I'm just curious, but have they actively begun banning people or is there a timeout/boot in the Crucible? Seems like a very exploitable system if not, as there is no real incentive to participate in the Crucible aside from the daily quests.

I don't know if it happens specifically in the Cruicible, but if you go idle for a set period of time, the game will kick you out of the Tower or any of the mission environments and pop some kind of "Are you still there?" message. I assume the Crucible has the same check.

At one point I thought about rubber banding my controller, joining a Crucible playlist, and going away until I had earned all the marks and rep I'd need to buy stuff.

@jeff: Is it the same time period for both the mission environments and the Tower? Seems like a Tower boot outside of 15-30 minutes is a little silly; especially given the loading screen woes.

You can really quickly report someone who is AFK. Personally, I think it should be even faster. There's also no good way to punish people who leave matchmade games early (like WoW does). I'm also not certain what if anything happens to the people you report. Unlike DotA and WoW, Destiny doesn't tell you if any action against someone you reported was taken.

Is griefing even much of an issue in this game? I get the general impression that it's more of a people who know each other sort of thing as opposed to dealing with teenage randoms?

It seems like bungie have probably done a good job in avoiding the sort of issues that usually crop up in these "MMO" type games.

@jeff: People just wiggle the stick a couple of times to still make it work though.

As someone who plays Crucible, I don't really care to be honest. It seems like one person is doing it at most on a team. It's a disadvantage, but not a big one. 5 on 6 is still fun. I don't really care about winning, I'm just trying to complete my bounties and that is going fine. In fact, the idle people make it a bit easier to complete the headshot bounties for instance.

The people who are super serious about the Crucible seem to form a Fireteam and go into matchmaking that way anyway. I don't think anyone is that bothered by it.

In other Crucible news, I've been getting very lucky with Scout Rifles ever since the patch. I've been consistently getting kill streaks, which I barely ever got before.

It seems really short honestly. To me I feel like the missions and tower has the same boot timing and it's not all that long. I was hanging out in the tower, left to check on my dinner and was booted out when I got back, couldn't have been more than 10 minutes. And yeah given the loading times it sucks. I had to restart a mission because I stopped near the end to take a phone call.

@rowr: AFKing isn't necessarily griefing, just if you can get something for free with literally no effort and very little time spent people will choose the path of least resistance. In Warhammer Online the best weapons in the game required you to win like 200 PvP scenarios (the equivalent of Battlegrounds in WoW or Crucible matches if you like), however if you lost 400 pvp scenarios then you would still get the weapon. As someone who got those weapons legitimately but had plenty of friends who did not and didn't really despise them for it I'm just interested in the inner workings of reward systems in online multiplayer that are either very loosely or not at all performance based.

To give you a more current example: Heroes of the Storm's early Alpha builds did not have anti-afk measures and all rewards are team based, which resulted in basically every game having 1-2 afk people until they fixed it. That's an Alpha with maybe 2000 people playing at the most, you can only imagine the number of AFKers in a game with millions of players. Presently I've been watching the Persona 4 Endurance Run whilst playing Heroes of the Storm and when the match goes poorly I'll be less interested in the game and more interested in the Endurance Run; I might not actually AFK but I'll certainly put less effort forth in most situations.

I dunno I guess i consider griefing basically causing other players in the game grief. Which this would obviously do.

My stance on this is always that "if you can get something for free with literally no effort and very little time spent people will choose the path of least resistance" why are you even playing the game?

Actually I guess if you are AFKing technically you aren't even playing the game... The whole point of these games is to do something that takes a little time and effort to get some satisfaction of completing it and a reward to help you with the next thing.

I dunno it's just something my brain can't compute, i sort of understand why people do it i guess.

Yeah, scout rifles are now totally viable in crucible, which is great. A quick four shots to the head will take someone down, which makes a gun like Vision of Confluence pretty damn effective with it's super high stability and high rate of fire (for a scout rifle).

I feel like primary weapon crucible balance is almost perfect now, each of the four is completely usable and each has specific circumstances where they are ideal.

I think it checks if you actually shot or killed a dude every 5 minutes or so. Tried hiding in a corner and moving a bit around while I was watching quicklooks or something. Still got kicked out around the 5 minute mark.

There was a point where I stepped out of the room during a boss fight at the end of a strike. Nothing malicious, I think I had to answer a call or something. But it was an easy strike and before I got back to the controller, my teammates already killed the boss. Ends up that kept me from earning the XP for the kill and didn't complete the bounty for that boss. It's entirely possible that I also hit a bug and it wasn't some idle hooks that kept me from that stuff. I've had that happen for other bounties and bosses when I was fighting them alone.

@ll_exile_ll: I still don't like Pulse Rifles. They seem to lack the damage of a Scout Rifle and the rate of fire of an Auto Rifle.

They do certainly seem to be the least used, but some of the better ones can kill in two bursts if all six bullets are headshots. They have their place, but most people seem to be preferring the other weapons at this point.

The game checks for active inputs, so rubber banding the triggers or analog sticks, or both, will still get you kicked out. Everything outside the crucible has a 15 minute timer, where if the game hasn't detected any active inputs for 15 minutes, you get kicked out of that instance. The crucible, is the same thing, just with a 5 minute timer.

So I joined a clash match like 20 minutes ago and 4 out of 6 players on my team were afk; which is basically what I was trying to find out in the process of this thread. That is some hilarious shit. The other team clearly was used to this as they had perfected methods of killing each spawn wave as fast as possible. I got some enjoyment out of pretending to be afk then shooting them in the back, though there's some artistry to doing this perfectly that I have not yet mastered.