Heh and call it The Colosseum Monster Farm. 
I like that idea, once you have beaten a boss it unlocks them in the special arena, and the preceding monsters could be all champions for extra goodies.
The biggest “farming” runs that make these types of games popular are boss runs. In D2, for instance, there were even bots made to do Pindle and Meph runs. Why not add a little something to boss runs that will make the game more enticing, not only better loot drops. For example, boss A only drops this item (1% chance or something) which is a part of a recipe to a grand master unique.
I quite like some of the ideas put forward so far. Sort of a summary of what I think:
- Farming is a bit of a headache and some don’t like running the same boss over again.
- Without farming however, you feel like you have no control over your loot (ala Hellgate).
- A system that allows you to farm within moderation is just downright awesome. I like a ‘boss rune/rift’ idea like my last post.
- I hate rubberbanding (i.e. reducing drops based on xp/time farmed etc) in all forms. Morrowind can go and EA great big D.
I am really of two minds when it comes to farming… The inability to go back and assault areas for experience and/or loot has hamstrung a few games for me but at the same time I really don’t like games that put me in a position of spending hour after hour after hour doing nothing but farming. This is why I don’t play WoW, just feels like I never stop farming. There is a happy middle ground, and for me it’s fairly wide. I’d have to see exactly how much the drop rates declined before I weighed in on any kind of ‘rubber band’ effect, but I’d hope that the quality of gear would not be influenced by such.
Just my 2 cents, take it for what it’s worth.
I agree - I think there is a happy middle ground and the key is just reasonable moderation. I mean most of us do play these games in one way or another for the psychological satisfaction of grinding XP and loot… just the grind needs to be a grind-lite. I think ARPG is sort of the province of those who don’t have the patience for MMO pacing or who enjoyed MMOs but have become burnt out / too busy with life and want that mechanic but served up faster in easier to swallow portions.
That’s exactly right…well at least for me 
I have to agree, even if there weren’t many boss chests in TQ that had repeated run penalties (Nessus, Minotaur and a few others?), i found it annoying nonetheless. They sometimes dropped usable stuff but knowing i had reduced chances of getting more strongly discouraged me from running them. All bosses should be worth farming at least to some degree, and not under penalty.
Some of the magic of these games is the # of modifications, customization, and the varying amounts of attributes, from imperfect to perfect on loot, that help give players a sense that there can always be a better version of the best item in the game.
That there is always something better to be found or attained.
So, if you reduce the chance to find that perfect weapon it does increase the amount of grind necessary to attain it. However, as a developer, it’s making the grind fun that matters.
How do you vary the game play enough and make it fun for the player to get these items, eh?
Killing enemies is fun for a while, but that eventually gets repetitive, so, what can help this? AoE attacks, certainly make killing enemies more fun, because then it’s no longer this single target grind fest. Single target attacks are fine, if they do some pretty awesome damage or pretty awesome effects.
What else can help? I would say, fun, or interesting challenges can definitely change up the game play and make the game much less stale and repetitive.
Challenge ideas -
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Timed challenges - Player’s goal is to get to an area in time before failing the quest.
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Traditional survival challenges (Waves of enemies) - Goal is to stay alive.
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Reduction challenges - Enemies can reduce the player’s movement speed or other stats, the players goal is to avoid reductions and eliminate enemies.
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Boss Challenge - Destroy a boss with specific conditions being met. (Could include timed, survival, and even reduction challenges all in a boss challenge, or individually)
These challenges should be continuously repeatable, and essentially give players another way to gain loot. I think this would be very awesome and very fun!
I must agree that there’s a lot of magic involved in grinding and finding the sweet spot. I don’t care if I had to kill 100 mobs for getting my character to even level 2 (over-exaggerated, I know), if that progress is somehow made fun with varying combat with good ragdolls, decapitations and just in general a some laughters about cool ways to decimate enemies.
I can easily sit grinding even if it’s very harsh grind, as long as it’s fun and I don’t need to watch my xp-meter all the time just to check how many more mobs do I have to kill to see the potentially cool next skill that might make the game more fun…
I have faith that things will evolve to that point at very least with patches and expansions when the voice is heard from the angry crowd also known as fans. But yeah, I have a strong feeling this one is gonna pack a lot more punch than TQ from the very start, and that’s gonna be a helluva good start.
EDIT: And yeah, would be fun to add some separate survival mode that’s basically just one arena that’s getting constantly spawned with mobs that are of selected character’s level at first, and eventually get harder… No xp gain at all, only chests as rewards for completing waves of enemies. Start off with small chests when killing equal level monsters, and as you progress to very high level monsters compared to you, you could be rewarded with better chests.
Could be fun mode for item farming. I could see myself doing that one “survival-mode” before I get to sleep… And in practice end up pulling all nighter in hope of some epic loot. The key is to make it hard to get even smaller chests, and very hard to get better loot. I dunno, but I just felt it could be potentially cool when implemented right.
Finally someone who sees things the same as I do! Since there’s already 2 of us, you could consider implementing these ideas
Hi, I’m new to this but thought i’d toss in my 2p.
Sorry if this has already been suggested or if it upsets anyone but how about considering a kind of ‘farming mode’ that enables players to revisit any areas they like to farm. The difference between ‘farm’ and ‘normal’ modes would be simple.
- In farm mode you can not progress your game/story, you can only go back.
- You can gain XP but only up to a level that will not ruin your game progress in ‘normal’ mode by making you too strong.
- All of the monsters scale to meet your current level making it harder to farm earlier stages of the game where people go around one hitting things for the loot.
There would then be room to make ‘normal mode’ more restrictive while allowing the players who love to farm the ability to do so. If done right, you could potentially change these modes on the fly and satisfy everyones lust for a strict game or a farmers paradise.
thoughts anyone?
duno, i like that the monsters just become stronger if you are at a lvl 10 place when you are lvl 30 the mobs must just be lvl 30+ miniboss 35+ as to meke it funn still.
any way it i understand you right +1… from me
Thats pretty much the idea, when in the ‘farm mode’ all of the beasts and monsters in the lower level areas will scale up to your characters current level range so that there is a real challenge when you farm. The bonus here is because there will be the same level of effort involved in farming, you can leave the majority of the good drops in place as the perceived cheat of it being easy to get the good drops… will be gone! (I hope)
The flip side of this would be if you went to a lower level area without being in ‘farm mode’ the drops would decrease in quality sharply making it utterly pointless to do after maybe 2 or 3 runs for example.
Sounds like a lot of work to create something that really doesn’t seem to bring anything interesting to the table. In fact, I hate the idea :furious:
I joke! But seriously…I hate it
any danger of an explanation to go with that joke? I’m all for constructive comments on the idea. 
To me it just seems like a totally unnecessary additional mode to the game. You explain it as it’s something simple, but in reality it’s probably a lot of work. Depending on mode monster spawns will have to be adjusted throughout the game. In “farm mode” because you can’t progress past “where you haven’t already been” now the game has to track where you have been and lock areas based on this. How will this be done? Fog of war invisible walls? Every area now needs invisible walls in the chunk segments? Or do the developers now need to design the world with doors/gates/fences/boundaries/ect to decide where players can and can’t go based on their progress?
And in the end, the game is designed by difficulties so you do eventually encounter the same enemies in the same locations but stronger and scaled to your level…just in a higher difficulty…so this mode is somewhat redundant to begin with.
Then there’s logistical concerns…like breaking up the game into even more modes. Online with TQ you now have normal, epic, and legendary when you want to join games. With this you are essentially turning into 6 different modes (normal, normal farm, epic, epic farm, ect)…
It does seem somewhat pointless, although not necessarily a bad idea in itself. If there was a “farming mode” i’d be opposed to an XP cap while farming. A whole lot of people farm bosses and dangerous mobs not only for the loot but XP as well, often i’ve been doing that in TQ just to get enough levels for a good artifact before i continue trekking on, for example.
I guess i just don’t see the point of it The only gripe i’ve had regarding farming/loot/etc so far in TQ is that the random drops aren’t as random as they should be… and now even that appears to be fixed. Otherwise it’s a pleasure to hunt items.
I’m not sure what the discussion is about, besides “farm mode” “another mode” “monsters scale with you”. If it’s something along those lines, GD’s mobs will scale with the player to a certain extent from what I remember. It won’t be like Oblivion, but it won’t be static like TQ, so it kinda removes the necessity for this “farm mode” I think.
Yea Renevent, I see what you mean about the way it could be implemented, I just guess I assumed that a lot of the work had already been done with minimaps tracking progression and online play in TQ that already spawns and kills monsters as needed.
I suppose problem for me is the fact that a lot of the time going back to farm is pretty dull as there is little challenge from the monsters and often poor loot.
Anything to make them worth fighting and drop decent loot would be a plus.
deimos, I also go back for XP at times , we shouldn’t just stop all XP farming as that would be lame but if the monsters are going to scale you could effectively just farm in ‘farm mode’ until you were uber and that would spoil the rest of the game so there has to be a limit of sorts to the XP you could gain if such a mode ever existed.