farm code - fact or fiction?

so what's up with the farmcode? is it a fact or fiction? has anybody from anet ever confirmed the farmcode? If there is such a thing, how do you get rid of it?

Supposedly it was removed when Hard Mode was implemented.

Although, I have many times wondered if they really did remove it.

use search now that it's working again, this topic has been gone over in excruciating detail

Confirmed to exist, basically if you zoned and repeatedly killed the same critters over and over your drop quality degraded until you got nothing. In fact, there was a nice little pop-up hint that told you this at some point. You could generally "reset" your drops by doing non-bot type things (clearing more than one area, doing missions, etc).

However it was removed with the addition of Hard Mode and Loot Scaling so the thing is all moot. Loot scaling means that enemies drop fewer items based on the size of the time. When the above farm code was active a solo player got 8 times the drops someone in a team did, with loot scaling you will get roughly double by playing solo (and by solo I mean true solo, not hench/hero as they act like normal players and take their share of the drops/gold). It is the equivalent of going in an old group of four.

Several things are excluded from loot scaling (Golds, Greens, rare materials, and a few other things) and you will get eight times the amount someone who always plays in a group of eight will get so there is still incentive to solo farm, just not the massive amount of drops you used to get.

After that there is some evidence that killing things rapidly (such as one normally does while farming) will result in fewer normal drops than killing things one at a time, however you still make the same money and maybe a little less (a large portion of your GPH now is from those rares which are not effected by the loot scale). Personally I rather suspect that the "loot scale" is closer in line to the Necromancer's Soul Reaping wherein Anet is mostly moderating how much per hour you can earn, not so much a simple "invisible players" taking drops.

Farming code or not, my drops are decreasing when I do repetitive runs. Decreasing from golds and tomes down to a few common crafting materials and the occasional white item. I have spoken with other people about this and it is the case with them too. (Interestingly and fortunately the Underworld appears to be exempt from this.)

So yes. There is an anti-farming code there. Maybe they took the old farming code out and put in a new one. Maybe they never took it out. But there is some code out there that is reducing the quality of drops when farming.

Do you ever notice when all of a sudden you start getting tons of gold drops after a few dry runs...the same day? In sequence? I noticed that recently..been spending alot of time in FoW and it's become rather random. first few runs of the day sometimes yielded a couple golds and a shard for each of us.(2-man) Couple runs later I get 6 gold drops and 4 shards each...doing nothing else in between.

In fact, I've doubled my shard count in the past week from doing almost non-stop FoW farming with my monk and one other. Now when I go into UW, it's pretty consistently dry runs, with one or two ecto drops here or there, and only when we branch off and do other things like chaos plains or the first two monument quests, both of which are doable (carefully) with a dual monk team.

You can try it for yourself. Go to an area that you enter from a town but which also has an exit to another map - Eternal Grove explorable, Rhea's Crater, etc. Enter from the town, kill the bosses, go out the exit to the next map and turn around and go back in. Kill the bosses again, go back out that exit and come in again.

Do that over and over and over and over, for several hours, and you will see the amount and quality of the drops decline rather rapidly.

If you aren't lucky enough to have, say, Incetol's Focus drop during the 1st 15 tries, it might finally drop on the 100th (or 125th or 150th - it's all a blur) which was my recent experience. Still, I amassed 3 stacks of cloth and, on Monday alone, 74 bone charms while trying, along with almost 100k XP and maybe 12k gold over the 3 days.

omg, omg - it was on Tues that Incetol's finally dropped for me (been trying since Sun to get it); reset my farm flag today (Thurs) by doing a couple missions, decided to go out again (actually, I'm trying to get another Vengence Seeker) and - boom! - another Incetol's dropped on the 1st run. omg, omg, rofl

farming code is there, farming flags are there, despite whatever Anet says.

kill things rapidly and enjoy reduced drops
kill the same things over and over and enjoy reduced and lower-quality drops.

As a test, I farmed Elemental Hunks constantly for some days, and quickly went from runs averaging 1.3k worth of common things and coins + a good amount of gold drops to (now) runs averaging 500 gp worth of stuff, and 1 gold thing every 6 complete runs (last one was a non-max weapon).

It takes just a few minutes going from V.Good to Average, and within an hour you go from Average to Crap.

I really think they introduced two drop-reducing codes from mobs: one akin to the Soul Reaping, and one similar to the Resetting Chests

Crap... that's gonna make farming my Darkroot's a PITA...

Anet says it is no longer there that we only have the loot scale thing. We do not know exactly *how* loot scale works and what I (and others - not my original idea) proposed about scaling GPH fits in with it and is quite doable on their end.

If you choose to not believe what they write (either because they lie or are incompetent) choose whatever you want to believe and run with it, you aren't following anything other than your own feelings at that point anyway and nothing will shake that believe from you (same is true over my GPH theory - I really do not know and is based on my *personal* experience).

You can also find examples and counter examples of everything - I have yet to note any reduction in drops regardless of how many times I try it and how many different ones I attempt (including things like mentioned above). I do notice highs and lows and that they tend to by cyclical but aren't related to how often I farm some place (in fact I find them not related to anything - I may notice that "OMG, drops suck" but if I generally keep with it a while then they go back to being great again, then terrible, then great, etc).

Since the programmers removed said code you will *never* get a confirmation of anything other than what the code does, there is no reason to ask for it and rants/complaints about it will pretty much get ignored by the devs.

In the end it doesn't matter, as of the loot scale update farming most decent places will net between 8-12k per hour over a long period of time regardless of what "trick" you use to over come whatever farming code you happen to believe is active. If you find a place that does over that keep it secret as it will get nerfed unless it is hard enough few can do the run (IMO they feel that range to be the sweet spot where a bunch of farmers can still afford high end armors yet not hurt the entire economy, it seems to be where they "adjust" farming spots to be).

I don't know, I was doing some repetitive 6 minute runs in Hard mode and even after doing it for over an hour I was getting more and more gold drops. But them when I go off to do some missions or dungeons I get nothing but whites.
I blame gambler's fallacy or selective pattern recognition.

The old farming code was removed. I do not think ANet is lying.

However, Loot Scaling may have either intended or unintended features that resemble farming code in their effects. This is not hard to observe.

Farm code did not go away. LOL why would Anet get rid of it? They want to hurt the Chinese farmers not help them. Common sense will get you a long way on this one. Farm code and Loot scale is the Anet response to gold farmers. They have done a damn good job of screwing this game over for last 29 months in their Jihad against them.

I would tend to agree with this. The only thing I ever farm is kurzick faction, and that at arborstone, hard mode, where you have 25 monsters and 4 bosses within 10 minutes of each other.

To get even one white drop in that little run is currently nothing short of amazing. But that may have something to do with its Bot Central reputation.

All a-net did was make the gold cost more....and now you have to buy it on websites of the seller and not e-bay. Oh and they made more people want to buy it since we can no longer farm the money ourself. I think the loot scale is the single biggest downfall of GW PvE. Guess that is why I only PvP now.

Yeah this loot scaling bullcrap has got to go.

Your immaturity is showing.

You can actually make perfectly good money just playing the game for fun, and selling your drops to merchants without ever doing player trades.

The object of Guild Wars has never been to make more money than anyone else. If that's why you're playing it, have you considered Monopoly as an alternative?

4 Hours of farming battle of Turai's Procession to get Legendary Survivor.
Kill count in hm 70*6*4. Amount of gold drops 1.

You must be Gaile Gray in disguise, this is word-by-word an answer I would expect from her xD xD ^^

I would like, however, to point out a couple of things, hopefully usefull to understand my pov.

First, just look at the goldpieces that sometime drop from mobs while you farm: if (I take the elemental hunks as an example) at the beginning they drop little stacks of 95-110 gp, and after many runs you see only 55-75 stacks dropping.... how would you link it with the Loot Scaling? It seems clear to me that it is something more, something specific.

Also, I think we ALL know that if u kill a group of mobs in the same instant, you'll get way less drops than killing them individually / over some time. Again, how could this be linked to Loot Scaling?

Lastly, cyberjanet mentions another aspect, debated in the past and negated by Gaile, but in some locations / areas so apparent that it seems undeniable: "extremely popular" areas seem to give you less drops even if you never farmed there, so many are speculating of a further code, lowering drops accordingly to the total number of players collectively insisting on the same area. I am still not totally positive towards this last theory, tho.

Farm destroyer cores seems the farming code really affects these past your first stack. I recieved 3-7 cores a run clearing the first wave of them before my first 250 cores, now i recieve 2-4 a run.

Ectos in UW used to get 2-5 a run (3 monument quests) now I get 1 every 3-5 UW runs so I quit doing that because it is not worth the time wasted farming for 1 ecto.

took a break from farming to cap roughly 60 elites in cantha and not 1 drop from any of the bosses was even worth my mouse moveing over it to pick it up LOL /rank for uber drops :-)

Farming code does exist and the trick that people think resets your drops well that does not work. I have done every trick in the book to reset drops and as you can see it does not work.