Overfarming

I'm sorry, let me clarify what I meant when I said overfarming. I meant farming the same mobs over and over again until the drop rates seem to decrease. Is this a myth?

It would seem he meant what is more commonly known as loot scaling.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Loot_scaling

To the OP: Im not sure there is any definitive proof one way or the other. I know some folks have done some math by doing identical runs at identical times with 2 different characters. Over time they collected some data that was kind of interesting.

If you search it on the forumns here im sure you will find it.

Now having farmed Vaettirs for the last 3 days solid without returning to town, if concluded the drops do in fact change as you grind it out. When i first started friday afternoon the drops were great, lots of golds and virtually every vaettir dropped event items or weapons of the colored variety.

By this evening some mobs 36 in the north end 24 in the south did not drop an item. Not 1. What does this mean?? Nothing really. To me it means that after dozens and dozens of runs the drops poop out for a period of time. Am i right in assuming this? probably not, however that is what IVE found.

take it for whats its worth. .... very little.



Cronk

I'm not going to bombard you with numbers and statistics but in my humble opinion drops are in fact affected by over-farming.

I've been farming since release. Before 55 there was RoF spam/Zealots, then 55 with old school prot-bond. This was all before loot scaling. Back then I do not think any anti-farm code existed. You could farm the trolls outside droks forever and the drops were always amazing. Zero decline in rare drop rates, etc. Well sometime between "the good ole days" and when loot scaling was introduced something changed. Again this is just my opinion, but I do think anti-farm was introduced at some point that affects your drops when you "overfarm" a place over and over.

My fix to this has always been to complete a mission/quest or two. Your mileage may vary but this has always worked for me.

The other thing I like to do is have several farm spots and try not to overfarm a certain place. This is always hard for me because some places are just better than others, but I think it's necessary. Also have several chars with several places and just switch it up every other run or so.

I'm probably paranoid but that's how I roll. I'm sure tons with dispute my theory so please just take it as an opinion from an old school farmer that's been around the block a few times.

Happy farming,

Levi

I don't know about this one. After reading the loot scaling page nothing was said about reducing drops for "advanced" solo farmers based upon the rate of farming. It just says that they were receiving a lot more reward before loot scaling.

I don't think that solo farmers that repeatedly farm an area end up receiving less valuable drops. I think its all in the person's head doing the farming.

For example,

Jimmy likes farming raptors.
In Jimmy's first raptor farm run he received a black dye and two lock picks. Upon returning to farm again Jimmy only received a spiraling spear, brown dye, and assassin tome. Jimmy feels after the second run that the GW monitors are prejudice and hateful towards him and must have nerfed his drops.

I don't think there is a specific anti-farming code. For a while I was compiling some fairly exhaustive raptor farming stats and when you start looking at numbers over large numbers of runs, they clearly don't decline. I don't doubt that the powers that be might scale back overall drop rates in certain exploited areas, so I do accept stories about people who claim certain farms seemed to be more profitable in previous times. However, at least based on my stats, you are safe to farm the same spot over and over without any decline.

One thing I've been meaning to study when I have time is whether there is some sort of anti-farm code preventing drops within seconds after entering a zone. While farming various Nick items or Chunks of Drake flesh for Thackeray, things don't seem to ever drop if you kill something right outside the door. I hit the drakes about 20 times in a row with literally NOTHING dropping. I then started letting the character sit in the zone for a full minute and stuff dropped very readily (was able to farm about 12 chunks of drake flesh in about 30 minutes or so). I noticed this same trend when farming the ruby djinn right outside the bone palace that week that Nick was looking for their item. Kill them right away, nothing. Wait a minute, essences drop pretty readily. If I have time I'll actually compile some stats and post them. Otherwise just take this as purely speculative on my part without any data.

In general, be wary of what's called "confirmation bias". This is when you already have a preconceived notion (like leechers increase drops with raptor farming or perhaps what I posted in the previous paragraph). It is a human tendency to remember the times that a farm run fit into your belief and forgot the times that it didn't. Every time I confront superstitious raptor farmers they never actually have any data or ever tracked their runs, they just "remember" that they got better drops while taking leechers. I suspect that a lot of the anti-farm beliefs are merely a form of confirmation bias.

There is no way they could justify setting a limit on how much could be farmed in a given area.

They have to treat all players equally so the guy that gets to the raptors many months after intensive farming began has the same chance as anyone else.

Any over farming rule would have to apply to individual accounts and I am not sure they would bother to set that up.

Also when it comes to working out the drop rate for anything few consider the numbers involved.

You would probably have to farm intensively on a daily basis over many months to work out an aprox %.

When I used to do Vaettir, my initial runs in a sitting yielded significantly more drops than later runs, and the quality of the drops similarly decreased. I noticed this affected both normal drops and event items, and this occurred every single time I went out. I took notes on how many golds and party items I got per run, but that post-it is long lost.

Regardless of my own experiences, there has never been official confirmation on this from ANet, and no one has definitely proved anything. There are accounts like mine, accounts that say drops stay the same, etc. We'll never really know for certain.

I really hate the theory that drops are dependant on how many on that area are farming - eg on that server and on that place.
Ive gone to russian dist before and theres been no1 there - even sat for a while an watched ( yup im sad lol ) and ive decided to go in and guess what - either there was a few thousand hidden farmers or i was havin extreme bad luck as i had only a few drops compared to bein in a normal busy server like usa.

The drop part id say there is something that causes a decrease over time.
Weekend i farmed eggs an bunnies at vaetires like most players were , several times i had the worse drops going - 1 or 2 whites and same in event stuff and at that point i went bk to gh and dealt with inv - upon return to vaetires my drop count increased.
1/2 of ppl will agree with what i said as its been seen in practice - now incase anyone wonders there is always a thing where situations dont always apply , look at login bugs where a percentage of players get affected instead of everyone - we are all using same client and game software so theorywise it should hit us all.
This can also apply to drops - what we dont know is a huge amount of variables that can change things that are out of our control.
Eg. has the chr farmed there before , have they been there for days using merch stones and never really left ( rezone not counting ) , has the chr "rested" from that zone for a few days.
Uw and ectos used to gave this problem and there was loads of "uw is nerfed" posts because players who farmed there went from a few ectos every run to quite a few dry runs with none.
Anet as always keeps things in a shroud of secrecy and instead of saying to us players what is what exactly and giving us a clearer picture of game mechanics and less posts debating subjects that cannot be proved or disproved ( and many arguements ) they leave us in the dark.
Maybe if they did say it would get players shifting farms around and maybe trying new areas.
Ps i think the statements about drop decreasing really came about a few yrs ago with the problem of farming bots - now they really overfarmed areas and some of us may remember places like rhilon refuge , gates of kryta and bergen teeming with bots doing same routes and routines.

Easy way to keep farming the same area if you are indeed worried about your drops petering off. Have more than one toon that can do it.

For instance, if I want to farm raptors, I can choose to do it with w/n, n/w, r/e, e/me, a/e etc etc. If you're good enough at GW to be farming, then you should also have more than one toon that you can do things with.

An experienced player who didn't just start playing, skip everything, and go straight to the "phat lewtz" will almost always have more than just one option. Kinda like having every class at DOA, just to have them there.