Creative Anti-Farming

I like the idea of only being able to open the elite chests once per 24 hour period. But, that doesn't really stop solo farming of other areas like raptors and vermin areas. So, it goes back to another idea someone had that if you use SF or 55 monk or 600 smite build while farming there will be no drops. Seems simple enough in idea, don't know how hard it would be to code. Of course my idea is still valid as well. You can only use 1 rune of each calibur per character + rune of vigor of any size. So, that would mean only 1 superior, 1 major and 1 minor rune + any rune of vigor. That would pretty much end the 55 monk for sure.

I do UWSC, DTSC, SoO Dungeon runs, Raptor Farm, and pay for certain dungeons to be ran sometimes. I don't understand the reason for this thread. There is nothing wrong with running or farming. Farming/Running is a choice, you don't have to pay someone else to do it for you, you still have the option to make a balanced group and do these things. Just cause the majority of everyone else is paying doesn't mean the game should be changed to fit your balanced group needs. Hell I'd like more loot to drop and more solo areas to farm myself but you don't see me starting threads about my own little reasons for it.

LOL maybe if you had actually *read* any of the thread you would understand it. It wasnt farm-hate.

Reading Comprehension FTW!!

<tosses you a bag of Smarties>
Eat those, pray they work.

nerf nerfc nerf nerf nerf nerf
That's all that's ever said

How is removing things to do in gw or nerfing it going to improve it?
It's not like groups actually do them anymore.

Excellent! Then you are exactly the type of player I was hoping would respond to this thread! Since the developers have said they plan to do something to stop Eternal SF and 600/Smite what would be your preference? What do you think would satisfy the dev's need to affect farming, and yet still have the least negative effect on your own playstyle?

Farming is a terrible way to make money.

The Dev's don't need to do anything about the farming. It's apart of the game and will always be that way.

If SF / 600 was nerfed then I'd do my usual QQ about it, not play for a few days, come back and load the next farming build off PvX wiki. I still don't understand why these things have to be nerfed. All I see is people list ways to nerf or remove content from the game and that to me seems like moving backwards. If anything more content needs added and less restrictions should be made. The hidden reasons behind many posts here seem to be from "casual" players who are upset that other players have more gold and would like to see those players farm runs be nerfed.

The "reason" farming needs to be "dealt" with, is all the griefers out there. 55's were hated, they got nerfed, UB was hated, it got nerfed. Now SF and 600/smite is taking away from people's fun, so the "nerf it" call went out. What will be next? The build that replaces SF and 600/smite?

I know the OP is looking for suggestions to "lighten" the nerf hammer. How about, once a week, if you have less than 300k on your account (in storage and on characters) when you log in, you get 200k. Do you think people will quit worrying about how everyone makes money? Probably not. There will always be the vocal minority out there.

There are times when the powers that be, should ignore the vocal minority.

You still missed the point. Its not anyone here saying the devs SHOULD do something about farming - its the devs who said they ARE going to.
Its not "players who are jealous of farmers" posting - I AM a farmer. The question is: WHEN they do nerf these builds, whats the best way for them to do it and not kill the farms completely?

if you lower the cash income of farming builds, you'll have to higher the general income, because there's an insane amount of cash already in game

nerfing farming builds without deeply changing in game mechanics would be a terrible mistake

Whoever wants to nerf what, there will always the same thing in mind: Speed clear, farming, Gimmick Builds. Seeing how far the game went I'd prefer keeping farming as it is.


Conclusion: farming and builds are running in circles.

Where they nerfed RoJ > MoP came in.

Too late, they already nerfed farming by introducing rate of kill scaling. So unless you farm loot nerf exempt items the problem is already solved.

The problem was never farming, but professional gold selling farmers. And those bots got a lot more popular after every anti-farming drive, because all that happened was that money became more valuable to players. Finally, NC got around to banning them (remember all the threads asking why they never did anything about the districts full of bots?) so all the anti-farm rubbish is now not needed.

Farming is also the most casual player friendly activity you can do. No time commitment, easy, solo etc. If you only have 15-30 mins available to play, you can't do anything in GW other than farm. For many people with commitments, kids etc. Forming up in a pug to do a mission or dungeon, or some PvP is simply not an option.

Fixed it for you. Two great reasons to farm:

1) You're too poor to trade items of real value.
2) You enjoy it.

But you're correct that you'll never become one of the game's wealthiest players by farming, regardless of the number of hours invested. Similar to IRL.

Yeah, thats exactly what I want... a game that limits when and how I can play it. Even better, why don't we just make it so that you can only log on for 15 minutes on tuesdays and have the server down all other times? That would be awesome. </sarcasm>

Seriously, let people play how they want to play. If you have a problem with it.. QUIT!

Scale the probability of rare drops (i.e. exclusive/desirable drops) from end chests to the duration of the time required by a team to complete the area, with caps at either end.

Let's look at Fissure of Woe for an example. Let's say that the reward scaling is capped at 45 minutes on the low end and 3 hours on the high end. The team that finishes in 3 or greater hours will have 4x the chance of getting an Obsidian Edge from the Chest of Woe. Skilled teams will use this to kill every creature in the instance and collect as much loot as possible thus reaping further rewards, whereas less skilled teams are still rewarded for their efforts, but not as much. On the other hand, a speed clear team that finishes in 30 minutes will have a significantly smaller chance at rares, but if they can beat the low-cap, can farm the end chest more efficiently. Statistically speaking, it would take 4 runs of under 45 minutes to get the same rare potential as the slower team. Still, if you can beat the cap, as in the 30 minutes example, in the same 3 hour time frame, you get 1.5 times the chance at the rare from the end chest at the cost of the normal loot from the instance.

Sure, it's far from perfect, but it's an idea that (if well balanced) would encourage and allow different playstyles. It encourages speed clear teams to go faster and compete at the most efficient "clear" mechanism, but it also encourages normal teams to take their time, completely clear the area, or even just enjoy the scenery.

As I understand it, the main motivation for nerfing farming is not to grief the farmers, but to better balance the PvE game economy. If a farmer's income is more than several times that of someone not focused on farming, that's considered bad for the game in general. One way to balance it is to boost income for "normal" play (which has been done to some extent), and the other is to nerf farming.

This would not work at all. Speed Clear teams could simply zone in, AFK at the beginning for 2.5 hours, and then clear it through and get 4x the drops. Sure, it would reduce the number of "runs" per day, but there would still be the same amount of cash coming out.

I think you're missing the point. There's a cap, so "slow farming" wouldn't be profitable. With what you suggested, the speed clear team in question would actually be less profitable than a newb team that clears the whole area at a consistent pace and gathers end rewards.

(1) Any "daily quota" would result in people with more accounts having the advantage to put 100% of their spare time into their farmgrinding effort. That effect is already bad enough with Xunlai betting.

(2) If the number of times you are able to start an instance is limited to once a day, pugging these areas will end right there, due to the risk of wasting a whole day with bad pugs.

The smartest thing on my books would be to introduce an item affecting the lootdrop rate, while at the same time destroying the ability to solofarm or speedclear things. That way teamplayer get the reward, not solists. The real money making farm builds rely on a +20% enchantment duration, so that is the slot the +20% loot upgrade has to go.

Playing as a team yields only 12.5% of the loot a solofarmer makes. So even if the +20 loot upgrade stacks across multiple players to a whopping +160% loot for the party, then each player still only makes 20% of the solofarmer. So in order to close the insanely huge gap regular groups have in contrast to solofarmers, even higher numbers can be thrown around.

With such a system tank and spank Permasin groups would then be a ubiquitous pest, at which point one can see that changes to farming and the loot system tend to get out of hand rather quickly and might prove to be too much work for the LiveTeam.

No. Just no. This will give tons of gold to people with multiple accounts as if Xunlai wasn't already enough (forget that is is down). Also it would encourage lazyness (why do I need to make gold? in a couple days the game will give me it!).