Feedback:User/Michael

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My suggestions
With all due respect, I've noticed over the years that you've expended a great deal of effort in fighting gold farmers. After reading an article in the January, 2010 Scientific American, "Real Money from Virtual Worlds", I began to question the tactics of all MMORPGs. The bottom line for your companies is to have players subscribe or pay for your services, but the outcome is waste of perssonel, ruining a good game for casual players and no harm to farmers who can do that 24/7 at a much lower price.

1) NERFING GOOD GUYS You're forced to NERF abilities constantly to ensure there isn't too much farming.  However, the individuals this principally impacts are the casual users who were just trying to make a few dollars themselves in your inflated economy.  The virtual farmers havea full time job and just move on to the next vein for virutal gold in some other section of your game.  End effect, you spoil the enjoyment for your paying customers and waste resources as you know full well the enemy will be back.  There are SUPPOSED to be abilities in a game that knowledgeable players take advantage of.  Some of those are lost to the new players because of your constant modifications for the PVE environment.  I dread EVERY update for what I might be losing this week. 2) TITLE TRACKS  The Bots that are run are more a nuisance to your staff than the consumer. However, Guild Wars II may not be immune to such problems with persistent areas. The real impact on players from Bots is it forces your staff to inflate goals for players to achieve. Anyone considering going up in rank is now looking at accumulating 10,000 points to have a title track maxed for the Drunkard or Party title tracks? If you look at the basic man hours required for that you'd realize that anyone with an actual job does not have the time to do that. Perhaps the numbers look different for your 4 year players, but not for the 2 and less. There should be achievable and realistic goals for new players as well if you plan to continue selling this game. Lower the bar for achievements to a reasonable level. One of the Wiki sites I read on your forums had linked to a page even suggesting power leveling for maxing out some of the title tracks like vanquisher, etc. Keeping the title track scores high ultimately leads to more fuel for the bad guys as it increases demand for services. 3) INFLATION Your game economy is constantly affected by inflation due to farmers.  Undoubtedly, some of your richest virtual characters are living high on the hog from illgotten gains while new players abiding by your rules are left with...threats to be banned if trading for gold, warnings about account thefts, scams, impossible monetary amounts being charged for cool items, and soaring prices for common items. The solution I propose for a bulk of this is to sell gold.  I know that you've enjoyed providing Guild Wars for free, but the truth is you're spending countless highly-expensive-man-hours policing people who can live off $150 a month at the additional expense of creating a hostile environment to loyal customers.  If you sell gold, you would be able to increase your profit margin, give work a day folks a chance to buy into luxury LEGALLY, and cause a dramatic decrease in people chosing gold farmers as a solution. If you are concerned about hyperinflation with such a move, it can't. You've already created a max cap on trades by limiting them to $100k or 250 ectoplasm. There can't be trades for higher than that no matter how hard anyone in game tries. If you combined this with a tweak of the Title tracks too reasonable levels that someone might achieve in a year of hard gaming, I believe the demand for virtual farmers would plummet. If you want a full examination of this I suggest go talk to a number of economists about it. Right now you are engaged in what amounts to job security for your staff in hunting down "bad guys" over seas who make 1,000,000th their salaries, harrass players and ultimately DO NOT ACCOMPLISH the desired goal of removing gold farmers from the system. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is insanity. SELL GOLD.