Our reactions to farming nerfs

#1 - June 5, 2013, 5:42 a.m.

Just making a general topic, maybe for the moderators to take all of the threads about farming nerfs and to put it into one topic that is generalized. Please keep it civil amongst eachother, please do not troll.

What are your thoughts about farming nerfs, pro or against?

Mine feelings/opinions:
And it would be nice if someone from Arenanet would chime in. This IS getting out of hand. I came back to Guild Wars 2 after a two month break to farm for my legendary, but areas continued to be nerfed. I don’t want to participate in guild missions. I do as many meta events as possible. Ive done enough instigator bosses in southsun to last a life time, and Im sure the 4-camp hold + karka queen will wear me down over time. I’ve done enough COF P1 (which seems the only way to acquire legetimate cash…70 silver before vendoring).

To Arenanet: I WANT to farm. Why can’t I do this? This is how I want to play the game. Isn’t that what you have been preaching? “Play how you want to play”? This is it. I want to farm. I want to do some metas and ocassionally dungeons/fractals, but I want to farm. You are shrinking the ground beneath my feet. Pretty soon, I’ll have no where to stand. I don’t even play 10 hours a day, 2-3 hours per night. Im not hardcore, but when I log in I want to kill things, get rewarded for it, while listening to music or watching a Star Trek DS9 episode(I dont care what you say, DS9 was the best!)

Why? Why are you doing this to your playerbase? We are not the casual people that come and go because of real life schedules. We are the people playing your game every single day or night for a few hours. We stick with the game(provided the game doesn’t fundamentally change, as it seems to be). We are the ones that will spend in your cash shop. I used to buy gems for one reason only: to reward Arenanet for a job well done. Well, then ascended gear and guild missions(ahem raids) came, and now RNG and farming nerfs. All things to make me STOP buying gems.

All I want to do now is farm. It is how I want to play your game. Can I play this way?

AnthonyOrdon

#35 - June 5, 2013, 9:08 a.m.

The latest case of “farming nerfs” was actually a bug fix. I’m aware of this because I was asked to help identify the issue. The area in question contained a spawn that was defined to have more creatures than spots for those creatures to spawn. So for example, 25 skelks spawning on 10 points. This is not intended. Not only does it just look absurd, it’s also leads to some extremely bizarre play conditions. This is one of those bugs that’s so buggy, the fact that our toolset even allowed this to happen is a bug. Another bug caused this bug. Bugception.

If we didn’t want players to be able to farm, we wouldn’t have put in the huge (and free) magic and gold find buffs for Southsun Cove. We wouldn’t drop loot from the giant mobs of creatures that appear in upscaled events. We certainly wouldn’t have put in chests that appear after events which cycle every 8 to 10 minutes. How quickly all of that content goes completely forgotten in the angered responses to a simple change to an area that was clearly bugged. :/

On farming in general, there’s a sweet spot that combines good loot with fun, engaging content. I think Southsun had that going for it, especially before certain aspects of the content were isolated as optimal. As someone who’s actively working on upcoming Living World releases, I’m aiming to find that sweet spot and hit it in a big way.