What to do about mage farming

Nerfing Mage farming would limit new players' ability to earn mesos, but leaving it untouched creates an unhealthy environment where Mage farming >> HT/Zak runs.
I agree with what another comment said: "nerfing Mage farming would actually help high-level players maintain their existing advantage while slowing down new players' ability to gain mesos" and "only nerfing excessively efficient maps (e.g.400m~500m+ per hr with low invest)"
for new players, at least, they can use 1 Bishop + a Lv79 NL + TC to hit 200m+ per hour at Skeles. (or 1Mage+80 presist + Lv79 NL)
For low-level content, I think minor reward adjustments or market-driven tuning are enuf— for example:

• Improving OPQ/LPQ bonus stage drop rewards
• Adding an upgraded 2wa/6slot OPQ glove that requires a Taru Totem to craft
• Filling the PQ-empty level gap between Lv85–Lv120

For the overall economy, similar to healthy inflation, I think the right approach is to let older money-making methods like Mage farming gradually depreciate at a moderate pace through updates — whether via new content (bosses/regions/PQs), new end-game gear, or even new meso systems.

Alternatively, give players new bosses or PQs worth investing time into as an exit from Mage farming. For example, having 1 Lv190+ character could replace 2 hours of Mage farming with equivalent meso gains. For a player willing to put in 20 hours a day, having 10 Lv190+ characters could fully replace all Mage farming time while achieving the same returns.
The balance implications of allowing bossing Mages into the class balance framework should also be taken into consideration.

 

I am strongly for leaving Mage Farming largely untouched, but do believe there should be limits put in place to prevent disrupting gameplay for others. The debate about how much mesos is allowed and whether it's good or not for the economy will probably never come to a consensus.

People who have already put in a lot of effort and time into their set-ups shouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them - and certainly not in such a drastic way as eliminating this method altogether. My two cents.

Instead of taking or stripping options away there should be more of a focus on the core issue: Improving the current gameplay loop.

As others have said slowly bringing up the mesos earned while doing other content would do a lot of good and I couldn't agree more, but I would also like to point out a few other things:

A lot of people that I personally know will often try to find people for content and when that fails they go log in to their mages or do solo content. Some people on my buddy list don't even appear online except for when their are events active. Alliance members complain daily about not being able to find groups and spend multiple megaphones only to be disappointed in the end. How many people do you know only log in to check off a daily solo task and then log out currently? I can name a good few. How many people don't join content simply because they don't want to move characters? LOL. Come on admit it - I do this too sometimes. How about not accepting people because it's not the exact party composition for a given boss? All of this happens daily.

I know for me personally I am just kind of bouncing around from one content grind to another in hopes of not completely burning out. Most of the time it ends up being solo content because it's just easier and more convenient. At some point instead of having fun as a group I started deriving enjoyment purely from character growth (leveling up characters and increasing their damage range) and I think that this is fundamentally the root of the problem.

My suggestions would be to incentivize what people find FUN. YES YES, MESOS THIS, MESOS THAT. Let the sweaty farmers go do their farming who cares. If someone derives all their enjoyment from flexing their imaginary muscles by all means let them. At the end of the day you are farming imaginary currency to make your character stronger for what...?

Instead we should incentivize the community and empower them. We should reward players for lifting each other up! Helping each other out! Sharing their successes and failures with each other. Connecting with one another! Events are fun because we all come together for silly stupid grinding as whole community.

Some of my best memories in this game:
- Black fireworks when you chaos scroll as a group and it all goes south?
- Passing around 30%s as a group to slam stuff and cheering when we actually pass something
- Collectively agreeing as a group to save our NX for months so we can spin a stupid wheel to see who pulls from Gachapon first and gets the luckiest.
- Doing scavenger hunts, jump quest challenges, and interacting with each other in creative ways.
- Trolling in Von Leon with firecrackers or wagering apples on who will die (and of course screenshotting the receipts )
- I'll even lightly admit APQ can be fun in the right group as long as we are yapping

This ended up going off the rails, but I really want to see more quality of life suggestions/upgrades. We should be focusing on ways to make content more accessible, easier to get to, and more enjoyable in a group setting. Would love to see suggestions that empower players to come together. Silly improvements to make literally anything more fun in a way that isn't disruptive to the current game would be so nice. I mean even Duey was kind of cool, right? I send buddies who are offline random junk sometimes.

Make TP rocks cheaper and/or free at this point! Mesos sink? More like motivation sink. Just gamify and make everything an optional gamble!!! Let players wager the clothes on their back in game against each other! No tradebacksies. Dry horntail? Spin a roulette and if it fails everyone loses 10 apples, but if it succeeds horntail drops loot again. 1% clean slates? Gimme those sweet .01% clean slates, why not. Make it drop like raindrops from a cloud. Give me some loot boxes from running content so I can be disappointed twice. Literally anything stupid and funny would go a long way. (NOT SERIOUS SUGGESTIONS BY THE WAY)

TL; DR
Let's work together to make what we have more fun rather then trying to take things away from each other or vilify each other. As long as it's not overly disruptive, and I don't think most mage farmers are, let it be. Staff will decide what is and isn't allowed to fly and we just have to trust their judgment. They do take our discussions and feedback into consideration from what I have seen.

 

I do think that farming should be limited to one channel, as controlling the same maps across multiple channels is clearly abuse. Maybe instead of nerfing mages, popular mage farming maps can be changed to instanced maps with reduced drops and exp like LHC. This would prevent players from holding multiple channels at once while still allowing mage farming to remain viable.
From my personal experience, bossing contents doesnt reli generate that much meso for the time invested. Most of the time im just doing it casually while watching shows on the side. I do know the sample size is small and RNG obviously plays a big role, so this is not anythg conclusive but I hope the below gives some context.

Spoiler: My recent boss farming experience

Zakum (100 Eyes of Fire)
Consumables: 4x gizers/day
Result:
• 0 Chaos Scrolls
• 2 Genesis 20
• Nothing else noteworthy

Neo Tokyo bosses (excluding auf)
Daily runs throughout Nov–Dec (~2 hrs/day)
Atk pots: about 10x peppermints/day
Result:
• ~10 White Scrolls total
• 0 Element Pierce
• Some Dragon Khanjars (none above 17 ATK)

Rose Garden farming (~2 months, 2 characters)
~1 hr/day
Atk pots: 2gizers + stooppers
LHC Gachapon results ~6k totems:
• 4 Chaos Scrolls
• 4 White Scrolls
• 3 Totems
• 4 Brown Work Gloves
• 109 ST

Solo Horntail (during Christmas coupon boost, ~14 days)
~2.5 hrs per run
Atk pots: 4 apples and a lot of peppermints
Result:
• 1 Genesis 30
• 0 Maple Warrior 20
• No equips worth more than 50m
Average: ~40m+/hr

Mage farming, on the other hand, generally requires a lower cost to gear up compared to bossing and seems to generate more consistent income. Because of that, it’s definitely a more appealing option for newer players trying to build up their funds, which is why I think it shouldnt be nerfed too heavily . That said, mage farming can also become quite repetitive and brain-dead over time, so it’s not exactly the most engaging gameplay either.

 

I'm half asleep so it might be a terrible idea, but simply make Mage Ultimates no longer hold a map like summons don't

Since Ultimates can't be macro'd it'd be harder to hold a channel, and it'd complicate things for mage farmers if people could steal their maps making holding harder during busy times or nearly impossible for 3b/hour setups.

Edit: Tired Apoc doesn't get to suggest things, I get it, it's a terrible idea!

 

A. 3b / hour setup is already impossible
B. This will literally achieve nothing. It is very simple to cast a different skill with the mages and it is also very easy to just have a map holding mule so it will just be annoying for everyone and achieve nothing.

 

Rather than debating whether to nerf Mage farming (though that matters too), the more immediate issue is that meaningful content updates have been absent for quite a long time — no new regions with better rewards or unique loot, no new bosses, no new PQs.

This leaves players with no choice but to squeeze more efficiency out of old content.

A game originally designed around exploring diverse content with a single character has, in the endgame, effectively forced everyone into hyper-optimized playstyles:

• 6 Mage farming
• 5 Shad / 1 Bucc solo HT

This is not a healthy game environment.

 

*limit 1 mapowner per person (IP/MAC across all channels regardless), this should be a straightforward implementation if Matt has the time and if it's done right there would be no need for GM intervention at all (the moment you hit a new map -> the other map you own gets flushed). complement this with a simple TnC polish i am pretty sure this specific community will be very much eager to help you enforce this culture

just do this and you solve:
- people scaling their farming setups *infinitely*: mage farming runs wild only because you can always slap on a couple more mages with relatively low headcost until you hit a bottleneck, be it either your juggling capacity or your PC's performance (the latter is also kinda P2W + unhealthy no?)
- people hogging area bosses: you dont see this as much anymore nowadays since playercount dropped significantly or maybe it's just that everyone is magefarming xd but i would imagine that people doing olaf quests would appreciate this
- similar to the previous point but it used to be a thing where players could not find a map where people magefarm heavily during special-drop events because 3-4 magefarmers are taking up more than half the available channels
- people feeling punished to not play "meta" because the alternatives to make meso are not even close
- and a handful more actually

i personally cant see any downside to this as we are all really just 1 player () so really one map at a time should be enough, it encourages a more engaged playstyle (not just with other players but simply also with whats in front of you)

no point in applying some bandaid fixes to nerf mage farms because it's not mage farming that is broken, it's the group of people who can+choose to scale it out of the norm in originally unintended ways that is the problem