Guild Wars 2

First off, this is not a rant so please try to be constructive. Flamers and fanboys don’t add to conversation, they usually just derail it.

After well over 1000 hours in GW2 and having played since launch, I have seen one problem rear its head over and over: FARMING. It’s just not fun. I don’t even think it is supposed to be. But it exists because of larger underlying flaws in the design of GW2.

So what? People farm. Why is this a problem? Many large changes in content seem to be in response to farmers. And the cycle is slowly ruining every aspect of the game.

Players need gold and item s for things like Legendary Weapons. (I know, you don’t HAVE to build one, but a lot of folks want one so get off your soapbox) Gold/items are not easy to come by. This is intentional as ArenaNet would like us to buy gems with real cash and exchange them for gold. I don’t have a problem with the developer of a game trying to make money from their hard work. But the gold/resource starvation in the economy leads many players to farm.

Farming is slow, and boring, and totally unfun. But it IS profitable. So what do farms do? They look for a method that makes farming faster and easier. They look for areas where farming is most efficient. Every time somebody discovers a clever place to farm, a game update changes the area and the farmers move on.

Way back when, farming in Cursed Shore was the IT thing. Lots of events, lots of mobs, lots of players around. Lots of loot. My first character was making in the realm of 5-7 gold per day farming just a few hours in Orr. My most recent character got to Cursed Shore to find it abandoned. Overrun with events that spawned waves of veterans. Waves of vets vs. me, in my blues/greens.

Currently, the place to farm is Union Waypoint by temple of Lyssa. This creates a problem as people want to do the temple event for the daily chest while others want the Union Seal event to run forever so they can farm. The need to farm has put players in direct competition with each other’s goals.

This is just bad design. For a game that seemed so intent on breaking the mold. Doing away with trinity and blah blah blah…. why did they settle on the traditional “enemies drop coin, coin buys stuff” economy??? A legendary weapon shouldn’t be about who invested the most time in grinding for materials or who bought the most gold. There’s nothing legendary about that. Instead of endless grinding and RNG in special events for skins, players should be rewarded by actually accomplishing things.

Set a list of goals for players to complete, give various rewards for completion, coolness of reward scales with difficulty. Simple.

Climb the mountain: get a small prize.
Climb the mountain, enter the cave: get a bigger prize.
Climb the mountain, enter the cave, slay the dragon: really amazing prize.

This lack of motivation that persists in the game causes players to sit around farming or just doing daily events rather than really playing the game. CoF p1 runs all day are profitable so lets ignore the other zillion dungeons out there.

If there was a goal like: help the Pact defend Orr and you get a reward. People would be out there. If the goal was help the Lionguard battle cavebats, I promise those bats would be dead. Just look at Southsun. An otherwise unliked and abandoned zone is crawling with players because ArenaNet told us to go there and do stuff for a prize.

An achievement based game > a gold driven game.

TL;DR Gold-based economy is old, outdated, and doesn’t work. Achievement based games are fun, set goals for players, keep players engaged.

Won’t change. Too late to change it. Regardless of how much I agree with your post, it would be better suited for a Guild Wars 3 forum. There is nothing they can do about the economy being gold based now.

PraetorMortis.8610:

Set a list of goals for players to complete, give various rewards for completion, coolness of reward scales with difficulty. Simple.

Climb the mountain: get a small prize.
Climb the mountain, enter the cave: get a bigger prize.
Climb the mountain, enter the cave, slay the dragon: really amazing prize.

This lack of motivation that persists in the game causes players to sit around farming or just doing daily events rather than really playing the game. CoF p1 runs all day are profitable so lets ignore the other zillion dungeons out there.

If there was a goal like: help the Pact defend Orr and you get a reward. People would be out there. If the goal was help the Lionguard battle cavebats, I promise those bats would be dead. Just look at Southsun. An otherwise unliked and abandoned zone is crawling with players because ArenaNet told us to go there and do stuff for a prize.

An achievement based game > a gold driven game.

TL;DR Gold-based economy is old, outdated, and doesn’t work. Achievement based games are fun, set goals for players, keep players engaged.

Good suggestions I endorse this.

There are three reasons I don’t see a change to drop rates coming anytime soon.
A) They’ve got a financial incentive to ensure players can’t buy everything in the Gem Shop with gold.
B) Making farming a slow process gives some players a reason to keep playing.
C) A lot of people have put in a lot of time to get stuff like Legendary weapons. If the bar to get these prestigious items is suddenly lowered, they’re going to feel cheated.

I’d like it if T6 mats were easy to obtain, I just don’t think that’s going to be a reality any time soon.

Having previously sold all of any mats I gathered, I am now saving them in an admittedly slow general idea that someday I will obtain a legendary. In 2 months I have less than 35 of every T6 mat. This is admittedly “casual play”, at this rate it will take me probably a year to gather what I need. Does this really matter..no. Is it understandable why people get frustrated..yes.

I just posted something about this in the suggestion section. The person that said that it’s too late to change anything now is probably right.

The question will soon be the following: Why farm for days and days and even spend some real cash for a legendary weapon that is badly implemented in the game if you could just experience a whole new MMO. The last nerf to the elementalist class (which has definitively unbalanced the game further and made the game less fun to play for me) convinced me that the next 50$ I spend wont be on the gem store, but on another game.

I absolutely agree. I very much enjoyed doing all of the southsun achievements – did it all in 1 day and the whole rewards built into achievement idea is very nice. I hope we see more of this, and I really hope this is how they implement the pre-cursor scavenger hunt.

The problem is it’s just taking way too long and I and many others are simply losing/lost interest. Southsun revamp was a breath of fresh air, but now it’s back to the same old grinding and mostly useless loot. Waiting patiently for this better design… please less RNG.

i like what they did with southsun this patch, achievement give you price, mobs gives you loot in shape of rares or money based on what boost you chose.
if all the zone world would like this…
why can’t we have nice things and more titles with achievements along with gold economy?

Players say that the accumulation of gold is too slow in GW2. I think it compares favorably to other games I’ve played.

Fun facts:

WOW: 13 months played, during late BC and early Wrath. Gold accumulation was about 24 gold. I made this mostly through the tedious process of doing daily herb/metal runs taking 1-3 hours and selling the proceeds. Purple first tier Wrath gear pieces ran from 3-6 gold on the AH. Drops and coin from mobs had little effect on gold gain. The only quest rewards that were noteworthy were those for high level dailies.

GW2: Almost 9 month played. Gold accumulation is ~315 at the moment. Gold gained through a variety of means, including DE chains, Pen/Shelt, Meta events, zone completion, leveling and node runs taking 1-2 hours. Drops do seem to matter, even in the low end areas. I am leveling a new alt and got almost 3 gold selling half of my Tier 1 bloods, fangs, etc. the other day. An Exotic gear piece or weapon can be had for anywhere from 3-6 gold.

I sympathize with those for whom gold gain in GW2 is not enough, but I find it hard to understand. Like other posters, I doubt very much gold will just be replaced.

As for more of what we saw in Southsun, I expect we will see things like it going forward. I don’t think we will see the massive rework of the reward system across the entire game that the OP would like.

I agree with OP.
they should also remove the daily chest that drops from dragon event and make it have a chance to drop a unique weapon Like shadow behemoth Final rest.

I have 4 words for Anet:

Please.
Watch.
This.
kitten.

I agree, they totally ruined Orr farming, I now pretty much only drop into the game to do the dailies. Why bother anymore, with something that they deliberately ruined, in order to keep people from making a little cash. Really sad, I hope that they realize how badly they screwed things up for the people.

Xillllix.3485:

I just posted something about this in the suggestion section. The person that said that it’s too late to change anything now is probably right.

The question will soon be the following: Why farm for days and days and even spend some real cash for a legendary weapon that is badly implemented in the game if you could just experience a whole new MMO. The last nerf to the elementalist class (which has definitively unbalanced the game further and made the game less fun to play for me) convinced me that the next 50$ I spend wont be on the gem store, but on another game.

My feelings exactly, I will be keeping my cash for a whole new fresh game!

The problem is guys, this isn’t the late ‘90s anymore. Too much money is involved in these games now and at the end of the day; regardless of what developers claim, dream about, or say there is going to be someone checking the ROI. And that’s just that. Those of us that were lucky enough to start playing MMO’s when they first came out got to experience new, innovative, and exciting new games because they weren’t yet completely at the mercy of meeting IRR requirements.

I’m not saying games are not “fun” anymore and that someone may pull off playing a game designed around being as fun as possible without regard to profit max; but, it’ll be a fluke like old old ultima online not a carefully planned project.

My suggestion, enjoy the little bits you can from game to game but don’t get your hopes up for some holy grail of an MMO anytime soon, if ever again.

what a sad day….

PraetorMortis.8610:

The need to farm has put players in direct competition with each other’s goals.

This is so true, I decided to go back to Orr on my main, yes it was tumbleweed heavy but when I saw an event on my map I thought surely ther’ll be others doing that. Went over and ‘Joy!’ there were other players. I started contributing to the event and for my trouble was told in no uncertain terms by all others there to get lost. Seems they just wanted to farm the infinite spawns or something, how pathetic. I did actually leave because there were enough of them to possibly report me for made up things

You have also forgotten to consider another key reason why certain aspects of the game require you to build quantities etc… its because development of new content takes time.. by introducing grinds it provides ANET windows of opportunity in which to keep the rolling stone thing going.. otherwise you and I and everyone else will be screaming for more things to do.

Everything in an MMO can be and often is, designed to incorporate some kind of grind.. even levelling, your toons is a grind when looked at in the same repetitive context, so is crafting, so is dungeon running, fractals and yes your Legendary…. its all about mindset and understanding why its there.
If you could achieve everything in a flash, then what.. you gunna sit there and wait for the next batch of content rather than logging in to do nothing.. the game needs you to be logging in – concurrent player base is what brings in the $$$ to the game and without game development gets choked until eventually the switch gets flicked.. seen it happen before and it will happen again for sure.

Forgive me if I am wrong though, I did not realise there was some time limit or race in which these things had to be achieved so what’s the rush, your not being forced to grind out mats, gold or anything really only the player itself forces that upon themselves.

There is definitely a time-factor relating to grinding and goal completion that impacts the game. If content is too easy, most players whip through it and abandon the game until something new to do comes out. (Seen this plenty in GW2 so far) At the same time, if content is too hard or achieving a goal seems too far out of reach, players give up and move one. Nothing wrong with grinding in MMOs. I played EQ1 where you had to grind beetles and rats forever before you could safely leave a town. But when the grind begins to FEEL like a grind…. most players get burned out.

Since GW2 is generally free of the gear treadmill (ascended stuff kinda confused me but that’s another topic), most of what players are chasing is skins and titles. SO here are some ideas to fun up the grind:

Make some fun achievements and give unique titles and skins for them. Living story as shown this can be done. But seriously, the stuff in SSC was a joke. 90% of my guild were linking that hentai backpack in gchat the first day. It’s not an achievement if everyone can just do it.

How about some titles for things like: speed clearing a dungeon, or beating a boss in a challenging way (didn’t get hit, avoided the hard to dodge attack, etc). Other games figured out creative goals to keep us grinding without feeling ground down.

Instead of trying to get me interested in the Consortium and your “living story”, try and get me back into Tyria itself.

Make the control points in Orr guild claimable like WvW locations. Offer leaderboard or other accolades to guilds that hold these areas. That’d probably get some people back into the cluster**** that Orr has become.

Want to see players all over the world? And see them playing rather than hopping from chest reward to chest reward? How about you actually follow through on that whole “precursor scavenger hunt” that has been shelved indefinitely.

I think it’s be a load of fun if it went something like this:
1) npc at some city sends you to zone X in search of an item. (bring me Ogre chief Bill’s head)
2) you have to scour various DE’s in the zone until Bill spawns. (like a personal guild bounty) then kill the mob and get the head.
3) you return the head to the npc, and they give you another assignment. Each one gets a little tougher to do. Still, all your time and hard work results in a precursor for your legendary weapon!

That sure seems like more fun than the Mystic Toilet. And even if scavenger hunting took as long as grinding gold to buy a precursor off the TP, at least it wouldn’t FEEL like a grind.

Every MMO puts a carrot on a string and expects the players to run on the treadmill for it. ArenaNet just made it too obvious. We all KNOW we’re supposed to buy gems or face the endless grind. That’s no fun. I don’t mind if you trick me into spending my money. Just try for a little more subtlety.

Paul.4081:

PraetorMortis.8610:

The need to farm has put players in direct competition with each other’s goals.

This is so true, I decided to go back to Orr on my main, yes it was tumbleweed heavy but when I saw an event on my map I thought surely ther’ll be others doing that. Went over and ‘Joy!’ there were other players. I started contributing to the event and for my trouble was told in no uncertain terms by all others there to get lost. Seems they just wanted to farm the infinite spawns or something, how pathetic. I did actually leave because there were enough of them to possibly report me for made up things

That’s very unfortunate to have happened to you, and very pathetic of them. If you’re ever worried about being reported in a situation like this, simply say in chat (since chat logs are often reviewed in situations like this) in no uncertain terms “I’m well within my right to attempt to complete this dynamic event.”