Guild Wars 2

Definitions I use for the purpose of the thread:
Directly: Killing a critter and getting an item in the loot from the body
Indirectly: obtaining the item off the TP via money made from selling other loot obtained directly.

I find it highly irritating that the best method of obtaining T6 mats is indirectly. Even without Farming Punishment, Anet has gone through and gutted T6 resources in regards to obtaining the items directly. About the only T6 mat I’ve been able to reliably loot directly is Karka shells. All other areas where you used to be reliably get T6 mats have been nerfed so hard you are lucky to get any drops at all.

What was a drop rate of around 3 or 4 every half hour (before Farming Punishment kicks in), has dropped to less than 1 per hour. Heavy bags drop stuff on occasion, but that is classified as “indirect” because it’s a random chance that it’s a T6 mat of a given type that you need.

Essentially Arenanet has forced players to choose indirect methods of obtaining specific loot types required for the gear they may want to craft. They’ve also skewed the values of given T6 mats on the trading post, simply because a higher priced item would cause more people to hunt for it in the areas where it’s known to drop until the price came back down to a reasonable level.

Farming Punishment has been heralded by Anet as effective against bots, but if it’s so effective, why is Anet keeping a strangle-hold on the T6 market by deliberately forcing scarcity instead of promoting free trade?

It is ridiculous that someone wanting to craft a given item should have to give up the tradition of exploration and adventuring in order to obtain a given material, but with GW2, you have to do exactly that. You have to play the game the way they choose, buy either zerging champ farms, or participating in completely unrelated content which may or may not interest you in the first place.

It’s like having to buy a boat in order to trade it for a car, because you are not allowed to buy a car directly, only through an “authorized” source.

The only things the current lunacy is doing is frustrating honest players and keeping bots in business, Farming Punishment or not.

edited for clarity

I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to try to farm a large quantity of Lodestones directly, rather than farming for general wealth and buying them.

Um..doesn’t someone have to ‘farm’ them? I am pretty sure they don’t magically appear on the Trading Post. I don’t buy my mats from the TP. But, I will admit I do sell mats whenever my stack gets full. I’m not a farmer, either. I just collect whatever I happen to walk by or whatever drops.

I’m sure there are alternate methods of releasing materials in the game, and it may be a valid concern, but if some people can gather mats by playing the game, and sell them, there must be a viable method of obtaining them. I am not sure what the solution is, except maybe slowing down the pursuit of the latest shiny. I could be wrong, I’m not a game designer.

Man i didnt even know about this whole farm punishment stuff until i tried to farm powerful blood and vicious claws a few weeks ago and wasnt getting anything.

I get a fair amount of Powerful Venom Sacs, Vials of Powerful Blood, and Ancient Bones while farming champions in Frostgorge. Nothing super amazing, but certainly not too horrible of a rate, not to mention what I get from the boxes I open afterwards.

You might want to complain about SOME T6 mats, rather than lumping them all together. It sucks that you can’t get a whole lot with ease I suppose, but they are required for the most powerful armors and weapons in the game. I don’t imagine it should be a cakewalk.

Zanryu.3417:

I get a fair amount of Powerful Venom Sacs, Vials of Powerful Blood, and Ancient Bones while farming champions in Frostgorge. Nothing super amazing, but certainly not too horrible of a rate, not to mention what I get from the boxes I open afterwards.

You might want to complain about SOME T6 mats, rather than lumping them all together. It sucks that you can’t get a whole lot with ease I suppose, but they are required for the most powerful armors and weapons in the game. I don’t imagine it should be a cakewalk.

With all due respect, I think you missed my point about “direct” vs. “indirect” drops. Champ loot does drop a moderately dismal amount of T6 mats, but, for starters, you have no control over what type you get.

And thus explains why champ trains are born.

Merely playing the game, it would take so long to get all the materials to make a legendary weapon that I would personally just get bored and eventually leave. Even in places like Orr the direct loot drops are pathetic….. no… REALLY pathetic. How many porous bones can one person get? So, here I am fighting level 80 veterans… no drops at all or something worthless.

I gave up a long time ago trying to get anything by just playing the game. I’ve been on the frostgorge champ train for a while now and have watched my T6 mats stack up as well as my gold. If I need a break I go do some map completion or WvW or PvP or whatever. If you don’t want to craft anything, you sell everything on TP to the poor suckers who still think “playing the game the way it was meant to be played” will get them anywhere.

Wait, what? Farming punishment?

I’ve been away for a while, what the heck did they do!?

And, um, yeah, the drop rates of anything are pathetically abysmal for a game that claims to avoid grind. Bleh.

ozmaniandevil.6805:

And thus explains why champ trains are born.

Merely playing the game, it would take so long to get all the materials to make a legendary weapon that I would personally just get bored and eventually leave. Even in places like Orr the direct loot drops are pathetic….. no… REALLY pathetic. How many porous bones can one person get? So, here I am fighting level 80 veterans… no drops at all or something worthless.

It’s taken me about half a year so far to get 1/3 of each of the mats I need, so.. yeah. it takes a while. Most of those mats, however, were through champ farming and running the Scarlet invasions.

Anet needs to strike a solid balance between current drop rates and the drop rates of vicious fangs in Crown Pavillion. In CP I picked up 250+ vicious fangs in about a week.

@Draco.2806: “Farming Punishment” is my pet term for Diminishing Returns, because I feel it more accurately describes what that code is for.

Neural.1824:

Zanryu.3417:

I get a fair amount of Powerful Venom Sacs, Vials of Powerful Blood, and Ancient Bones while farming champions in Frostgorge. Nothing super amazing, but certainly not too horrible of a rate, not to mention what I get from the boxes I open afterwards.

You might want to complain about SOME T6 mats, rather than lumping them all together. It sucks that you can’t get a whole lot with ease I suppose, but they are required for the most powerful armors and weapons in the game. I don’t imagine it should be a cakewalk.

With all due respect, I think you missed my point about “direct” vs. “indirect” drops. Champ loot does drop a moderately dismal amount of T6 mats, but, for starters, you have no control over what type you get.

Your point was that it’s difficult to get T6 mats via the direct method of acquiring them. I acknowledged that, and to be quite honest T6 mats have roughly the same value if we exclude Vials of Powerful Blood, even if you have no control over which you get you can easily sell them on the TP and buy what you want. A mix of direct and indirect methods. Obvious people are getting enough drops to supply the market with them, it may not be 10 or 20 in an hour of farming, but you do get them. Like I said they’re used for the highest tiers of armor and weapons in the game, should they really be THAT easy to get?

You can go directly farm coin and buy them, same effect really, though honestly that tends to be more effective than farming for mats alone. Farm 6g in an hour, or try to farm 2-3 T6 in an hour.

Zanryu.3417:

You can go directly farm coin and buy them, same effect really, though honestly that tends to be more effective than farming for mats alone. Farm 6g in an hour, or try to farm 2-3 T6 in an hour.

That’s where it gets to be a playstyle issue, and I’m apparently one of the few, if not the only, people in the game that believes part of the crafting process involves finding the materials you need, as opposed to just buying them. Even so, this game has broken that for me to the point that I’ve gone against my own guidelines and purchased some items directly (drop rates on specific T6 crystals is pretty silly).
The problem I have overall with the farm-to-buy vs. explore-to-obtain is that if Anet is going to make the drop rates so low that it’s easier to buy the mats by farming gold, why not just nuke the drops all together and put T6 mats with an NPC? There is no point in having them drop anymore if the primary method of obtaining them is through indirect methods.
Right now I need over 100 of at least seven of the eight types, is it that wrong to want to be able to choose mobs like spiders and wurms, etc. and hack them up for powerful venom sacs, then move to things like risen for powerful blood, etc.?
To top it all off, Anet is still trying to combat bots, which I think we all agree on, but with Farming Punishment and only 4 zones to pick up T6 mats in, the bots are the only thing keeping the prices of T6 mats somewhere below the cost of precursors.