Posts with tag farm

Look, farming isn't Warcraft, okay? It just doesn't fit the fantasy of a grim conflict, of a war between ideologies, of a setting divided and defined by conflict for me. I just couldn't make that mental leap - I felt stupid running around killing weeds once, much less doing it over and over again so someone I didn't even particularly like would like me. Not even the dog could motivate me to do it.

But somehow dress up much of the same kind of gameplay behind stone walls and describe it as me constructing a fortified base on an alien planet and suddenly I am there. It all comes down to trappings - the garrison concept works with what I think of as Warcraft. It seems like bringing the RTS's whole 'construct a base, generate resources, use them for battle' gameplay into the MMO, and it works for me in a way the farm never could. So I'm down for it, ludicrously so.

How about you? Did you farm? Are you looking forward to garrisons?

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So, it seems like the good news is that the ranch definitely won't be gone for good. It will remain on Pandaria, in its peaceful setting,for you to visit whenever you see fit, grow some herbs, watch the virmen and the birds, kill a weed, or just shoot the breeze with your pets. However, it doesn't sound like it will continue to be updated in the new expansion.

What does this mean for the farm's success? Did it perform how the devs had hoped? Did it kill herbing? Were players too reliant on it? It would certainly be interesting to see whether this means an enhanced farm, or even something more akin to the much-desired player housing might appear with 6.0. It is also possible, of course, that the farm might go the way of other features that have been left for dust, and never reappear.

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Farming was literally the farthest thing from my mind when I wondered in a recent Breakfast Topic where you've been choosing to set your hearthstone, but boy did all the replies of "Halfhill! Halfhill!" set me straight. My daughter, a confirmed Glitch-aholic, hasn't been active in World of Warcraft for quite some time -- even playing a panda can't tear her away from milking butterflies -- but I know that one glimpse at the temptations of the Tillers, and we'll be renegotiating the list of games she has time to play.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree; I'm a fan of farming, too. What I find so striking, though, is the number of WoW players who are discovering the attractions of this sort of gameplay for the first time via the Tillers. I suppose it's still early enough that many players are simply grinding through the content to grow veggies for cooking or harvest other materials for your professions. And obviously, the minipet and mount fanatics among us are all slaving away for a Terrible Turnip or a Riding Goat. But I suspect there are plenty of players out there like me who are tickled by the whole farming concept. We're one step closer to having our own little WoW homesteads!

Is there something you especially enjoy about farming? Or are you only buckling down in order to grab certain rewards?

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For as long as I've played World of Warcraft, players have been making farmer outfits. Who knows why? Maybe it's because Blizzard made it so easy, or maybe it's because every gamer subconsciously yearns to live an agrarian lifestyle -- Eh, on second thought, I'm going to go with it's because Blizzard made it so easy. I mean, look at the types of items we can get. There are overalls, a pitchfork, and lets not forget all those ugly brimmed hats. Wrath of the Lich King even gave us the chance to wear plaid flannel shirts. Flannel shirts! What fantasy world application truly requires the abomination that is flannel!?

Well, whatever it is, Mists of Pandaria has finally given us a place to live out our agrarian dreams, and thus a good reason to make a farmer outfit.

I'm a solitary person outside of raid nights, so I do end up loving all the archaeology, fishing, and cooking. I like providing feast materials for my guild, and I wrote a blog post before I joined WoW Insider about the pools one could fish for the guild achievement while still being buff-food productive.

So it's no wonder I'm really psyched about farming. My own personal farm, where no one can reap from the same planting as I can? Yes, please!

The farming faction is the Tillers, who are based at both Halfhill Market and the Heartland in Valley of the Four Winds. But farming isn't all they do. The Tillers are involved in the expanded cooking, and they offer dailies that reward valor points as well as the Pandaria-based cooking tokens.

One of the many NPCs you can gain personal reputation with, Old Hillpaw, has a chicken farm. So naturally, one of the dailies he offers is Chasing the Chicken. This isn't your ordinary daily of kill X hozen and steal back Y vegetables. Old Hillpaw has tasked you with finding his prize chicken.

When Mists of Pandaria was first announced at BlizzCon 2011, the developers stated that players would be able to grow cooking mats and herbs on their very own farm in the next expansion. Immediately, players began to speculate on what exactly the words "your own farm" meant in World of Warcraft. Would we be getting our own version of FarmVille in WoW? Or maybe something more like Harvest Moon? Could this mean player housing? No one knew, and the general shortage of information over the months led some of us to wonder whether we'd be seeing the new feature at launch or have to wait for it in a future patch.

Now, almost a year after the original announcement for Mists of Pandaria, we can finally put a lot of our questions to rest. Over the weekend, Blizzard implemented The Tillers quests on beta servers, and with them, the new farm feature. So is it FarmVille? Let's take a look.

Your adventure in farming begins in Valley of the Four Winds, where you'll be able to start a line of daily quests to gain reputation with a pandaren faction known as The Tillers. Quests revolve around an NPC named Farmer Yoon, a young pandaren who recently traveled to the valley to inherit his late grandfather's farm, Sunsong Ranch. As it turns out, though, Yoon isn't cut out for all the hard work a farm requires, so he enlists you to help him run the farm and win favor with the valley's farming guild, The Tillers.

My warrior recently found herself farming a lot of Khorium in order to build her Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, and while flying a seemingly endless number of circuits in Nagrand in order to get the metal (which is a rare spawn on other Outland ore nodes), I started to wonder where this farm fell in relation to other grinds. Khorium sometimes cooperates by spawning regularly, but this time, it was its usual, awful self. I'm sure the Burning Crusade-era players can relate.

And yet, somehow I still don't think that khorium is the worst thing in the game to farm. Off the top of my head, I can think of others that are or have been equally bad or worse:

• Non-combat pets A lot of farmable non-combat pets (e.g., the dragon whelps, the firefly, the Fox Kit) have a 1-in-1,000 drop rate and a limited number of mobs up at a given time.
• Combat pets Waiting for a particular pet to spawn somewhere and then finding and taming it before someone else does can be maddening if you're consistently unlucky.
• Fishing Accomplished Angler is justifiably famous for being stuffed with requirements full of RNG. Let's talk about the year it took me to get Mr. Pinchy's Magical Crawdad Box! On second thought, let's not.
• The Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest This disappeared in Cataclysm, and with it went all the work that went into farming up bug parts and Elementium Ingots, which is where I got stuck in the chain. (So close, and yet so far.)
• The Insane This almost goes without saying, although it's easier these days than it used to be.

Your thoughts, readers? What's the toughest thing in the game to farm?

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In the past year, even before Mists of Pandaria went into beta, we've been seeing an expansion of options for players in World of Warcraft that have broadened our idea of endgame content. Endgame content can be described at its most basic as stuff we do when we're at max level, and patch 4.3 added not only the Raid Finder (which is absolutely endgame content) but also transmogrification (which is content for everyone). It revitalizes older content that was once endgame; it gives players from the level 17 twink to the 70 running BC raids to the new level 85 something to do that in no way actually amplifies a character's power in any way. It breaks with the mold of what we think endgame content is supposed to do.

Mists is bringing more of this. From the Pet Battle system, to a mass of hundreds of new daily quests and a removal of the limit on daily quests, to specifics such as being able to level up your own farm and improved Raid Finder support for each new tier of raiding, what we're seeing is an emphasis on broad content -- things people who play for six to 10 hours a day can do but which are also accessible in smaller bites for people with far more limited play time. You can hit up the buffet, do some Pet Battles, run some dungeons, or work on a reputation, or you can pick one aspect of the game and work on it. Do you really want to develop your fishing? Are you completely disinterested in anything but PvP? You can go as deep or as wide as you wish.

As someone who has no interest in Pet Battles, fishing, or having my own farm, I think this is fantastic.