How long will the exploits go on?

Good. I'm glad that particularly nasty little exploit has been shut down. Its effect on the Market has been rather annoying.

It doesn't matter what the devs personal opinions on farmers or farming are. They can despise the practice and wish a pox on it. But as employees of a for-profit MMO they need to realize that farming and farmers are one of their customer demographics.
And in any game with an economy a vital demographic, one that contributes directly to core functionality for all your other players.

Again, they don't have to encourage or officially condone it as long as they understand it's an important component of the success of the commercial product they're selling.

I'm not saying that they have to actively encourage farmers or that they shouldn't put the kibosh on things they feel are over-rewarding, but neither should they be going out of their way to suppress or marginalize the activity.

The structure of the game encourages and rewards farming, whatever the intent of the devs. They don't have to like it, but they should recognize that reality.

I guess my field crafter can kiss the flood of 500k common IOs goodbye.
=(

*tips a beer in memory of the monkey legions*


Sort of on topic, was able to log in this AM just before work. My Monkey Level Bumped characters were all happy as clams.

You'd have to take into account people with leveling pacts.

My husband has far less playtime than I do. We are in several leveling pacts. His logging into those characters usually results in him gaining 1-5 levels instantly without so much as moving a foot. It would suck hard if he somehow became caught in an exploiter net because of something the devs put in the game.

Oh wait.

Seriously?

Heck some of them were getting up above 1million.

Giving us the ability to set a virtual team size of 1-8, completely at our own discretion, was one of the biggest boons imaginable to farmers. They may interfere with farming as a side-effect of other changes, but they sure launched the Gravy Train with this change.

I hope that wasn't a surprise to you. We've known I19 was going to fix that exploit for quite a few weeks now.

Congrats. No one really claimed the Devs were going smack "everyone" who chose to exploit the game.
You risked it and won. Good for you...

I actually got close on my first character without going out of my way. And I did earn Illusionist without even trying to.

I know how they roll, it wasn't a risk.

With the old rules for it? I didn't have anyone who was close without farming for it before we got paper/scanner missions.

Anything that we fight in regular, recurring content, especially that exists at level 50, we'll get eventually. Anything that we can outlevel and that doesn't appear in a prominent TF or the like it seems to me that grinding for it would be the norm among people who get it.

Yeah. My first character was a Storm/ Defender and I mostly ran on PUGs, and this was back in the days when being Storm/ was enough to get you kicked from the team before you even entered a mission, so I pretty much had to take what I could get. Somehow, this always seemed to be Carnies. I lost count at some point, but I remember running big chunks of Madelein Casey's arc something like ten times. And fighting the Envoy of Shadows 20-something times, because it was about the one thing most of the FotMs still needed help with.

This is false. What would happen is the devs would datamine the total drop rate across the servers as being far lower than it used to be, and increase the drop rates across the board.

Same thing happened with XP normalization. Players leveling slower than intended when datamined. XP cranked up across the board within those level ranges.

What they cannot do is tweak the reward system player by player, depending on whether they farm or not. But the notion that farming helps the economy is based on a premise, that the drop rates are fixed and its up to the players to crank as much drops out of those drop rates as possible. That's not how it works.

Trust me: that's not a mistake I'm ever going to make as long as I live.

The intent was to prevent the need to advertises for fillers or make people door-sit. It wasn't so much to help farmers as to make them less visible and less intrusive. That was a compromise between making the activity potentially easier, and making it less of an annoyance for other players.

By the way, this is one of those features that I warned the devs ahead of time that it would be used as proof the devs actually encourage farming.

The very statement that the Devs would have to change drop rates if they nuked farming from orbit just supports what I was saying, which is that farming benefits the system greatly in its current form. At this point you're just splitting hairs and I honestly don't understand why. It's almost like you find the idea of farming itself offensive and are absolutely determined to portray it as aberrant behavior. If I've misunderstood, I apologize, but that's what I'm taking away from your posts.

It goes back to my original point: non-exploitive farming, for whatever reason, has some kind of weird stigma associated with it in this game. I fail to understand why. I cannot name another MMO community that feels this way. If a player wants to gather materials for crafting in pretty much any other MMO, they farm for them (or buy them from other players, who themselves did the farming). What's the problem? Why do we even need to make a big deal out of it at all? And why the need to make it so abundantly clear that it is "unprotected" by the Devs? That statement alone implies they are barely tolerant of it.

This is a case where the functionality was already in the game, they just formalized it and made it more convenient for an important customer demographic.

Smart move, helping the farmers do their thing without having to recruit fillers.

There's a fair sized population that are burningly intolerant of anyone who doesn't play the 'right way', defined as the way I think they should.

It crops up all over the place, but the jihad against farming is the most obvious example.

I personally don't have much stake in non-exploitive farming either way. I'm correcting the incorrect statements consistently made by both sides in this argument. The devs don't hate farming. They don't encourage farming. For the most part, they see it as marginal behavior, in the literal sense of behavior at the margins of what most players do most of the time.

And one of the biggest myths is that farming helps the game. It does not. If farming was eliminated tomorrow somehow, the total number of drops in the game would not decrease in the long run. It would basically be the same after the devs next rebalanced drops. The difference is that those drops would be spread out among more players rather than concentrated in fewer. But to a first order approximation, farmers neither help nor hurt the economy. They are basically neutral contributors that should be neither blamed, nor congratulated, for the state of the economy (they have second order effects that are a more complex topic: some beneficial, others less so).

Of all the topics discussed on the forums, the topic that I post on that perplexes the most people is the general topic of the game economy, including farming and marketeering. Primarily because I seem to be one of the very few posters unwilling to take a side and capable of surviving in no mans-land indefinitely. You're not alone in thinking that if I don't seem favorable to one side, it must be because I'm championing the other one.

that market merge sure ruined the game, didn't it.

There was also another original target demographic: lunatic scrappers and other ultra powergamers. The audience was wide enough to make the feature worthwhile to implement. And it was widened even further by allowing players to use -1 in combo with the multipliers, which turned out to be useful to low performance squishies who could adjust their difficulty to something like -1x2, which was often more enjoyable and less threatening than the standard 0x1.

So all around, even with the potential for people to claim it "encourages farming" I think it was a good option to add to the game overall. It helps farmers, and I have no problem with that, but it helps lots of players across the board.

I don't know if ya'll are fans of The Wire, but I find this little clip to be appropos to this idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2fV-_eiKxE

Not to call out on you personally, but I saw something relevent to quote.

Have the devs actually expressed a distaste for farmers? I've heard them expressing their strong views about exploiting bugs and getting involved in RMT, but I've never heard anything beside player assumptions that the devs are against people running genuine and WAI content repeatedly.

I wouldn't mind being proved wrong, but I just don't recall this ever actually being said.

I never said it would. What I said was that I wouldn't perform a merge without carefully studying the economy on both sides, because I wouldn't roll the dice and take a chance on lots of potentially bad things happening.

And if you look back, assuming the posts are still there, as time progressed I specifically stated that at some point, red side trading volume had reached such low levels, its unclear if it was possible to damage the markets any further with a merge. In both liquidity terms and in terms of the original intent of the markets - which was to provide a dynamic subset of the economy under the control of the players - there really was no significant red side market to damage any more.

If you had asked me in '07 if I would have supported a merge, I would have said no and I stand by that statement. In '08 I would have been 50/50 on the fence. By mid '09 I would have been generally in favor, provided a few precautionary steps were taken. By the time the devs were thinking about a merge, I was telling them I thought it would be for the best.

The one thing I was worried about, and still have no answer to, is whether net influence is flowing *to* the red side or *out* of the red side. If the markets are functioning correctly after the merge, net inf should be flowing into the red side at the moment. If net inf is flowing out of the red side, it points to potential long term problems which we wouldn't be able to see clearly yet.

Why this is true, or I should say why I believe this to be true, is an extremely lengthy discussion. It centers on the fact that the blue side has higher overall participation and higher net influence stores. Its entirely possible for there to be more pent-up buying pressure than selling pressure on the red side, but that cannot create a net outbound inf flow for very long, because the red side cannot sustain one, unless the primary material participants of the red side are essentially the ultra rich and farmers, and there's very little lower-end participation, which is dominated by sellers. And that points to a more systematic red side problem.

To be honest, at the time the merge was announced I was (and still am) much more worried about the markets as a whole than what the merge itself might do. There are systemic problems with the way the economy works that I think are preventing the markets from being as useful to the players as it ought to be. One of the biggest, in my opinion, is the huge valuation range of items. The difference between the least desirable and most desirable items, even ignoring purples and PvPIOs, is like eight orders of magnitude, from hundreds of millions to not even worth taking up a recipe slot. It would be like going to an open market where some people are trying to sell pebbles, and others are trying to buy 747s. But that's a tricky problem to solve in a way that would be immune from exploitation and also palatable to the devs.

A great question, actually. Would love to know.

Atlas Park on the Freedom server.

Since they fixed the exploit on the Monkey Farm, there are a dozen people spamming for zombie farms as I write this.