Curse

striderkaaru · Nov 15, 2005, 02:47 PM // 14:47

a lot of people think that the recent aoe change was done against farming, but i don't think it was. it really was implemented to bring more equality among classes. before the patch, 95% of the pve elems were echo fire nukers and 95% of pugs wouldn't take you into a mission unless you were a warrior, monk, or elem.

since the patch, i've seen a lot more variety. i recently just beat thunderhead keep with my necro using a curses/water build. i advertised this and immediately got an invite. that's right. a non-minion master or non-battery pve necro getting an invite. to my surprise, there were absolutely no nukers on the team. aside from the monks, the only casters were me and a mesmer. we both killed things so quickly it wasn't even funny.

so no, anet isn't against farming.

it's true that there are still a few bugs to work out, but it's a step in the right direction. we're going to start seeing more build variety now.

MaglorD · Nov 15, 2005, 04:03 PM // 16:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by D.E.V.i.A.N.C.E

fyi you should jump on arua of lich too, so we all hate your dumb agrument.

I bet he's some lame W/Mo that gets murdered in CA by 55monks or 8hp monks.

FYI theres more than 1 build that doesnt require monk; to solo areas such as UW, hell I bet Rangers can solo UW now becuz the monsters wont come close cuz traps set off the AoE detection.

Sorry you lose the bet. I have characters from all professions. How childish of you to resort to insults just to further your argument.
FYI, Anet is very much against solo farming in high level areas. Go read Gaile's statements and you will be enlightened.

aron searle · Nov 15, 2005, 04:06 PM // 16:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by MaglorD

Sorry you lose the bet. I have characters from all professions. How childish of you to resort to insults just to further your argument.
FYI, Anet is very much against solo farming in high level areas. Go read Gaile's statements and you will be enlightened.

she mentions UW only, not high level areas full stop

MaglorD · Nov 15, 2005, 04:08 PM // 16:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by aron searle

she mentions UW only, not high level areas full stop

I'm sure she means all high level areas. Read between the lines. Why would she only single out UW? The gist of the message is the same...

aron searle · Nov 15, 2005, 04:15 PM // 16:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by MaglorD

I'm sure she means all high level areas. Read between the lines. Why would she only single out UW? The gist of the message is the same...

it was in response to UW, but yes its says high leve areas, but >

i dont care, i want reasons why farming should be stopped.

Do you know why anet say they are farmer friendly, because lots of people farm.

Go to augery
Go to sorrows
Go to TOA and look at all the farming groups
ect ect ect

Making good skills useless just to stop farmers, is not the way foward.

Quote:

Following the same argument, protective spirit should also ignore the effects of dealth penalty. Otherwise ppl will just keep dying to reduce their life.

Do you realise how badly that would affect people in missions, when my team-mates have lots of DP, protective spirit is the only effective way to keep them alive sometimes.

And ill say again, why try and stop farming?

D.E.V.i.A.N.C.E · Nov 15, 2005, 04:37 PM // 16:37

http://www.guildwars.com/community/f...-friday61.html

scroll till you find bold; then go to the bathroom and change your maxipad.
They dont care how you farm.
What is the Guild Wars team’s philosophy on in-game farming?

In Guild Wars as in any other online roleplaying game, we think that maintaining a robust player-driven economy is important and adds a lot of fun to the game.

It’s true that Guild Wars is a competitive game and therefore focuses much more on player skill than on item acquisition. But PvM-oriented players still look for rare items that they can use to distinguish their characters, as well as long term goals that they can work towards acquiring. In order to allow the game’s economy to be an important and fun factor in PvM-oriented play but not create unfair imbalances in PvP-oriented play, we often make rare items easier to acquire for PvP use than for PvM use, or make rare items differ from common items only by their appearance. In general we try to make it much easier in Guild Wars than in most games for average players to acquire almost-the-best of everything, and to compete on a level playing field, while still giving the more hard-core players ways to differentiate their characters.

It’s theoretically possible to create an online roleplaying game without a player-driven economy. For example, you could make every variant of every item in the game available for purchase from NPC vendors. But that would take away a lot of the feeling of accomplishment of finding a rare item. Even that might not be enough, because if certain vendors were difficult to find or travel to, then players would still trade amongst themselves at above-vendor prices. More broadly, you could simply disable the ability of players to trade items or to drop them on the ground. None of this sounds particularly fun, and given that Guild Wars uses randomly generated loot, placing every variant of every item in the game on an NPC vendor is certainly not an option for Guild Wars.

Players often wonder why we allow prices to float on the traders, and this is fundamentally the reason. Traders are not vendors; they don’t offer an unlimited supply of rare items. They’re just there to facilitate trade between buyers and sellers. If the traders quote buy and sell prices that are outside the range of what players think the true value of an item is, then players simply stop using the traders and switch back to using chat to find trading partners. Of course, for any given type of rare item, we could theoretically stop treating it as a rare item and instead put an unlimited quantity on NPC vendors for sale at a fixed price. But this tends not to be a good idea for two reasons. First, player perception of the value of items tends to change over time; if the vendor sale price can’t adapt, then there will be times when the item seems undervalued and times when it seems too expensive and no one will buy it. As specific character builds go in and out of favor, the items that support those builds can experience wide swings in their perceived value. Second, Guild Wars will always have a player-driven economy because the game uses randomly generated stats on weapons and equipment. Those items can't effectively be sold by vendors, and the more we pull other types of items out of the player-driven economy by placing them on vendors and giving them fixed prices, the more we focus all price swings and inflationary pressures on the few remaining items that players still bid for, potentially pushing their prices far out of the reach of normal players.

Because Guild Wars does make extensive use of a player-driven economy, we at ArenaNet have a responsibility to manage the economy, and we take that responsibility seriously. You might ask: what exactly is our responsibility? Is it to keep prices within a certain range? Is it to maintain price stability? We think that, expressed in its most general terms, our responsibility is to keep the distribution of wealth as fair as possible, so that normal players can afford to bid for items in a player-driven economy. We need to avoid situations where a small subset of players can earn orders of magnitude more gold than the average player, thus driving up prices of rare items to a level where normal players could never hope to afford them.

There are three ways that certain players earn more gold than the average. The first and most obvious way is that, because everyone plays the game differently, some players are able to find unusually profitable areas to hunt in, or tricky strategies for killing a lot of monsters quickly. The search for the most effective way to play can be a fun part of the game for everyone -- we all like to see how well our characters can do, and whether we can tweak our characters to be better than they were previously -- and so we at ArenaNet don’t consider this a problem unless it’s extreme. Although a very knowledgeable or tricky player may be able to earn gold twice as fast as the average, this tends not to create a significant problem, because prices for items in the player-driven economy will still stay at levels where normal players can afford them. But sometimes differences in the distribution of wealth can be extreme; a group of players can find ways to earn gold ten times as fast as the average player. In this case, prices can rise to a level where normal players can’t afford to trade for items anymore. Then we have a problem, and we need to adjust the game to bring wealth distribution back into normal ranges. We constantly monitor the game, so we know when a certain place or technique is being heavily exploited. When an issue like this becomes too severe, we make tweaks as necessary to bring things back in line.

The second way that wealth distribution becomes a problem is when players use bots to farm gold around the clock. This is obviously unfair to the vast majority of players who play the game normally. We have no tolerance for bots. We constantly monitor for bots; we have tools that help us to easily identify them; and when we find people using bots, we permanently ban their accounts. This whole process is largely invisible to the average player, but behind the scenes, we’re regularly banning accounts for using bots.

The third issue, which is quickly becoming the biggest threat to the game’s economy, is companies that farm gold and items professionally and sell them for real-life cash. These companies hire large teams of people, often working in sweatshop-like conditions for very little pay, to play Guild Wars for many hours a day in order to rake in gold and items. The workers aren’t bots but they farm gold in similar ways, using very specific character builds to kill very specific monsters, running the same path and killing the same monsters hundreds of times each day, doing whatever exact sequence of actions their employer has determined is currently the most effective way to earn a lot of gold per hour. They then turn over what they’ve farmed to their employer, who sells the gold and items to other players for cash.

It creates a vicious cycle. If a player buys 1000 platinum pieces for real-life cash, and then uses that in-game wealth to make high bids for items in order to acquire all the rare items he wants, then in doing so he drives up the price of items in the game, causing other players to feel that they too need to buy gold in order to keep up.

Selling in-game items for cash is clearly against the terms of service, and engaging in any farming or storage activity that assists other people in selling in-game items for cash is also against the terms of service. If you're farming gold or items for someone who sells them for cash, you need to stop now. We are currently gathering data, and when we take action it will be to close entire networks of accounts at once: those used for farming, those used for storage, and those used for distribution. Buying in-game items for cash is also against the terms of service, so for those of you engaging in this practice, please understand that you're not only hurting the game in a way that makes it less fun for you and everyone else, but also risking getting your account permanently banned.

Of course, the number of players who engage in any of these activities -- farming exploits, using bots, selling or buying in-game items for cash –- is very small relative to the total player base. At ArenaNet we play the game just like you do, so we know that for most of you, gold is a precious commodity that you work hard to attain. In fact, our statistics show that 50% of all active accounts have fewer than 10 platinum pieces, and 75% of all active accounts have fewer than 20 platinum pieces. So when we make small tweaks here and there to keep the economy under control, please understand that we’re not trying to make the game harder for the average player. We work hard to understand how normal players play and how extreme players play, and then find just the minimal changes necessary to keep the economy healthy and fair.

Trance Addict · Nov 15, 2005, 05:14 PM // 17:14

Protective Spirit SHOULD have a Minimum amount of damage it has to allow. I mean, in a normal context, people have around 450 health. To stop 55 hp monks / etc, just make it so Protective Spirit has to allow like 20 damage to be taken by hit, no matter what your health is at.

jibikao · Nov 15, 2005, 08:57 PM // 20:57

Stop soloers? Easy. Give monsters the ability to strip enchantments. The more the better.

The chance of the monsters using enchantment removal skills gets higher and higher when you have less and less people in the party.

It's the monsters that lack the ability to stop soloers, not the game. There are plenty of ways to counter those soloers and most of them rely on enchantments.

Edit: Oh, if it's stance, then add Wild Blow!

Saba The Hobo · Nov 15, 2005, 10:08 PM // 22:08

Yeah, lets just give all enemies enchant stripping.

More fun than the days of NR...

--

Honestly, I don't see much wrong with setting a minimum amount of damage you can take with Protective Spirit up....so long as it's a low number. Say 12-15? That'd stop the farming with it without rendering the skill useless to everyone else.

MaglorD · Nov 16, 2005, 01:23 AM // 01:23

Why should other enchant users suffer just because of one overpowered skill - protective spirit?

I think the suggestion to set a minimum damage is also feasible, however it has to scale according to character levels, otherwise the skill will be unbalanced for lower level characters.

Anet is not against farming per se, but against solo/duo farming in high level areas, especially at the speed at which it's done.

The Hand Of Death · Nov 16, 2005, 02:05 AM // 02:05

Maybe if you wanted to stop farming you could remove the set creature spawn points. For example you leave augry and right there there is always a rockshot. Well why not mix the spawn areas a bit. Maybe next time you leave there are some minotaurs standing there or maybe a group or griffons and rockshots. Just so that it isnt so predictable and farming doesnt become the same routeen. Maybe it would make it harder to solo since a they wouldn't know what to prepare against.

D.E.V.i.A.N.C.E · Nov 16, 2005, 03:58 PM // 15:58

Well lets see; if most creaters are going to have a strip enchantment, and you hold enchantments; time to do BACKFIRE, how predictable isnt that?

when you mess with spawn points people might gte a lil pissed off due to hmm whered that elite guy go....

Iv told you before N/Me's can solo faster than any 55 monk in UW, then everyone makes a N/Me what then? all creates have a remove hex spell now?

next thing you will say prot bond is over powered. or even arua of lich.

aron searle · Nov 16, 2005, 04:14 PM // 16:14

D.E.V.i.A.N.C.E

Completly off topic, whats your avatar, its been bugging me.

Nefertem · Nov 16, 2005, 04:21 PM // 16:21

Eh, after DEVIANCE's post, I think this thread is nwo deprecated.