How To Nerf Farming

Farming could be nerfed across the board quite easily by recording on each toon how many gold and purple items someone received in a given area. Once the number of gold and purple for an area is met, all future gold/purple drops could be automatically converted to blue or none instead. The number of gold/purple can depend on the size of the area, number of bosses, or any other simple measure.

For those people who are doing the missions and playing the game, the rewards are drops. Each area has a cost/drop ratio, and people who farm look for areas where the cost is low and the drop is high. This gives those players who are "into the grind" an advantage from casual players who follow the quests, etc. Arena Net takes great care to balance out areas; a change like this would help since it dynamically changes the cost/drop ratio after the Nth visit to an area. In effect, it would make farming far less attractive. IMHO, this would help balance the game.

(more explanation added after some of the comments below)

I'm not saying that they shouldn't _increase_ the drop rate for major/superior runes. I'm suggesting a method for limiting farming. There is a difference. What I'm saying is that finding an "area" to exploit for a few hours, days or weeks, and then shutting the "area" down isn't fair to those that have not exploited the area (while it was still farmable).

I wouldn't care if other people farm if they didn't "nerf" the areas. I'm proposing a alternative, more fair, across-the-board nerf mechanism. In this proposal, if one area is "easy", and people get 3 gold items from it; then later players can get 3 gold. That's all.

I've played many many days (but not farmed) and I've yet to see a good weapon I'd use, and I've only unlocked minor runes. This is a problem, yes. And it should be addressed. However, this is not the problem I'm addressing with this proposal. What I'm addressing is the inherit unfairness that person X and Y who farm area A on Monday get 5 gold, but after a nerf on Tuesday, person X only gets 1 purple -- with the same time spent. That's not fair. It's not fair that person X who reads the web pages and talks to his guild members about best "farming" places gets an advantage over someone else who spends as much time playing (and thinking).

Farming isn't about skill, it's about knowing where and investing a ton of time. It's grind. Seeing people with all of those Runes on them makes people at Arena Net want to further _restrict_ drops, not increase them. If you arn't farming, this increases _your_ grind; if you are farming, you're already grinding. For those that want to see the drop rate go up, you should be for my proposal, not against it.

Farming doesn't lower prices, it creates wealth differences that bleed over into PvP combat. The best way to level prices is to have auctions. Removing farming won't necessarly cause prices to go up; you are assuming that the overall drop rate would go down across the entire marketplace. This assumption need not be true -- indeed, it might be false depending on how the change were implemented.

Yes, exactly.

And the point of this would be....?

Whats your point?

Or, for an actual feasable solution, remove the need for farming altogether. Increase the Rune drop rate, get rid of the silly Skill Point system... better for all parties involved than tracking drops.

While I understand the OP's concern of farming in regards to market pricing and game economies, the zones are completely instanced...so why is this even an issue?

Think the economy prices are outrageous?
I've always found what works best is that I get off my butt and go get the desired item myself. Gear and runes just don't make or break your character in this game as they do in others - the anticipation is a carry over from the EQ/EQ2/Lineage2 mindset.

Play Accordingly,

Talesin

Uhm... how does making runes harder to get help casual players?!
Are you being sarcastic? Is today opposite day? Help me out.

Well, since there's no way to anticipate where a specific item will drop or from who, the best way to get the one you want is usually to farm for it...

I agree farming is a problem, but the solution is to make it unnecessary, not unviable.

I "casually" made my way up to the Ring of Fire area and have yet to unlock a single superior rune of any kind.

Boy I sure wish they would make it harder to unlock superior runes.

I'm really amazed. I'm level 20 now, but in all those weeks I found 2 gold and maybe 5 purple items. Droppings in the field are very low right now. So what are you talking about? Doing temple quests?

Why do we need to limit farming? That will just raise the prices. Why the hell do you care if other people farm?

OK ok now I understand what you are saying IxChel - make it so you really shouldn't HAVE to farm, and if you do farm it will autonerf that farm spot for you without globally nerfing that spot. Is that what you mean?

Burem, I have spent many hours farming for runes and upgrades. While I have never made 100k in a day, I did make enough to help my guild buy a sigil. I am now about to buy the last bit of my 15k armor set, and even after that I will still farm. I have been very unlucky when it comes to unlocking runes for my main class. Once we got a guild hall, I just gave everything I didn't need to my guild mates so they didn't have farm. Now that you can see the class and power of a rune before you ID it, this works out even better.

So yeah, you could be unlucky like me. No matter what, you could do a lot of good for your guild, your friends, or even just random people.


Lazarus

you guys are being kinda harsh to the OP. He's suggesting a way to help!

As of now, Anet is nerfing every farming spot they hear about right? Well this garuntees that only the top of the top will be able to farm the hell out of any spot before it gets nerfed. Only the people with the most connections/friends will know about a certain area in time before it goes down. I don't know how this helps casual players.

What the OP suggests is a personal nerfing. Anet will get the nerf that they want but that doesn't mean that all players except a certain few will get good items. This way, everyone has an equal chance to get items. If they decide to farm, it will autonerf and they will have to move on to the next zone.


He's not saying that farming is good or bad (from what I see) but he's offering an alternative to the current nerf-bat of doom that Anet is swinging.

Exactly. The problem with Arena Net's current "nerf bat" is that it is asymmetric - it gives advantages to the first movers (the ones who can afford to stay home from work or don't have a life out side of Guild Wars). I'm proposing that they can get rid of their "nerf bat" with a bit of adaptave program logic -- an auto-nerf. This way everyone can enjoy the fun of getting cool drops from a given area rather then just the first 20 that figure out how to exploit it.

Moved to sardelac sanitarium as it is a suggestion to ANet.

The aim of this thread is to propose an alternate drop system to remove or to reduce repetitive item runs (aka: farming or item/rune grinding). Stay on topic, please. If you want to tell us how good a farmer you are, or if you want to convince that farming, grinding, is good/bad/necessary/boring or whatever, you'll find plenty of other threads for this.

Ok then i see what you mean but what you sujested wont work because making sup vig/sup absoratoin more common will make em less valualbe meaning that it damages the econamy and also i dont wish to flame or anything and im not saying that u do do this but the people who do the missoins like every one else but expect sup vigor or absorotain are maybe to lazy to try to find an area that you can farm i mean for me farming is a skill to go out and kill monsters without dying is very hard although wot I dont like is the people who get rich by going online finding a bot that auot farms going out to work/school comes home and has 500k on his carachter

I really like this idea of the self-nerf instead of screwing over the newbies.

This will actually PROMOTE farming for new players BUT limit it from being abused.

Its just like real farming. You cant keep tilling a field year after year. You have to let it lie fallow so it can regenerate.


edit:

How about once you nerf all the farming areas, you can activate a counter to un-nerf it.

So you have a character who finished all the missions and quests and have just nerfed all the farming areas for the character. Now what?!

Now you go and help the new guys out Thats right! For every mission you help newbies with (discounting missions that can be ran) it will give you "un-nerf points" that is spread randomly through out all the farming zones.

How about every time you beat a mission and bonus you get 1k

This thread was over 4 months old....
Threadnecromancy....

Don't forget that ANet is not against farming completely.

Making inherent caps would seriously kill a lot of the replay value of the game. When I finished it the first time - what's the point of re-exploring if I know I reached my "rare" quota in a given area? In other words, what you propose will just kill the game entirely for a veteran player.

Savio should close this thread, its just an explanation on how to nerf farming, gives no game suggestion.... and no one wants farming to be nerfed....

if you want anything half decent in this game, then no one can afford farming to be nerfed.

Theres nothing wrong with farming IMO it's not like only a few people can do it, everyone can do it if they want to.

Plus a sudden complete nerf would be more unfair than keeping it, as everyone with hundreds of 'k' in storage would still have it and new characters would be at a disadvantage.

Also IMO farming is keeping the game going for more than a few people in the hunt for better and better weapons.

in conclusion

Chipp <3 farming.

Yep. I agree.
If someone thinks farming is unfair then we ought to nerf HoH since it's repeatedly won by a select few players. I know I've never won HoH ... does that make it "unfair?"

Spoken like a true "poor man" (the OP whiner), the only people I ever see talking about nerfing this and nerfing that because of the economy is from the poor. Get out there and "work" for it like the rest of us did, do you think superior runes just fall in our laps? lol Nosir, we have to put hours and hours and days and days and weeks and weeks to get them just like anyone else.

Get off your fat lazy butt and get out there and earn your keep. After level 20 the game is over the story is over, there's nothing left to do but farm or help sorry arse people like you get stuff cause you're too lazy to do it yourself.

You get what you get by the amount of "time" you put into it, just like real life that works for me. Put in your time, get a lot of goodies, whine whine whine, get a lot of nothing.

Most people that are going to have a fortune have already made their fortune, it's unfortunate that Anet didn't have the drop policy they have now in the game at the beginning. But, oh well that's progress for you. Now, everyone is just going to have to "work" that much harder and longer to reach the wealth status of the "rest of us".

Got a 10/10 Sundering Axe Haft that just dropped for me today....how much yah gemme? hehe 60k? YESSSS

Well, this idea is good, IMO, but there are two problems that I see with it:

#1) If I use up all my "farming" areas and never randomly find the items that I think I want, then I am just plain out of luck for my character unless I want to dive into the bizarre Guild Wars economy. I'd rather think I have a chance of randomly finding an item than know that I have to just buy it for 75k from some dude.

#2) I would think that anyone who is serious about farming would just respond to this change by keeping a disposable character slot on their GW account. That way, they can farm the heck out of every area, delete the character and repeat. That wouldn't really stop people from farming, in fact, it might just make the problem worse.

Part of any game is the economy and every game I've played online has always had a "bloated/inflated" economy. It just happens because there are people who get out there and farm items and they are the ones that set the prices. When they have an abundance of money, they really just end up selling to one another. Everyone else should really care less what the prices are.

There is a balance of what equipment someone has by the same balance as there is by how much money people have. I read one of the Anet Devs say that 75% to 80% of the total population has less than 20K most of the time. So, they are getting what they can afford by their amounts of money. They just aren't meant to be part of having "it all". If everyone had the same as everyone else, how boring this game would be. If everything was 10k or less how boring this game would be. It's what keeps the lower 80% out there kicking and looking and working for something and the higher 20% out there getting them more to buy when they do get some money.

Then we come to the ebayers, both buyers and sellers, whatever, anyway that ingame money that they are buying was already in the economy, so, it's not like it's printed "extra" money added to the game, that would be "duping" it, now that I would be against cause that would make prices even higher than now. And it's a violation of the rules, well let me tell yah, every mmorpg online has that rule and those that buy and sell on ebay have "never" observed it. It's like telling a deaf person don't do that. Basically you can't make a person obey some computerized EULA (lawyers say it's not enforceable because there is no legal signature whatever people argue what lawyers say also lol.), so, people do what they are going to do. I would never buy anything for a game or sell anything, but, that's just me and I'm not part of that billion dollar a year party that buys and sells stuff on ebay. (yeah they make that kind of real life money total from all mmorpgs even some just morpgs like Diablo 2 as well)

I've always looked at all these games the same though. I get out of them what I put into it. Yeah I know some of you can't play 24/7, but, look at it this way, it doesn't cost you a dime to play after the initial purchase, so, that's the biggest savings of all vs the other mmorpgs. You can goto anyone of them and you will see the same farming, the same whinning, the same ebaying, etc. etc.

It's best to just learn to live with the flow of things instead of coming to forums whinning about it. No matter what Anet did, the farmers and ebayers would find a way around it and the 80% would just suffer "even more". If it were me, I'd open the drop rates up just like Diablo 2 where anybody and everyone was getting good drops during their time playing. Seems that would make everyone happy but the ebayers. Since the more good loot you can get into the 80% "faster" the lower the prices the ebayers will have to start selling for and when the market is "flooded" with lots of good stuff, prices will come down. And eventually ebayers will just leave because there will be no money in it for them. Anet is taking the wrong approach, they are actually INCREASING the NEED for EBAYers. Not decreasing them.

wow dude. no offense, but its called spellcheck.
anyway, back on topic:
imo, a bad idea. ruins the replay value and would make it harder to unlock items because you would have to keep going to different areas instead of just being able to go to the same area until you find your item. what you are suggesting would not fix farming, it would ruin it. i dont personally farm, but the majority of the items that my pve char uses were obtained through SOMEONE farming. what you are suggesting would make the game much harder for new players because they would not be able to get good items as easily, and would make the game boring for veteran players such as myself.

Let's say you really, really want a rare Storm Bow for your ranger or a Sup Absorption Rune for your warrior. But, in all the times you've been to the UW, you haven't gotten one. Eventually you will reach your "quota" - so then it's impossible to get now as a drop. Your only chance is then to search around for a seller in LA .... but wait, how will you get the money? The guy is asking for 200K. Looks like you have to farm ... and it's going to take forever since most areas will now only drop blue items for you ...