How do the devs feel about farming?

I know how some people look down on farming and others love it, i want to know what the devs think about it

I very much doubt the devs will ever directly say what they think about it for the same reason they are never going to explicitly define "exploit" (as soon as they make any sort of definition it'll be used by someone to justify behavior they do not approve of but that is technically covered by their statement). Given their actions to date I suspect they do not particularly care for it but are resigned to it's existence as long as the rewards aren't to far out of whack.

They will not answer that question directly. They are constantly checking the numbers and if they ever see anything unbalanced or exploiting the system they will shut it down or nerf it.

The only time they will discipline players is if they have obviously broken the Eula so run your favourite mission as much as you want.

I dont get what you are saying, what is the point you are trying to make?

Thank you claws for explaingin but, who knows, mabye 1 of them will post here and answer my question?

If not for farmers, we'd still be hunting and gathering. Or bowling, maybe.

Judging from the Incarnate Content being only three (soon to be four) raids we need to run over and over again if we ever want all those rewards, I'd think some of the devs are just fine with farming.

As long as the farm's not taking an advantage of exploits or breaking any rules, I doubt they could care less about it.

Another example of an anti-farming change: Converting the "Defeat Shadowhunter" to a timed mission.

--NT

Reading thread while logged into Warrior farm.

Hey, I am working hard. I showered, started laundry....

1. If it's ordinary content, you can play it as often as you want and get what rewards you want from it as often as you want with some exceptions:

• If it's a thing that gives surprisingly good rewards that are so good that people seem to be doing nothing but that thing over and over again to the exclusion of everything else, the Devs will 'fix' that out-of-balance reward: e.g., they'll put a timer on the mission; reduce the rewards; increase the difficulty. This is really a question of game mechanics being unbalanced and the perceived 'nerf' is really fixing the balance.

• If it's a thing that a sizable number of players are using to annoy another sizable set of players, it will get 'fixed' to make it not so appealing. This happens when all of a sudden the broadcast channel is fill with nothing but appeals looking for that thing or recruiting for that thing. Or if the farmers in question are badgering others with tons of unsolicited tells regarding this thing. (With the number of solo farming options now available, this scenario is now not as likely to happen.)

• If it's an AE mission that is so obviously a 'farm' with no redeeming story quality. It gets removed. Eventually. After enough petitioning. When they get around to it. If you dress up the farm in a basic story, it's likely never to get touched.

The only thing I remember a dev said about farming is that it's boring. There's lots of content in the game, running the same mission over and over and over again seems boring to them.

However they also believe you should have to work for your rewards (risk Vs reward) which has caused numerous changes with player designed missions to not make them insanely easy with enormously disproportionate rewards.

Given that they still haven't updated or removed Unai Kemen's "To Click a Thousand Glowies"/"To Farm a Thousand Maps" I'd say they don't mind it.

Seriously though, given how they took to AE farming, I don't think they appreciated it very much.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

While they'd never say for sure and thus this post is merely speculation, I believe the unofficial stance on it is they'd rather we didn't, but have no outright problem with it unless we're exploiting some bug or quirk of the system to do it. Things like the older farm maps and even the newer AE farms are breaking no rules, thus we don't get smacked for it. In the latter case they had to fix a lot of exploits to get it to the state it is now (And in many cases, annoyed a lot of people who used the same feature for legitimate reasons), I doubt they would leave it alone if they thought there was still something definitively wrong about it.

I would agree they're not 'keen' on it. However, they have made various 'pro farming' changes to alter how it impacts other players. We had lots of complaints about people broadcasting for 'fillers' to get a large team to farm a mission solo. So they gave us the ability for a solo person to run a mission as a team of 8.

So it seems they don't particularly care for it, but they acknowledge it exists and will never go away and they're okay with that. Probably because it would anger a boatload of paying customers if they eliminated farming.

Incarnate End Game = Farming.