Dont nerf farming, make it hard but rewarding.

One last thing before I log off for the weekend. The concept of restricting people from entering areas with less then a certain number. Won't work. Why? I just get the required number of guildies, zone into area, tell them all thanks as they zone back to town and farm .......... S O L O ! ! ! !

Since they zoned out I get all the drops, and some people claim that the drops increase with this tactic.

You all have a great weekend .... see ya monday.

The thing is, farming near the tail end of the life cycle of the game is to be expected. How many farmers were there when the game first came out? Well however many there were, I'm sure they were far from the majority. The real problem is the game is just getting stagnent. There is nothing more to do and only farmers (for the most part) remain.

But this is the reason why they are going to churn out chapter after chapter on a bi-yearly basis. The game, frankly, was only really made to be played once or twice. Alot of my friends love the game but don't play it anymore. With the impending new chapter, many of them are going to come back.

In fact, the founders of ArenaNet have gone on record about how proud they are that they have a game that one does not feel compelled to play all the time (ala WoW or EQ); that they can just put it down for a few months and pick it up later when something interesting is happening.

Edit: Oh, and The Fox is absolutely right about "area balance." There is a balance of "things to do" and the rewards they yeild. Most people try everything at least once, then simply go for the most rewards for the least effort, if they keep playing at all. People don't bother with quests much anymore, for instance, because they offer no rewards (well, experience, but who cares?).

I think that the best idea I've seen around is right here. Make drops stay the same for everybody no matter how many people are in the group. It would also be good if gold was not divided but everyong got the same amount of gold. I would enjoy going out and killing things a lot more with my guild than on my own, it's just not echonomical. If you think about it, if your guild wants to make the most money in the shortest amount of time everyone has to go off and solo farm, or at least go in small groups to maximize on drops. If drops were the same no matter how many people were in the group solo farming would be dead. 55 monks would be dead. This would not solve all the problems of the economy, but at least people would play together again.

The thing about nerfing farming areas to is that it doesn't really do anything to bots. It only makes it harder for honest players to make a living. Bots will always be making more money than players while they're able to exist. here's an idea for the bots. Every time you enter an area that is regularly farmed or one of the high end pvp areas a box comes up with a number rotated at a random angle with random hues/saturation/contrasts and a texturized background. It would be one, or even two numbers that would take half a second to recognize and type in before entering the area. This would work the same way most forum registrations work and can virtually eliminate all bots.

So here we have 2 solutions to farming that allow players to continue to enjoy playing the game without limiting the rewards for continually playing the same area more than a few times. I personally enjoy playing in FoW more than most of the rest of the game, I don't feel that I should be penalized for that. Some may find the bot solution to be cumbersome and annoying, but is it more annoying than hordes of bots being able to ruin the economy. It wouldn't even be needed in most places, although they would most likely just migrate to areas that didn't require this. I think typing two or three numbers to be able to enter FoW as much as I want(when we have favor) without it being nerfed or bot-farmed to death is not too much to ask. Kill the bots!

Em...

Am I the only one that knows Factions is going to be released in the next few days?

How the hell do you know that they don't have new farming areas in there?

If they don't address the current problems what's to keep them from coming back? Just because Factions is coming out doesn't mean that new areas won't be overfarmed and taken over by bots. I think that BECAUSE Factions is comming out that the economy, farming and bots need to be addressed. Hopefully Gaile, or other devs, will read this thread and maybe use some of these ideas to fix the problems that we see in Prophecies before they saturate Factions.

By the way, I love GW just fine. I just think that there's better ways to address problems than nerfing everything. I also think that ANet feels the same way and we should see more of this with Factions.

Solo farmers do not get more drops than anyone else. the only thing is because there is only one person in the group the game assigns all drops to them, so they get more than if they were sharing with a party or with henches but the total amount of drops remains pretty much the sam. Addressing the issue of Factions though the learnign curve will be as steep as ever while poeple prioritize items and mods they want. Give it two weeks and we'll find more areas but it will take time. You've got a minimal learning curve of two weeks then another week to acumulate enough loot to be tradeable. So three weeks with the mods we already like going as usual throughout those three weeks.

Yes, I understand this. What I meant was the the number of people in the group should not effect the number of drops per person so the no matter how many people were in your group you would still get the same number of drops. That way there would be no advantage to solo farming, but also no disadvantage other than the difficulty. This would encourage people to play the game together instead of everyone going off and playing by themselves.

This is one suggestion that's been put forth before on the subject. There've been a few variations to it as well.

• Give drops to every party member per kill, regardless how many people are in the party.
• Do away with drops entirely and put all the great random goodies and gold into the quest rewards.
• Nerf the drops, which screws everyone over. (ANet has taken this approach, unfortunately.)
• Always divide the drops by the maximum possible party size (i.e. 1/8th chance), even if there are less than 8 party members.

In each of these cases, the aim is to remove the incentive to farm rather than directly nerfing the farming itself. That's the approach I prefer. Nothing wrong with soloing for a challenge. Personally I like the second bullet, but of course I would, since that is my own proposed suggestion from one of my threads.

It's also probably the hardest to impliment.

He he that last one was mine.

Very true but that's what the randomized mobs are for. One thing that solo and paired farming depends on is knowing the enemy and their skills. If the enemies were more randomized with their spawn locations, class, and skill set. Using a randomly picked 8 skills out of say 32 so even two enemies of the same class may not have the same skills. Anyone who can solo high level areas with that kind of setup deserves to.

Or it could be that if your party size drops below the minimum requirement everyone gets sent back to the last town or outpost.

"We're improving the quality of all rare (gold) and uncommon (purple) items significantly."-from the recent interview.

Looks like chest runs are gonna be a viable source of income again but also means farming overrall will have less effective since prices of rare will be on the decrease save for the rarest of eyecandy items with perfect stats.

Hunter..........
Cmon why not make it impossible to log on unless you log on with 8 friends so you have a full party. What you propose here his no good, you get half way through a quest, some1 leaves then some lagg another1 leaves and a bad connection(not every1 have broadband) oops sorry minimum reached back to outpost, BUT I WAS SO CLOSE.
Really good for the in game moral. A bit exagerated but you get the drift lol

Somehow I think everyone who farms solo for hours on end would have a much better time if they just played Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Guildwars should make a government or something and charge taxes and illegalize selling gold on the internet. Then they should sell all the gold they get for real money and spend it on making the game better lol. We have no middle class so we should start a war. Lets nuke all of the newcomers so its like there are little towns controlled by different groups. Then we could actually have huge wars! Lol... this is stupid but it would be fun IMO. Everyone would be so caught up fighting off different Guilds from taking over their towns that they would have no time to farm. And then if you are farming solo people could join your world and take over your farming area. Then you couldnt farm we could all just have a big war. lol mebbe this sounds dumb but i think it would be cool ^^

Well I'm just throwing in ideas trying to find a middle ground solution since it is obviously a problem. What are you doing to help the situation? Cause your suggestion bashing is doing jack except make yourself sound like an ass.

Since you didn't have anyting to say towards the increased randomization of the enemies I can only assume you agree.

Groups of people getting together to fight for control over areas. Sounds like factions to me.

i had no idea factions was going to be like that... hmm factions sounds fun lol ! ^^

Ive said it before and I'll say it again. Anet and more importantly NCSoft WANTS farming... its obvious of that. because they could be rid of it almost over night with a simple change to the drop system.

Every drop is for you and you alone, and not able to be traded for gold to other players except through vendors. This solve OH so many of the major issues in the game... Botters, Spammers, Gold sellers, Inflated prices, UNfair Trader buy back prices. EVERYTHING is solved with this one fix...

Here is how it goes...

Kill boss

Weapon drop for <playername>
On pickup that weapon is now customized for that players account (all characters)...

This leave that player 5 potential choices for that item.

1: Use the item and add prefix suffix mods to it as desired for any character on their account...

2: Salvage for materials or prefix suffix Mods.

3: Sell to Blacksmith or Merchant in towns or guild halls for legitimate values. (NOT THE CURRENT INFLATION MARKET VALUES, and not the ridiculously low merchant value either)
4: (If implemented properly) Place on Auction House Block for Legitimate resale to player market and customization to new owner account. (becomes ONLY way to sell pickups, and allows for a TRUE market table of values for items, not the imaginary inflation values the resellers make up.)

5: (not implemented yet) Place an item in Guild storage which changes the customization to allow entire Guild to use the item rather then just an individual account.

again this will rid the GW community of Botters, Resell inflators, Gold resellers, Out of control farming and nerfing, and finally and most importantly Spammers... I think the only reason farmers are really despised in the game has nothing to do with their activities or what they enjoy. it has to do with their activities in the game once they have said farmed items. IE spamming and inflating prices for items to unfair and unjust levels, or providing gold to gold resellers... No one really cares if a guy farms SF or Tomb to death for themselves or their guild. But when they start abusing chat channels and make the game UNPLAYABLE for PUG activity. Or making it that Anet has NO choice but to nerf a spot from over use and abuse. That is where people get upset and start cursing Farmers.

Finally a constructiv Idea that would work and still make it worth while to do some casual farming. Unfortunally it will not sell more games for NCSoft so guess we never will see it implemented. LOL

Wow..um...NO. They don't want farming, not in the way we have been discussing. Anet didn't have to introduce a player driven economy but they did because they figured it would make the game more interesting and fun to play. They like to see people be creative and inovative when it comes to their characters and playing the game and have no problem with people being clever enough to find ways of earning gold twice as fast as the average player. What Anet has said specifically in an interview is that it IS a problem when people find ways of earning ten times the amount of gold through repetitive farming over the average player because it DOES cause prices of goods traded amongst players to be too high for the average player to be able to afford it without doing any repetitive farming themselves. So anet is not against farming per say they are, however, against repetitive farming that brings in large quantities of gold.

And why not introduce a fixed economy too? Because anet feels that the trading and player driven economy adds some fun to the game. Their right, it does.

Now what we have been discussing here is a possible solution that gets rid of the bots and repetitive solo and paired farming that brings in the ten times of gold anet was talking about but not ruin it for the rest of us. As for those that go solo for the challenge, with the suggestions above the challenge would be changed to dealing with a much more unpredictable enemy requiring atleast a small team just to survive them. The idea is to make a change so that it doesn't raquire someone in a full party of eight doing missions and quests eight hours to earn the same amount of gold a solo farmer can get in an hour. The 'ten times' anet talks about. Requiring a partial party to do the missions or quests would cause the drops and gold to be divided amongst a group making the 'ten times' impossible to achive.

Now high level characters could handle the low level enemy mobs (even with the randomized enemy mob class and skills) but they don't drop as much as the high level enemies so it wouldn't be a problem.

This idea cannot be implemented into a game. It's bad enough on a daily visit to some online forums - let alone a game I play for several hours per day! Sorry, but

/not-signed

with a big, fat, black marker!

The way I see it, nerfing every area that can be farmed will not solve the bot problem, So, unless you can come up with a different solution to the problem maybe something like this could be used. Perhaps this could be triggered the same way the current anti-farming code works. That way if a bot returns to the same area over and over it can be stopped. That way you wouldn't have to do anything if you were just going from place to place, and if you were farming it would only take a couple of extra seconds each run. The fact is, bots cant read numbers like this, so it's easy to identify them.

Ummm, no. I've played that game maybe 6 or 7 hours in the 2 weeks since I bought it. It's about as exciting for me as watching 3DMark demos. Running around the countryside for 10 minutes with nothing to fight except the occasional wolf does nothing for me. Part of the reason I farm is the barbaric satisfaction of killing a lot of stuff. If all I wanted was scenery, I'd be a runner, not a farmer.

Well the randomization of enemy mobs isn't my idea, I just mention it often because I think it is a great idea and would be a successfull solution to not only bots but all repetitive solo and paired farming. All solo, paired and bot farming depends on one major thing. Knowing before hand the location of the enemies, what classes the mobs are comprised of and the skills used. Why do you think that the trolls are so easy to farm? They are all warriors with no healers, interupters, enchantment strippers and nukers and they all have the same attack skills. They are also located in the same place all the time (in those caves) so it's easy to use a program to control your character for you (bot).

So if the enemies randomly spawned in the combat areas with random classes making up the mobs and each class had a random skill set selected from a prefabricated list (so you can have two monks but they both wouldn't have the same skill set), it would make for a completely unpredictable scenario every time you enter a combat area. You would have no choice but to have a few henchies atleast with you just to survive. It would make the farming in other areas of the game like the SF farming (done in groups).

actually theve been doin it for a bit.. but not the right mobs...lol

but yeah, it would add some spice in the boring 2 hours of farming... at least its gonna be somehow exciting

It would also change up Tombs a good measure. Barrage/Pet groups can be fun for a bit, but I really want to bring my mesmer into Tombs now and then. I've been in some Tombs groups with friends and guildies that were great fun, but most of the time I just need a PuG (since I'm such a damn night owl).

But in Tombs, nobody wants a Mesmer or a Warrior or an Elementalist.

Anyway, this thread seems to be several topics all crudely mashed together, and I doubt the OP wanted it that way.