Ever wanted to hop on, quickly take care of your daily achievement, and move on to something more fun? Matt Visual over on YouTube shows Guild Wars 2 players an extremely fast way of farming the needed amount of kills and events needed to nab the bit of extra karma and cash obtained from doing the achievement every day. His favorite farming location happens to be Queensdale, and he directs players on which mobs to kill and provides a sample route. As a bonus, he’s a pretty entertaining guy.

Keep reading to check it out.

Yesterday, John Peters, Game Designer for Guild Wars 2, had a few interesting things to say about the diminishing returns some players are seeing for rewards such as karma during dynamic events. These diminishing returns, it seems, were put in place to stop bots and economy-breaking exploits, and not normal players who happen to be enjoying an endgame gear farming session. The problem? It’s affecting everyone, even some players at lower levels.

Guild Wars 2 is a game about freedom. We want you to be able to explore the world and engage in a huge variety of activities, focusing on whatever best suits your tastes.

Some players have run into “diminishing returns” thresholds we put into the game to provide a safety net against unanticipated economy-breaking issues. We do have these thresholds in place, but it’s not our intention that normal players should ever run into them. We’ve recently had bugs and imbalances that have caused normal players to hit thresholds, and we’ll fix those.

These systems are put in place to protect the economy from botters and exploiters. We will close exploits as quickly as we can. These thresholds help create a safety net to keep the economy safe when we aren’t there to deal with the offender. It’s important to have a safety net in place. It would be bad for everyone if, for example, a group of players learned how to speed-clear a dungeon in 5 minutes, with full rewards each time, and then repeated that continuously. When one activity emerges that’s order of magnitudes more profitable than anything else in the game, it forces everyone to either engage in that activity or get priced out of the economy.

While we need a safety net to stop unanticipated economy-breaking exploits and botting, we have no desire to stop farming. Farmers are a part every online economy and when they are doing normal game activity they do not cause any harm. If a player finds a normal game activity fun and would like to keep doing it, that’s fine with us.

Initially we have to rely on smaller data sets, instinct and some guesswork to find the correct cutoff. What this means is that some players are going to bump into the edges of these systems for a while as we get them sorted out. Please bear with us while we gather more data and lower the safety net until it’s only providing critical economy protection. Looking at the numbers this morning, we believe some of the threshold systems are just too harsh empirically and we’ll be adjusting those systems within the next few weeks to ensure that fewer legitimate players are being impacted.

I hope this helps to explain why a game like this needs systems such as this to protect its economy. I also hope it gives some insight into our philosophy about botters (BAD) and exploiters (BAD) vs. farmers (GOOD). Thanks for your support and we will see you in game.

For anyone who’s journeyed to a lower level area in order to help friends, complete exploration objectives, or gather crafting materials has noticed that part of the time, loot scales with a character’s level. The rest of the time, players receive loot equal to the area they’re in. This is quite an interesting mechanic in theory, one that attempts to strike a balance that meets the objectives of multiple players. Need Jute Scraps at level 40? No problem– run some starting area DEs. Helping guildmates in Metrica Province? Fear not– you might get some cool upgrades, so it’s still worthwhile to loot.

But what about in practice? Is it better to farm on a low level alt, or farm on a level 80? Also, how about WvW? How does loot scaling work there? Yesterday, Linsey Murdock, Games Designer, answered a couple questions in regards to WvW loot scaling. It seems that ArenaNet still might be working out some of the kinks in the system.

For crafters or salvagers looking for ways to get the most bang from your Guild Wars 2 time, here’s an interesting item to consider: Mystic Salvage Kits. These yellow-quality kits raise the chances of finding rarer materials by 25% and recovering upgrades by 80%. The item recovery stats are the same as the stats on Master’s Salvage Kits, but with an interesting twist– they come in stacks of 250. Yes, 250! Out on a long farming session or WvWvW adventure and often run into bag space issues? Mystic Salvage Kits may be your answer.

There’s a slight catch, naturally. Mystic Salvage Kits must be made at the Mystic Forge, and require the following materials: 1 Fine Salvage Kit, 1 Journeyman’s Salvage Kit, 1 Master’s Salvage Kit, and 3 Mystic Forge Stones. Mystic Forge Stones are available in the Black Lion Trading Company Gem Store, which makes forging these kits a little complicated. Still, it’s an interesting option.

Check out this video, where Dontain talks about Mystic Salvage Kits.

What do you think– worth the Gems, or no?