Guild Wars 2

Erasculio.2914:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Actually, I already did. You just skipped my entire rebuttal because I made sense. Now you’re avoiding my follow up question because you know for a fact that you’re misusing the term “exploiter” to label people like me who don’t play the game your way.

In other words, you avoided answering every single of my questions because you know they prove you wrong, and are using the “I already did” as a poor dodge. I can counter your arguments easily without having to hide behind excuses. Want one more example? Here:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

You have yet to explain how my doing of Jumping Puzzles on Invasion maps is an exploit. I’m still waiting.

Show me the quote where I say that you doing a jumping puzzle is an exploit.

… Oh, you can’t? My, what a surprise!

The worst aspect of this update isn’t only how it creates a toxic community, but how it empowers the most toxic aspect of the community – ArenaNet is telling people that yes, they are exploiters, but they are not going to be punished for it. There’s little surprise in seeing how many of the Anchorage event exploiters are exploiting this now, as nothing bad happened to them after the first exploit, so it’s only logical that they would exploit more.

Ultimatelly, ArenaNet will realize that the champion boxes will have to go, or the exploiters will have to go. The game can’t work with both of those.

I’m not one of these champion farmes you call “exploiters” (you really should learn the meaning of that overused term btw.), and still I feel sympathy for Smooth Penguin, because he is right – and somehow you seem to fail reading his posts in a level of detail that enables you to understand that.

The only gamebreaking thing about this event are people like you, calling other people names because they play the game the way they want. Comparing actual exploits (like salvaging items giving back more reward than the input is) to simply choosing not to attend an event is -> ridiculous (also an overused term but fitting in this situation). Same goes for accusing people of deliberately stalling the event just because they are doing something else.

Smooth Penguin already tried to explain to you what the difference is, but some people seem to be simply resistent to learning and too focused on making their point instead.

I was attending lots of these events full time and aiming at finishing them, but once I was stupid enough to stay at a bugged event spot (still showing on the map, but no mobs present) to simply rezz someone who has fallen there. It took about 20 seconds until the first one wrote in the whisper chat that I’m stalling the event because I didn’t move on, and even asked in the map chat why all those “dumb people” at this spot can’t be banned. Now tell me again, which part of the community is more poisonous?

But enough of the troll feeding. You will keep on accusing people and calling them names, that’s for sure. I just hope for you, that you won’t be caught in a minute of being afk or hitting the “wrong mob” or being in the wrong spot for some seconds and therefore “stalling the event by not attending”, because such behavior “should be banned”.

Maybe you see the flaw in your statements and the whish to make such things bannable: how do you tell apart people simply playing different content, being afk for important reasons, just wanting to farm some champions or really wanting the rest of the map to fail in the events? The last point actually does only work, if a high percentage of players farms the champions so there are not enough people left to kill a single mob – the Aetherblade “boss” spawning champions… I actually never experienced that happening. When there was an event fail, it was due to lack of organization of the rest of the players not farming champions.

btw: The term you were looking for when using the word “exploit” would be grief play and even then it would not apply to all people you were previously talking about.

cheebuguh.2536:

timidobserver.7925:

cheebuguh.2536:

To start off, I’d like to say that I really do appreciate this update. Zones felt like an awesome battlefield and I enjoyed the story cutscenes. A lot of things were done well and I do feel that some parts of the living story have improved over time.

However there are also a lot of problems that this update has brought. My main problem is the issue of zerging champions during invaSions and ignoring the entire goal of the event. While participating in map chat, I was disappointed to see how the community reacted to calls to actually doing the event. Instead, people were opening telling people to just ignore the event and farm. It has really brought out what is to me the worst of the community in this game.

As this is the internet, it is only natural that there are hordes of people that aim only to zerg and get the most profit out of an event rather than playing it how it was intended. This means that the only solution is to develop content in a way that discourages or prevents such behavior. The invasions and champion loots together, while both good ideas, combine to make farming zergfests. As someone who wants to actually play the game and finish events, I feel that such zergfarming behavior being at the core of a huge game update is a step backwards for this game.

While I doubt that much will change as devs are already working on the next living story release, I hope that future releases will find ways to prevent and avoid the behavior that is occurring right now.

You seem to be implying that zerging isn’t playing the game as intended. I disagree given that that the last 3-4 updates have significantly increased the benefit of zerging. If they didn’t like zerging they would introduce updates that discourage it.

Hmm. Yeah, I do see your point.

In any case, I still do stand by my desire to have less zerging. Perhaps Anet does want zerging mechanics, and I don’t want to say that all zerging is bad since I do it at times too when I feel like just following a group, like in WvW. But what I don’t want to see is it becoming the main focus and center of content and gameplay as it has been in the last two releases.

And yes, I’m happy they’ve done something to solve the champion farming problem

False. This game punishes the Zerging, but in a VERY subtle way that requires a long explanation.

Basically, the more people you have, the more enemies, and difficult enemies, spawn. Correct? But enemies will always have a three second delay on spawn. This means that you can bring all the dps and Zerking gear in the game, but you will always loose three seconds BY DEFAULT before you can clear the wave.

Now, if you factor that in with Mob Numbers, Mob Strength and levels, and mob types, you will eventually notice that even though it’s by subtle and small amounts, you have to increasingly spend more time at a single mob. This is at the VERY MINIMUM four and a half minutes. Something hardly anyone will notice. But if you include killing the mobs, WPing from place to place, running from place to place, dying and downing damage reductions and more, this game DOES punish inefficiency, but not in an obvious way. The average person won’t realise that’s what happens to all the time but it does actually effect the game greatly. You have 45 minutes. You can’t afford to loose 10-15 minutes. And many many people do without noticing the subtle time-sinks.

Basket of Boxes.1976:

HAHAHA they just really don’t want people to make gold in this game do they, first Dead Eye now this. The only way to make gold where they can’t nerf you is the trading post.

Are you kidding?

Goldfarm has gone up dramatically since the patch, theyve nerfed outliers a bit but you should still be making a ton more gold then you would before the whole Queen’s stuff.
The nerfed stuff is still a lot better then what we had before. For godsake, people farmed 800gold doing the gauntlet in a week! And you dare complain that they nerfed it?

Erasculio.2914:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

All we’re doing is playing a game.

The snowflake exploiters used very similar arguments, eight months ago.

ArenaNet intended for players to try to complete the dynamic events. Intentionally failing or stalling an event in order to farm, while being detrimental to other players, is playing the game in a way that has not been intended. Ergo, exploit.

I haven’t seen a single exploiter actually admiting he/she was exploiting. I do love some of the excuses they bring up, though.

It’s bad game design.
And it’s not like this is the first time it’s happening. There have been plenty of events in the past that were more rewarding to stall than to finish. All they need to do to fix this is to make a finite amount of mobs spawn. There, problem gone.
And well, you can blame the players all you want, but in the end it’s ArenaNet who’s designing these events. It’s them who make these events in such ways that they’re more rewarding to stall them than to finish them.

Milennin.4825:

Erasculio.2914:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

All we’re doing is playing a game.

The snowflake exploiters used very similar arguments, eight months ago.

ArenaNet intended for players to try to complete the dynamic events. Intentionally failing or stalling an event in order to farm, while being detrimental to other players, is playing the game in a way that has not been intended. Ergo, exploit.

I haven’t seen a single exploiter actually admiting he/she was exploiting. I do love some of the excuses they bring up, though.

It’s bad game design.
And it’s not like this is the first time it’s happening. There have been plenty of events in the past that were more rewarding to stall than to finish. All they need to do to fix this is to make a finite amount of mobs spawn. There, problem gone.
And well, you can blame the players all you want, but in the end it’s ArenaNet who’s designing these events. It’s them who make these events in such ways that they’re more rewarding to stall them than to finish them.

The same logic can be used for people killing others with a gun. Don’t blame me for killing people, blame the people that make guns. It’s called taking responsibility for ones actions.

Only those that “exploit” feel the need to constantly justify their actions. Those that don’t have no need for that.

Danikat.8537:

I think a lot of people genuinely don’t understand what they need to do here.

THIS…..

….and the fact that people are basically greedy at their core and the OP is blowing the problem way out of proportion. Nothing wrong with asking Devs to nerf the Champ loot in Invasion zones during those events (I seriously don’t like the idea of removing Champ Loot Boxes as I have enjoyed some small “zerging” across zones for a bit of reward during my normal play). But making this out to be the downfall of Guild Wars civilization is going a bit far.

First off, my main is an Engie.

I was in Fields of Ruin this morning attempting to get map completion. The Clockwork Chaos event started up in the area, and I knew I’d have a lot of difficulty with completing the map while it was running, so I decided to participate rather than leave. Plus, I hadn’t yet won the event in this particular map.

I tried to go it with small groups/solo to try to speed things along, but no matter where I went, the zerg would show up within moments since there were at least eight commanders with their own zergs there. With the gigantic groups and me playing an engie (we don’t output a ton of damage), I couldn’t even begin my auto attack fast enough to hit the normal mobs before they died, couldn’t do enough damage to the vets for kill credit, and with champs, I either couldn’t walk (twenty feet..) to them quickly enough or, if they spawned next to me, I couldn’t do enough damage for kill credit the vast majority of the time, because they literally melted in seconds. I mean, I wasn’t trying to farm, but some reward for the effort besides end-of-event loot would be nice? On top of all this, it’s caused me to crash about five different times since Clockwork Chaos began (even with the wvw models and such) and makes it almost impossible to move from lag at times, compounding the above issues.

And no matter where I went, a zerg would be up my backside within, literally, seconds. Or several zergs at once.

Thankfully the event ended and I could resume map completion. Except I couldn’t at all, because it started up again in Fields of Ruin..

Just wanted to point out to those complaining about farmers ruining the event that you can still progress the event by killing Scarlet’s minions. A dev has posted the following in another thread:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

The waves of Scarlet’s minions are depleted by killing creatures that emerge from the portals. Kills count, not necessarily events.

The pirate and molten waves are depleted by completing events.

So running around the map killing her minions (even without finishing that portal closing event) will progress the waves even with your farm groups killing aetherblade champs.

EDIT: Link to forum post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/speech/Invasion-Strategy-Kill-mobs-or-Leave-mobs/first#post2687345

If you just wait by a zone exit for a few minutes, you can exit the zone, re-enter and get an overflow that does not have an invastion event running. Pretty simple way to get a clean, zergless, map.

Mindlessly droning around spamming a couple abilities and loot button isn’t really what I consider the best use of Gw2’s potential.

Brother Grimm.5176:

If you just wait by a zone exit for a few minutes, you can exit the zone, re-enter and get an overflow that does not have an invastion event running. Pretty simple way to get a clean, zergless, map.

Haha, I don’t know if it’s bizarre, unwanted luck or what, but I almost never end up in an empty overflow even past the ten minute mark.
Unless I actually want to get into one of the overflows the event is running in.

i feel bad for the people that describe such scenarios, ‘cause even when i’m on overflows, map chat is friendly and helpful at best, and silent at worst. i even got one overflow to talk about GW1 all the way through the event.

friendliness attracts friendliness.

on a side note, explain that if people stay for that champion, they won’t be able to finish the event, and if they finish the event, instead of one champion chest, they get 10, plus a bunch of gold and two rares/exotics.

the update brought other problem aswell. the doungen rewards lured the lvl 80 elitist to the other doungen rather then jsut cof. even though low level DO effectivly more then 80s in dmg (which is unfortunatly the only thing that matters atm) YES they do. 80 do under the cut LESS dmg then lower levels.

Conner.4702:

Milennin.4825:

Erasculio.2914:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

All we’re doing is playing a game.

The snowflake exploiters used very similar arguments, eight months ago.

ArenaNet intended for players to try to complete the dynamic events. Intentionally failing or stalling an event in order to farm, while being detrimental to other players, is playing the game in a way that has not been intended. Ergo, exploit.

I haven’t seen a single exploiter actually admiting he/she was exploiting. I do love some of the excuses they bring up, though.

It’s bad game design.
And it’s not like this is the first time it’s happening. There have been plenty of events in the past that were more rewarding to stall than to finish. All they need to do to fix this is to make a finite amount of mobs spawn. There, problem gone.
And well, you can blame the players all you want, but in the end it’s ArenaNet who’s designing these events. It’s them who make these events in such ways that they’re more rewarding to stall them than to finish them.

The same logic can be used for people killing others with a gun. Don’t blame me for killing people, blame the people that make guns. It’s called taking responsibility for ones actions.

Only those that “exploit” feel the need to constantly justify their actions. Those that don’t have no need for that.

What? This is a video game with no real world consequences. Hence comparing this with guns and killing = false analogy.

In any case the analogy fails hard because when you shoot someone with a gun you’re actually violating someone’s right to live their life, breaking their body and their property.

This example on the other hand is nothing but the tragedy of the commons. The prisoner’s dilemma. It’s only rational to expect people to act in their own self interests.

Conner.4702:

The same logic can be used for people killing others with a gun. Don’t blame me for killing people, blame the people that make guns. It’s called taking responsibility for ones actions.

Only those that “exploit” feel the need to constantly justify their actions. Those that don’t have no need for that.

No, not really. A gun can’t really be designed to not hurt people (ignoring water guns, lol). An event in GW2 can be designed to be more rewarding for finishing it, rather than stalling it. It’s just up to ArenaNet to actually make it that way.
Other than that I don’t see how you could compare killing people with playing a game. But okay…

I am personally done doing the invasions. People’s insistence in turning this event into a mechanical process with less reward makes it feel like a chore.

When the event first started, everyone was just playing and having a good time, just zerging our hearts out. It was an awesome time, probably the best I have ever had in GW2; epic battles, awesome loot. In the first couple of days, we won about 50% of the invasions.

Since other players have started this diatribe against zerging, we have not won a single invasion that I played. Which has me seriously questioning whether or not we truly understand the mechanics of the event.

Regardless, other players have sucked the joy out of the event. If only there was a hotfix for that…

All they need to do is have the champs spawn after the mobs are wiped out and destroyed. So simple to fix.

Erasculio.2914:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

So today I’m going to do a bunch of Jumping Puzzles while the invasion is going on. Show me what rules I’ll be breaking, and I’ll stop.

Do you want to see something interesting? Take a look at the rules of the game. Show me which rule were the Snowflake exploiters breaking, and which rule were the Cultural weapon exploiters breaking.

And comparing jumping puzzles to intentionally stalling an event: well, using a somewhat poor metaphor I have read recently, “apples and jalapenos.”

So uhhh… Anet already responded in a thread complaining about zerg farmers and whatnot… And you might think they’d have taken the opportunity to wag their finger and say “shame on you”.

Instead, they said that they’re looking at a way to restructure events because they didn’t want to create the divisiveness you see today.

This says to me that, while you may not agree with zerg farmers, they are not breaking the rules of the game and you REALLY have to stop crying “exploit! exploit!” at everything you don’t like.

First thing to change is the terminology. In any other MMO what is being called a zerg here, would be called a RAID!

I hate this stupid zerg runs!
And this new achievements I cant even get to the map. Its always overflows me.
I dont have time to sit in the game for 5 hours. It’s so frustrating! Cant play the content!
I had so many hopes for this game. Hate it now!!!!

As for players in game behaving badly as a result of the LS events, we are in a faceless world, under a false persona. We escape reality to live our dreams in game. This doesn’t lend itself to what would be accepted behavior outside the game. I don’t condone the behavior of some, I’m just not surprised by it. I’ve seen hate speech, racial remarks, sexist remarks, verbal abuse etc.. I report it, but I also do not expect much to come from it. Most games look on this type of problem as WAI. They want every dollar they can get. Who spends it seems to be of little or no concern.

People seems to miss the point of farming champions in invasions. Farming will get you more loot bags in the end. You also don’t need to win to get credit for the achievement. I know this for a fact since we failed FGS due to it being terribly buggy and I still got credit winning only matters if you need the scarlet achievement.

If you nerf the farmability of the invasions, people will have less incentive to join a map they’ve already completed. This means less people and you could wind up having even less of a chance of succeeding in stopping an invasion. Imagine trying to get the 100 kills for each representative in Crown Pavilion now. Hardly anyone is there as there are more desirable things to farm.

You have to face the facts that you need farmers otherwise you’ll fail.

Dont blame arenanet blame the community. Go on your servers teamspeak and rally people up to successfully finish the event. Its time you stopped complaining and being helpless and take matters into your own hands…

Something to think about, why do they fail it and farm it over and over? Because they can.

Consider this:

The champion farming zerg is there for one reason only: to make money. If we couldn’t farm aethers during the event, what do you think we would do? We wouldn’t decide to start actually DOING the event. The way this event is designed, its just like farming, except the rewards are garbage, and you have to waypoint all over the map instead of saying in one spot, or following a set path. Go here. Kill twisted. Go here. Kill twisted. Go here. Kill twisted. Its the same dull repetition as farming, but without the rewards. So the answer is, if we couldn’t farm aethers, we wouldn’t even be there.

The event isn’t fun either, for the reason I described above, so you’re not going to get a lot of general players either. There’s more fun to be had in dungeons, or WvW, or world boss farming. Each of those would probably be more rewarding too. A half hour spent farming world bosses can net you 6 rares, even on a bad day. So if its not rewarding, and its not fun, the who would do the event? Achievement farmers. That’s pretty much it. Do you think there’s enough achievement farmers to actually complete the event? Maybe at first, but a week into the event, when a lot of people have got their achievements, it’ll be a desert. Nobody would do it, and you’d never get to finish it.

The fact is, the zerg is a huge part of why the event ever succeeds, despite people saying that we make it fail. A series of bad design choices makes it fail. The zerg takes your focus off aetherblades so you can focus on twisted, if you really do want to complete it. So while we’re certainly not helping the event intentionally, we’re helping it unintentionally by focusing the achievement hunters on the twisted.

Psycho Robot.7835:

Consider this:

The champion farming zerg is there for one reason only: to make money. If we couldn’t farm aethers during the event, what do you think we would do? We wouldn’t decide to start actually DOING the event. The way this event is designed, its just like farming, except the rewards are garbage, and you have to waypoint all over the map instead of saying in one spot, or following a set path. Go here. Kill twisted. Go here. Kill twisted. Go here. Kill twisted. Its the same dull repetition as farming, but without the rewards. So the answer is, if we couldn’t farm aethers, we wouldn’t even be there.

The event isn’t fun either, for the reason I described above, so you’re not going to get a lot of general players either. There’s more fun to be had in dungeons, or WvW, or world boss farming. Each of those would probably be more rewarding too. A half hour spent farming world bosses can net you 6 rares, even on a bad day. So if its not rewarding, and its not fun, the who would do the event? Achievement farmers. That’s pretty much it. Do you think there’s enough achievement farmers to actually complete the event? Maybe at first, but a week into the event, when a lot of people have got their achievements, it’ll be a desert. Nobody would do it, and you’d never get to finish it.

The fact is, the zerg is a huge part of why the event ever succeeds, despite people saying that we make it fail. A series of bad design choices makes it fail. The zerg takes your focus off aetherblades so you can focus on twisted, if you really do want to complete it. So while we’re certainly not helping the event intentionally, we’re helping it unintentionally by focusing the achievement hunters on the twisted.

+1 on that psycho even if people don’t seem to read and all their thinking is ‘’OMG, FARMERS ARE EXPLOITERS!@#$’’ which is kind of funny, because without zergs you might not even have a chance in the first place to complete the events. Some of my guild mates ended up in bad overflows that had too few people and this event while it does scale , it doesn’t guarantee that your 10 people will complete it in the time frame unless each is a warr capable of soloing a different wave and assuming they are on TS communicating every action.

Psycho Robot.7835:

So the answer is, if we couldn’t farm aethers, we wouldn’t even be there.

Ok, bye.

Right now, each map goes into multiple overflows, which means worlds get their maps filled, and the exceeding players are enough to fill many maps. Assuming two thirds of the players there are the exploiters, which is quite a high number, removing them would still leave us with at least one map full of players – the difference being that those players actually want to play the game as intended and finish the event, instead of exploiting the champions.

We don’t need exploiters. They are not helping the game. Quite the opposite – they are leeching the players who want to do the event and so happen to help them clear the waves until the pirates come.

Erasculio.2914:

Psycho Robot.7835:

So the answer is, if we couldn’t farm aethers, we wouldn’t even be there.

Ok, bye.

Right now, each map goes into multiple overflows, which means worlds get their maps filled, and the exceeding players are enough to fill many maps. Assuming two thirds of the players there are the exploiters, which is quite a high number, removing them would still leave us with at least one map full of players – the difference being that those players actually want to play the game as intended and finish the event, instead of exploiting the champions.

We don’t need exploiters. They are not helping the game. Quite the opposite – they are leeching the players who want to do the event and so happen to help them clear the waves until the pirates come.

What is this “as intended” nonsense I keep hearing? Nothing is “intended”. It is what it is.

Erasculio.2914:

Psycho Robot.7835:

So the answer is, if we couldn’t farm aethers, we wouldn’t even be there.

Ok, bye.

Right now, each map goes into multiple overflows, which means worlds get their maps filled, and the exceeding players are enough to fill many maps. Assuming two thirds of the players there are the exploiters, which is quite a high number, removing them would still leave us with at least one map full of players – the difference being that those players actually want to play the game as intended and finish the event, instead of exploiting the champions.

We don’t need exploiters. They are not helping the game. Quite the opposite – they are leeching the players who want to do the event and so happen to help them clear the waves until the pirates come.

lol always ’’exploiters’’. I think you need to learn your definitions, seems like you have no clue what are you talking about. As for the leeching part,some of them actually want to rush until pirates.

bhagwad.4281:

What is this “as intended” nonsense I keep hearing? Nothing is “intended”. It is what it is.

I have the feeling you don’t remember the other exploits in this game.

Months ago, there was a bug that made Cultural weapons be sold for a very low price. Some players quickly noticed the bug, and bought a lot of those weapons, expecting to sell them later after the price had been fixed.

They were banned from the game.

“The price was what it was”, the banned players would say, “We didn’t do nothing beyond what the game allowed us to do”.

Yet, they were banned.

A few months later, players learned that salvaging the Snowflake items could give them most of the materials back. They could salvage rare Snowflake items for a chance to get ectos, and then use the materials to make another rare item for a very low cost, effectively creating a nearly infinite, ecto-producing loop.

They were banned.

“Crafting was working as it was”, the banned players cried, “We were just doing something the game allowed us to do”.

Yet they were banned.

Exploiting means playing the game in a way that was not intended. We know for a fact that there are ways to play the game differently from how ArenaNet intended people to play. Those who abuse the game like this – the exploiters – have been banned in the past. They always make excuses claiming they weren’t doing anything wrong, but it never changed the fact that yes, they were exploiting.

And for the records, I love this quote:

Vol.5241:

It’s not an exploit. People are trying very, very hard to complete the event. But it’s too difficult.

Too difficult indeed.

Erasculio.2914:

Psycho Robot.7835:

So the answer is, if we couldn’t farm aethers, we wouldn’t even be there.

Ok, bye.

Right now, each map goes into multiple overflows, which means worlds get their maps filled, and the exceeding players are enough to fill many maps. Assuming two thirds of the players there are the exploiters, which is quite a high number, removing them would still leave us with at least one map full of players – the difference being that those players actually want to play the game as intended and finish the event, instead of exploiting the champions.

We don’t need exploiters. They are not helping the game. Quite the opposite – they are leeching the players who want to do the event and so happen to help them clear the waves until the pirates come.

Again. Anet’s already addressed the issue, calling people exploiters is just kinda being all sour grapes about things not being the way you want.

Kirschwasser.3972:

Again. Anet’s already addressed the issue, calling people exploiters is just kinda being all sour grapes about things not being the way you want.

No one has managed to make a solid counter argument claiming it wasn’t an exploit. The fact ArenaNet fixed it is one more sign of how it was something they didn’t intend to have in the game.

The thing is, ArenaNet didn’t solve the issue. They simply covered it a bit. We are now on the third event ArenaNet had to modify in order to prevent exploiters from exploiting. It’s about time they noticed that, unless they are prepared to change many more events, they are trying to apply the wrong fix. ArenaNet should either deal with the exploiters (something they are not going to do – we all have learned that the GW2 community as a whole is filled by exploiters, and ArenaNet cannot afford to lose all those players), or deal with the new system that has allowed exploiters to exploit so much – they need to remove the Champion drop boxes. Those should be moved to rewards for finishing the Dynamic Events themselves, and each champion in the open world should be changed to be an event (even if just like the “Kill the Champion Troll” event in Queensdale) so people would have a reason to fight them.

Until ArenaNet implements a fix like that, for the real issue behind the current troubles in the game, we are going to have the same problems over and over.

Kronus.6048:

Erasculio.2914:

Psycho Robot.7835:

So the answer is, if we couldn’t farm aethers, we wouldn’t even be there.

Ok, bye.

Right now, each map goes into multiple overflows, which means worlds get their maps filled, and the exceeding players are enough to fill many maps. Assuming two thirds of the players there are the exploiters, which is quite a high number, removing them would still leave us with at least one map full of players – the difference being that those players actually want to play the game as intended and finish the event, instead of exploiting the champions.

We don’t need exploiters. They are not helping the game. Quite the opposite – they are leeching the players who want to do the event and so happen to help them clear the waves until the pirates come.

lol always ’’exploiters’’. I think you need to learn your definitions, seems like you have no clue what are you talking about. As for the leeching part,some of them actually want to rush until pirates.

MOST do, they want to get to the pirates fast.

Also, why are other “bad apples” causing event fail not being brought up?

-Players who QQ the whole time about not enough time and don’t give their all.
-Players who see they are in an overflow and automatically give up
-Players who QQ and are abusive in map chat, taking focus off the event with arguments
-Players who are literally 30 seconds from a wp but cry “REZ PLZ” and won’t respawn
-Players who run off the moment the circle poofs and leave others stranded in the middle of a mob to die
-Players who focus on the fake-out Scarlet appearances

They all take time away from the event too.

Erasculio.2914:

bhagwad.4281:

What is this “as intended” nonsense I keep hearing? Nothing is “intended”. It is what it is.

I have the feeling you don’t remember the other exploits in this game.

Months ago, there was a bug that made Cultural weapons be sold for a very low price. Some players quickly noticed the bug, and bought a lot of those weapons, expecting to sell them later after the price had been fixed.

They were banned from the game.

“The price was what it was”, the banned players would say, “We didn’t do nothing beyond what the game allowed us to do”.

Yet, they were banned.

A few months later, players learned that salvaging the Snowflake items could give them most of the materials back. They could salvage rare Snowflake items for a chance to get ectos, and then use the materials to make another rare item for a very low cost, effectively creating a nearly infinite, ecto-producing loop.

They were banned.

“Crafting was working as it was”, the banned players cried, “We were just doing something the game allowed us to do”.

Yet they were banned.

Exploiting means playing the game in a way that was not intended. We know for a fact that there are ways to play the game differently from how ArenaNet intended people to play. Those who abuse the game like this – the exploiters – have been banned in the past. They always make excuses claiming they weren’t doing anything wrong, but it never changed the fact that yes, they were exploiting.

And for the records, I love this quote:

Vol.5241:

It’s not an exploit. People are trying very, very hard to complete the event. But it’s too difficult.

Too difficult indeed.

…Exploiting coding errors is not in the same league. I don’t know why people are unable to understand this basic difference.

And for the final kicker, not only did Anet not ban any players for farming the gauntlet, they also said they were aware of it and had plans to manage the economic impact. In other words….it was fully working as intended.

As long as players are not making use of obvious cheats (like the snowflake and cultural weapons exploits), anything goes if it’s part of the mechanics of the game.

bhagwad.4281:

And for the final kicker, not only did Anet not ban any players for farming the gauntlet, they also said they were aware of it and had plans to manage the economic impact. In other words….it was fully working as intended.

The real kicker is – can you point a single post of mine in which I say people who farm the gauntlet are exploiters?

he never said you did. he’s using the comparison to delineate the difference between exploiting a coding error and farming an event.

Erasculio.2914:

bhagwad.4281:

And for the final kicker, not only did Anet not ban any players for farming the gauntlet, they also said they were aware of it and had plans to manage the economic impact. In other words….it was fully working as intended.

Oh and according to your reply, anet did not plan for players to farm gauntlet else they would not have nerfed it twice
The real kicker is – can you point a single post of mine in which I say people who farm the gauntlet are exploiters?

sure, you said this : ‘’Exploiting means playing the game in a way that was not intended’‘.OK so in other words we should ban players that do more than 1 different fractal, ban for all doing WVW if they take the same keep more than once, ban for those exploring all over again on more than character for rewards because that’s grinding, ban to everyone doing invasion more than once per map (oh wait achievement) and so on because anet said they don’t want anyone to farm. So in other words, let’s ban 90% of the population just for the sake of it!

Oh and according to your reply anet did not intended players to farm gauntlet because they nerfed it twice, therefore it was not intended

Erasculio.2914:

Kirschwasser.3972:

Again. Anet’s already addressed the issue, calling people exploiters is just kinda being all sour grapes about things not being the way you want.

No one has managed to make a solid counter argument claiming it wasn’t an exploit. The fact ArenaNet fixed it is one more sign of how it was something they didn’t intend to have in the game.

The thing is, ArenaNet didn’t solve the issue. They simply covered it a bit. We are now on the third event ArenaNet had to modify in order to prevent exploiters from exploiting. It’s about time they noticed that, unless they are prepared to change many more events, they are trying to apply the wrong fix. ArenaNet should either deal with the exploiters (something they are not going to do – we all have learned that the GW2 community as a whole is filled by exploiters, and ArenaNet cannot afford to lose all those players), or deal with the new system that has allowed exploiters to exploit so much – they need to remove the Champion drop boxes. Those should be moved to rewards for finishing the Dynamic Events themselves, and each champion in the open world should be changed to be an event (even if just like the “Kill the Champion Troll” event in Queensdale) so people would have a reason to fight them.

Until ArenaNet implements a fix like that, for the real issue behind the current troubles in the game, we are going to have the same problems over and over.

They literally came into a thread where people were complaining about farmers as exploiters, didn’t say that farming was exploiting, and simply said that they didn’t mean to create such a rift between the two playerbases and are hoping to tweak events in the future so that both sides can benefit.

Erego, you can call them exploiters, but Anet has only shown interest in mending the situation, not banning people currently undertaking it.

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

cheebuguh.2536:

timidobserver.7925:

cheebuguh.2536:

To start off, I’d like to say that I really do appreciate this update. Zones felt like an awesome battlefield and I enjoyed the story cutscenes. A lot of things were done well and I do feel that some parts of the living story have improved over time.

However there are also a lot of problems that this update has brought. My main problem is the issue of zerging champions during invaSions and ignoring the entire goal of the event. While participating in map chat, I was disappointed to see how the community reacted to calls to actually doing the event. Instead, people were opening telling people to just ignore the event and farm. It has really brought out what is to me the worst of the community in this game.

As this is the internet, it is only natural that there are hordes of people that aim only to zerg and get the most profit out of an event rather than playing it how it was intended. This means that the only solution is to develop content in a way that discourages or prevents such behavior. The invasions and champion loots together, while both good ideas, combine to make farming zergfests. As someone who wants to actually play the game and finish events, I feel that such zergfarming behavior being at the core of a huge game update is a step backwards for this game.

While I doubt that much will change as devs are already working on the next living story release, I hope that future releases will find ways to prevent and avoid the behavior that is occurring right now.

You seem to be implying that zerging isn’t playing the game as intended. I disagree given that that the last 3-4 updates have significantly increased the benefit of zerging. If they didn’t like zerging they would introduce updates that discourage it.

Hmm. Yeah, I do see your point.

In any case, I still do stand by my desire to have less zerging. Perhaps Anet does want zerging mechanics, and I don’t want to say that all zerging is bad since I do it at times too when I feel like just following a group, like in WvW. But what I don’t want to see is it becoming the main focus and center of content and gameplay as it has been in the last two releases.

And yes, I’m happy they’ve done something to solve the champion farming problem

False. This game punishes the Zerging, but in a VERY subtle way that requires a long explanation.

Basically, the more people you have, the more enemies, and difficult enemies, spawn. Correct? But enemies will always have a three second delay on spawn. This means that you can bring all the dps and Zerking gear in the game, but you will always loose three seconds BY DEFAULT before you can clear the wave.

Now, if you factor that in with Mob Numbers, Mob Strength and levels, and mob types, you will eventually notice that even though it’s by subtle and small amounts, you have to increasingly spend more time at a single mob. This is at the VERY MINIMUM four and a half minutes. Something hardly anyone will notice. But if you include killing the mobs, WPing from place to place, running from place to place, dying and downing damage reductions and more, this game DOES punish inefficiency, but not in an obvious way. The average person won’t realise that’s what happens to all the time but it does actually effect the game greatly. You have 45 minutes. You can’t afford to loose 10-15 minutes. And many many people do without noticing the subtle time-sinks.

People that zerg want stronger enemies. They want the loot drops. You get better loot running in a zerg, therefore the game supports zerging over not zerging.

I think the main thing that needs to be changed is the aetherblades and even molten alliance events need to fail as soon as enough of them have been completed like the minions do at the end of the 3rd wave.

Can tolerate people zerging up and farming them during the wave but it’s frustrating to see 50+ at aetherblades long after the aetherblade quota has been met.

Here’s another destructive thing about this update:
http://www.gw2state.com/temples.html

Hope they come back some day, but I doubt it at this rate.

timidobserver.7925:

People that zerg want stronger enemies. They want the loot drops. You get better loot running in a zerg, therefore the game supports zerging over not zerging.

You don’t need more than a dozen ppl to spawn a Champion in most events.
Ppl zerg because they know it makes the Champion die a lot faster and hit it’s maximum targets per attack limit too, making it actually a lot Weaker, not stronger

ilr.9675:

Here’s another destructive thing about this update:
http://www.gw2state.com/temples.html

Hope they come back some day, but I doubt it at this rate.

timidobserver.7925:

People that zerg want stronger enemies. They want the loot drops. You get better loot running in a zerg, therefore the game supports zerging over not zerging.

You don’t need more than a dozen ppl to spawn a Champion in most events.
Ppl zerg because they know it makes the Champion die a lot faster and hit it’s maximum targets per attack limit too, making it actually a lot Weaker, not stronger

I never said you need more than a dozen people to spawn a champion. Who cares about the act of spawning a champion? What it takes to spawn one is completely beside the point. Apparently the point went entirely over your head. The point was about gathering loot efficiently.

A zerg champion train results in more loot and gold than 8 people. This fact proves that Anet supports zerging. They would change this mechanic so that 5-7 people could be just as effective at mass champion box hunting kitten.

So, linking this back to my original post, Zerging is playing the game as intended. If it were not intended, there wouldn’t be as much benefit to zerging. I have personally made hundreds of gold from casually zerging around without putting a bunch of time in. When I can make hundreds of gold in a small group or solo play, the game won’t be in favor of zerging.

don’t tell me I missed the point.
…When You don’t even know that a WvW dev already admitted that their 5 target limit is also a Technical Server performance Limitation that they’d like to address but just can’t at this time… IE: Zerging is basically an exploit that they can’t fix yet. There was never anything intended about it. And if they were to really start scaling Event Difficulty everywhere else like they’ve done in Orr, you’d see a lot more people QQ’ing that zerging was ruining their current super easy farming

If it was ‘intended’ for us to finish the event as people seem to think, why would Anet put in unrelated champ packs of aethers and moltens?

Obviously because what’s really intended is for us to choose between Scarlet, and gold.

Oh, and gold wins again? Surprise surprise. Aren’t you glad though we voted in Ellen Kiel? I’ve been portal hopping like a mofo.

ilr.9675:

don’t tell me I missed the point.
…When You don’t even know that a WvW dev already admitted that their 5 target limit is also a Technical Server performance Limitation that they’d like to address but just can’t at this time… IE: Zerging is basically an exploit that they can’t fix yet. There was never anything intended about it. And if they were to really start scaling Event Difficulty everywhere else like they’ve done in Orr, you’d see a lot more people QQ’ing that zerging was ruining their current super easy farming

And when they nerf champ loot into the ground again you will see a lot more people “QQ’ing” about not being able to complete events in Orr and the rest of the open world.

all i can say about the title of this thread is
were you not here for the last event they released….

I really don’t see these exploiters you are talking about, maybe my overflow servers don`t have them… Normally 4 out of 5 events are successfull with killing Scarlet at the end. And yes, there are always farm zergs for champions but I have never seen them not killing the aetherblade captains to spawn more champions. Normally they kill them, then move on the the next position… Yes events could be done faster if there were not so huge farm groups but more smaller groups doing all the events at the same time. But what for? The events are working, farmers are happy, everything is fine.

I’ll be going back to the events, looking for these “exploiters” I have to see yet^^

Something I haven’t seen brought up in this whole discussion. Champs aren’t just about the loot. The items we need to bring to Vorpp are dropped by Champs. If you are on a server where everyone is nice and spread out doing the event “correctly” it can be a problem to find anything beyond vets.

It has brought out the design flaws, sure. The reason people farm champions is that win or lose, they get more money and the reward for failing(which isn’t good even if you succeed anyway). Not only that, but there is absolutely no end game in GW2 other then making gold for skins. People complaining need to look at the bigger picture and notice why GW2 is failing in certain areas, you cannot dictate how someone plays, nerfing every area you can make money from causes them to go elsewhere hence people are champion farming.

I’m so sick and tired of this. People are whining constantly, on both sides. Every zone, people just have to dictate how other should play, arguing about what is best, what is MOST FUN, calling each other idiots for having a different viewpoint, it’s a kittening circus. Enough already.