Anti-Farming backfired..

Yep, it's not working. All it did was send prices through the roof, and drive more to ebay. Players still farm, and sell stuff for real money. There was a player in Kamadan last night selling 1000k of gold for $52.00. The time and R&D money spent on developing the anti-farm code, was wasted. IMHO, that is the single biggest reason for GW2. I'm betting they add auction houses, etc, like WOW™ and LOTR™ have.

You can't expect to make a game without farming.

Especially in GW, a game with relatively nothing to do after beating the game, farming is the only thing that keeps people hooked.

If A-net wants to stop farming, they have to stop letting monsters drop loot, and give us all the same weapons with same stats, skin etc. I don't think someone will like that, though.

OR have desired loot drop more often. Less demand means less farming, no more ebayers, no gold sellers, etc.. BUT it would mean the need for "more to do" would skyrocket. Hopefully GW2 will not be so wealth oriented. I play online games to escape the world and it's worries. I do not like having to "work" in game as hard as I do in RL. Now, if things could be like Second Life™ and you could legally make 100k+ in real money selling cyber realestate. Then that would be different.

no its not anti farming that backfired... lack of updates at game start did that... anti farming code was put in place to try to wash out their mistakes of not nerfing 55 monk in the first place... if u remember in the early days poor griffons [ice griffons and desert griffons] dropped rares and gold like crazy... and it went on for months... if that was stopped in early stages of development there wouldnt be so much gold ingame and prices would never have got so high... coz there wouldnt have been so much gold in game let alone in few players hands... and lets not forget the merchant reset... the first one... the one they didnt roll back... ppl bought stacks of ectos and black dyes for 100gp a piece... ppl that were online then are not "big traders" yea lol...
gg anet... you killed your own economy with your own lazyness...

but then again if they could have rolled back servers then i bet they would... i think that first bug made than implement database rollback in gw

My latest Tin Foil Hat theroy is that is why mobs target monks. Not because they are important to the group, but because they might be farming.

And did you report the person advertising the selling of gold?

It does work. I've reported several of them, put 'em on my friends list, and after a day, I've never seen them again. Several times, I've gotten the "we took care of it" e-mail (not the first one) within hours of reporting the weasels.

Not to mention the keyless chests in THk and those places, I started playing this game practically 1 year ago, 1.1k hours, and I haven't experienced any of these freebies many other players got.

Try no E-Baying? E-Bay banned all virtual world items from being sold.

Have you checked ebay? There ist still as much gold sold as before. Maybe not in america, but here in germany it is.
Wanna take a look?
Go to ebay.de and simply search for guild wars.

Back to topic.
And I'm thinking the same. On their crusade against the professional farmers and bots, ANet took several wrong turns and sacrificed many things that were fun for the ordinary player. Drops are bad, so bad you almost need farmers to get at least the basic eqipment to play. Herobattles with PvE-chars? Forget about it, you don't live long anough to play this game that much to get all the needed equipment....
The antifarmingcode ist utter crap in my opinion. Even while just going for the elonian cartographer title I got "flagged as farmer" by the game, that my drops where wothless when I finnished. "You have to play the game in a normal way and you won't trigger the anti farming code". That's the biggest common misbelief in this game. Fail a missiomn two times in a row and you already triggered it. You might not notice it and think "hey, just bad luck", but luck is not something you can reproduce all the time.

And what do the gold farmers think about it? They love it! Why? Because the first steps reduce the drops to more gold coins and collectables. That's all stackable and is on average increasing their gain.

By the way, does anybody know why on earth ANet reduced the propability of zealous mods in pve about a year ago? Any explanation? During a whole year my guild managed to find exactly ONE zealous mod for sword after that update

Make a game without the possibility to trade, gain wealth, and give everything for free. No gold. gogogo!

Another idea is to make items yours only when you loot them. LOTR does this with some items, they are "bound" to you. They can be sold to the merchants but not eachother.

They have always targeted the monks in the group. Nice theory though...is that why you target monks? LOL

You have to except that gold buyers are part of any MMO, there is no "easy fix" for this.

Any changes to the game would please some and anger others. I have not yet seen an solution that would benefit everyone without damaging game play.

I say the code is useless and should be take out,Bots are still there after al lthis time it only made it harder for legit players to pay for that damn high end gear they want.

IMHO, GW is seeing who blinks first. Personally I think they are cutting their own throat. They know how to fix things (increase drops etc) and how to remove the need or desire to ebay, and they absolutely refuse to do it.

They would rather see the game go under than to concede peoples wishes (player base majority). This is a perfect formula for financial failure. Lineage WAS their (ncsoft) cash cow, it's failing to produce like it once did so they are rethinking gw. I really hope for their sake they truly listen to ALL the players and not those interested in furthering their own agendas.

Which is a bad one. A monk either goes alone or duo. If they were going for the monk first... they'd be doing exactly what everyone wants them to. If they suddenly decided they wanted to go kill the necro for casting that bastard hex on them... things would be alot different.

No. But a GM in the following places:
Ascalon International 1 (people actively spam GW gold sites in here...
Granite Citidel... seriously, this is getting to the stage that i'm thinking Anet owns these bots and is making profit on the side. They don't do a single thing to stop them. Its ridiculous.

Evil sod I agree. As I said it was my latest tin foil hat idea.. :P

As for the part I bolded (gw is selling their stuff on ebay) this is a popular concept in game, most feel they are not doing what they could and only want to make the extra profit. Scary thought indeed.. My concept is as follows, the game is a way for gw to make money, as long as it goes on as is, and doesn't cost more to produce then it brings in, it will continue. When it doesn't it will go poof. Any romantic notions of them wanting it to be a perfect game and making it so we all love it, is truly naive...

Lineage still has more players then GW does or ever will, I believe the total was around 7 million mark for both games (source: old issue of PC Gamer). Granted not many are new subscribers but GW has a way to go before it meets the money Lineage made for NCSoft.

Anyway, I don't see the bot's as a massive problem, they don't effect the game as much as some people believe. Yes, gold buyers might raise the price of certain items but these items are generally out of reach of your 'average' gamer anyway. I'm not defending them but I don't see it as a massive problem that will be the end of GW as some of you seem to think.

Give it a few weeks LOTR will have gold available to those that wish to buy it, Aion will have items/gold for sell within weeks if not days of it's release.

Note on source - I can't remember the exact issue otherwise I'd write up a direct quote.

Anet still maintain there is NO farming code, only an anti-bot code. After seeing Granite Citadel and people complaining about their drops getting worse, I'm inclined to think that's the wrong way 'round.

I wouldn't say it is the 55 as anyone can make a good farming build just visit The Farming Forum and there's lots down there.