They came at nighttime, and there were too many of them to fight off. They swarmed McFarland first, all grunts and oinks as they ripped him to shreds. He was resurrected just a few feet to the left in his campsite and when he reappeared those crazed boars killed him again! It took him three more deaths and took me two more just to get out of the campsite boundary. Tomlinson says we should try and reclaim the camp on sunrise, but I say we abandon this venture. I’ve never seen the yellow eyes of a boar look at me with such malice, such hatred. Something is not right here, and I am not sticking around to find out why.
If Amazon considers farming this location to be an exploit when the game tells the player that the spawn behaviour of these boars is intended, that is a huge failure of communication. Any punishment for players utilizing this location ought to consider this. The damage done to a given’s server’s economy and progression obviously needs to be addressed, but unlike other locations where players are abusing game mechanics to force something unintended to happen, there are clear signs that Boarholm was intended (but perhaps not fully understood).
I hope Amazon releases a specific statement on Boarsholm to ensure there is no further room for misunderstanding.
Really don’t see how this one could be considered an exploit unless AFKing in a party or some kind of automation occurs.
As pointed out in the notes, it is meant to have a massive amount of boars. They also don’t respawn instantaneously as some others do, there are just a lot of them in a condensed area. The elite also does not respawn instantly, it takes him a few minutes to come back (like most other elites).
Boars also (minus the elite) give significantly less exp per kill than anything else of an equivalent level, so it isn’t even something that is going to level you up faster than zerging portals, pvp quests, or any other activity that utilizes a massive amount of players annihilating everything around them.
If they don’t want this to occur in the future, a good implementation would be a soft instance where the boars are no longer there for players who completed the quest. The head hunting comes from a clear lack of understanding that this area is really not worth the time, which obviously participants in this farming as also ignorant of and are just riding YouTube hype trains.
I generally agree but there are elements of this location which is very worth it, the skinning. Skinning can be maxed here very very quickly, and a tremendous amount of thick hide is being generated and entering the economy constantly as a result. The value of Thick Hide on my server is essentially nothing, and I’m certain this being a popular location is some of the reason for that.
Another large issue is that the boars here somewhat regularly drop Vials of Suspended Azoth, which sell for quite a nice price, in totality the benefits of farming here are:
You refill your azoth completely in about an hour
You get 2-4 vials (my server: 400-800g)
You get maxed skinning quickly
You get as much Thick Hide as you could need
You get to level any given weapon’s exp while getting all the above too.
It is very clearly a good use of time, especially for lower level players. Regardless of that fact, all signs indicate it being intentional by the developers. My best guess is some junior designer implemented this area and didn’t realize that they basically invalidated the economy around skinning completely.
[Edit] The exp from each level of a profession increases as your level in that profession does, so in the process of maxing skinning here the effective exp of the boars is higher than you might realize, too.
Skinning gets maxed extremely fast just by skinning in the level 40+ areas in general, with the mourningdale mobs giving just shy of 2K per skin.
Similar to all T4 mats, they have almost no trade value due to the amount of materials you need to refine them in to usable material. Players collect them from leveling and then dump them in trade post cause they are heavy and take up space. That wasn’t due to the boars, it is due to the design of the game and players all hitting similar levels at the same time.
My skinning was already over 170 before I ever went to boars at level 39 and I got around 20 exp in a group of 5, which was much lower than the alternatives of main questing, running expeditions, or tagging corruption groups. It was decent for catching up weapons I never used to around level 10, but other than it isn’t a faster method of leveling up than anything else, which is what a lot of individuals have incorrectly assumed. Being tied down in one spot for so long for mediocre experience hurts more overall as questing/traveling around different regions allows you to collect various materials, level various gathering skills, and collect faction tokens/influence/quests for gold and better experience.