In Your Opinion, What is a "Farm"?

I hear a lot about "farm" this and that. I report "farms"..."farms" are exploits, etc..so I thought I should find out what makes a farm, a "farm".

So...what, in your opinion, makes a mission a farm and thus something that should be reported?

Farming is going to do a mission or missions with the explicit purpose of getting loot drops, recipes, or money.

Good Farmers do it alone. Because sharing drops defeats the purpose.

Most farmers have a specific map they enjoy, and can do quickly.

:edit:

WTH are you talking about "reporting" ??? Are you talking about some AE BS?
Because Real Farmers dont farm tickets.
Real Farmers are the ones making white garbage drops cost over 100k each.
Real Farmers sell purples.

My apologies for not, apparently, clarifying what I meant.

If a "farm" is, and I quote:

Farmers are level 50.... for the most part!
I have a perma 24 to farm DA...

When you talk about leveling that is called power leveling. Dont confuse that with FARMING.
Farmers dont care about exp because they arent getting any...

Agreed. A lot of those 'farming' in AE aren't really farmers.

To the OP:

Farm maps in general are chosen for their unique synergy with various AT's. Also, farm maps typically are fairly large, making it worthwhile to take the time to gather fillers and set the map for a larger group.

AE has let people pick a map they are best familiar with, place a mob type they are best suited against, and run the mission to their heart's content. In the process, wanting to fill a team, a bunch of lowbies get a free ride. I look forward to issue 16, where I believe it will be more about what you can offer for a team, rather than only being a way to increase the spawn size. While there are farmers in AE, the majority of the 50's you see running AE aren't what I would consider farmers, because their behavior is the exact opposite of a farmer. A farmer is concerned about one thing: inf/time. Deadweight only slows this down.

One more thing: Real farmers do enjoy the rewards they get, but they also find what they do quite enjoyable. The person you see regularly on a fire/kin will likely tell you that they really enjoy having entire mobs under their whims, while that brute that rips everything to shreds does it for the exact same reason - to be able to charge in the middle of something and feel incredibly powerful. If anything, farmers can often be compared to soloists who like to solo maps built for teams.

I hope that answers some of your questions.

None the less, I farm for drops, money, and recipes.
I sell my crappy salvage drops for 100,000 Inf now a days because a bunch of people... Think playing AE is somehow better...
When they power level their characters up, getting nothing but tickets and random rolls they have managed to skip all the merits for the most part, and all the good recipe drops and salvage.

I am also a marketeer, But I am mainly a farmer... and sometimes, I power level - but that is a rare occasion.

We got a 3rd acct just so we could farm more.
We are considering a 4th account if Issue 16 goes live with the team size slider feature intact.

Running nothing but freakshow and council radio missions is a type of farming.

Streetsweeping Perez Park is a type of farming.

Sewer teams are a type of farming.

Slaughtering zombies by the thousands in Dark Astoria is a type of farming.

Killing skulls or monkeys or Fake Nemesis for a badge is a type of farming.

More often, by farming people mean running the same high-end mission over and over and over, or an AE mission designed to be repeated, in each case for high rewards. Specific to AE, you'd have one of a handful of maps, but often the narrow city map or the dreck map, and you've have a specific enemy that are all bosses or all Lts., and usually an enemy that does smashing/lethal damage and does not have much of a ranged attack.

None of that falls into what I would consider exploits, although I admit it's my opinion only. But one of the definitions given by the red names is too much reward for too little or no risk. A boss farm yields a very high reward -- but not without risk. In fact I've rarely been on one where people didn't die, sometimes quite a few times, even on ones run by people who know exactly what they're doing.

I've seen one such mission with Lts. who don't happen to have any ranged attack at all. This is a lot closer to an exploit, in my opinion, although in truth a hovering blaster would take forever to clear the map on his own because they will run all over the place. But with a well built tank to herd them, you can blast from on high and you're in no danger whatsoever. People on the ground are in quite a bit of danger (we had a team wipe in fact, except for the one person who could fly -- me), but still, that one felt like probably an exploit to me.

Helper NPCs that buff, etc., also seem to push the envelope for me, but of course they're quite common in such missions.

Another one that I've seen that I thought was potentially borderline an exploit involved lots and lots of a certain AV. Granted, it's an AV -- people died, often. But each was worth a lot of experience, and I just don't think you're supposed to encounter 20 or more of the same AV in the same mission. How does that make any sense?

Ultimately though, my only real problem with boss farms or AV farms is the repetition. I think you gain experience too fast in these missions, but there's also a lot of danger if your team isn't built well, so it's hard to call them exploits. Serious exploits like bubble farms and all-rikti communication officer farms are much easier to spot as patently against the rules.

The upcoming change in difficulty settings is, frankly, giving people who love to farm what they really want. I don't really see a problem with that -- if you can solo a map set for 8, then go for it. I agree that it can be a lot of fun. But that's farming, too.

Well, there are many definitions, but a farm is where crop or livestock cultivation occurs, usually on one to several acres of fertile landscape. Plants range from various, standard crops to exotic crops dependent upon the climate and soil availability as well as soil nutrient level. Farms are fairly typical in the "Breadbasket" of the Uni--wait...

Wait...

OHHHH.

Farming in this game is differant than most games. The traditional definition of farming is preforming the same taks repeatedly, usually fighting a single enemy type or boss, to obtain a specific reward. IE, "This boss drops a weapon, I want that weapon, therefore I won't stop killing him til I get it."

CoX is differant, because there is no "X drops Y". Almost anything can drop almost everything. So the task is modified, farming becomes killing as many enemies as possible in a short amount of time to get the reward.

Is this wrong? Not really, it's a fundamental part of gaming which everyone does, to one extent or another.

The problem lies not with farming as a whole, but with powerlevelling. Farming for XP is differant, and unhealty to the game balance. We've all seen the "AE Babies", and they speak for themselves.

The other problem is AE. It was not designed for making farms, and doing so is basically spitting in the face of the people who went through programming Hell to design it. It's like making a new toy for a child, and then watching the child gleefully smash it to pieces. They might think it's fun, they might say "You didn't say not to", but your hard work was just ruined.