I’m hearing rumors that farming got nerfed in the most recent update, and I’d believe it, because I just went 24 hours without farming a single event in Orr, and when I finally decided to do it, I’m getting about 1/2 the normal total loot and less than half the quality (half the # of blues and greens), even with 145% magic find.
I’d be okay with this if I actually knew another way to make money, but I don’t. The rewards for exploring, something I enjoy doing, are absolute garbage. Nothing below level 80 drops anything of value, and the exploration rewards is something like 20 silver for 2-3 hours of work.
The solution to farming is not to nerf farming, it’s to make not farming just as profitable. If you nerf farming people will still bot the farming, because they don’t actively participate anyway. Meanwhile all the players who casually farm just leave the game. I’m not even exploiting the farming – I’m doing 2-6 events, going to work on my explorer for a couple of hours, then coming back. Rinse and repeat. I haven’t abused dungeons or exploits. Is even THAT not within the paradigm on “no farming, no grind?” Working to get high end gear is fun for me. What’s not fun is having every single way I’ve found to make a bit of cash nerfed into the ground, so that it takes me so long to get end-game gear that I just give up – because there’s only so much “fun” I can have not farming before I realize it’s going to take me months of play just to make progress. I get the whole “work hard and long” for your gear sentiment, but there’s a little thing called present value, and when you keep increasing the time it takes to get anything cool, you’ve worked so long and hard that you’ve discounted the awesomeness of having that gear into 0. There are negative returns to scale here. If something is too easy to get, everyone has it and getting it is lame. If it’s just right, some people have it, but not everyone, and getting it is AWESOME. If something is too hard to get, then nobody has it, but getting it isn’t any cooler because you have to bust your mule for so long that you stop having fun trying to obtain it, and then you buy it and look back and say “the coolness of this doesn’t make up for all the time I wasted trying to get it.”
I’d actually decided to go for Tier 3 human cultural, despite the fact that it’s non-max and grossly overpriced, because I really like how it looks. If you really have nerfed the event I’ve been farming, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to afford the armor with anything less than 2 months of playing – and I’m someone who still manages to get in a solid 6-8 hours of play a day, at least. I can’t imagine how anyone who has work, or a more rigorous schedule, can possibly afford to purchase anything above rare gear.
I hope you have something big planned in terms of content updates soon, because all that’s happening right now is that you’re trying to sting botters while crippling legitimate players, encouraging auction sharking and exploitation, and in general, you’re really just making it seem like a player’s ability to make money is cutting into your bottom line (read: gems). I’d like the believe Anet is better than that, but all these recent changes are making it really hard to think otherwise, as evidenced by the increasing number of conspiracy threads.
I really hope you guys have some kind of plan for this. Going back to GW1 looks more and more promising with each update, where you can actually reach the carrot on the stick. Also that carrot has max nutrition and beauty. Also you can buy slightly uglier but equally nutritional carrots for 1/10th the price so everyone has a fair chance of eating healthy, and the beautiful carrots don’t take trans-continental distances of jogging before you get them.