There's anger here towards players who chose to farm. Would anyone care to explain what difference it makes to ANYONE but the player farming? If that's how they want to spend their time, who cares?
Because much to the contrary of what farmers claimed, it
does affect the game outside of just what they're doing.
Arguably the most pronounced affect was on the market. Things that were deemed "desirable" cost billions of influence, more than a non-farmer could ever hope to earn unless they were extraordinarily lucky and happened to get a desirable drop that they could sell. Unfortunately, that was
extremely rare. I would sometimes go weeks without getting a single purple drop, for example, and then when I did, I'd get something that was generally considered junk, worthless on the market. There were a few IOs that eventually I just resigned myself to never possessing because I didn't farm.
This is especially brutal to new players, which the game desperately needed to survive. When you come into the game and a bunch of people are all purpled-out to the point where it seems hopeless that you'll ever meaningfully contribute to a team, it doesn't take long before you leave the game.
Related to that affect is the affect on the tone of the player base. One anecdote in particular sticks with me. My roommate Belle used to play for hours at a time helping people out, and she detested farming. Once, she joined a team advertising for a task force, but before she did, she specifically asked if it were a "speed run" team, and the leader told her no, it was just a normal run. So she joined, and the team proceeded to speed run the task force. I was sitting there watching her as they blew through mission after mission, taking every shortcut they could, even doing things like deliberately failing missions just to get to the next mission faster. They would finish some missions before she could even get inside the instance. Finally, she nicely told them that she didn't know this was going to be a speed run, apologized, and left the team.
I was already annoyed that this is what had become the de facto standard of what was considered a "normal" run. But what came next utterly disgusted me. Some of the people on the team started sending her private /tells cursing her out for leaving the team before they fought whatever big baddie was at the end of the task force. Being a kinetics defender, they were expecting her to be around at the end so that she could use Fulcrum Shift and whatnot to buff the team and debuff the enemies. When she left the team, that meant that they were going to have to fight in the final battle for five minutes instead of the two or three they were expecting. Thus, for the next 15 minutes or so, she received a slew of insults and accusations of griefing the team by leaving.
I tried my best to get her to petition the people cursing at her, but being Belle, she wouldn't do it, and I knew that the GMs didn't respond to petitions sent on behalf of someone else, so they basically got away with it scot free. But it really pissed me off because again, that was the kind of thing that probably would have caused a relatively new player to abandon the game and move on to something else.
Then, of course, there's AE. At the time, no mainstream games that I knew of had such a feature that allowed user-generated content in the game. Being a roleplayer, and being someone who had all sorts of cool ideas for missions and storylines, I was super stoked about the thing. But after creating a few stories and getting one-starred because it wasn't farmable enough or because someone objected to a mission because it didn't give enough experience, and after looking at the arc list and pretty consistently seeing stupid farming arcs ranked at the top of the list, I was done with it. A feature that I thought had the real potential to be revolutionary and really set CoH apart from every other grindfest became THE grindfest that I abhorred.
Look, I know that some amount of farming will always happen. Players will always want to reach that next level, get that next new shiny, and knock out a mission or two specifically to get there. That's not what I'm complaining about. I don't even mind if every once in a while I see someone broadcast that they're looking for a team to just do a quick ITF or whatever. But when speed runs and farming become the norm and people start getting upset at people who aren't playing the "right" way, when I see one of the nicest people I know on the verge of tears because she left a team and had the audacity to negatively affect their precious XP/sec stat, when I basically give up on the market because it's just a cesspool of junk and items that are hopelessly expensive, yeah, I take a dim view of farming.
Of course, part of this is partly because I come from a background of pencil-and-paper roleplaying. Yeah, it was cool to find a +3 Sword of Whatever, but you rarely had such blatant min-maxxing going on, and when it was encountered, it was
strongly frowned upon; many a DM I knew would take great pain to specifically pick on your character if you were what we referred to as a "roll player"--that is, a player who cared more about the dice than the story and characters.
The thing about an MMORPG, the thing that is
supposed to separate the genre from others such as RTSes, FPSes, etc., is that it's
supposed to bring that sort of philosophy to the gaming world, that it's not so much about "winning" as it is to put yourself into the role of the sorcerer, or the steampunk pirate, or the spandex-clad invulnerable behemoth. At its best, City of Heroes was very good at that, and AE had the potential to really push that idea to a new extreme. At its worst, though, it was just another grindfest, and to me, the farmers, power-levelers, and min-maxxers were directly responsible.
