I came back to Halo 5 at the beginning of June, after a few years off, to grind the last few levels. Started at late 146, and am now early 151. Firefight has contributed to about 95% of that XP - Mythic FF wherever possible.
During that time, I’ve played with a number of accounts who just AFK for entire games, and it’s gotten bad enough to the point where I’ve had to come to the forums to complain. It seems that the only thing that will kick players for being idle, is if there no movement whatsoever, after X amount of minutes - which isn’t an effective solution.
I have an old, busted controller (which I don’t use) - if I were to tap up on my left analog stick and then release it, my character will continue to walk forwards indefinitely - so the game will continue to read that as an input, and therefore I’m not AFK - when I could be. Now, I don’t know if this is what other people are doing, but it’s the first easy work-around that’s come to mind.
Why is there nothing in place to check whether a player has 0 kills for the entire game? (Even this suggestion isn’t a perfect solution.) It’s quite frustrating, because in some cases, these AFKers have come away with a higher score than some of the other players, as they get the survival bonuses from some, if not all of the rounds.
There’s one player I frequently match with, who for a long while I thought was just a “bad” player (they always ranked low on the scoreboard, and their service tag is “NOOB”), but I eventually realised they were playing round 1, getting a few kills, and then hiding for the next 4 rounds. I even messaged them asking if they were AFKing, and they replied back confirming so.
What grinds my gears, is going sweaty and spending reqs, either to carry AFKers to victory, or losing round 5 by a few seconds, because an AFKer took up one of the 8 player slots that could have been taken by someone actually playing the game.
Currently, I’m having to message all the other players after the game to report the AFKers, but that doesn’t seem to be working because I keep getting re-matched with them.
I propose that the idle kick timer is updated, so that players either get booted for being AFK (what’s currently in place), or get kicked when 2 consecutive rounds has passed, where the players hasn’t achieved any kills (this would exclude players who get assists in those rounds, to respect the dedicated warthog drivers out there). If that’s too hard, perhaps disable XP and req points for those who finish with 0 kills, to at least de-incentivise them, or something similar?
Either way, I feel like something needs to be done, because it negatively affects gameplay, and this somewhat simple change would definitely help reduce that problem.
Thanks for reading.
Zappy180.