I like this idea.
I’ve not been big on farming for equipment in a linear game, largely in part as I like to play these arpgs in co-op with a bunch of friends so restarting to farm is not really an option.
The concept of having certain scenarios pop up to be replayed, like a repeatable quest, would entice me though. Particularly if the scenario fitted into the game story in some way. For example, a border town that is continually under seige. Being able to travel back to the town to resolve the threat could be a lot of fun, singularly or as a group.
Whichever way you twist it, some players will want to farm because they hit a spell of bad drops, because they must have the best possible gear, or because they absolutely must have that unique level 10 fool’s cap that has a funny graphic.
Making farming artificially unrewarding doesn’t add anything to the game.
All it achieves is creating worse gameplay then “normal” farming.
Overlord 2 had an arena that I found more fun than farming actual game areas.
Any creature (type) that you had defeated in the game, was put on the arena roster.
Could be anything from hobbit spearmen to 2 stories tall lava golems.
Each “type” was a specific encounter so if you selected the golems, 2 would spawn.
If you selected the hobbits, 20 would spawn, making for a completely different kind of fight.
In Overlord 2, you “farmed” creatures for their life force bubbles (crafting) but also for rare drops. (items for your goblins to use)
The arena system simply made the inevitable chore of farming far less painful - to the point where it could actually be fun!
I’m all for putting area boss monsters on an arena roster like that.
Then it either spawns in a standard arena or the player is teleported to an “instance” of the level the boss normally lives in.
More diversity in scenery with the 2nd way and more freedom to use the environment, which can be important for some boss encounters.
There could still be rare “wandering monsters” that you only encounter along the way in specific areas.
Some sort of “elite” critters with distinct loot tables.
They could spawn in place of any regular monster of similiar type. Even across multiple areas, so that “The Goblin Berserker” could replace a lvl 2 green goblin in Greece or a lvl 18 fire goblin in Egypt.
Would have to have “unique drops” for multiple level ranges in that case or you’d get the lvl 2 apropriate item in a lvl 18 zone. =)
I would not put these specials on the arena roster. To find them, you actually have to “explore” the areas where they spawn.
Another option (a heretical one =) would be to open up the area boss loot table as (uncommon?) drops for elite critters in an area after you have beaten the boss.
I was thinking of a Megaman style boss gauntlet where you have to fight all the bosses in a row. Make every boss much harder than they normally are and only if you defeat the last one you get the loot and if you die even once the event is instantly over.
It should become available after you have finished the game at highest difficulty and it would have to be extremely rare event. Making the bosses insanely difficult this would be a nice challenge to overcome and at the end you have a chance to get good drops.
Make it actual farming. Help the people in the town farm their fields. Sometimes you find valuable ancient items in the ground, but for the most part you just find rocks and a bad back. You could add a twist to it and sometimes your horse or ox runs away and you have to catch it.
Now I’m starting to wonder if one can be banned for stupid “ideas”.
seed planting mini-game?
Only if acquiring the seeds involves detonating zombie faces.
Obviously, how else would you get seeds?
There. Fixed it for ya 
LOTRO has a farming tradeskill.
Could never wrap my head around that one.
What if you planted entire zombie brains? Could you kill the zombies when they are ripe (ewe) and get loot drops? Well, loot… and brains to plant more zombies.
Thinking about it and what you’ve said… I think the best thing you could do is remove ‘boss runs’, but keep farming in the game. I think replaying areas to get ahead is pretty much ok and even wanted, it’s the repetitive running certain optimal paths over and over and over and over that gets monotonous.
One idea, which is probably ridiculously bad but just throwing things out there: a mode that enables you to convert experience to a +% to drop loot buff, including quest XP rewards! And enable quests to be done again in this mode (maybe it’s a mode that you toggle on and off?).
This way, you can play through an area again, even whilst still going through the game normally, and you aren’t going to outlevel to game and all of the content as you’re not actually gaining levels. And, it encourages playing rather than straight boss runs as you’re gaining % to drop as you play, and with quest XP contributing to this you have a reason to actually replay the storyline.
It’s pretty much a very very similar method to Diablo 3’s proposed buff system whereby level 60s can get +drop buffs from killing champions, to encourage doing entire dungeons and not just straight speed boss runs, but i feel this might actually work better (plus toggleable any time, not just a switch at endgame!).
Obviously, you gotta get the limit and the % to drop balance so that people dont either get ridiculous amounts of good loot, or end up on marathon day long play sessions to get it to the limit. I’m thinking capping it after 15 minutes of average mob slaughtering. And maybe you want something like, getting a really awesome drop decreases your buff, halfs it or maybe even wipes it completely - so you don’t just play for 15 minutes to ‘prepare’, then go teleporting around the world doing boss runs. i.e. if an hour of gameplay involves you getting an awesome drop around 30 minutes in, then having to rebuild your buff, and getting the same at the 60 minute mark… then you’ve got the same result from an hour play session or two 30 minute play sessions. Which is good design, no?
This eliminates quick boss runs but… people are still gonna find an optimal path in the game and replay it… it’d just be a larger path instead of a short boss run. So, combine this with either unique loot for bosses, or possibly losing the ability to gain the +drop buff from an area after a set amount of killing or defeating the boss (so you gain an epic item, your buff drops, and then you have to go elsewhere as you can no longer gain it from doing the same area/boss again). This makes the optimal path to actually naturally play through the game, completing areas and defeating bosses. Which sounds to me like a solution for people who feel forced to do boss runs for efficiency - although I’m not sure what you’d do about people who prefer boss runs. Could cause backlash so I’m really uncertain.
Someones probably posted this idea already and in a far more coherent manner, but… too lazy to read 43 pages first! 
Oh, and yeah, challenge areas… one thing that’s pretty cool in some games these days is the Last Stand style arena gameplay, where you face waves of increasing enemies and have to last as long as possible. You could even put it on an infinitely increasing difficulty curve and it may become a game in itself to see how long people can last and what epic loots they can get. I think THIS would be far more fun than boss runs.
Maybe both systems, so people can play the arena or just replay the game purely for loot?
Likely irrelevant as this thread is so old now, but just throwing this stuff out there
/ughlongpost
TLDR:
Problem1: Boss runs more efficient than natural play, forcing players into this route.
Solution: A capped +% loot drop / magic find buff that you gain instead of experience from killing mobs, so running straight to the boss isn’t optimal.
Problem2: Players will gain more from longer play sessions due to not wasting time gaining the buff, or will gain the buff and then revert to boss runs.
Solution: Buff is reset when you gain epic enough loot.
Problem3: Boss runs discouraged, but gamers will still find the optimal area to grind out.
Solution: The ability to gain the buff from an area is removed after some condition, forcing natural progression to the next area.
Plus, side benefit: Reason to continue replaying the entirety of the game even after leveling and experience is capped out. Adds another level to the ‘end-game’.
I think a last stand arena would be awesome also though. Then people would keep playing to gain loot to get further and further in the last stand, so they can boast about how they reached level #247 and defeated the Epic Boss Of Uber Mega Doom that only 5 other people have so far achieved. Etcetera 
Then don’t do it
So in order to ‘fix’ that some people may feel that they have to do boss runs to get the most loot per hour, you want to force everyone to just play the regular game to get the most loot per hour ?
There is nothing wrong with boss runs, if you don’t like them, don’t do them. Of course bosses should give better rewards than just playing the regular game, they are tougher too…
Having boss runs is not a bug.
None of these are problems… boss runs should be more efficient
Buffs should make it easier to get loot, that is the whole point of having a buff in the first place. If you think they give you too much good loot, then they either should not be in, or you should not be using them. Most people do not feel that there is such a thing as too much good loot
Forcing a player into always playing through the game end to end by otherwise being penalized in items drops for not doing so (which is your proposed ‘solution’) sounds way worse than simply letting the player decide what he wants to do, be that boss runs for loot or regular play because they get boring after a while.
There is nothing wrong with boss runs, so breaking them is not fixing anything, it is just breaking boss runs.
The most fundamental reason that people find farming frustrating is because it is counter-intuitive that the optimal (and all-too-often necessary) way to play the game is to play the same section of the game over and over again when you could be continuing on to new areas.
The solution to this problem is to not create it in the first place. Don’t give better loot off of bosses, just give more loot. Every location should have a loot table and an “expected average hitpoints” (that is, an abstract value that represents how many hit points an “average” enemy in that area would have), when an enemy dies, its chances of dropping anything from the loot table should be multiplied by how many hit points it has relative to the the “expected average hitpoints”. Since bosses will have way more hitpoints than the EAH, they’ll drop a lot of loot. The upshot of this system is that loot drops will be roughly relative to damage done to enemies, which intuitively makes sense.
Now, you’ll want to put in a “tilt” variable on enemies so that you can increase the effective hitpoints for this calculation for enemies that are tougher for some reason other than hitpoints (eg. high resistances, a healing ability, tendency to run away, teleport, or attack from range, etc.). Likewise, you can put a negative tilt on enemies that are, for some reason, easier than would be expected (eg. having a critical weakness, suiciding, less threatening than normal, etc.). The beauty of the tilt system is that you would only need to set it on unusual enemies.
So the formula would be:
[chance to drop a given piece of loot] = [base chance to drop that loot] * ([monster’s hitpoints] + [monster’s tilt value]) / [area’s expected average hitpoints]
Boss fights would still be epic because you’d get more loot and unlock new areas and get to fight an interesting fight.
You could even add a town upgrade that would allow you to jump straight into a fight with a boss that you’ve already defeated but adjusted to your level. That would allow people the fun of fighting their favorite boss fights over and over again without forcing it on people or making people have to fight through the same area over and over again to do it.
not sure why that is counter-intuitive. You get a good drop from every 100th regular mob let’s say, if you kill a boss, you notice that on average you get 1 or 2 good drops. So it should be anything but counter-intuitive that the best way to get better gear is to kill that guy repeatedly
To me, boss runs should not be necessary (unless you were unlucky in drops or just feel generally underpowered), otherwise you can simply move on. I rarely do boss runs until I have finished the game. By then I want the best gear tho, at which time boss runs do make sense as a way to obtain that.
Doing boss runs in say normal difficulty in TQ on the boss of act 1 is a waste of time, you get better gear soon by simply continuing on - so unless you want to complete a set, there is very little incentive to do so.
The solution to this problem is to not create it in the first place. Don’t give better loot off of bosses, just give more loot.
A boss should have a higher percentage of dropping better loot, not just more overall.
I don’t think that in TQ there were any items that could only be dropped by a boss, so in essence you can find anything the boss drops elsewhere too, it just takes way more kills.
Don’t really see the difference to what you propose, short of a boss dropping a large amount of ‘useless’ loot on top of the good loot because in your system you would have to dramatically increase the overall loot a boss drops.
Every location should have a loot table and an “expected average hitpoints” (that is, an abstract value that represents how many hit points an “average” enemy in that area would have), when an enemy dies, its chances of dropping anything from the loot table should be multiplied by how many hit points it has relative to the the “expected average hitpoints”. Since bosses will have way more hitpoints than the EAH, they’ll drop a lot of loot. The upshot of this system is that loot drops will be roughly relative to damage done to enemies, which intuitively makes sense.
Not sure why you think this makes sense intuitively. To me it definitely does not make sense at all, let alone intuitively.
The loot should be a reward for the dangers you had to overcome. If the loot scales linearly with HP, you are better off avoiding bosses and just killing mobs, as the reward / danger ratio is better that way. Say killing 100 crows gives the same loot as killing one Typhon, but Typhon is dangerous while hundred crows are no threat at all, they are just tedious…
Now, you’ll want to put in a “tilt” variable on enemies so that you can increase the effective hitpoints for this calculation for enemies that are tougher for some reason other than hitpoints (eg. high resistances, a healing ability, tendency to run away, teleport, or attack from range, etc.). Likewise, you can put a negative tilt on enemies that are, for some reason, easier than would be expected (eg. having a critical weakness, suiciding, less threatening than normal, etc.). The beauty of the tilt system is that you would only need to set it on unusual enemies.
ok, which brings you back to bosses drop more better loot… I believe you pretty much described how bosses are already being handled, it may not be the same formula, but the outcome is very similar
Note, even you had to adjust what you claimed ‘makes sense intuitively’ so it actually does make some kind of sense
You’re not taking time and effort into consideration. Since bosses take more time and effort than mobs, it’s again, not obvious that that’s the most efficient way to get loot.
But the problem is that the way you’ve described it is not the way it actually is. If bosses just gave more loot, there wouldn’t be that much reason to kill them a bunch. The truth of the matter, which is hidden from the player, is that bosses typically are skewed to give better loot, which is unintuitive because the obvious state of affairs is that loot drops are generally random and related to the difficulty of the area they’re dropped in. The fact that bosses are silently skewed to drop better loot is only obvious to people with spoiler information or lots of experience killing bosses.
A boss should have a higher percentage of dropping better loot, not just more overall.
Here you’ve just stated that things should be the way they are without providing any reason or even acknowledging the fact that I just showed that this leads to the undesirable feature of boss farming.
Don’t really see the difference to what you propose, short of a boss dropping a large amount of ‘useless’ loot on top of the good loot because in your system you would have to dramatically increase the overall loot a boss drops.
Bosses already drop tons of (and usually ONLY) useless loot. I am just saying that they shouldn’t have a hidden (or obvious, for that matter) ability to sometimes drop the really good stuff, as that encourages farming.
Not sure why you think this makes sense intuitively. To me it definitely does not make sense at all, let alone intuitively.
It’s not the system that makes sense intuitively (just like real-world physics systems don’t make sense intuitively)–it’s the OUTCOME that makes sense intuitively. Specifically, you aren’t penalized for playing the game as it presents itself as it’s supposed to be played. Likewise, it intuitively makes sense that in a game which is supposed to be fun, it’s not better to do something tedious and repetitive than something fun and interesting.
The loot should be a reward for the dangers you had to overcome. If the loot scales linearly with HP, you are better off avoiding bosses and just killing mobs, as the reward / danger ratio is better that way. Say killing 100 crows gives the same loot as killing one Typhon, but Typhon is dangerous while hundred crows are no threat at all, they are just tedious…
As I mentioned, non-threatening mobs would be given a tilt value to reduce their loot.
And the difference is that killing 100 “crows” over and over will happen naturally as you just continue playing through the game, so you don’t have to farm to accomplish it. Yes, that’s desirable.
Note, even you had to adjust what you claimed ‘makes sense intuitively’ so it actually does make some kind of sense
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
My suggestion for this kind of thing is simple:
make different league.
hardcore, semi core, normal…
in each you could make other rules as how items are droped, by certain percent, by exp, by type of monsters…
the point is that the option is unlimited.
and ofcourse that if you go to a certain league, you cant share your “bank, or stash, or w/e” you want to call it with other char (so you wont exploit it)
and you are “stuck” in the league you chose.
also you could make those leagues for P.K, aloud everywhere, some places, only if you duel… you got the idea.
sorry for bad english.
Well, it seems everyone who ever played an ARPG has figured it out
But the problem is that the way you’ve described it is not the way it actually is. If bosses just gave more loot, there wouldn’t be that much reason to kill them a bunch. The truth of the matter, which is hidden from the player, is that bosses typically are skewed to give better loot
not sure where I did not describe exactly that, I did not say the average mob drops 1 item in 5 kills while the boss drops 20, I said the player gets 1-2 good drops from the boss.
Of course the better item probability is higher, I never meant it any other way.
Here you’ve just stated that things should be the way they are without providing any reason or even acknowledging the fact that I just showed that this leads to the undesirable feature of boss farming.
Ok, to make it more obvious for you boss farming is not undesireable. Can’t make it any more obvious than that
Bosses already drop tons of (and usually ONLY) useless loot. I am just saying that they shouldn’t have a hidden (or obvious, for that matter) ability to sometimes drop the really good stuff, as that encourages farming.
I know what you are saying, you seem to have difficulty grasping the concept that I disagree with your whole idea of boss runs being undesirable. So what you consider a fix to them to me is breaking a useful and wanted feature.
It’s not the system that makes sense intuitively (just like real-world physics systems don’t make sense intuitively)–it’s the OUTCOME that makes sense intuitively. Specifically, you aren’t penalized for playing the game as it presents itself as it’s supposed to be played.
I disagree again, boss runs are intuitive. They are also optional. So if you do not like them, do not do them.
Likewise, it intuitively makes sense that in a game which is supposed to be fun, it’s not better to do something tedious and repetitive than something fun and interesting.
Different things are fun to different people, if you rather keep playing on, do so, if you rather want to find some good gear first you know where to get it (and don’t give me ‘it’s unintuitive’ line again, I am not buying it)
As I mentioned, non-threatening mobs would be given a tilt value to reduce their loot.
Yes, that is why bosses have a better chance to drop items, but instead of dropping 50 items like you suggest, they drop maybe 10 with a higher probability of good items, which you somehow think is wrong.
And the difference is that killing 100 “crows” over and over will happen naturally as you just continue playing through the game, so you don’t have to farm to accomplish it. Yes, that’s desirable.
No it is not desireable, you completely ignore the ‘more reward for more danger’ concept. Killing a boss should give better loot than killing 100 crows even if they combined have the same HP / deal the same damage as the boss (or whatever you base your formula on).
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
I was talking about your tilt, which is just your way of saying bosses should drop more compared to average mobs, something which you initially claimed is ‘intuitively wrong’.
Following your discussion, you might want to take these quotes into account
As long as I am allowed to farm something that is more difficult than most other content and gives better drop rates, I don’t really care what it is.
Area spesific loot is also a good way to add variety to farming runs.
Planning on doing soronis runs i TQ later today, and afterwards I’ll be doing pythian caves and minoan laborinth. Looking for rare greens.
These last days I have been doing Typhon runs.
To me that is fun, I don’t have to do it because the game is easy enough.
But finding those spesific items you are looking for is really rewarding, and knowing where they drop certainly helps.
Planning and building the character with a certain skillset and gear i mind is just as much fun as the actual monster killing. To me atleast.