Not Planned Overwatch Discord AFK Bot

[Buster]

It has become obvious that a few people in the overwatch discord have taken it upon themselves to afk in any of the voice channels to artificially boost their activity rank. I feel like this should be limited to a 1-2 hour maximum to make it possible for people who are new/cant afk to be on the top leader boards.

wahtur - the afk master

I understand the want for the server to be active but I also think I want to be #1 and I cant do that with these afk noobs.

 

[CelDamage]

I do think there should be an afk channel, however we should not discourage joining the voice channels at random, because usually thats how an active vc can be jumpstarted. Most the time when I jump into an afk channel with someone muted they will unmute

 

[Buster]

I do think there should be an afk channel, however we should not discourage joining the voice channels at random, because usually thats how an active vc can be jumpstarted. Most the time when I jump into an afk channel with someone muted they will unmute

Maybe this is too complicated for bots, but if you're afk in any channel other than the designated afk channel, you get moved to the afk cahnnel, and the hours spent in the afk channel dont show on the leaderboards.

 

[EDisch222]

I'm kinda split 50/50 on this one. We encourage and still encourage people to afk in our discord to promote activity, and I think the bot giving XP encourages people to "seed" the discord more. At the same time, I don't think it would be the end of the world if we disable it giving XP if deafened

I want to be #1 and I cant do that with these afk noobs.

I think you might be interpreting the xp as a competitive thing and I don't think that's how it's meant to be. Leveling up should be a personal thing, it's supposed to be fun and a way to get some cool new ranks on the discord.

I don't think we should promote competitiveness to the bot and I don't know if disabling the afk xp will or will not, because what's stopping people from just afking in the lobby with their mic muted? or what's going to stop people moving out of the afk chat once they get moved in there? it'll just make a bunch of messy gray areas and people will start complaining about other people "abusing the system". (That was kinda a side tangent, but yeah.)

TLDR: I'm probably overcomplicating this. 50/50 What are other people's opinions?

 

[Wahtur]

I like the idea of an afk channel for anyone inactive >30 minutes?
and reduced/removed xp gain in that channel

 

[Star]

I dont think the bot has the settings for this kinda thing

 

[Star]

but I also think I want to be #1 and I cant do that with these afk noobs.

There are a multitude of channels for you to use, number 1 is still obtainable for you if you vibe out in chat and talk in voice.

 

[Rykes]

A few things in regards to this.

I will start off with saying this. Since this isn't a bot made by EdgeGamers I can't configure it exactly how I'd want or change certain things. There is a good bit of configuration settings that come with the bot but not enough to find a happy compromise here.

Discord Seeding
There is an option within the bot to disable voice chat XP while deafened. I currently have it enabled so you can gain XP while deafened and I think we'd see a large decrease in activity if we were to turn this setting off. We have been encouraging people to AFK in our voice channels for almost a month now and normally we have one or two members doing so, and it's looked good on our Discord, it helps boost our stats, etc. However since implementing this bot it's clearly increased people "seeding" the Discord. Just right now I can look on my other monitor and see five separate people currently AFKing in the Discord. I want to continue to encourage this behavior because people AFK in voice channels leads to someone undeafening eventually and then another and so on and so forth. Seeding the server leads to more activity and I want to keep this type of behavior going.

AFK Channel
There is the option of an AFK channel however once you break it down this channel will serve little to no purpose. With the settings at our disposable we could make a channel that sends people who have been AFK for one hour and we can make users in this channel gain no XP. Okay well everyone AFKing is on their computer anyways, you can sent to the AFK channel you simply rejoin Cozy Longue. Let's say they don't rejoin Cozy Longue, having three to five users in an AFK channel as opposed to a general channels doesn't look too hot.

Competitiveness
The bot wasn't intended for people to be super competitive about it, but I know how people like their leaderboards and enjoy being on top. If you are struggling to climb the ranks try talking in a text channels. It is 6xp per text message and 3xp per minute in a voice channel. In reality it is much easier to level up via messaging in the discord as opposed to AFKing in a channel.

 

[kuantum]

hey, that just means you need to afk harder then, huh?

 

[Buster]

A few things in regards to this.

I will start off with saying this. Since this isn't a bot made by EdgeGamers I can't configure it exactly how I'd want or change certain things. There is a good bit of configuration settings that come with the bot but not enough to find a happy compromise here.

Discord Seeding
There is an option within the bot to disable voice chat XP while deafened. I currently have it enabled so you can gain XP while deafened and I think we'd see a large decrease in activity if we were to turn this setting off. We have been encouraging people to AFK in our voice channels for almost a month now and normally we have one or two members doing so, and it's looked good on our Discord, it helps boost our stats, etc. However since implementing this bot it's clearly increased people "seeding" the Discord. Just right now I can look on my other monitor and see five separate people currently AFKing in the Discord. I want to continue to encourage this behavior because people AFK in voice channels leads to someone undeafening eventually and then another and so on and so forth. Seeding the server leads to more activity and I want to keep this type of behavior going.

AFK Channel
There is the option of an AFK channel however once you break it down this channel will serve little to no purpose. With the settings at our disposable we could make a channel that sends people who have been AFK for one hour and we can make users in this channel gain no XP. Okay well everyone AFKing is on their computer anyways, you can sent to the AFK channel you simply rejoin Cozy Longue. Let's say they don't rejoin Cozy Longue, having three to five users in an AFK channel as opposed to a general channels doesn't look too hot.

Competitiveness
The bot wasn't intended for people to be super competitive about it, but I know how people like their leaderboards and enjoy being on top. If you are struggling to climb the ranks try talking in a text channels. It is 6xp per text message and 3xp per minute in a voice channel. In reality it is much easier to level up via messaging in the discord as opposed to AFKing in a channel.

Cool, thank you for a thorough answer. I’d say this is done then.

hey, that just means you need to afk harder then, huh?

What’s your favorite flavor of crayon?

 

[MS]

If you plant dead seeds you’ll have to dig them up sooner or later. I don’t see the point in getting people to AFK if they’re not actually active. The point of the leaderboards is the promote activity, not AFKing.
Faking activity is deceitful and dishonest, I don’t understand why it’s so heavily encouraged. Host more events, genuinely make people want to use the discord. It’s like faking reviews on Amazon, or lying to someone about how good a restaurant is. You can bot a service, views, clicks, etc. as much as you want, it’s not gonna improve it.

 

[kuantum]

Faking activity is deceitful and dishonest, I don’t understand why it’s so heavily encouraged.

Then it becomes a chicken vs. egg issue. You can't force newcomers to interact with the new community, right? So how do you keep player retention? You have active players. However, the issue is now that the active players become less interested in the game over time, burnout, etc. so if newcomers come into the Discord and there's barely any chat discussion, not one soul in a VC, what's the point in staying?

Do I agree it's deceitful? Maybe. However, how else do you grow without some sort of seeding this way?

I think this post sums it up nicely, and the person who wrote it I imagine is one of the reasons why the OW discord is rapidly growing and on track for a 1k members by the end of March (I think, maybe February...maybe).

 

[Star]

If you plant dead seeds you’ll have to dig them up sooner or later. I don’t see the point in getting people to AFK if they’re not actually active. The point of the leaderboards is the promote activity, not AFKing.
Faking activity is deceitful and dishonest, I don’t understand why it’s so heavily encouraged. Host more events, genuinely make people want to use the discord. It’s like faking reviews on Amazon, or lying to someone about how good a restaurant is. You can bot a service, views, clicks, etc. as much as you want, it’s not gonna improve it.

People sitting in voice channels waiting for members to join is not botting. They arent afk, they are waiting for people. Similar to seeding a server, it works.

 

[CelDamage]

People sitting in voice channels waiting for members to join is not botting. They arent afk, they are waiting for people. Similar to seeding a server, it works.

exactly this. It's not botting a server to join a vc and wait for people to become active. People are more likely to join a vc with some people idling than nobody at all. Most of the time when you join a vc with a handful muted members, some will unmute. Most are still at the computer just waiting for others to get on

 

[MS]

People sitting in voice channels waiting for members to join is not botting. They arent afk, they are waiting for people. Similar to seeding a server, it works.

They’re not waiting for members to join, they’re AFK to increase their rank.

exactly this. It's not botting a server to join a vc and wait for people to become active. People are more likely to join a vc with some people idling than nobody at all. Most of the time when you join a vc with a handful muted members, some will unmute. Most are still at the computer just waiting for others to get on

I’m not in the OW discord but from what I’ve read it just sounds like people are AFK for hours on end. If they actually are at the keyboard and waiting for friends then that makes sense. But 1-2+ hours are definitely excessive.

 

[Star]

They’re not waiting for members to join, they’re AFK to increase their rank.

I’m not in the OW discord but from what I’ve read it just sounds like people are AFK for hours on end. If they actually are at the keyboard and waiting for friends then that makes sense. But 1-2+ hours are definitely excessive.

You aren't in the OW discord so how can you say they are AFK for the sole reason to increase rank? The reason they are in those channels is literally to get new members in the channels

 

[EDisch222]

I’m not in the OW discord but from what I’ve read

I feel like that's a slight issue in this conversation. Not being apart of the discord might make the afking seem worse than it really is. (Which I encourage you to join! It's always nice to have conflicting points of view, starts conversations.) From my point of view since we have started to advocate people using the voice channel, afk or not, we have been seeing a lot of new players using the voice channels and getting involved in the community.

Host more events

This kinda enforces my point. We have hosted an event 7 of the past 7 days (excluding today) and we are going to be hosting 4 more in the next 4 days.

Faking activity is deceitful and dishonest,

Nearly every person who afk also attends events and queues with people on a daily basis.

 

[CelDamage]

The people who are afk since the bot were added are the same people who idled before the bot was added, they are not doing it just for rank

 

[Buster]

I don't know how this got to lying and deceit, I was just trying to say add a limit to how long people can afk in a "normal" voice channel so that the activity tracker only tracks your true activity.

Although it sounded good at first a separate afk channel now doesn't seem reasonable as the cozy lounge has become that.

I also see that afk'ing is good for the server and the activity rank is a "reward" for it.

I feel that this idea has gotten the feedback I wanted and I don't really see a need for this discussion to keep going.

 

[Rykes]

I don’t see the point in getting people to AFK if they’re not actually active. The point of the leaderboards is the promote activity, not AFKing.

People who sit in the voice channels are active. In fact they are always our most active members. We don't really get random people or people not really involved sitting in the voice channels. They are members of the community who sit there, wait, and if they are AFK they AFK, but I'd say 75% of the time someone joins unmuted and everyone else unmutes to talk.

Faking activity is deceitful and dishonest, I don’t understand why it’s so heavily encouraged

It's not fake activity. Someone in a voice channel is activity. These are real people sitting in our voice channels not bots. It's just seeding. If this was the case why do we allow so many people to sit deafened on TeamSpeak, stay in spectators in our CSGO servers, sit in queue on our FiveM server, etc.

Host more events, genuinely make people want to use the discord.

We host events almost every other day and our ECs all are really overworked in all honesty. We do a lot and we host a lot. With more admins will come more ECs which will come more events but I honestly think we're doing extremely well for events right now. If we get even a few more ECs we'll honestly be hosting them daily.

They’re not waiting for members to join, they’re AFK to increase their rank.

They were sitting in the voice channels deafened prior to the bot being introduced it has been something we'll been promoting for over a month now. This isn't something new we just have maybe 1-2 more people who don't normally sit in voice channels deafened doing it. Also on top of this which I already addressed, sitting in a voice channel almost does nothing for your rank. It's 3xp per minute whereas messaging is 6xp per message. If people were really looking to boost their rank they would have pointless conversation or end up spamming a channel however that's not the case. People more often than not in the voice channels to seed the server and gaining 3xp per minute, which again I stress is super low, is just a reward.

not in the OW discord but from what I’ve read it just sounds like people are AFK for hours on end.

I mean this with all do respect, but you can learn a lot from actually looking at the Discord as opposed to reading a thread about a small issue which I already clarified. Our Discord is used by lots of people daily. At peaks hours we usually have 2-3 lobbies going for either casual or competitive gaming. Our text channels are also actively used for people having discussion revolving the game or just talking in general. It's not like people deafened in voice channels is a majority of our activity. Most of our activity comes from people meeting up with others to queue, and what helps the most with starting these lobbies is the people in our voice channels. Let's say 4 people are deafeneded in a voice channel. Someone new joins so two undeafen. The new person asks they if they want to play quickplay. All three of them leave to a different channel to play and when people see them playing quickplay three more join. Simple as that with people deafened in a voice channel we just got a full lobby of people queueing. This is usually what happens.

Now once again not trying to sound rude, but before making assumptions or basing how you think things normally operate or run in the OW Discord (https://discord.gg/ZaYjZmF) I highly suggest joining it and seeing for yourself. We usually peak at 11-12am with our EU crowd and 5-8pm with our NA crowd. We host events almost every night or every other night and we have a decently sized returning player base. Our discord is currently at roughly 900 members and we are gaining about 200-300 members a month. We are far from having to fake activity or something of the sort. However, when people join a Discord usually they decide if they are going to use it or leave it within the first few minutes of being there and if they see people in the voice channels at that moment, odds are they will stay. So if we don't have a lobby going at the moment (which we usually always do except for at really odd hours like 2-9am) it looks extremely good and welcoming on us.