Gold Farming

[gobbly2100]

What is your thoughts about currency farming and power leveling service for Huxley if it were to come about upon Huxley's release? Do you agree or not with it? Do you think it is right or wrong?

We are really interested in knowing how our members feel towards this.

[Darrksy]

Power leveling I can get behind not as a way for people to make money but as a way for guilds/clans to start working together. From the looks of it this game is going to require a degree of real life skill, probably won't be like WoW were if there is a 3 level gab you don't stand a chance, power leveling could be a good way for people to get together and work on strategy with eachother.

Currency farming I can't comment on to much. Without any knowledge on what the best way to make money, or even what it's measured in. All I can say is if you get currency by fighting/killing other players I'll be farming all the time.

[Felix12g]

I don't see anything bad about power leveling. Especially in Huxley. The foremost reason being that anybody who has been power leveled will not have the associated familiarity with their weapons which is attainable only through use.

Because Huxley will not be gear based and will rely heavily on twitch skills, they are not getting much of an advantage from being power leveled. The only thing that helps them is a higher amount of weapons available as well as skills. However, with that higher access comes harder enemies.

It is a good thing in giving people an actual reason to join in with others. Barring loot whoring there isn't much of a reason to throw in with guilds in MMOs usually. Even planetside you could do quite well going solo.

[randin]

currency farming ruins the games economy. I've seen too many MMOs become nearly unplayable for the part time player because prices become unreasonable.

powerleveling i don't feel does anything other than promote noobness among the upper ranks, and that happens anyways.

[connnnn]

Here's the thing... we've really had no indication (have we?) that Huxley will even feature a player-driven economy. We know it's possible to trade weapons to at least some degree, but we don't know where the weapons come from (straight NPC buys or mission rewards or what), and we haven't seen any indication that NPC or player opponents will drop ANYTHING at all. They certainly don't in the newest gameplay video.

What this leads me to believe personally is that rather than an open economy what you'll end up with is players leveling in order to access better equipment, which they can buy from the NPC using some sort of money. And as you'd expect, when you access a new piece of equipment you could sell your old one for more money to another player than back to the NPC (which he would buy for less than the NPC). But since the ultimate origin for the stuff is probably still whatever NPC merchant system is in place, the economy is relatively tight-reigned. This is of course assuming there's no kinds of special/unique weapons you can earn through missions... in which case they would likely need some sort of "soul-bound" type system in place to keep higher level players from running lower missions and hording reward equipment to sell to lower level players.

Ultimately, I would suspect that money to afford equipment won't be as much of an issue to players as leveling up to grow their character and access better weapons/armor/abilities. Of course that's just a hypothesis...

[Ao1xBlazenAce]

Originally Posted by Felix12g

It is a good thing in giving people an actual reason to join in with others. Barring loot whoring there isn't much of a reason to throw in with guilds in MMOs usually. Even planetside you could do quite well going solo.

Developing superior strategies with familiars, and being able to be identified as part of a whole creates a different environment than a Quake 4 DM round. Also your actions reflecting on your group enhances the social environment. All IMO, this could be a new topic .

PL-
For my first character I take all the time I want 'leveling', etc, as per to understand the game, my skills, my character, and my role better. After that initial character people will naturally level alts faster. Personally I won't PL a first timer, otherwise I know they won't understand some of the lessons they missed out on, and screw me or my party later.

Farming-
I agree that there has been no real shown monetary system shown. I do believe that Lunarites are going to play a role in the trade system.

Hopefully there will be an 'auction house' aspect, because from my MMO experiences World of Warcraft has used that to most efficiently control prices, inflation, and prevent destroying the game for late comers. Not saying its perfect .

[Felix12g]

People are social yes, that is why MMOs are doing so well these days. That's one of the reasons that the first arcade games were put in bars and eventually had co-op or vs play modes. People like playing with others or against others, whether in close physical proximity or over the internet.

The thing is, alot of people these days can't be considered "serious" gamers. They play to have fun and socialize, this doesn't lead to most people "strategising" if that's even a word, IE forming strategies. WoW has done wonders with this aspect of gameplay in getting people to jump through hoops in order to get things. In their case it is driven by a purple train, people are greedy and want overpowered loot.

In a game like Huxley where your equipment is less important and it is more twitch skill based listening to commands from people higher up is still going to have devestating effectiveness, but will people follow it? We will run into the fact that most people seeing Huxley will see a pretty new shooter and just want to frag, not actually expand the gameplay.

If they do what I'm thinking they will, you won't need to be in a guild to hop into the battlegrounds and if the mercenaries pan out in the release they won't even need other players to complete missions. That all leads to people having an alternative to being yelled at over the mic by somebody who thinks they're a "commander" because they were the first people to talk to the guild creator NPC.

After all that I'm not trying to say that there won't be great teamwork and coordination within guilds, I'm just saying that the amount you've found in MMOs like WoW will not have the same benefits that make people put up with what they do in those games.

[Jack Inaboks]

Originally Posted by Darrksy

Power leveling I can get behind not as a way for people to make money but as a way for guilds/clans to start working together. From the looks of it this game is going to require a degree of real life skill, probably won't be like WoW were if there is a 3 level gab you don't stand a chance, power leveling could be a good way for people to get together and work on strategy with eachother.

From some of the Dev's comments it would appear that you level primarily determines what you can buy from vendors, as it stated in one of the movies that a higher levle player could give a lower level player equipment above that player's level. This may virtualy end the NPC trade market as everyone will use higher level stuff, but there may be ways around that.

[CidCaldensfey]

I don't like either idea but theres nothing I can do about it. No matter what happens, regardless of what people want or their opinions, it will happen. I'd rather have it be done officially and accepted instead of something that needs to be done under the counter.

So I'm 'okay' with it.

[Flasher702]

I wouldn't be likely to use such services myself, but I could really care less if other people do.

On Power Leveling:
There will always be noobs in the game. In a FPS game we can tell who the noobs are by looking at their PvP stats (if such a feature is available) or just playing with them for a few seconds.

They are using an engine that some people are already *very* familiar with so if someone wants to buy an account that is already leveled up it's not like they are missing any "training".

It's not like playing many hours as a foot soldier is going to magically make someone an awesome jet bike pilot anyway. And unlikely that a few days of playing Huxley is going to hold a candle to the skillz some people have developed playing UT2004 and other FPSs for years either.

If someone wants to be sniper but doesn't have the time to level up their character themselves who cares if they get power leveled while they are at work? If they are good I'll want to play with them, if they aren't I really don't care how many high level characters they have.

On "buying" in-game currency/items:
I hope there is some kind of player driven economy in the game. After a hard day of killing baddies it's sometimes nice to engage in a little economic warfare. There are ways to keep inflation slow, and in a player driven economy inflation is self correcting anyway. I don't care if someone sat on their ass for 10 hours farming to get "item X" or used real cash to buy "item X". It makes zero difference to me. I care about skillz, and you can't buy them xD Some people um... HAVE LIVES and can't sit around farming all the time, if they got skillz I still want to play with them. If a professional farmer is camping something I want... I'll camp it better, or just buy it either with cash or with in-game currency. What do I care if farmer-boy lives in china or in his parent's basement somewhere in suburbia? Actually, I prefer professional chineese farmers, they are far less whiney and hiporitical then the basement brats that are more then willing to play games on hardware made in china, but let forth intollerable streams of rascism and xenophobia when they have to play *with* chineese people.

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As for the above comment about how people will be far less likely to put up with BS and far more likely to be mercenaries in Huxley I say: I hope that's true, and it's one of the major reasons I'm looking forward to Huxley and will probably never play a traditional MMORPG again. I'm sick of noobs that can beat me just because they were ok with letting an idiot tell them what to do for 20hours a week and now have a substantial advantage over me. Gear will still matter huxley, but skill should matter much, much more. And hopefully you can specialize into a niche role without having to sink too many hours into the game so you can get on to pwning people without the endless grinding xD Maybe someone who does have a lot of time to invest in the game maxes their character out, but they can still only do one thing at a time. It expands their skillset allowing them to do many things, but a tank is still just a tank, and a sniper rifle is still just a sniper rifle (unless Webzen lied to us about the game not being level and gear based and there are invincible, invisible, teleporting, instant death dealing tanks of doom that take entire guilds thousands of hours to get so that one person can drive it, in which case the only thing that will matter in the game is getting one or being in a guild with someone that has one and I'll go back to playing WoW...).