Guild Wars 2

Hello all. I’ve seen many discussions/arguments/flame wars about farming and would like to open a dialogue about the playstyle.

I’ve read many arguments for and against farming, but I don’t quite understand why many players are against it entirely. I know that zerg-farming allows many players to get the mats, items, etc. that would normally take long periods of time to get as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible. I can see how this can be both good and bad, but this strikes me more of a positive thing from the casual player perspective.

On the other hand, I know that mass zerg-farming has been a big problem in the past in areas such as Dry Top, Silverwastes, and COIL where the farming actually hinders players trying to complete certain events. To my understanding, these issues have been somewhat resolved and players aren’t having so much trouble completing events.

I would like to know the opinions of the playerbase on farming; do you agree with mass farming or not and why? If you don’t agree, why do you think that zerg-farming hurts the playerbase?

I would like to keep this discussion civilized and flame-free. Happiness and smiles people

I fall into the middle I don’t care about players mass farming or those wanting to do events.

When it comes to my personal option other players should learn to respect each other and there is no right or wrong answer.

What it boils down to is players starting an argument over it when it comes to how they view the game should be played and other players that aren’t playing it their way is doing it wrong and shouldn’t be allowed to play.

Zerg farming can be fun and profitable, and a great way to get mats. However it depends on the zerg. Some are kittens, and will try to exploit events for maximum profitablity. Others will actually get a bunch of people to scale up the events, then follow them to completion, and reset the chain.

Personally I’m not a huge fan of zerg farming either way. I have nothing against it, unless they are of the former group. (i.e haters and kittens). But farming is actually a good thing. If they are farming to sell, it helps lower prices in the TP, as they are helping increase the supply, instead of increasing the demand. And if they are farming for use, then they are not increasing the demand, which also helps keep prices lower. But I prefer to do my farming solo. I have found a few areas with decent T6 drops, and while solo I can generally get ~10 an hour, sometimes more.

You need a good in-game balance between gold generation, gold sinks, materials generation, and materials sinks.

I am against any activity which threatens the balance between those four things whether it be farming buffs or farming nerfs.

The biggest con for me has been seeing how no effort to lil effort (blixx and silverwaste) farm were. I support farming and all but these were just basically handouts which me and plenty of people took advantage of. Wish they brought back the traditional mat farming by killing certain stuff but sadly bots killed that by overfarming certain spots back early in the game

I have stopped farming, since in the long run it makes the game boring to play.
Now I just casually play a couple dungeons a day and pvp.
With the dungeon tickets + reward track weapon chests I just try my luck in mf with all I make.
Have been lucky twice last 2 months, so if your lucky it pays off

But in the beginning when the game was new I did enjoy it however.. Have farmed for at least 2k hours.. so def don’t have a problem with it, whatever is fun to you is what works ..

I’m not against farming itself.

What I find unfair, however, is the way zerging contributes to farming profit. The main purpose of scaling was to adjust events for different amounts of players, not to generate additional loot.
The way the system works atm, the guy that’s nor zerging events is being hit twice:
a) Because his events generate far less lootable enemies.
b) Because his events are probably less profitable by design (with megaservers, we can expect really profitable events to be somewhat crowded at any time).
the profit gap between zerg farmers and people just completing events on some not specially crowded map is just too big for the small difference in effort and challenge.

Ultimately, event rewards should depend on average completion times, difficulty (somewhat related to the map level) and other factors like the proximity of many other events or a potential big prize at the end of a chain, never on the amount of people playing them.

I have no problem with people farming, so long as they don’t complain when someone actually wants to complete the event as opposed to farming. This happened to me. It was my event, I started it, I was there first, then some butthead proceeded to call me and a few others “kittens” and “kittene$” because we wanted to do the event, rather than fail it.

Bottom line, as long as farmers don’t interfere with players who just want to play, I couldn’t care less.