In Your Opinion, What is a "Farm"?

Originally Posted by MunkiLord

Not it's not. It's AE and double XP. The marketeers just take advantage of the extra demand and lower supply. They don't cause the prices to rise like that.

Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea

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.

Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum

If this was a single-player game, that'd be fine, but your actions affect others here... and when the actions in question have already been flagged as undesirable by the devs, it makes others feel more justified in addressing them.

Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain

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

Originally Posted by SeedyXX

A perma-24 by turning off xp? Did you not think of using Ouroboros to exemp a purpled-out 50 for DA farming and keeping some nice +recharge set bonuses?

*shrug*

Jer

Originally Posted by Nethergoat

The value of flagging an action as "undesirable" when you refuse to define the action is nil.
.

Originally Posted by Barata

To me, farming is any repetitious action that you perform solely for the reward. Want to keep clearing the war wall in Cimerora because you get purple drops? Farming. Have an AE Boss mission you run over and over again for tickets? Farming.

Keep in mind that I'm not making a statement for or against farming, I'm just answering the OP's question of what my own opinion of farming is. I've done the argument before with people who state that simply playing the game is farming because you engage in combat repeatedly for fun (meaning you have a repetitious action with fun being the reward). Whatever. I won't argue semantics. I farm on occasion, not very often, and usually when I get bored.

Of course, if I'm already bored and resort to farming, I usually just wind up increasing my boredom and log off shortly afterwards, but that's just me.

Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain

I never want to purple that alt.
I don't really have loads of fun playing it for regular content... So since I went to the trouble of doing most of the badge contacts up to lvl 24 I decided to keep it... and just turn off the exp.

There are some alts I have that have absolutely nothing in their slots. I never play them. Ever. I see no point in wasting my time or Inf purpling people I never use.

LOL, The only thing most of them are doing is holding INF.
Some are holding recipes for rainy days.

Originally Posted by Barata

I don't place much of an emphasis on purples. I have some toons that are specced out nicely enough now that I just don't want to be bothered with going through the work to purple them out. On my one blaster, he's being gradually purpled as the mood strikes me, but that's just mainly to see how far I can take him.

Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum

I think the devs have, in the context of their posts, demonstrated that they're using the 'old schooler's farm definition as I had. In the totality of their posts and their actions, they've regularly associated "farm" with exploit behavior... and I really haven't seen them use "farm" much in "innocent" context.

This doesn't mean that the devs see "all farming as exploit." I think it means that many of them don't see much of what you call farming as "farming."

Originally Posted by PL4U

Good Farmers do it alone.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat

Firstly, farming is the efficient generation of rewards. This quest for efficiency generally means finding large numbers of an enemy you can defeat swiftly on a large, open map with a simple layout.


Secondly, keep your nose out of other people's fun.

Originally Posted by InfamousBrad

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.

Originally Posted by Agonus

Fun? You make this game sound like work.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat

I provided a definition of farming.
If it's not your thing, don't do it.

Unlike the anti-farming jihadis who want us all marching in lockstep to their notion of 'appropriate gameplay', I don't care how you get your CoH jollies.

Originally Posted by Fleeting_Whisper

No, that's marketeers. Farmers either have no effect on the price of common salvage (some will just delete it because it's not worth enough, which is just as if they hadn't been farming in the first place), or they'll make the price come down by introducing a larger supply.

Originally Posted by Tonality

There are extremists in both camps. I find flaws in both positions.

Originally Posted by srmalloy

I disagree; because you don't get salvage drops, and the best payoff for your tickets is to buy recipe rolls, the people farming MA missions -- whether for influence and tickets, or for that plus XP -- aren't accumulating salvage that gets dumped into the market, and the ones who are leveling via MA missions go out and jack the prices of salvage in the auction house by competing for the smaller pool of salvage that's being put in by the fraction of the characters that don't spend their lives inside an AE building.