Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 seems to be sending some rather confusing mixed messages in regards to farming.

First: the game includes magic find gear and food. These are explicitly “use me if you’re farming” items, especially because, in the case of magic find gear, their stats are lower than other gear since part of their stat budget went to magic find. People probably shouldn’t be using them in explorable dungeons as a result, so they only really exist for open world farming. The same could be said about the Karma Booster gem shop item, which encourages players to spend its hour long duration gathering as much karma as possible. Add to this the very, very high cost of many items that require karma (80 exotic vendor gear in Orr) and gold (cultural armor) and it seems clear that the game wants players to farm for items and karma to earn these items.

Enter the anti-farming code, which confuses everything. I’ve been given the opportunity to use magic find gear, which tells me I should be farming for things; but if I do that for longer than 30 minutes at a time, my drop rate is sharply reduced. I need a lot of karma for many items, but if I do events with a frequency that the game dictates as “too quickly,” then my karma gains slow to an absolute crawl, with or without a Karma Booster.

My suggestion? If we’re not supposed to farm for things, don’t include items that require farming, and don’t include items that encourage farming. It just leads to frustration for players to be shown that a certain gameplay approach is intended and then immediately told by another aspect of the game that it isn’t.

BULLSEYE!!!!! You hit it right on the head!!! Its getting pretty hard to craft when I get punished for trying to farm for fine crafting materials…..

the message is obvious, leave the game after hit 80 and buy mop

Here’s my take:

The game was originally intended to have optional farming (which it still does). It also offers methods to reduce the tax of farming through magic find armor and materials. It was working as intended.

Then, bots came into play. They used the magic find materials and wrecked (and are still wrecking) havoc on the game. ANet, in an attempt to stop these bots from destroying the economy, instituted the anti-farming code.

This hampered the bots, but it harmed legitimate players MUCH more.

There are, of course, methods of circumventing this code (farm one zone, run to another after 25 minutes, and then rotate your crops), but what ANet did only partially solved the problem and at the expense of many players.

They implemented the code because they cared about their players, but only wound up causing further harm and not enough good to come out of it.

I’m still playing the game, of course, but ANet needs to figure out a way of getting rid of the bots AND keeping their farming community relatively happy.

And I trust that they will. Just takes a bit of time.

Very well put, Agent Noun.

Duveth.5742:

the message is obvious, leave the game after hit 80 and buy mop

Buying MoP is an awful idea and nobody should ever do it. Whether one leaves this game or not is a different matter.

Vorch.2985:

Here’s my take:
Then, bots came into play. They used the magic find materials and wrecked (and are still wrecking) havoc on the game. ANet, in an attempt to stop these bots from destroying the economy, instituted the anti-farming code.

This hampered the bots, but it harmed legitimate players MUCH more.

There are, of course, methods of circumventing this code (farm one zone, run to another after 25 minutes, and then rotate your crops), but what ANet did only partially solved the problem and at the expense of many players.

I think you’re right on the intention of the anti-farm code, but I disagree about its effects. It seems to have harmed legitimate players plenty, but given the amount of bots I still see, it doesn’t seem to be discouraging them one bit.