no one does the objectives in AV as well , including the Horde, and you guys use the cave advantage to do it, you all run right past Alliance with 0 engagement for you quick honor.
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I honestly don’t expect them to ban or punish people, they left incursions alone despite the gold that ruined the sod economy.
Then surely you won’t be banned
Something that they did as a mistake they wont take as serious because they have other things to do.
When you force them to look into dumb things like this that waste their time
They are going to break you
AFKers may get actioned, but people actively PvPing won’t. If you think this will turn out any other way, you’re going to be disappointed.
Winning against the horde is real easy if you actually all agree to try to win.
The devs can see people spamming for “LFM AB LOSER QUEUE 50K HONOR PER HOUR 5 IN GAMES!!!”
Easy punishment for these cases. They are admittedly losing and actively recruiting others to do so.
My power was off this weekend because of the hurricane. I’ll be sure to hit 60 and only cap flags in AB as Alliance this week 
I’d bet a paycheck no one gets banned for just going for HKs in BGs. Only for reporting others who do objectives, telling others to lose and making loss teams using LFG, or other chat channels. And people certainly aren’t going to be banned for playing like noobs.
It’s funny that not even retail has done this yet. Granted, I could see this immediately being misused, which is probably why it’s never been a thing.
I think you’re almost on the right track, in regards to viewing BG objectives as being the important thing, but I think that’s the wrong way to approach the overall problem. Punishing people for Blizzard’s own mistakes or lack of due diligence isn’t going to fix the real problem at hand.
Whenever player behavior gets called into question, one has to consider why things have ended up the way they have. The environment - the system, that we are in, is what dictates the player behavior. People react to their environment accordingly and naturally try to take advantage of it. This is human nature, and video games aren’t exempt from it at all. You can even extrapolate this to explain why toxicity becomes so rampant in multiplayer games, and I think it largely comes down to whether or not player time gets “wasted.” The minute people feel like their time is getting wasted, they naturally try to find ways to alleviate this to the best of their ability. I don’t think this current situation is any different to the many things people have done in this game over the years, it’s just that it has a different coat of paint this time around.
I think that in order for them to move away from a situation like this, by naturally discouraging throwing games and promoting more positive PvP environments, then they need to genuinely incentivize players to play the game normally. Buffing the honor payout for the quest turn-in was, in my opinion, the wrong move. I think they should’ve massively buffed BG objectives instead, maybe a notable buff (albeit much smaller than a buff to objectives) to HKs, and a massive buff to reputation earned for the 3 mark quest turn-in (instead of a massive honor buff for that). This idea would benefit all BGs, in particular something like Alterac Valley - maybe we’d even see the epic, decently long games (1-2 hrs ish) come back.
TL;DR: Encourage natural, positive PvP by incentivizing normal gameplay – buff honor gained from BG objectives massively, maybe notably buff honor from honorable kills, and massively buff reputation gained from the 3 mark quest turn-in (but not honor gained from the quest).
Yea, you can change the incentives to encourage playing the right way but the degens should still get punished for going in with the intention to lose. This doesnt have to be mutually exclusive.
Before they go banning anyone for this week they need to address the fact that people have been also mass reporting people playing the game as intended and stop that in its tracks… i’m intentionally not touching flags b/c i had an entire lobby go and report me wed or so for capping anything … soooo if u cant play as intended b/c you’ll get mass report banned and you cant just kill people but not touch the flags for fear of getting banned then … we need some official word on this b/c if both things are bad then u cant que for bg’s at all b/c there are no AV and no WSG games either and people want honor so i’m gonna keep quing AB but not capping OUT OF FEAR of being mass reported b/c blizzard doesnt do anything about it when u get mass report banned
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I think punishment for people who intentionally reported other players is very straightforward.
But as Spotemdottem points out:
The issue becomes muddy. Aside from looking into mass reports and punishing people who got others unfairly punished, there isn’t a good, realistic way to go about dealing with the problem.
I think both issues need addressing: the false reports and BG rewards.
But I really, really hope they actually do something similar to what I suggested in my comment above because we’re just going to go right back to square one all over again. If they just punish the false reporters and don’t change the PvP reward structure (a nerf in one area and no buffs in other areas to compensate would be very bad too) then there won’t have been any actual growth to come from the situation at all.
To an extent. You can very easily also punish the alliance members who are guarding horde flags for them.
Honestly, just blanket ban people who never even clicked the flag once in 500k honor worth of AB. You dont even need to be the one who capped it, but if you never even started the capture channel in any games then straight to the gulag.
I don’t think that’d be a good way to handle it either though. What if you have someone who has a 60% speed mount, who naturally almost never has a chance to cap a flag? Or what if they’re actually laughably bad at PvP? What if their internet is so crap that they can never keep up with anyone? Is that super realistic? No, but it’s not impossible.
And also, what about the other BGs? I’ve gone a whole week without capturing a flag in WSG or capping anything in AV before.
Not to mention, but how would they even have the ability to track something like that? Going off of how things are in retail, starting a channel for a flag, or opening a box, etc isn’t tracked. It’s the end result that gets tracked, not the start.
It would set a bad precedent for the future and could result in unnecessary fearmongering.
I just feel bad for the people seriously PvPing in this hell-scape at this point
The smug Shamans in every thread is just icing on the cake
Im strictly speaking about AB. And from my experience, you could backpeddle and have the chance to cap a flag. People are just choosing not to.
Im sure blizzard can track it. Weakauras are capable of tracking when you start a spellcast so I’m positive the data points exist.
A heavy handed approach is necessary to prevent degen behavior. As we see from Blizzard all too often, gameplay degeneracy that only results in a slap on the wrist doesn’t deter people.
I think a better alternative is to discourage degeneracy naturally though.
We have seen this work before, with retail in particular. Does it fully stop degeneracy? No, because humans are humans. But you can bet your top dollar that it would deter most people if they felt like they didn’t need to in order to progress in an efficient manner.
It’s like the whole conversation about pirating games or movies. Piracy exists, typically, because the native way of obtaining said thing is unsatisfactory. Gabe Newell said it best with “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
If Blizzard wants to beat the average degen playstyle, they need to incentivize the game to be played naturally. Buff objectives above everything else, by a landslide, and then you’ll have people actually fighting for the objectives. Absolutely punish people who wrongly got others punished, but don’t deal with the overall problem by only punishing people. That won’t solve the root issue, but making the system more conducive to natural gameplay will.
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You say this but they make the rules so they can indeed punish it.