« »
August 22nd, 2007

#59 - Busy Sulking

Do yourself a favor and watch the video below… I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. What I would love to see is the Lineage II version of this video. The common attitude is “lol, it’s a private server”.Granted. What happens when the GMs not only abide, but support and assist farmers? When I speak of this I am referring to L2, and not to WoW, so let’s be clear on that point. However, let’s have a little example:

Catacombs are a great place to level, in fact, they’re the only place to gather materials that allow you to gain skills more rapidly, purchase high level heals, swift magic and attack potions, and so forth. Also, if you want to increase the power of your gear, there’s a fella there who provides the scrolls you need - otherwise it means buying them from other players, most of the time farmers.You see, farmers bot the catacombs, running parties that never require rest - and usually one person to monitor the group. The mob spawn rate in these rooms is astronomical, so it’s easy for a perpetual motion party to accumulate a lot of very valuable scrolls and pots to sell to lazy players.Now, when a group of real players wants to hunt in one of these catacombs, they have been known to be packed with these farmer groups with face-on-the-keyboard-names. There’s no mistaking them. Players can petition the GMs, but unless enough players do it, what you hear is “It’s a PVP situation”.

In other words, it’s our job to go red on them. On the other hand, if enough of your party complains, you will experience this:

A complete and total mystifying vacating of the entire catacomb of all farmers.

Before you know what has happened, every single room in the catacomb is empty. Let’s do a little math here… parties are a most 9 members large. Let’s assume 40 parties in a catacomb. Assuming they’re all full, that’s 360 individual accounts. Within ten minutes of the petition, they will have ALL vacated.

I’ve seen this happen in Dark Elf Village as well. Watching countless farmers with faceplant names infest DE village, I became irate enough to report them all. Before I received a reply, they had once again all mysteriously flown the coop! Not run out of town, but logged! Then I received a reply to my petition thanking me for reporting the issue.

I don’t know if that contributed to the future mass ban of farmer accounts (that happened six months later), but if I were trying to maintain a group of farmers under a certain level, I would welcome a mass ban. So much easier to create characters from scratch rather than de-level them all.

My point, again: GM Power + Farmer Masses + “Cheap” Buys + Lazy Players = Inflated Economy, Overpriced Gear and Total Farmer Control. Tell me that’s not a microcosm for the modern world. Right now Canada’s pretty ticked off about the poor quality of products “farmed” by Chinese manufacturers.

The irony? We demanded it.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.