The AFK Problem in Battlegrounds
If you’ve ever fought in the battlegrounds of Warcraft like Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, or most notoriously Alterac Valley, you probably understand the problem of AFK players. Rather than fight and participate in the battle, you’ll often see these players hanging out by the graveyard or starting point. Here they’ll sit, from the very beginning of the match to the end, hoping to leech a small amount of honor from your team (which probably lost because they lacked the teammates).
It’s a frowned upon tactic that I personally don’t understand. If you don’t enjoy fighting other players, why pvp at all? The gear acquired is really only good for PvP, so I’m not entirely sure what the motivation is. Regardless Blizzard has taken steps to nip this problem in the bud, so to speak. They’ve implemented a reporting system, where players can report AFKers. This gives the player a debuff which stops any honor gained until they get back into combat. Sometimes this works, other times the afker realizes what happened, runs off to get killed, and then plops back at the graveyard/entry point again.
What can you do to stop it? Currently not very much, except try your best and fight on if your team is losing rather than plop yourself at the graveyard and do nothing.
There’s also a UI addon you can use to automatically report AFKers. This can be found here.
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