Guild Wars 2

Long Read :

One of the big issues I have with this game is the really wonky risk/reward ratio when it comes to “wealth” in this game, wealth as in, gold/loot/rewards/mats/karma what have you. The stuff that is given out for many things in order to acquire other things.

Right now, the few options you have for making decent money, aside from playing the TP which is a very niche activity, is mainly Champ Zerging, and short Dungeon paths. I’ll group TP flipping with crafting/gathering since that’s mainly player economy driven.

I’m pretty disheartened when a potential new farming option comes around and turns out to be bad in comparison to the 2 mentioned above. For example, Halloween is back around, with the new Lab grind area, except this time the bosses take longer and spawn less, and the DR kicks in seemingly much faster, that or the loot was just straight up nerfed.

For instance, I logged on for the first time today, jumped into Labrynth and started tagging some mobs from one of the corner doors, I tagged a lot of mobs but when I loot about 90% of the loot was Bones, both large and porous. Since I already finished my achievement check list, and experienced the place last year. I really have no reason to go there anymore aside from chilling out in the center and taking screenshots for teh luls (I do love the atmosphere).

It’s sad, because as I said, I really, really love the atmosphere of this place, but it’s just not worth “farming” in, why would it be so bad for it to be as profitable or close to as profitable as champ farming? Would that be terrible for the game?

On top of that, last year after mastering the Clocktower, I also farmed that for the halloween bags, if you were good enough you could farm them at a decent rate, it wasn’t really that amazing, but it was good enough, I had some decent rewards for doing something different, and fun. This year that’s been heavily nerfed as you get a measely 3 bags per “finish” (the chests have cooldowns), which is the equivalent of chopping a sapling in Gendarren. =p

I’m afraid the Mad King dungeon is next on their “nerf” list, as last year not only was the instance a fun boss fight, but it was repeatable, the reward wasn’t a daily limit, and it gave good rewards. I was in heaven at that time, not only could I farm this fight that was fun (especially with friends), but get good rewards at the same time.
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I’m gonna give you an analogy of what the lack of farming options is like :

Imagine we’re all little piggies. There are a selection of pig pens all with different colors and atmospheres. There’s a Blue one, a Green one, a Red one, a Yellow one, a Pink one, etc. Now, the Blue Pig Pen has a giant buffet inside, with all kinds of food and treats. The Green one also has a couple troughs full of food. The rest however, have some leftover food scraps thrown here and there occasionally.

Now, which Pig Pen do you think all the piggies would flock to? That’s right, the Blue and Green one. While the colors Blue and Green are nice and all, you would kind of get sick of them, and occasionally you might like to hang out in the Pink or Red pig pens, but they have little to no food.

Well, what about the piggie who hates the color Blue but LOVES the color Yellow? Well, now they’re torn, they’ll just have to starve in the Yellow Pen if they want to have fun. Now, why can’t we just share the food so it’s in all Pig Pens equally (or as equal as you can get it)? Then you can eat your food in whichever colored pen you wish, get your cake and eat it too. (Play the game how you want)

The Blue Pen in this example would be Champ Farming, it’s nice that it’s an option to get some nice farming in, but why should it be the only really good option? I’m not saying to remove Champ Farming, I’ve indulged here and there, but I couldn’t stand doing it all the time.

Imagine if you could just do Activities all day, and make 50% of the profit you could make Champ Farming all day (would need better AFK checks though or rewards based on placement). Or if you could grab a friend and 100% a zone together doing hearts/DE’s and make a similar profit as champ farming, or close to it.

Or imagine doing the hardest dungeons/fractals with a group of good players and making even MORE profit than champ farming.

Hell, I don’t even care about having everything match Champ Farming, but if there were just MORE alternatives, let me farm Labrynth (with normal DR) for good profit, or let me farm Clocktower for decent profit, or even Lunatic Inquisition and other minigames for “ok” profit.

Continued :

You wonder why people stop doing things such as old dynamic events, Tequatl, and even the new TA path, the rewards just aren’t that great for the risk (effort or time) required.

I enjoyed the TA path, it was fun the first go around, but I’m not gonna do it again unless it is worth it. It would be fun if I could run this even more for decent profit/rewards.

Here’s another analogy for you : Things have a certain % of fun attatched to them. If some new content comes out that’s pretty fun the first experience it has a 100% fun rating. After I do it a few times, that rating slowly drops to 50%, at the point it’s not really enough fun to do w/o having good enough rewards.

With good rewards, I get to squeeze the remaining 50% fun out of something, even then if I continue running it til it gets to 0% fun then even with good rewards I probably won’t do it. That’s really the best way I could put it.

Right now, my champ farming fun % is at 0% or 5%. Even with the good profit, I’m not gonna do it. =p

For the people who will post about how they can play and enjoy everything with 0 rewards, and everyone who doesn’t is a bad person.

You are the rare breed of pig who can sit in an empty pen forever with no food, even then everyone who plays this game is guilty of indulging in “rewards” I don’t think there is a single player here who doesn’t enjoy “rewards”, it’s pretty much core to the game.

And as I said in my fun % example, rewards can let you enjoy content that otherwise wouldn’t be enjoyable w/o again.

Rewards in MMO’s are a really complex issue.

1. Players will not repeat content much unless there are rewards. GW2 players have essentially told the developer that “because fun” is not an adequate reason to repeat content, especially to repeat it many times.
2. Developers want to provide rewards because players enjoy the experience, and a happy customer is a good thing. However, they also don’t want players to reach their goals quickly, because they cannot keep up with the demand for things to pursue unless there is something to control how quickly players reach their goals.
3. In GW2, many reward nerfs — such as zone loot DR and the elimination of several farm spots — have been explained as being to prevent bot farming. This makes sense to me. Gold sellers hurt the game, and they hurt legitimate players. I believe this is why we see rewards being concentrated in content that is less amenable to bot farming, like Champions, meta events and zone zergs like the pavilion and invasions.
4. RNG can lead to dramatic differences in the experience of being rewarded. I was shocked when, in a different thread, a couple of players reported getting 3-4 rares per world boss on a regular basis. I wondered if they were playing a different game, as I’d guess my average is about 1.33 per, with 2 being the high. Someone who has gotten a precursor drop is going to feel a lot more rewarded than we who get rocks.

I hope that the rewards balance that began with meta boss chests and has progressed to Champion bags is still a work in progress. Even with Champion bags, RNG can make for a very different experience. During the two weeks of invasion events, I got something like 8 or 9 exotics, and at least as many rares from champion bags. Since, though I’m still killing a lot of Champions, I’m only getting greens, and about 25% of the cores I got in the invasion weeks.

Sure, I’d like to see rewards diversified further. I’d like my play style to be rewarding (doing DE’s in under-populated zones, killing Champs solo or with a friend or two) — generally avoiding the zerg because of particle spam disgust. Perhaps my 2nd biggest disappointment in GW2 is that new rewards for the karma system have been sparse and are generally things I have no use for.

IndigoSundown.5419:

1. In GW2, many reward nerfs — such as zone loot DR and the elimination of several farm spots — have been explained as being to prevent bot farming. This makes sense to me. Gold sellers hurt the game, and they hurt legitimate players. I believe this is why we see rewards being concentrated in content that is less amenable to bot farming, like Champions, meta events and zone zergs like the pavilion and invasions.

There’s a couple things I want to address here.

1.) I don’t see how this hurts Bots in the least bit, in fact the zergy easymode method of farming is by far the most beneficial to bots. All you have to do with auto attack, hell 80% of the people champ farming ARE essentially “botting” in a sense just because you can afk while doing it. Rewarding stuff that requires skill and teamwork would be loot that botters can’t touch.

2.) Diminishing Returns were/are a bad idea, they should focus on positive reinforcement instead of negative. Loot should be dropped slightly overall, then make it so the more you do one thing, the more the rest are boosted.

For example, take Dynamic Events. Now take the bonus xp/loot idle mobs accumulate. Now put them together, what do you get? Dynamic Events that scale up in rewards if ignored, this encourages people to spread out and do events all over the place, and discourages farming a single one.

Knote.2904:

For example, take Dynamic Events. Now take the bonus xp/loot idle mobs accumulate. Now put them together, what do you get? Dynamic Events that scale up in rewards if ignored, this encourages people to spread out and do events all over the place, and discourages farming a single one.

I actually agree with quite a bit of what you said, but this is actually an incredible idea. make events all over the world scale up in rewards, not infinitely, but to a fairly high degree to encourage spreading out. That’s the type of thing that would encourage player to experience all the content that the devs spent so much time making.

Now, at the same time, I would say that it would be a good idea to also adjust level scaling on these events, so that a level 10 doing a little known meta event isn’t just going to stumble on 10g randomly, they might get 20s or something like that (which is a lot for a level 10 event), but not as much as a level 80 character who is spending time actually exploring the game.

Polismassa.6740:

Knote.2904:

For example, take Dynamic Events. Now take the bonus xp/loot idle mobs accumulate. Now put them together, what do you get? Dynamic Events that scale up in rewards if ignored, this encourages people to spread out and do events all over the place, and discourages farming a single one.

I actually agree with quite a bit of what you said, but this is actually an incredible idea. make events all over the world scale up in rewards, not infinitely, but to a fairly high degree to encourage spreading out. That’s the type of thing that would encourage player to experience all the content that the devs spent so much time making.

Now, at the same time, I would say that it would be a good idea to also adjust level scaling on these events, so that a level 10 doing a little known meta event isn’t just going to stumble on 10g randomly, they might get 20s or something like that (which is a lot for a level 10 event), but not as much as a level 80 character who is spending time actually exploring the game.

LOL, well I can’t imagine ANY event scaling up enough to grant 10 hard gold. It would have a cap obviously just like mobs have bonus caps.

A good cap would be maybe 250%? 300%? They could add a new UI feature on the DE to show it’s bonus level. Then the bonus would basically scale the rewards from beating the event, as well as the XP granted by the mobs spawned from that event (but not the mob loot).

You would get a hefty amount of XP, a good chunk of karma and maybe 10s. Though I would prefer the lvl 80 event reward being like 5-6 silver base, which could scale up to 20s at most at 300% bonus.

I haven’t read your post just yet as I’m busy until tomorrow, but I’ve bookmarked it and will read tomorrow. I do think that they need to decide their final stance on farming. They want us to farm for everything in the game. Legendaries, holiday items, achievements, etc. but they have so many safeguards in place to prevent people from farming.

They need to figure it out because it’s sort of annoying having all this farm-heavy required stuff in game but so many farming preventions.

Knote.2904:

IndigoSundown.5419:

1. In GW2, many reward nerfs — such as zone loot DR and the elimination of several farm spots — have been explained as being to prevent bot farming. This makes sense to me. Gold sellers hurt the game, and they hurt legitimate players. I believe this is why we see rewards being concentrated in content that is less amenable to bot farming, like Champions, meta events and zone zergs like the pavilion and invasions.

There’s a couple things I want to address here.

1.) I don’t see how this hurts Bots in the least bit, in fact the zergy easymode method of farming is by far the most beneficial to bots. All you have to do with auto attack, hell 80% of the people champ farming ARE essentially “botting” in a sense just because you can afk while doing it. Rewarding stuff that requires skill and teamwork would be loot that botters can’t touch.

2.) Diminishing Returns were/are a bad idea, they should focus on positive reinforcement instead of negative. Loot should be dropped slightly overall, then make it so the more you do one thing, the more the rest are boosted.

For example, take Dynamic Events. Now take the bonus xp/loot idle mobs accumulate. Now put them together, what do you get? Dynamic Events that scale up in rewards if ignored, this encourages people to spread out and do events all over the place, and discourages farming a single one.

It never has in fact it’s always hurt players only. Other older game developers found smarter ways to keep bots at bay because they realized it did nothing to hurt bots.

The history is long with this, they aren’t going to escape the facts that DR and loot manipulation are never the right things to do!

IndigoSundown.5419:

Perhaps my 2nd biggest disappointment in GW2 is that new rewards for the karma system have been sparse and are generally things I have no use for.

Good point, I wonder why there are no new things to purchase with karma. There could be extremely expensive things people need, like 20slot bags, certain new skins… so that people start spending karma again. It’s a great currency imho, since it can’t be traded – perfect for prestige objects.

Bags are easily purchaseable via fractals already, give people who don’t enjoy fractals an alternative way to get them, 14g on the trading post is not a friendly option.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Perhaps my 2nd biggest disappointment in GW2 is that new rewards for the karma system have been sparse and are generally things I have no use for.

Good point, I wonder why there are no new things to purchase with karma. There could be extremely expensive things people need, like 20slot bags, certain new skins… so that people start spending karma again. It’s a great currency imho, since it can’t be traded – perfect for prestige objects.

Bags are easily purchaseable via fractals already, give people who don’t enjoy fractals an alternative way to get them, 14g on the trading post is not a friendly option.

Yeah, it’s funny because it was supposed to be the CORE currency for stuff that’s supposed to be EARNED, away from IRL cash.

Unfortunately 90%+ of legendaries are gold oriented lol.

Knote.2904:

IndigoSundown.5419:

1. In GW2, many reward nerfs — such as zone loot DR and the elimination of several farm spots — have been explained as being to prevent bot farming. This makes sense to me. Gold sellers hurt the game, and they hurt legitimate players. I believe this is why we see rewards being concentrated in content that is less amenable to bot farming, like Champions, meta events and zone zergs like the pavilion and invasions.

There’s a couple things I want to address here.

1.) I don’t see how this hurts Bots in the least bit, in fact the zergy easymode method of farming is by far the most beneficial to bots. All you have to do with auto attack, hell 80% of the people champ farming ARE essentially “botting” in a sense just because you can afk while doing it. Rewarding stuff that requires skill and teamwork would be loot that botters can’t touch.

It may hurt bots because the spawn time of most champs are slightly varying, and the time it takes to kill a champ may differ each time, because of this it would be difficult for bots to follow along, because they wont now when the zerg is porting, and where they are heading.

example: FSG is usually fish – kodan – norn – wurm – troll – drake

How will a bot know to move from fish to kodan?
What if the fish is killed early and everyone skips to norn?
What happens if the bot gets stuck in combat? Can it correct itself and catch up with the zerg?
What if drake is killed early, will it automatically know and port to fish?
etc

Well, they did manage to make bots capable of ports directly to nodes, I think programming one for FSG champ farming would be difficult though. afaik, I have yet to see anything resembling a bot on a champ train

Lambent.6375:

Knote.2904:

IndigoSundown.5419:

1. In GW2, many reward nerfs — such as zone loot DR and the elimination of several farm spots — have been explained as being to prevent bot farming. This makes sense to me. Gold sellers hurt the game, and they hurt legitimate players. I believe this is why we see rewards being concentrated in content that is less amenable to bot farming, like Champions, meta events and zone zergs like the pavilion and invasions.

There’s a couple things I want to address here.

1.) I don’t see how this hurts Bots in the least bit, in fact the zergy easymode method of farming is by far the most beneficial to bots. All you have to do with auto attack, hell 80% of the people champ farming ARE essentially “botting” in a sense just because you can afk while doing it. Rewarding stuff that requires skill and teamwork would be loot that botters can’t touch.

It may hurt bots because the spawn time of most champs are slightly varying, and the time it takes to kill a champ may differ each time, because of this it would be difficult for bots to follow along, because they wont now when the zerg is porting, and where they are heading.

example: FSG is usually fish – kodan – norn – wurm – troll – drake

How will a bot know to move from fish to kodan?
What if the fish is killed early and everyone skips to norn?
What happens if the bot gets stuck in combat? Can it correct itself and catch up with the zerg?
What if drake is killed early, will it automatically know and port to fish?
etc

Well, they did manage to make bots capable of ports directly to nodes, I think programming one for FSG champ farming would be difficult though. afaik, I have yet to see anything resembling a bot on a champ train

I think you’re underestimating how well some of these bots are made.

Also, I don’t think it’s that complicated.

Target Fish
Run into range
Auto
Loot
When dead waypoint
Follow path
Repeat

Alternatively they could always make their own bot zergs and just camp champs in other zones, they probably are who knows, zerging mobs is easy enough that you could zerg something naked, just auto attack, and rez any downed… lol

Hell, imagine guardian mace bots, or the famous bearbow.

AFAIK champs don’t have DR either.

If something as faceroll, and mindless as champ zerging is in the game a bot could do it, I’m sure of it.

Personally, i think it’s pointless to think of mmos in terms of “rewards”. It’s more meaningful to think about it as an economy with incentives.

Farming itself is a problematic concept, because it’s basically a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time.

A game designer has to think, “is that how i want players to play my game? Are those the sorts of people i want to be richer than everyone else?”

Personally i wouldn’t want farmers to be richer than other players. At least item trading has a real risk of losses and requires paying a lot of attention.

These are the sorts of players i want to get rich:
1. Players with a lot of skill. (for the hard core). This means competitive leader boards in speed runs of pve content, and organized tournaments for pvp, with big daily/weekly gold/item rewards for top winners. This also means a certain group of people will repeatedly get these victories and everyone else misses out.

2. Players that see a lot of content. (for the casuals). This means a single guaranteed ascended weapon for completing the story, a big gold prize for doing all the jumping puzzles, a big one-off prize for map completion, doing all dungeons, etc.

To me, these are the two groups of players i want to be richer than everyone else: players who do the same thing over and over, but do it better and competitively; and players who explore and play all the content in the game.

Players who find the most easy and efficient thing to repeat endlessly for infinite profit that anyone who watches YouTube can copy – i don’t want to reward that kind of gameplay, i don’t want those players to become rich.

Rieselle.5079:

Farming itself is a problematic concept, because it’s basically a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time.

This is what I’m talking about though, this game currently follows this definition of “Farming”.

Farming isn’t problematic imo. It’s just the lack of options for getting wealth. It’s only a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time because there’s only 1-2 farming methods.

If you could make decent profit from a lot of different activities you have options, you can just “play the game” it no longer becomes “farming”. You’re just playing the game doing w/e you want, and getting rewarded for it.

Knote.2904:

Rieselle.5079:

Farming itself is a problematic concept, because it’s basically a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time.

This is what I’m talking about though, this game currently follows this definition of “Farming”.

Farming isn’t problematic imo. It’s just the lack of options for getting wealth. It’s only a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time because there’s only 1-2 farming methods.

If you could make decent profit from a lot of different activities you have options, you can just “play the game” it no longer becomes “farming”. You’re just playing the game doing w/e you want, and getting rewarded for it.

Farming exists because the game allows it to. Before, there was specific orr chain events that spawn lotsa mobs and these events trigger quite frequently. Then there were champ trains that follow a specific route because champs respawn heck even less than five minutes after being mowed down mercilessly by a zerg without putting up a fight.

One option would be (as someone has mentioned above) increase the rewards on certain events or champs the longer they are not contested or initiated (a positive incentive), or put a diminishing return on a frequently farmed event or champ (this is viewed as negative).

Also, it’s either the frequency of these kinds of events that give good rewards that has to be adjusted (random spawns might be nice) in order to spread out the farm trains into multiple zones hunting for multiple champs OR properly adjust difficulty scaling so that auto-attack fest on loot piñatas are avoided.

The rewards for these champs and events are decent enough (some definitely needs more buffing though) when encountered solo or by a small party but they become trivialized with a zerg and are abused by fixed and quick spawn timers.

However there will always be people that will find the most profitable thing to do in-game and announce it to the world and everyone will simply follow suit.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

However there will always be people that will find the most profitable thing to do in-game and announce it to the world and everyone will simply follow suit.

You’re absolutely right, but I find the issue at the moment is that there’s a huge disparity between doing X and doing Y.

This, in my opinion, is where the focus from ArenaNet needs to be. I am also not arguing for a nerf in any rewards to achieve consistency, this raises another point.

Players need to feel rewarded, and whilst I can speak only for the PvE game at this time, I would have to say that a lot of the time I head out “and just kill stuff”, whether that’s targetted farming for a particular material I need, or whether it’s just me zoning out and wandering/exlporing/killing, the number of enemies that drop no loot can become quite disheartening.

I think what needs to happen here is some testing – have folks go out doing a certain thing for a set period of time, and measure the reward. Then work to even out that reward between the many and varied activites or things that can be done.

It’ll never be perfect, nor does it have to be, but the disparity that exists at the moment is what is driving the groups who farm Champs or a particular Dungeon – not that I blame them in the least, people who need or want things in game will tend to gravitate toward the easiest way of obtaining them.

Knote.2904:

Rieselle.5079:

Farming itself is a problematic concept, because it’s basically a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time.

Farming isn’t problematic imo. It’s just the lack of options for getting wealth. It’s only a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time because there’s only 1-2 farming methods.

If you could make decent profit from a lot of different activities you have options, you can just “play the game” it no longer becomes “farming”. You’re just playing the game doing w/e you want, and getting rewarded for it.

Again, you’re just looking at a single player (“what can i do that is profitable?”) instead of the big picture: if everyone could find an activity that was profitable, either everyone would be rich (and thus no one would be rich) or time spent would be the main factor to becoming rich.

So again, if we look at the entire economy, ask your self this: there has to be rich and poor in any (market) economy. Who do you want to be rich? Which players get the most rewards?

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Knote.2904:

Rieselle.5079:

Farming itself is a problematic concept, because it’s basically a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time.

This is what I’m talking about though, this game currently follows this definition of “Farming”.

Farming isn’t problematic imo. It’s just the lack of options for getting wealth. It’s only a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time because there’s only 1-2 farming methods.

If you could make decent profit from a lot of different activities you have options, you can just “play the game” it no longer becomes “farming”. You’re just playing the game doing w/e you want, and getting rewarded for it.

Farming exists because the game allows it to. Before, there was specific orr chain events that spawn lotsa mobs and these events trigger quite frequently. Then there were champ trains that follow a specific route because champs respawn heck even less than five minutes after being mowed down mercilessly by a zerg without putting up a fight.

One option would be (as someone has mentioned above) increase the rewards on certain events or champs the longer they are not contested or initiated (a positive incentive), or put a diminishing return on a frequently farmed event or champ (this is viewed as negative).

Also, it’s either the frequency of these kinds of events that give good rewards that has to be adjusted (random spawns might be nice) in order to spread out the farm trains into multiple zones hunting for multiple champs OR properly adjust difficulty scaling so that auto-attack fest on loot piñatas are avoided.

The rewards for these champs and events are decent enough (some definitely needs more buffing though) when encountered solo or by a small party but they become trivialized with a zerg and are abused by fixed and quick spawn timers.

However there will always be people that will find the most profitable thing to do in-game and announce it to the world and everyone will simply follow suit.

There will always be a best farm option, that’s fine.

But if Activities B-Z were around 90% as profitable as Activity A that would be fine.

Compared to if Activities B-Z were like 40% as profitable as Activity A.

Rieselle.5079:

Knote.2904:

Rieselle.5079:

Farming itself is a problematic concept, because it’s basically a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time.

Farming isn’t problematic imo. It’s just the lack of options for getting wealth. It’s only a mechanic that incentivises doing the same thing for a long time because there’s only 1-2 farming methods.

If you could make decent profit from a lot of different activities you have options, you can just “play the game” it no longer becomes “farming”. You’re just playing the game doing w/e you want, and getting rewarded for it.

Again, you’re just looking at a single player (“what can i do that is profitable?”) instead of the big picture: if everyone could find an activity that was profitable, either everyone would be rich (and thus no one would be rich) or time spent would be the main factor to becoming rich.

So again, if we look at the entire economy, ask your self this: there has to be rich and poor in any (market) economy. Who do you want to be rich? Which players get the most rewards?

Well there’s always going to be a time factor in who makes more money. But right now it’s also an activity factor. You can eliminate one of those.

And the thing that TRULY seperates the rich from the poor is the TP, not farming lol.

If you’re arguing this, then that means you think champ farming is too profitable. If so it can always be nerfed (I mean normalized hue) then boost everything else to be closer.

The thing is, Anet is famous for nerfing the good farm options, then that’s it…. Then they’ll introduce a new super farm option, then nerf that to crap, then another. And so we cycle from one boring option to another instead of having multiple DECENT options.

Midnight.9205:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

However there will always be people that will find the most profitable thing to do in-game and announce it to the world and everyone will simply follow suit.

You’re absolutely right, but I find the issue at the moment is that there’s a huge disparity between doing X and doing Y.

This, in my opinion, is where the focus from ArenaNet needs to be. I am also not arguing for a nerf in any rewards to achieve consistency, this raises another point.

Players need to feel rewarded, and whilst I can speak only for the PvE game at this time, I would have to say that a lot of the time I head out “and just kill stuff”, whether that’s targetted farming for a particular material I need, or whether it’s just me zoning out and wandering/exlporing/killing, the number of enemies that drop no loot can become quite disheartening.

I think what needs to happen here is some testing – have folks go out doing a certain thing for a set period of time, and measure the reward. Then work to even out that reward between the many and varied activites or things that can be done.

It’ll never be perfect, nor does it have to be, but the disparity that exists at the moment is what is driving the groups who farm Champs or a particular Dungeon – not that I blame them in the least, people who need or want things in game will tend to gravitate toward the easiest way of obtaining them.

Exactly this. There are people that argue against me that say “There will always be something that’s best”, and that’s completely true. But having “the best” be only 5% better than everything else is a HUGE improvement to “the best” being 50% better than everything else.

If champ farming was still the top farming option, so be it. If it was better by only 5-10% that would be fantastic, I could give up that tiny bit of extra profitability (if that can even be measured so precisely) to change up my routine and diversify what I’m doing in game so it’s FUN.