Guild Wars 2

This is my first post on the forums, as I’ve been away from GW2 for a while now, and returned when I found out this whole ‘living story’ was going on. For starters, I think it’s pretty cool, and I look forward to future living stories. However, there’s a little problem I have with the way the dungeon has begun to play out. I don’t really have a problem with ArenaNet’s design, but more so with the way players treat dungeons in this game.

When I started playing again last month, I got myself to 80 and started running dungeons. Lo and behold, a lot of the boss fights and in between sections are essentially farmed. Take CoF p1; people skip things left and right, essentially trying to complete it as fast as possible. I understand, as permanent dungeons become a little stagnant, and people just want to get their tokens and move on. Fine, I’m not going to oppose that. But it’s this ‘farming mentality,’ when applied to Molten Facility, that really bothers me.

When the dungeon was first released last Tuesday, it was a blast. I even did it twice in the same day simply because I found it that fun. The first boss, especially, is like a Mario Party mini-game in its design. Even the last boss, although a bit more challenging, is quite fun if everyone coordinates it properly. But I did a run of MF this morning and, since its release, people seemed to have attached themselves to some farming tactics that really took the fun right out of the dungeon.

Take the first boss. The first few days I did this dungeon, everyone did it the way it was sort of meant to be played. Running around, avoiding all the traps, jumping over the shockwaves, etc. Incredibly entertaining. This morning, people just stood in a corner, self-healing, and waited for the core to be opened. It destroyed all fun involved. I was incredibly disappointed.

Thinking the last boss didn’t really have any design mechanics that could be ‘farmed’ as easily, I was proved wrong. My group said to kill the Jetpack mob first, so that you could stand under the berserker and only have to auto attack and self-heal to win. Again, this took both the challenge and the fun out of the fight.

Does anyone else have a problem with this trend? I find that players only seem to play through the game/dungeon to farm things, instead of enjoying the original mechanics of the design. Not only that, if you’re in a group where 4 out of the 5 players utilize these farming tactics, you’re kind of forced to go along with them. Perhaps there’s a way that ArenaNet can prevent these methods, or patch over them once they’re discovered. I’m not really sure what can be done about this issue in the future, but I was simply wondering if anyone else is on the same page as me. I’d rather not be alone in this mentality.

For the record, I haven’t tried Fractals of the Mists yet, but I almost don’t want to. I have a feeling that there’s probably a way to manipulate the game’s design in each of the Fractals to make it both disappointingly easy and not fun.

My problem is that they keep making it (any new content) turn into a task/necessity to farm it since it’s only around for so long. SAB was only around for a month, which was fine, until the dev made the comment that the current skins might not be coming back, which then made it a job of getting as many BB as possible. MA Test Facility was already a job since we only have 12 days to do, and it had three (four if you consider the recipes/insignias) exclusive items that are tied to RNG. Two (jetpack/mini) of which have horribly low drop chances, while the other (azurite gems) is gated by randomness and once per day nodes (Oris I get, but not mithril ones), which if you want any of the three, you have to farm the hell out of it, just in the hopes of getting what you want.
If they keep adding adding these temp content with exclusive rewards, then yes, they are going to keep making us farm the new content, instead of just playing them for fun. I had fun the first time running the test facility, but then once I saw how low the mini/jetpack drop rate was, it turned my fun into work and stress.

Sometimes it does get quite silly when it comes to this stuff, I agree. FotM is pretty free of these situations though. There’s a few exceptions (like the end boss of the Cliffside Fractal, which they claimed to have fixed but actually didn’t), but most of the stuff in FotM usually gets taken on as intended.

Players are extremely creative when it comes to finding ways to not play the game while playing the game.=P

Honestly…LFG people that want to it it your way. When you do 30+ runs like me, to get a jetpack drop, you do not want to spend 1-2hrs inside that place every run. If you only do it 1-5 times just for fun, then you might want to play out every single bit of it. I don’t understand people complaining about people who want to farm for a certain item. If you don’t want to do it that way just go with a group that’s not farming!

When I first did the ‘first boss’ (i.e. the test room) I started running around, and then… then I got hit by things. Due to lag, mostly. And while I was lying there on the floor, on fire, watching fire rain down on me, I thought… ‘oh. This doesn’t actually hurt that much at all’.

So I started to just sit next to the core. Sometimes I even open my equipment tab and try out new dye colours. Do you know of anything metallic that goes well with ‘blood’?

When we fought the final bosses, I quickly learned another trick that renders them easily defeated. I equipped a longbow and ran around firing it at them. When the berserker teleported to me I… moved away and kept firing. When he made waves, I- oh… they didn’t reach me. It was such an ingenious idea I almost felt like I understood what it would be like to be an Asura – only nothing went catastrophically wrong.

Then later, people found out you could do pretty much the same thing with less running laps of the arena. So not a lot actually changed for me. In fact, I still use the running and shooting thing when we’re killing the fire guy and he decides to sit in fire. Or when we kill the berserker first and the fire guy decides to give him some fire to walk around in.

Wait, what did you do, play in the shockwaves or something?

Firefly.5982:

Honestly…LFG people that want to it it your way. When you do 30+ runs like me, to get a jetpack drop, you do not want to spend 1-2hrs inside that place every run. If you only do it 1-5 times just for fun, then you might want to play out every single bit of it. I don’t understand people complaining about people who want to farm for a certain item. If you don’t want to do it that way just go with a group that’s not farming!

This.

LFG that you’re not doing a farm run. You’ll find like-minded people, just look at this thread.

People that really want the jetpack want quick easy runs. Also, believe or not, some people like speed runs. They like to challenge themselves to be as efficient and fast as absolutely possible. We’re doing this dungeon in less than 30 minutes easily with zerker runs, and I’m personally still having fun.