I’ve assumed for a while now that- given the sorts of changes A-net has implemented in the past- CoF farming is doomed. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next week, but someday, it will be brought to an end in the harshest possible way. It will be so bad that the CoF farmers will rank the new AC as more farm-able. Aspiring dungeon masters will have to refresh lfg.com for hours just to get a CoF group together. Each trash mob will be replaced with pre-nerf Lupicus. Anyways, you get the picture.
This thread isn’t about the actual likelihood of that happening though, it’s about how people would feel about that happening. Currently, the disparity in profitability of farming CoF P1 and any other activity- in raw gold per hour- is massive. I imagine that a nerf to CoF farming would raise a huge outcry along the lines of what we saw in response to the implementation of diminishing returns, etc: “A-net is forcing us to play the game their way, and we should be able to choose to play it our way.” In this argument, ‘forcing’ is used with the assumption that players want to gain gold as efficiently as possible, and so A-net is able to force players to do or not do things simply by altering what is and is not the most efficient way to make gold.
But with the current state of things, aren’t players just as ‘forced’ to play a certain way? If high-level fractals suddenly gave 1-3 exotics in the final chest each time, people would complain that A-net was forcing them to run fractals. Anyone not doing fractals would find prices rising faster than they could make money, and so they would not be able to realistically pursue a legendary or other luxuries. CoF doesn’t give 1-3 exotics per run, but you can see the point- CoF farming just shines too much in comparison to other money-making methods.
If I want a legendary- time to invest in a warrior and some berserker gear, and go farm CoF. If I want a luxury item like a black lion training contract- time to CoF. Heck, if I want a fancy dye- time to CoF. It’s so bad that the common consensus on legendaries is that it’s most efficient to buy all the mats, because gold gain through CoF is so much faster.
Would it really be so bad if there were actually some other options? Let’s say you are going to start building a legendary, and you are interested in doing this as efficiently as you possibly can. If you could choose which is most efficient- a variety of world and dungeon activities or running the same dungeon endlessly- which would you choose for yourself?
Now obviously it would be nice if A-net decided to buff other activities to equal the profitability of CoF farming. People that want to CoF farm would be happy, people that don’t want to CoF farm but do enjoy one of the newly buffed activities would be happy. I think we can all agree, however, that this is very unlikely. Much more likely that CoF is just nerfed to oblivion. This would mean that the most efficient way to gain gold post-patch would be significantly less efficient than the method pre-patch. I’m not going to say that that isn’t an upsetting thing.
However, I personally would still be happy about the patch. There will always be one dungeon/event/instance/whatever that is most efficient, but the gap between varied play and optimal play would be significantly smaller than it is right now. I would suddenly possess the freedom to enjoy different world events, dungeons, and activities and know that I was progressing towards an expensive goal in an efficient way, not too far from the optimal way. (Let’s leave the trading post game out of this, that’s an entirely different bag of Charr).
Also consider- true CoF farming is much more than just grinding a certain path in a certain dungeon. It is adopting a single build, for one of two classes. I’m not complaining that people are excluded, because quite honestly it isn’t very hard to acquire a level 80 warrior and berserker gear. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that every player actually has, as one of their characters, a warrior that is properly geared for CoF farming. Ta’da, he’s yours. You can go make money at a decent rate with any class of your chosen build that you enjoy playing with, or you can make money at a wtfbbq rate with your berserker build warrior. What are you going to do, assuming you are, once again, interested in progressing efficiently towards a luxury goal? Which option would you find more fun?
I’m really interested in hearing your answer to two questions:
1) If A-net asked you if they should buff a wide variety of activities in the game to be just as profitable as CoF farming, what would you say?
2) If A-net asked you if they should nerf CoF so that the disparity between the optimal gold farming method and high-but-not-quite-optimal methods was dramatically lessened, what would you say?