Well, the hard mode update has come, and I have some mixed feelings about it. Hard mode itself is very good. It adds a whole new spin on old areas, and the new titles go toward those lofty goals so many of us love. It really provides some new challenges to old players.

At the same time, it does mark some pretty severe changes to what many of thoes old players were doing before. Tucked neatly away under "Miscellaneous" in the update notes is the line: "Loot now scales according to party size." From most early player testing I've seen it can be translated as "A solo farmer will now get 1/8th of the drops he previously did. "

Credit to mr_groovy on guildwarsguru for the example:
http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/7...eplsji3tk8.jpg

Its too early to tell what this will do to the market. I just think I'm getting a bit tired of changes to the staus quo. Solo and small group farming was a good way for me to pick up a bit of swag for my characters, and is a fun passtime for many players. This certianly seems to go against Anet's previous claims that they had nothing against the farming community.

I like the scaling. I really hated having to leave my friends out of farming runs because everyone in the party wanted a better chance of getting a green. I think that more greens should drop if more people are in the party. If they have done this in a manner similar to Diablo II, there will be drops that will only fall for large party sizes.

Those pictures are a little out of context. Was the after picture taken after clearing an area in Normal mode or Hard mode? They nerfed the monsters in normal mode, so the drops may have been nerfed accordingly. People should be rewarded for playing intelligently rather than for spending hours repeatedly exploiting a cookiecutter solo build. That's a testament to spare time and patience, not to ability.

In addition to removing incentives to exclude others, ANet removed a big temptation to exploit imbalances. Overall, I think the change is good. The economy will go screwy for a little while, but it will eventually adjust.

Besides, there is a flip side to this. ANet also removed the drop penalty for repeatedly entering the same area. You can now farm the same area over and over to your heart's content without seeing your drops decrease.

Does The Party Size Include Henchman?

Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought this was bad.

Thanks for listening to the community Anet. We appreciate it.