Is the maize balm rat farm an exploit?

#1 - Oct. 23, 2014, 1:38 p.m.

Hi,
So i heard about the rat farm recently and decided to try it as it sounds interesting. So i bought 4g worth of balm and started the instance and kept converting rats which was oddly satisfying. After about 15mins i decided to check my loot and i had 215 ToT bags, thinking how oddly alike gw1 festival raptor farming this was i realised that this is very profitable, in fact, it was too profitable. The balms are 9s each and i used maybe 4-5 per run which netted me about 20 bags which is about 1.2g? So i have decided to stop for the time being as guildies have advised me to not continue just in case.

So my question is, is this an exploit? It is pretty much gw1 festival farming and the consumable is doing what its meant to , but still it just seems too good? Maybe it’s only so profitable because the patch only just came out?

Chris Cleary

#11 - Oct. 23, 2014, 6:19 p.m.

In a player driven economy, the demand of an item surpassing the supply generated by the playerbase will increase the value of it. While there are some items in these bags that are not based around cosmetics (the low drop rate of T6 mats), the price of these bags is directly relative to the cosmetic value that is being placed on them. While currently profitable, that profit is derived directly from other players and their willingness to play a higher price. In essence, this is a transfer of wealth not wealth generation.

As far as this specific spawn of ambients is concerned, it’s defiantly one of the faster ones to farm. As long as the playerbase is willing to pay for that item, and the demand remains higher than the supply, it will be profitable. This is not an exploit, it’s the playerbase saying “thank you for farming this, because we didn’t want to”.