Guild Wars 2

Pariah.8506:

Qaelyn.7612:

Phy.2913:

No, human nature will cause them to find the next easiest farm. If you need evidence, just open your eyes.

Another non-response.

If something else gets farmed, you adjust that. You keep adjusting until people are doing a variety of things.

This isn’t difficult. It just requires a bit of time and attention.

I agree, let’s just abolish ALL drops.
Look who has the last laugh now farmers! ha!
What will you farm now eh? Thought so!

While this is mostly sarcasm, this would be the only way to stop farming.

Phy.2913:

cesmode.4257:

Phy.2913:

Qaelyn.7612:

Astralporing.1957:

Qaelyn.7612:

After that, you get greatly reduced rewards. Ta-da — champion farming is fixed.

Too bad that it doesn’’t help any in the problem that OP posed, right? Nor does it “fix” anything else, really.

It absolutely does, by balancing rewards and providing an incentive for people to do a multitude of activities rather than just one.

Take just one simple change: each champion drops a bag only once per character per day. Immediately instead of having huge percentages of players farming two maps, you’d have players all over every map.

Now greatly increase the first-time rewards for doing hearts or DEs. Again, you will see a lot more people exploring and doing different things.

What would actually happen is the complete abandonment of champion kills.

And what is wrong with this?

It doesn’t do anything to “fix” the problem.

By removing an incentive to farm champions, people are now free to do other things.
If they remove the incentive for champion kills, and placed that incentive in the open world participating in any dynamic event in the game, yes that might help.

Phy.2913:

While this is mostly sarcasm, this would be the only way to stop farming.

Absolutely false.

It’s exactly like class balance adjustment — if too many people are using something in a way that the developers find unbalanced, small tweaks can change it. No reason to get rid of anything.

In this case people are abusing (IMO) the champion system, because it gives easy rewards in minimal time. So you make the rewards better match the time and effort required, or you limit them. This removes the champion farming as the “go to” method, which encourages people to do other things. Not all of them will have the same #2 choice; if most do, then you adjust that.

You continue until when people ask “what’s the best way to make gold?” they get a dozen different answers or “depends what you enjoy”. Just as in a good game “what’s the best class” gets a bunch of different answers or “depends what you enjoy”.

I dunno, I guess it depends on what the “next easiest thing” after champ farming is. For many people, it’s WvW zerg chasing. Simple and rewarding, and has an overall positive gameplay impact. I can’t deride that. What would the next easiest thing be fore the pure-pve crowd?

The mechanics for this kind of encouraged diversification is already started, though it seems they just kind of gave up on it. When you kill mobs, you get bonus xp based on how old that mob was. It’s not a little one, either. It can easily double the value of the kill. Not a bad payoff just for wandering off the path or killing a few yellows.

Then that was it. Back at launch, when karma trains were getting popular, they were talking about making it so events started diminishing the payoff after the second time you did them in a day. And I haven’t heard another thing about it since. It just ceased to be a priority somewhere along the way.

cesmode.4257:

Phy.2913:

cesmode.4257:

Phy.2913:

Qaelyn.7612:

Astralporing.1957:

Qaelyn.7612:

After that, you get greatly reduced rewards. Ta-da — champion farming is fixed.

Too bad that it doesn’’t help any in the problem that OP posed, right? Nor does it “fix” anything else, really.

It absolutely does, by balancing rewards and providing an incentive for people to do a multitude of activities rather than just one.

Take just one simple change: each champion drops a bag only once per character per day. Immediately instead of having huge percentages of players farming two maps, you’d have players all over every map.

Now greatly increase the first-time rewards for doing hearts or DEs. Again, you will see a lot more people exploring and doing different things.

What would actually happen is the complete abandonment of champion kills.

And what is wrong with this?

It doesn’t do anything to “fix” the problem.

By removing an incentive to farm champions, people are now free to do other things.
If they remove the incentive for champion kills, and placed that incentive in the open world participating in any dynamic event in the game, yes that might help.

You’re free to do other things now. Do we really need to go back to the DE chain farms like we had in Orr? Is that really an improvement? (it’s not)

cesmode.4257:

Or another solution that has been suggested time and time again on these forums is randomize the spawn timers of the champions in every zone.

I know the farmers hate the idea, as well as people trying to get the materials needed for ascended weapons and such, but zergs need to be broken up. Yes, its my opinion and countless others share it as well. But without zergs in one or two zones, we might have a population spread out a bit more throughout the world. I think that is a far better alternative.

Randomize the champ timers, and lengthen spawn times on a handful of them so that the zerg cannot bounce from one to the next to the next,etc.

Sorry, but this would make ZERO difference on my server. The FGS train is gone. There are MAYBE 15 people in the QD train at any one time. Busting that up does what, exactly? Add 15 people scattered here and there, or 15 people that might just give up on this game altogether because the rewards here are atrocious.

The problem is the following:

In a game that was advertised as not item centric, everything is about farming items or gold to buy items.

In fact, getting rid of all items would free people. But I do not think that most players in Guild Wars 2 would be ready for this. The carrot, it has to be hunted.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

In a game that was advertised as not item centric, everything is about farming items or gold to buy items.

In fact, getting rid of all items would free people. But I do not think that most players in Guild Wars 2 would be ready for this. The carrot, it has to be hunted.

Seems to me it’s the opposite. You have a bunch of people who aren’t happy unless they have something to hunt, so Anet gave them something. Of course most of them now complain that it’s too hard to catch, but if they caught it, they’d then complain that they had nothing to do.

Qaelyn.7612:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

In a game that was advertised as not item centric, everything is about farming items or gold to buy items.

In fact, getting rid of all items would free people. But I do not think that most players in Guild Wars 2 would be ready for this. The carrot, it has to be hunted.

Seems to me it’s the opposite. You have a bunch of people who aren’t happy unless they have something to hunt, so Anet gave them something. Of course most of them now complain that it’s too hard to catch, but if they caught it, they’d then complain that they had nothing to do.

That’s why it has to be a carrot that is fun to catch, like mastering your class.
In GW1 you had a ton of skills, and could make, test, share and try out builds endlessly on as much as 10 professions. This kept a lot of people interested, because there was constant variation and any time you got bored of playing the game one way you could spin it around entirely and play it another way.
In GW2 the difference in builds consists of traits – which are all passive and self sufficient – and equipment, which is also passive. With the poor amount of skills we have access to we play different builds (as little variation as there is by comparison) the same way because 7/10 skills on our bar never change.

GW2 could have expanded the build variety, diversity and accessibility (changing stats on your armour) but instead chose to cater to the people that consider getting a high number of a virtual item in their inventory to be fun.
But here’s the thing: While GW1 entertained people with its unique gameplay and the possibilities of endless variations of it GW2 tried to hold the players with something that 13 a dozen MMOs have. How long will these people stay loyal with the upcoming and existing competition on the market of games that do the exact same thing as the latter case but better?

Valid points. Never played GW1 and there’s always something new and awesome coming out (until it comes out, usually). I’d certainly love to see more build variety and more skill options, though for me personally there’s already quite a lot to try to master.

First and foremost we need an underflow system. No amount of tweaking or hammering in any mechanics of the game will change the fact that all players are spread out on 24 different servers per region for a given map, of which there are 20+ in the world.

With an underflow system, all servers would share the same map until it maxes out. You may only see 6 people in Timberline Falls on your server, but imagine if you saw 6 people on it from every server at once…

The game has an absolutely massive population that is being sliced to ribbons.

Hannelore.8153:

First and foremost we need an underflow system. No amount of tweaking or hammering in any mechanics of the game will change the fact that all players are spread out on 24 different servers per region for a given map, of which there are 20+ in the world.

With an underflow system, all servers would share the same map until it maxes out. You may only see 6 people in Timberline Falls on your server, but imagine if you saw 6 people on it from every server at once…

The game has an absolutely massive population that is being sliced to ribbons.

I agree and have thought the same? But doing this or merging servers might look like population is shrinking and for a game that loves its PR…this is a nono

Qaelyn.7612:

Astralporing.1957:

Qaelyn.7612:

After that, you get greatly reduced rewards. Ta-da — champion farming is fixed.

Too bad that it doesn’’t help any in the problem that OP posed, right? Nor does it “fix” anything else, really.

It absolutely does, by balancing rewards and providing an incentive for people to do a multitude of activities rather than just one.

Nope. It removes incentive to do champ trains, but doesn’t give any more incentive to do anything else. Result? You kill one activity, but it doesn’t cause the people to spread out.
It may cause more people to afk in LA, though.
Apparently, the people that champ-farm do need those incentives. If you want them to spread out, instead of congregating in one place, you need to provide incentives to do that. SImply nerfing place after place (what seems to be advocated here) won’t work, because farmers will eventually decide it’s not the game for them and just leave.
Besides, it has been tried already. And there’s a reason why Anet stopped that approach and started to add more incentives to less desired activities (which killing champs was one of then).

TL/DR: The solution is to make every activity equally rewarding. The solution is not to make every activity equally unrewarding.

cesmode.4257:

I know the farmers hate the idea, as well as people trying to get the materials needed for ascended weapons and such, but zergs need to be broken up.

With ascended weapons requiring as much grind as they do and ascended armor on the way, there are people who will fight tooth and nail against anything that decreases the efficiency of their grinding, because there are people hate what they’re doing.

Best-in-slot gear requires grinding, so people are grinding, even though they hate it.

cesmode.4257:

But on any server I play on, I see very few, if any people at all. Its disheartening, disappointing, and depressing. So then if I can’t participate in the open world content the way it was meant to be(with other players and not only solo), I turn to WvW, Dungeons, Fractals. Only so much of that I can do.

So..Im at a loss. I want to continue playing the game. Arenanet got so many things right with GW2, but one or two things just ruined this game for to the point where I am looking to the future for a new game. Don’t want to let go of GW2 just yet, but <shrugs>..theres no one around in these zones to play with. Why bother with the game at all?

The problem I have with this is that you’re blaming Arena.net for what is entirely a player-side problem. It’s typical MMO conditioning… gotta get the phattest lewtz… gotta get the best shinies… and gotta do it now now NOW!

There’s really nothing a company can do about it. There’s always going to be a path of least resistance no matter what they do, and that is inevitably what the MMO masses are going to rush for. Doesn’t matter how insignificant that difference is. Doesn’t even matter if it really IS more efficient. Whatever the perceived “farming” or “grind” route is, that is where the bulk of the player base is going to be.

And that is true for pretty much ANY MMO out there. Sorry… hate the playa, not the game.