Fansite Friday # 61

What is the Guild Wars team’s philosophy on in-game farming?

In Guild Wars as in any other online roleplaying game, we think that maintaining a robust player-driven economy is important and adds a lot of fun to the game. It’s true that Guild Wars is a competitive game and therefore focuses much more on player skill than on item acquisition. But PvM-oriented players still look for rare items that they can use to distinguish their characters, as well as long term goals that they can work towards acquiring. In order to allow the game’s economy to be an important and fun factor in PvM-oriented play but not create unfair imbalances in PvP-oriented play, we often make rare items easier to acquire for PvP use than for PvM use, or make rare items differ from common items only by their appearance. In general we try to make it much easier in Guild Wars than in most games for average players to acquire almost-the-best of everything, and to compete on a level playing field, while still giving the more hard-core players ways to differentiate their characters.

It’s theoretically possible to create an online roleplaying game without a player-driven economy. For example, you could make every variant of every item in the game available for purchase from NPC vendors. But that would take away a lot of the feeling of accomplishment of finding a rare item. Even that might not be enough, because if certain vendors were difficult to find or travel to, then players would still trade amongst themselves at above-vendor prices. More broadly, you could simply disable the ability of players to trade items or to drop them on the ground. None of this sounds particularly fun, and given that Guild Wars uses randomly generated loot, placing every variant of every item in the game on an NPC vendor is certainly not an option for Guild Wars.