Just had the worst farming experience of my life.

I’ve mostly given up on camping to farm. Whenever I do it, it takes 5 minutes to get one orokin cell. Whether we’re doing Gabii, Ophelia, or Piscinas, I’ve found it’s always faster to run towards the enemy than sit around waiting for them to come to you. I can kill twice as many enemies moving around than still, so what’s the point of Strangledome in situations like that?

Today I formed a farming group with somebody who seemed new to Steel Path, looking for orokin cells. I asked if we could farm plastids at the same time. I recognise that there’s a 10% lower drop rate of cells on Piscinas, but wasting 10% of my time is better than wasting 50% by having to go to Ophelia later on. The newbie also wanted plastids.

But player 3, who clearly knew exactly what they were doing, wanted to go to Gabii. They made fun of me for needing plastids and started us on Gabii. We didn’t communicate at all before starting the mission, the newbie thought we were going to get Plastids at Gabii until it was too late to change the vote. Nobody even brought Khora.

I decided that since we didn’t have Khora and half the people would rather be somewhere else, I’d just do what I thought was the most efficient farming strategy. I started exploring while mowing down infested. After a couple minutes, I’d found two orokin cells in resource deposits, I had 300 kills, and my camping allies had a total of about 60 kills. I recognise that my absence was throwing off the spawns for their plan, but they couldn’t have got 300 in that time by camping, and certainly not 2 cells. Nobody even bothered to go pick up the second cell I pinged.

My allies started yelling at me for farming how I wanted to. I made my case that I’ve tried it their way dozens of times, and it doesn’t work as well. They said that they’ve gotten 60 cells in an hour of camping. That sounds implausible to me, but if it happened, it was with Khora, Nova, Nekros, a resource booster, and luck.

Player 3 kept on calling me “guy” and “man”, and it really pissed me off, being trans. So I said I’d go camp with them if they apologised for calling me a guy. They proceeded to keep calling me a guy on purpose, accuse me of trolling, and extract.

They still had not picked up the second orokin cell I pinged for them. But they did lie that thanks to a resource booster, they already had 5 orokin cells from 6 minutes of off-meta farming. I went to the camping site, found no cells, checked the scoreboard, and saw that getting 5 cells would have been a statistical miracle anyway. They asserted that the cells had despawned because I took too long.

I recognise that some people have good experiences with sitting in a room for an hour doing nothing and say it’s more efficient. But if you’re going to do that, at least have a plan. Don’t leave Khora and Nova home, and then demand your teammates farm your way after the mission already started. Don’t misgender fellow Tenno after they ask you to stop. Don’t call people trolls for wanting to actually play the game. Don’t lie to your teammates out of spite. And don’t turn your nose up at orokin cells because your teammate got them in a way you didn’t approve of.

I filed a report on player 3 for the harassment, and I felt so scared when I did, because there was a warning I could be punished for filing what they see as a false report, and I don’t know how good their reports system is on intentional misgendering.