OreoCookie

Originally Posted by baron_inferno

I don't think anyone here has suggested that the devs do not care about farming at all (exploitive or otherwise). They've been quite vocal about their desire to stop exploitive farming (see AE abuses) but somewhat less blunt when it comes to farming in general. That was the point I was making. Even though the devs may openly disapprove the general concept of farming, they quietly tolerated it none the less. Why? Because they have no choice in the matter.

Farming is not a new issue. It has been around since the days of Mudding. The developers at just about every MMO has had to deal with this reality at some point. Dare I say that eventually, based on my own observations in the half dozen or so MMOs I've played in the past, they do come to that very mentality I mentioned above.

What's the alternative? It is literally an exercise in futility for developers to try to eliminate farming entirely from their MMOs. First of all, they run the risk of alienating a sizeable chunk of their subscribers so it doesn't make a whole lot of business sense, especially if it's a smaller game with less subscribers to begin with. Secondly, the resources required for such constant vigilance is beyond the means of most developers. On one hand you have hundreds of thousands of players (if not millions) armed with their creativity and on the other you have a few dozen developers running the game from a reactive/defensive position. Is there any reason to believe that such a game of cat and mouse will ever end? Just how much resource and time can the developer devote to such hamster wheel of an operation before they finally realize that they will have to be make some concessions in order to not get completely bogged down?

Getting back to CoX, being that it is a game based almost entirely on instanced missions, the task of eliminating farming becomes a virtual impossibility. In games like EQ or FFXI where farming is extremely rampant (some may say fact of life), at least there were the factors of spawn competition and timer for the players to take into account. With instance based games like CoX, there are no such concerns. We can repeat just about any mission we want, at any time we choose. Short of adding a anti-repeat timer on every mission in CoX, there is just no way to stop players from running higher reward missions over and over. Even then the players can just keep track of their time of completion and run a continuous string of different higher reward missions whenever they are up, which is exactly what players in some other games do to get around spawns timers.

The above is just yet another example of how reactive anti-farming solutions implemented by the developer will accomplish little other than to prompt the players to come up with new countermeasures. It is a bottomless pit. Now I'm not saying that the developers shouldn't try to fix exploitive farming but frankly, it is a waste of development time to devote an undue amount of attention to the so called "farming" problem.