Afkers are getting smarter.
Blizzard has gradually been introducing some checks and balances for players who AFK, reporting features – no honor debuffs ect ect.
But Afkers are getting sneakier. They no longer stand on the Starting Rock ( like in EOS) or Stay in the Flag Room in WSG. They move to a quite little place that is close enough to the action for people to think that they are involved in the battle.
Untill you realise that yellow dot is Still in the water in AB.
I did a couple of EOS’s tonight and because its a tuesday and less people do BG’s (because they expect the servers to be offline for most Tues night but they are doing restarts at AEST 5am.. Woot Australian 5am) , I kept seeing some of the same people in my Bg’s.
One BG we had taken MT and DR and were pushing onward to try take FRR and BEF and I noticed that there were 2 yellow dots still on the rock. We had had no one enter the BG from the start, and their buffs confirmed that they had been up there for the same time the rest of us where before the start. So I say in BG chat. ” Report the AFKers”
One of the dots jumps off the rock, and goes somewhere.. I think nothing of it but remember the name. Then the next BG I notice one of the names I had assumed where AFK, think nothing of it, untill I look at the score board. See 0 damage and 2 heals, and then I couldnt find her yellow dot at any of the towers, or on the battle map.
The final score shows that she was indeed AFK for the entire battle. Or only moving every now and then so that she didn’t get the Auto AFK Debuff.
So Using the Scoreboard below, what can we tell.
Our AFK’er at the top of the list
The Obvious 0 damage, 2 heals. – but now she could have been gaurding a tower or a flag so low damage doesn’t automatically mean that your not ‘there’
0 killing blows – She might have been a healer so that doesn’t necessarily means shes AFK – But healers normally don’t guard towers, ( or shouldn’t)
2 deaths – now for a participating squishy – let alone a healer participating in a 23 min BG thats low, but it could have been luck, the screenshot shows others at 2 deaths as well with damage and or healing.
But there is one telling factor that something is amiss. Even if the above points aren’t making you suspicious
She was there for the entire battle. You can tell this by the bonus honor she has. Its the same as most of the rest of the Alliance team. The 2nd person on the list was probably only in that battle for less then half of the total time as you can see by his reduced bonus honor, and his flag carry shows active participation)
Now there is two other horde who maybe didn’t do as well as they could have, The druid at number 5 and the Hunter from Barth at 7th last, they seems to have the least participation by looking at their kills, deaths, and damage/healing , but their bonus honor shows again that they were there for the whole battle. They both could have been guarding a tower and from memory I don’t think at any point in that BG we sucessfully took FRR and they could have been on gaurd. But their Honorable Kills show that not many allies died around them either so we either didn’t try too hard to take the tower, or they weren’t as active as they could have been. .
The bonus honor also tells you that both sides had significant points up on the board at the finish. From memory we were about 500 ahead.
I can also see that the horde didn’t have any healers… whereas we had 3 over 100k healing
It was a good fight that one, and I’m sure if they had, had healers they would have done alot better.
Provided by 
Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
As horrible as the PvP grind was back in the day, it did require some level of active participation to gain any significant gear due to the ranking system involved at the time. As a result, I don’t think that the term AFKers even existed at the time.
Introducing gear that required Honor and Marks from Battlegrounds did thing: it brought people back to the battlefield. Unfortunately, a lot of those people who joined are not there to play, have fun, or participate; they want gear and put forth minimal effort — or no effort! — to get their goals.
I hate AFKers. I hate Battlegrounds bunnies. I hate people who feel that they need to do something that they obviously don’t want to do in order to get things that they feel they need off of the battlefield. All it does is ruin the fun of those people who want to participate and do well.
Rant aside, damned good tips to figure out who’s AFKing. And Horde had no healers? That’s almost an anomaly! Usually they outnumber us significantly in healing done. More often than not I’m the only active healer on the battlefield.
Well tell Blizzard to stop hiding gear behind honour and arena points and we can talk 😛
I hate pvp, but to gear my lock since she is an alt the best gear I can get is in the pvp sections… give me a pve way and I won’t be there cluttering up your bg 😛
@2ndnin – Blizz is on its way to accomodate the gear issue with the rep peices that are available, however admitably some of the rep grinds are woeful. Good Gear shouldn’t be too easy to get – or there is no distinction between people who put effort in and people who don’t, having said that I would like to see more obtainable crafted items cross all classes. In Bg’s There is a difference between people who try and people who afk. Your not expected to be good. How do you measure good? The Most killing blows, the highest damage/healing.. or that you were the one that babysat stables and called Inc. Whats important is that you try, and learn… and I am not looking forward to the pvp grind i intent to do for some select peices on my almost 68 Fire Mage alt who has a total of 17 resistance and 5000 health. But I’m gonna try! I might have to go ice to make the millon deaths more bearable..
@Cyra – It must have been really bad luck as to their lack of healers.. or they were the two that dropped out of the bg and were replaced. I have heard stories of 6 healers in a WSG – the fun of randomness!
I had one AFK mage that was smart enough to build up some damage and kills early on in a fight.. in fact I wonder still if it was someone multiboxing.
When I put out the call to report, someone piped up that the afker was top on damage and kills… that shut me up for a few minutes.
However I was sure they hadn’t moved in ages, so after chasing down an enemy flag carrier, I dropped by said damage/kill leader to discover they were merrily running into one of the sides of the battleground.
They did enough to give the impression of playing, then went off and played their xbox (or something…)
😛 yeah, but my point was that a lot of the gear thats achievable in pvp isn’t in pve, at least before badge gear starts to exist, and that doesn’t cover every slot. Really there needs to be 3-4 loot systems in the game:
PVP Gear
—- Battleground Gear
—- Arena Gear
—- Rep Gear
PVE Gear
—- Badge Gear
—- Raiding Gear
—- Rep / Instance Gear
Taking the rep gear aside since that can easily be implemented for both sides (pvp rep ftw!, and could actually have some cross-role implementation) we have Badge / Raiding gear and BG/Arena Gear. Of these Badge gear for PVE can basically be slot fillers, and a good base level set for raiders, it can lack hit rating and such like on many of the items as its not designed to be boss gear (16% hit rating needed) so can optimise more for damage and survival, tanking sets can be pushed through this route as well.
The PVP gear can again be split, however with Arena gear and BG gear split, Arena is a small high resilience environment, BGs something else. Make the gear separate and different from PVE and you have two complimentary systems, let them overlap to the degree that they do at current and you have raiders needing to do PVP in order to get gear of equivalent level. Thats the fundamental problem, PVPers don’t want afk PVEers in their BG/Arenas messing it up, and PVEers don’t want to have to go afk when they could be doing something more relevant to them (or have a BoJ -> Honour/Points conversion?).
Eww the afker had to be from my server too! Yea afkers are getting sneakier with it nowadays. You can see stealthers just hiding behind rock near the flag area in EotS, or NEs shadowmelded somewhere near the action, and never see them move.
Maybe I’ll see you around in BGs someday. Be on the look out for Utada, who will be stealing your kills, one Fireblast at a time.
@2nd nin – I have a theory – that most of the theory crafting isn’t blizzard…. that often their gear use intentions don’t end up being used for what its supposed to. The players and theory crafters determine a pieces ‘best use’ and would explain perhaps why the loot trees for Tier, PVE, and PVP haven’t developed in tandam, I’m suprised that one of the PVP Daggers has Spell hit on it, but my Badge Blade doesn’t. No matter what gear is introduced players are going to find other uses then what it was intended for..
@Tuna – I will lol – Shadowword death for the killing blow!
Blizzard sets up the gear, might not be their plan but in general high ilvl gear > low ilvl gear (in general, there are many exceptions). This relationship means PVP providing a fast and easy way to high Ilvl slot gear is an imbalance between PvE and PvP.