In Your Opinion, What is a "Farm"?

Farming is running content over and over and over and over and over and over again. yawn. Just thinking about it makes me want to roll an alt.

Looking at the original poster's registration date, I'm having a hard time accepting that the question might be anything but troll bait. If you've been playing, even off and on, for five years then you know expletive-well what a farm is, because you've been seeing people spam invites for fillers for one farming mission after another the whole time you've been here. You know what the people who are looking for missions to farm find desirable. You know what maps they prefer. So when you see someone exactly replicate one of the classic farming missions, any of the long list of ones that NCsoft, Paragon, and/or Cryptic have had to go in and set to timed missions so that people couldn't farm them over and over forever, you know full well what the person who designed that mission was thinking: "this combination of enemies, with this particular design for an ally that will increase my farming efficiency without kill-stealing my XP, on a map that lets me move continuously and effortlessly from one spawn to the next until we're ready to reset, of exactly the right size to hit hit the max-ticket cap for me and all 7 fillers -- there, perfect."

If you weren't someone who registered back in 2004, I would tell you to not feel bad if you can't tell the difference between a legitimate mission and a farming mission, it just means that you haven't learned all the borderline exploits, and that's a good thing; let those of us who have been disgusted by the whole phenomenon for years put our knowledge to good use shutting them down and don't worry about it yourself. I'd reassure you that the exact combination of the right one or two factions with exactly the right one or two maps with a particularly counter-intuitive NPC design is not something you're likely to stumble upon by accident, and if you do, you're unlikely to get the slot locked for first offense.

But since you're not someone who just fell off of the turnip truck, it seems to me that it's far too likely that you're trying to stir up an argument, cloud the waters, to create the false and dishonest impression that there's any particular doubt about what's legitimate and what's not, so that you can lie to yourself and to others that you had no reason to think that your lovingly-recreated wolf farm or TV farm or Dreck farm or meow farm or anything based on similarly exploited game mechanics was disallowed, so that if you get punished for it, you can feel justified when you scream and cry that the developers are meanies, that they're arbitrary dictators who only picked on you because they're bad people and they hate you for not being a fawning fanboy.

If my guess is wrong and the question was sincere, my apologies for the misunderstanding. If my guess is right, good luck with that, farmer.

I pay 15 bucks a month same as most of you...

Why is it you people *read: rawr* make posts about farmers like we are somehow "unworthy"... I PAY to play this game, and HAVE FUN. How are you better than me? Seriously. Some of you post with a condisending tone.

*Disclaimer*
I do feel that Farming in the AE is not REAL farming. I think its more power leveling. Or something.
I feel that farming, atleast the way I do it is REAL, because I get real drops and not tickets.

I have a very simple definition of farming:

If you do something repeatedly explicitly for the quantifiable rewards it offers, you're farming.

If you make a boss-only map in AE and run it over and over because it's challenging and you enjoy taking down powerful foes, that's not farming. If you do it because they give the best XP/inf/drops per minutes, that's farming.

@SpaceNut - My 50s, AE arcs and current projects at ParagonWiki

Main Entry: farm
Pronunciation: \ˈfärm\
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English ferme, from Anglo-French, from fermer to fix, rent, from Latin firmare to make firm, from firmus firm
Date: 14th century

1 obsolete: a sum or due fixed in amount and payable at fixed intervals
2: a letting out of revenues or taxes for a fixed sum to one authorized to collect and retain them
3: a district or division of a country leased out for the collection of government revenues
4: a tract of land devoted to agricultural purposes
5 a: a plot of land devoted to the raising of animals and especially domestic livestock b: a tract of water reserved for the artificial cultivation of some aquatic life form <a fish farm>
6: a minor-league team (as in baseball) associated with a major-league team as a subsidiary
7: an area containing a number of similar structures or objects (as radio antennas or storage tanks)

Let's consider what a farm is outside of MMOs for a second. Farming started when hunters and gathers decided to stand still and plant seeds in a plot of land, cultivate it, and reap the harvest.

That definition was carried over to MMOs and games in general. When you stop moving around and stay in one place to cultivate your rewards, you are farming. It doesn't matter whether you do that in dev missions, AE, Ouro, arena, or a hazard zone. If you are staying in one place to harvest rewards, you are farming.

Farming, in and of itself, is not bad. The rise of civilation and societies is based on crop and lifestock farming. In MMOs, the availibilty of many in-game items and rewards are greatly increased by farming and do trickle down into the population beyond the farmers.

In real life, certain farms are disallowed. Coca leaves and marijuana immediately come to mind. Why are those farms disallowed? Because the derivatives of those plants are an inordinate amount of wealth concentrated into the hands of a few law breakers, which can lead to corruption, and a stuporforic effect on the population that uses the derivative drugs.

In MMO terms, things like the mito farms and meow farms have the same end results -- an inordinate amount of wealth concentrated into the hands of a few and stupified players that don't know how to do anything but sit on a stoop and watch the world go by.

Farm, a place where foodstuffs are produced, either in the form of vegetation or livestock.

Not to be confused with a ranch, where only livestock are produced, and not necessarily for the purpose of becoming food, or an orchard, which produces no livestock, and generally specializes in fruits.

A "farm" is something that causes self-appointed mother hens to climb atop their soap boxes and don a cloak of self righteousness and then proceed to tell others how to do things their way......

Or you could just play how you want and leave the rest of the population alone.

Is that a clear enough definition for you?