How to make farming FUN and a couple other ideas.

This is a direct quote of my post in the Invinci-Monk thread in the Riverside forum. Since it turned into more of a suggestion post than an invinci-monk comment I think it will be well served over here....


You would be better served asking ANet to give a crap about people that actually want to play this game rather than asking them to remove the things that fans of it actually enjoy about it. The main problem of PvE right now isn't builds like this or the fact that farming spots/builds exist in the first place. It's that ANet has yet to come to an understanding that people LIKE to be able to walk around their world and not feel like they've wasted their time on it. I do not like henchmen stealing my damn drops. Worse yet, I don't like that ANet never thought for a SECOND to even tell the players travelling with the henchies what specific drops they even get. It's so lame. Seriously. If the henchies are getting something I want to know WHAT it is, not be completely ignored.

So ANet doesn't want to increase drops across the board for players? Fine. How about adding in more scrolls (like the XP scrolls), such as one that reduces the ratio of drops & gold that computer players in a party get to the human players in it. Seems like a PERFECT idea for a scroll to me. Of course that is also why ANet hasn't thought of it yet - because at the same time it is a new item in their world and it helps alleviate one of players' main concerns about the game. No point in adding depth to a shallow pool, right? The developers create this cool scroll trader that allows you to purchase items that break the existing rules of this game and right now there's only one rule that can be broken: XP. Okay. What about a scroll that adds an extra tick of health or energy regen for 10 minutes or so? +5 armor? Invincibility to bleeding for a few minutes? Stuff like that would be a lot more interesting to carry around in your backpack than 8 million stupid monster bodyparts.

It is possible to make farming difficult and still allow it. People go to these areas over and over and over and over and over because the rest of the world is a giant waste of freakin' time and space. There's an easy way for ANet to make allowable farming that also encourages the players to actually go out and explore the world that right now is too lame to even walk around in. All they have to do is change the drops & mobs in certain areas every couple of weeks. What's a farming spot this week may not be next week, but instead some random mobs/zones in some other area which previously were not giving good drops all of a sudden give a goldmine. The key is to NOT tell the players which areas get unfarmable and refarmable. Make us actually have to form teams and go out and find these (always changing) farm spots. The idea is that eventually farmed mobs are going to run out of loot (from being continuously killed by players), but monsters in other areas who aren't getting killed continuously over this time build up their stashes over time or are overrun by refugee mobs from old farming areas, looking for a new place to be able to survive in.

ANet wouldn't put something like that in their world though. Too much work to maintain and god forbid their world ever gets something dynamic in it such as this. This is the kind of thing the game should've had in the first place. An overworld that seems like it is full of life and not one that is a programmed anti-botter. Players would eat this idea right up. You'd actually see farming parties form in cities rather than naked dancing all day by the water fountain.

Oh wow, there is a God out there. I would SERIOUSLY love it if this game changed chest locations every week so you could enjoy a spot for a while and look for new ones, so every place would be different. Then each week put in 2 chests randomly across the map, one with really rare items in it and one with tons of gold that can only be opened once. You could check this week and all previous weeks of how many rare chests you've found by typing something like, "/rarechests" and it would display something like:

You've discovered 1/2 chests this week and a total of 13 chests!

It'd make exploring the world a great and wonderful thing. And eventually if you discover enough maybe the allowing of a treasure hunter's emote that appears when you do it similar to "/rank". I think it'd make the game tons more fun, and maybe adding in random bosses around etc...

One other solution is they should make all chests locked, and the only way to open them is by killing a boss or a random monster for a key... but I really don't like this idea, but it could be used occasionally.

Anet really needs to make this game fun because it SUCKS. We can't play this game right off the bat for skills, we have to pay outrageous sums to customize our armour to look cool and it's quite pathetic. I mean we have to actually pay for something useless just so we can be original. Originality should be about 25 gp each for the dyes and runes. It is SKILL we're talking about, not how much money you make, and not to mention how crappily low they pay for stuff, forcing you to sell everything manually, which stinks. We already have almost no storage, I mean seriously, this game really has a lot of things lost and it could all just be fixed if they spent the time to do it. So many flaws, I can't believe I practically wasted 50 bucks on this game. I am STILL fighting mindless monsters over and over so I can get all the skills I need to actually have a good game plan for my me/mo. I'm in the Ring of Fire, and Elite skills are a hassle, for no reason. Where is the skill? This is so obscenly horrible, I can't believe it. How could this have happened Anet? How?