On "Farming"

Fighting cyclops in Greece is a great example of good boss fight. You could anticipate it if you’d talk with NPCs who were repairing the bridge it had smashed, but it was a surprise nonetheless. Adding NPC allies was a great way to further make it appear that the cyclops was a strong character. This is just what I mean by immersion. It doesn’t have anything to do with numbers or labels.

Difficulty levels work if they make monster strengths more pronounced, rather than adding multiplier to every stat. I’ve never understood what’s the appeal to have big numbers. Dealing 100 damage to monster with 2000 hp is the same as dealing 135k damage to monster with 2.7 million hp. What if fighting turtles practically required some way to deal with armor on higher difficulty setting? Beating higher difficulty would mean to actually master the content and not just farming for overpowered item drops.

I’m going to say this out loud. I did a search in this forum and I didn’t see it come up. But…

… Boss Rush Mode? Not so much an instance. Well no, I guess, instance is probably the best example. Taking a page from the mmo, like Secret World. Torchlight had the silly maps you could buy, and the phase beast mini-maps.

So I’m not entirely sure how to optimize it but, like. You get a group of Lv 40 + (scaled more maybe) and perform a ritual that opens a gate to a small map, with multiple bosses on it. The bosses aren’t just leveled to match, they should probably have some significantly different bonuses (invisible/splits into barely weaker multiples when killed/infinite shield which only drops when you stun/alternating 100% damage type absorption/duplicates which each have different 100% resistances)… The better you do, the more chests or the better quality loot, or a combination of both. Minor bosses mixed in with an “Alpha” boss. Or … maybe a Boss which runs away, you have to keep up with him while he triggers traps and stuff.

/out of spitballs

Before I start, I would like to thank you guys for doing an amazing work on GD (haven’t played such great ARPG since D2 LoD/TQ:IT).
Today I reached 500 hours of played time in GD and decided to contribute my experience as an ARPG veteran.

“Farming” in this type of games is what keeps you motivated to continue playing even after hundreds/thousands of hours already put into the game.
In GD you have 3 things you can farm: character level (experience), reputations and of course, GEAR!.
If you want to have a game that people play for hundreds and hundreds of hours then you must have at least one of those those things well designed.

  1. Leveling in GD:
    Cannot say much here since the game is not completed yet. However, from what I have experienced so far, the best leveling concept is in D2 LoD where the last 10 levels are incredibly hard to farm which drives people to continue playing because the higher level you have, the stronger your character gets (obviously).
    I hope to see someting similar in GD, i.e. harder leveling progression to the max level.

  2. Reputations in GD:
    The current reputation system in GD is conceived as a “nice add-on” rather than something that keeps you motivated to play for a longer period of time. It took me about 2-3 days per faction to have the revered status and around 2 weeks to have all the nemesis ones. It is true, that I am not a casual player, so most of the players will farm longer to achieve max reputations. However, for experienced player as myself it is just a matter of few days to have every reputation completed.

If you wanted to make it more “deeper” feature of the game then my advise would be to add more ranks of reputation with good/usable rewards and increase the maximum reputation needed for achieving max status. You could say that what I propose is nonsense since you have Mandates and Writs on the max rep. and by increasing the rep. requirement you will unable some players to use them. Well, I agree but you could also introduce more types of Mandates and Writs with lower bonuses, that you could buy let say starting from Respected status.

Example:

  • Respected mandate: reputation gain increased by 25%
  • Honored mandate: reputation gain increased by 50%
  • “Admired” mandate: reputation gain increased by 75%
  • Revered mandate: reputation gain increased by 100%
  • “Exalted” mandate: reputation gain increased by 150%
  • “Worshiped” mandate: reputation gain increased by 200%

well… you get the idea

(More ranks/rewards in the nemesis reputation system would be welcomed as well)

  1. GEAR in GD:
    Finally, the most important aspect of farming in any ARPG game.
    Gear farming is what keeps us sitting in front of our monitors for “outrageous” number of hours. Yet, many games fail to give us the proper “feeling of being rewarded” for our effort. Good example of a bad design was/is Diablo 3 where you have RNG not just on numerous values of each stat, but even on a type of stat itself! Result: 99% of gear you found was unusable and you didn’t feel rewarded for your hard effort at all since you could drop a very rare legendary item usable only by Barbarian (Strength based character) while the item had Intelligence one time and Dexterity other time, seriously… what the f*ck?

My personal opinion is that the best gear farming system is in D2 LoD in terms of effort/reward and overall longevity of the game due to super rare items such as higher level runes and some of the best rares/uniques/set items. They are extremely rare but when you find one, the reward is more than satisfying.

Current epics in GD are well balanced in terms of rarity and reward. However what I find game breaking is that you can buy the best items in the game from a basic vendor! I am talking about rares that have both prefix and suffix. Yes, vendors have them rarely but all it takes me to get them is to teleport from one vendor to another and check what they have in store. And I don’t find this very “challenging”. Hope to see some changes about that in the future.
On the other hand, it is totally fine with me if a rares with perfect prefix/suffix are sometimes better than Epic items. So why not to keep the best ones only for drops and crafting?

With regards to the upcoming Legendary items in GD: please, make the best pieces rare as hell but make them worth it. Because if you make them weak or too common, then there is no reason to play the end game for a longer period of time.

Well guys, that would be all for now, let me know what do you think.
Thanks!

PS: I wanted to make my post short but it turned out to be a bit longer so apologize for that :slight_smile:

Love the game, as my Son said to me “it feels a lot like what D3 should have been.” I had to try it then and I agree.

On the Farming Topic, my opinion is that farming is a very tedious way to acquire gear. I did not read all 51 pages of replies so this may have been stated already, but I think a better way is to allow players to get great gear by either having the ability to craft items, or have NPC’s do this with materials you provide. Randomness is not really desired when making your ‘epic’ pieces, so this needs to be considered. Lowering random stats should come with a cost, and these pieces should be fairly expensive to make. Requiring rare material is not a good thing either as then you have to farm the mats which would defeat the purpose.

Melting items down to gain mats would be sensible also, though I have no suggestions on how to balance the whole process. One idea is a global auction house where players can offer the great drops they do get that are for classes they are not and buy the drop they are seeking from someone else. Maybe that’s planned, but I’m pretty new to the game and have played more than read the forums :wink:

Everything you mentioned is pretty much in the game, but all have some farming requirement, be it for components, mats, iron ore, recipes or the items themselves - not to mention faction rewards. You mention that they should be expensive to make, but then state that requiring rare materials is not a good thing … I’m having trouble understanding the ‘expensive’ word, because… well, rare materials are expensive, they’re the epitome of expensive.

Most of the farming I do in this game is fun and doesn’t feel tedious… sometimes it does, but, no more than trying to get a Zod rune or a Griffons Eye in D2. It feels right, at the moment, except a few sets are easier to get than others… like, redemption set, for example, feels far too easy to get whereas the Guardsman set feels impossible - relying on recipes basically, to finish the set - right along the lines you’re talking about, but too expensive for a level 22 item, imo. HOWEVER - the more you play, the more stuff you accumulate, and the easier it is to get / craft this gear for future playthroughs.

IMO, farming isn’t the issue, it’s storage space to store your farmed items, which is far too small for the volume of components and items found in this game.

When there was a Poll about component completion bonuses I was more for the “random completion bonuses” option since you have more possibilities for making an unique build (even though I already have 9 mules that are totally stuffed with components only…). However, the more I think about it, the more I incline to having a “stable” completion bonuses that would allow stacking of components (saving significant storage space). Components would also immediately play much “bigger” role in bounties, crafting and farming (i.e. increased longevity of the game with much better Profit/Loss ratio than the current component design has).

Let me explain why.

If you have RNG on a completion bonus and get „unwanted“ bonus 20-30 times in a row on an extremely rare or expensive component then you will most probably get frustrated since your effort is rewarded with „trash“ just because of RNG. That is definitely not a profit in my opinion.

By changing components to have a specific bonuses will developers get more room for creating some unique components with awesome stats/bonuses. Of course, much more components would have to be added into the game in order to keep the „diversity aspect“ of the current design (has to be balanced so it won’t introduce storage issues with uncompleted components).

I imagine it would be set in a similar way as the Runes in Diablo 2 in terms of rarity vs reward (not talking about Runewords, although that would be more than superb ;)). By that I mean having more tiers of components (already ingame) where the most powerful ones would be very rare.

Little example: completion bonus of Chains of Oleron / Hallowed Ground changed to +1 to all Skills since + skills bonuses are the most wanted on the current component versions (drop chance would have to be significantly lowered, which is OK since you have guaranteed powerful bonuses).

I was thinking about a somewhat similar system on the components, but I would not competely remove the random bonuses. But still, instead of a lot of random useless bonuses, the components should have only like 4-5-6 but really useful bonuses with fixed numbers, for example on the hallowed ground the +1 to all skill for the different classes, that’s only 6 version, or on a weapon component, for example searing ember, it should have
1: 8% fire damage,
2: 8% physical damage
3: 4% attack speed,
4: 8 offensive ability.
This is 4 version. Maybe 6% total damage as fifth. Who needs searing ember with aether damage, or 3 physique and such? We have a different component if we wanna raise the physique of our character or for the aether damage.

So when we have these much smaller pool of possible useful bonuses, with fixed numbers, the drop rate for the common components can be reduced a bit, and we should be able to stack the components which have the same bonuses. So we have now 4-5-6 stacks of the same component with the diferent bonuses. So this system would not remove the completion bonuses completely but it should solve a lot of issues regarding the storage space and the sometimes frustrating useless random rolls. I would really like to see this system implemented in the game. I hope the devs read this.

I’m curious what the counter argument is to NOT having extensive storage? I have played a bit and raised money for another tab but why not have like 50 tabs to begin with? Is it somehow ‘fun’ to have a project of raising gold (edit: iron bits) for tabs? I raised for one more tab and it felt like I should have had it to begin with and it wasn’t particularly rewarding. And even 2 tabs is nowhere near enough…

Ok I got into complaining mode but my original curiousity was what the possible counter argument could be for not having a lot of storage.

Create explained their reasoning in Grim Misadventure #56 - also see the following three dev posts. See [Tool] GD Stash for more storage.

I don’t totally understand. I think at least 50% of people used TQ vault (mod). Or am I wrong? So why would the developers make me want to ignore their game until release because I am some degree of a hoarder? I would be willing to pay GD/Crate 5 extra dollars for unlimited space. The way it is now makes me motivated to ignore the game until GD Vault (mod) comes out at the game release (to play… I have paid long time and played a few characters). Hoarding is not uncommon. For Sacred 2 my clan had several accounts for mules so we could twink our characters. ‘Hoarding’ to some degree is very common and only in extremes you have someone with 20 copies of uniques (for personal use). edit: and I also play totally untwinked sometimes…

But as it is now not having stash makes me think “oh I will play something else and wait for GD vault mod”.

But I am ignorant of how hard (time) it takes the programmers to make an infinite stash.

Anyways I am not trying to make trouble and will drop this and read the full threads you linked (read some part already). Thank you.

edit: I do understand from the article you linked that there are two types of players who do not like to have too much stash. One type gets overwhelmed seeing all the junk or what have you. It is too bad we both can’t get the product we want like individuals. I can use mules I suppose.

edit: I think the type of player of me is not a hoarder but wants storage for hard core characters so I can ‘team effort’ earn them items and feed them the items… If I am just making a soft core character I can just advance them and the loot earned never ‘poofs’. For hardcore ‘team effort’ I want to play one type of build (that I have no idea if it is a good build) and then save all the items I find so that I have resources for future hardcore builds (of one or multiple types of builds). So I am not really a hoarder but rather I want a hardcore experience with only the gear protected from ‘poofing’. So maybe there is more than 3 types of players as far as gear? This was shaped by my Sacred 2 experience belonging to a clan. In Titanquest (before Sacred 2) I used vault but I didn’t like my experience of having legendary items in normal act4. So I experimented with TQ vault but ultimately my complete playthrough characters I did them self farming. Sacred 2 community taught me the experience of having a hard core character heavily twinked by the community. In some ways it is quite silly to be hardcore in silver difficulty with niob shopped/smithed gear, but yet did I have fun? Yes! There still is a hard core element even if your gear does not poof. You may not lose the gear but if my level 177 shadow warrior dies then I have to start again at level 1 so yes it is still a hardcore element. This is interesting to me to reflect on how my Sacred 2 experience affected me. I can use mules until game release! Love so many elements of GD game!! ::GD love fest!!:: Thank you Crate (and community)!!

edit: another thought is that hardcore is totally different fro GD/TQ versus Sacred 2 series. Sacred 2 had nothing like Dactyls for example. In GD I intend to play hardcore without the expectation that any character might complete the game. In contrast in Sacred 2 type world there is no Dactyl and you can pretty much make a character that is impossible to die.

edit (regarding the tool linked and swapping files versus muling): For that tool and even a vault mod (or stash files swapping) there is a negative side to that for me. I am not very computer savy. I have had two games (one TQIT by coincidence) become corrupt and even uninstalling re-installing did not work. The other game was Neverwinter Nights 1. So for me when I fool with my computer and files there is a very real risk that I will screw up that game on the computer permamently. When I do install mods I need cookbook instructions. And i am not total idiot I have been successful with mods just there is a very real risk that I will screw up the game permanently. For me I would rather use mules than swap files just because it makes me nervous. And mules and file swapping both would in any case be tedious and immersion breaking. But don’t assume that all players are computer savvy.

Having 50 tabs wouldn’t solve the issue of having tons of items with random values in them. The real problem with ARPGs is the incessant micromanagement with items. Picking them up. Comparing your drops to your existing items. Shuffling items to mules. Selling them one-by-one to merchant. To me that’s not very appealing way to play. I wrote of another system that would really improve the sense of collecting valuables on another thread:

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?p=243655#post243655

I won’t argue that you’re right or wrong about this, but I would suggest being careful with such assumptions, because that’s all they are - assumptions. Maybe 50% of the people who frequented the TQ forums used TQVault. Maybe. I don’t have any metrics on that. But I’d hazard a guess and say that those who didn’t frequent the TQ forums (like myself) also didn’t hear much about the tool (wasn’t until after getting TQ:IT a second time on Steam that I heard about and used it). And, of course, that playerbase is going to be hard to quantify in terms of size.

Point being, remember that there’s likely to be a TON of people playing GD that we will never know about, and we will never hear their opinions. Hence, for these people, Crate must create their game as they envision it with the hopes that those playing are doing so because they’re satisfied with Crate’s vision. Ultimately, we’re all hopefully satisfied with that vision, too, but those of us here on the forums don’t speak for the entirety of the playerbase even if/when we ever agree on anything (which doesn’t seem to be too often ;)).

Yes Ceno you are right. In hindsight I think probably very few used vault. It’s just mind boggling for me that some people would dislike an infinite stash. Reading about the types of people I empathize and I can understand but I just can’t imagine for me not liking that feature.

Hello. I forced raise the issue of the size of the stash, despite the fact that this topic has been a discussion. As far as I know, the main argument from developers against an infinite stash is unavoidable quickly drowning of players in piles of crap, which they will collect. It is frankly insulting to the normal players. Why should we suffer because of the hypothetical idiots, incapable of self-discipline? I play Titan Quest for many years and use TQVault, and a have few chests for different categories of useful items. But in accordance with your “logic” i must already to swim in tons of crap with totally crazy look and scream “I WANT MOOOORE!!!” Seriously, what a crap?!

So, here are some arguments in favor of large (or infinite) stash size.

  1. The game has a large number of components for improve and craft items. Furthermore, each component of a certain type has a certain bonus, which can be useful in different situations. Thus, the personal stash of character jammed by components (or items), and when playing on hardcore lose it all because of the lack of free space in shared stash is simply unthinkable stupid.
  2. There is also a large number of items that are useful for different builds. Because of two-class system in the game at present time has lots of possible builds, and this number will increase by N - 1 for each new N of masteries. Naturally, many players (myself included) like to experiment with builds, but how is it possible if I can not store items suitable for my future crazy ideas? What do you suggest - sell rare items, and then to farm it again as completely idiot?
  3. With the increase in level cap come new items and even within your paradigm it is necessary to increase stash size, but you don’t doing this. And what will happen when there will be items 60+, 70+ levels etc.?
  4. Players on hardcore-veteran (like me) are in need of an additional place to an even greater extent for keeping spare items because their characters - SURPRISE! - sometimes die!
  5. Finally, sometimes you just want to do collecting items and sets. So why can not I keep all honestly collected content in game i bought?

Seriously, the little stash size was the most fatal mistake of Titan Quest, and in your new project you seem to want to correct the mistakes made then? Then your current position about this topic especially strange.

Perhaps it will be good idea to make a vote at a forum on this issue?

Not going to rebut each point, they all say the same thing. Game has stuff, you want to keep it all.

Sorry, it is not a vault, it is a transfer stash. It is designed to move stuff from toonA to toonB. IMO, 1 page is plenty. And yes, I am one of the idiots that cannot stop putting stuff in the stash so require it to be of reasonable size so I can actually find the one thing that needed to be in the stash, in the sea of the other crap I keep, even without a toon planning to use it.

Poll has been done, it is a polarized issue without consensus.

Uncontrollable collecting of crap is a behaviour deviation. But normal players can’t obtain comfortable gameplay because developers want to prevent emotional trauma of players with this deviation. Amazing…

Why not evolve it to vault then?

Seriously, the most demanded plugins for D2 and TQ where PlugY and TQVault. Quite self-explaining, eh? Players want these things and not giving them to players is a mistake which will be used once by one of the smart competitors.

VanHelsing has a much larger stash - I don’t hear anyone blames it for this reason. Torchlight has much larger stash - the same thing, no blames for this.

I can understand Crate does not want to spend time for this task - completely understandable reason. But, for the sake of truth, please don’t try to put a logical reasoning under this decision. Just say honestly - we don’t want to do it. Philosophical reasons “players are wrong when they think they want it” look lame on my sight. Some sort of “you play it wrong” myth.

One more thing - you can just make cost progression for every new stash tab. Or you can to add one more violet item with low chance of drop and make
this item necessary for stash improvement. So nobody will drown in crap and hardcore players will be happy.

This is already a thing.

Because of

So they have kind of said they don’t want to do it, and gave a good reason why.

Personally I still think expanding the personal stash is the route to take to solve all of these problems…

I mean every new tab in infinite stash.