriously? Banning people for the company's mistake?

No. That's bullshit. Yeah, technically, they're violating the EULA. However, I must remind us all that Rebel Rising manipulated a Monthly Automated Tournament Guild versus Guild Final and all they got was a slap on the wrist - a temporary cape trim removal. If the GvG monthly tournament final isn't worth banning over, why the hell is Hero Battles?

Reggie et all have posted numbers on that shit. TA and HB are dead (except probably HB during RR weekends). On top of them being dead, they're being removed from the game in less than a month. Why the fuck would you ban anyone over it?

Anyway, here is a long list of things they could have done to fix this problem without banning anyone:

1. Apply dishonor points to resigning out of a Hero Battles match.

Holy shit, that was hard! I just fixed Red Resign day and I didn't have to ban a single person to cover up for my failure at game design! On top of applying dishonor, I would have gone one step further and actually told players what was happening, because, mind you, nobody actually knows any of this unless they frequent guru and the wiki. As KJ has attested (and I went around and checked to verify), plenty of people don't know that HB/TA are being removed from the game. ANet is removing an entire game type and they haven't bothered to put up a notice about it on the login screen? Really? What the hell? Isn't that your job, Regina Buenaobra?

People need to be kept in the loop. Linsey and Reggie have made journal entries promising that the playerbase will be kept up-to-date. Firstly, they make journal entries about once every six months, and most of them contain no information anyway, but more importantly, they're only reaching a fraction of the playerbase by posting shit on the wiki.

The login announcement screen is an amazing tool, ArenaNet. I'm not sure if you know this, but every single player who boots up the game sees those messages. If you want to tell people to stop resigning in Hero Battles, what's a great way to reach them all? Here's a hint - it isn't your journal on the wiki. Tell them via the login announcements. At least give them warning that they're liable to be banned for it. If you're removing entire arenas from the game, that's a pretty major change - that should at least be on the login bulletin board for at least three days.

To keep this simple - ArenaNet, you've fucked up again. You're at least aware of it this time, but you're reacting to it the wrong way. Punishing people who don't know they're breaking the rules will never work better than talking to them. Use your login announcements. Hire CRs that stand in Kamadan ID1 and talk to people. Don't assume the entire playerbase reads your silly journal posts or guru snippets. And lastly, stop overreacting to stuff that can be easily fixed! Hero battle manipulation has gone on for years, and you just now decide to start banning for it? What happened to the middle ground? Why haven't you just applied dishonor to resigning/leaving a HB match? Why didn't you just remove Hero Battles from the zquest rotation? Why didn't you just make PvP zquests available once per day per account, so people can't reroll PvP chars all day to farm it?

Most of this could have been avoided by a simple thing called communication. A competent PR staying in touch with people via any means necessary (i.e., in-game visits, login announcements, wiki journals and guru posts) would have helped you see this problem months ago and would have led to a more sensible fix. You have no communication, so your fix came way too late and was way too harsh for the problem at hand. Fix your PR problem and you'll find that many of these small issues are nipped in the bud, and not allowed to grow into a massive issue like this one has. - Auron 12:45, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

P.S. thanks to HKIAG for helping me brainstorm - Auron 12:55, 21 October 2009 (UTC)