Well, after playing countless hours of arpg, here are my 2c about farming:
Farming is not boring by itself. The main problems comes when your efforts aren’t rewarded because of too much rng, when the runs are repetitve and when you can’t help but overlevel when farming.
In order to make farming fun, you have to manage 3 elements:
- Diversity
- Reward
- Punishment
Diversity: When you make only some spots worth farming, you kill diversity. Even worse, if I want X lv item my farming spots will be limited.
Solution: Randomly generated dungeon, with many levels(or infinite) full of labirynths, traps, secret doors, etc. Key would be required to open it, getting that key will take some time.
Reward: Ok, player likes good items, player likes rng, but not too much of it.
Something is staying in the way: repeated items. It’s really frustrating when you want that extra piece of set and you keep dropping the same chest piece or boots you already have.
Solution: In this dungeon, ANY item up to the player’s level will drop, and while you are there, any epic/legendary will not be dropped twice. Chests in boss rooms(yes the dungeon should have it own unique bosses) inside said dungeon WILL drop at least 1 epic.
Punishment: Here is the good part. A dungeon full of nice loot has to come with a decent pay off, right?
Solution: The items obtained by the player in this dungeon should go to a “secondary” inventory, and can only be used after the player decides to leave the dungeon. He will have to decide wich ones he will bring with him, because this inventory will be shorter, like one of his bags.
The dungeon’s curse will prevent the player from gaining any XP.
The further the player goes, the thougher enemies will get, and loot will be of higher lvl, traps will be stronger to the point of one shotting a 50% fire res char(fire trap).
If the player dies, he will lose all items found in this dungeon and will have to get a new key.
Call me exaggerated, but the only way I see farming being fun is to make it like if you are in a vast treasure room filled with traps and explosives between you and the all the valuables. It needs to be an all-or-nothing game
that you feel special and excited when you get the luck to play.
The problem with arpg’s is that they are too afraid of trying to innovate on the anemic and “classic” formula of farming.
*I’m disregarding shared stashes because I don’t like giving a full set to a character that I didn’t have to risk his ass to get it.
Thank you for reading through this wot