On "Farming"

Grim Dawn Development Updates
161

I see your point of view. But you don’t ever need to look at an online guide. You always have the option to just play the game and see what happens. That’s how the people who write the online guides figure it out in the first place.

Would you prefer a game where you don’t ever have to know anything? You can just kill the last boss over and over and eventually get everything there is to get? That doesn’t require any knowledge but it’s boring.

I prefer a game where there is more to know. It’s more interesting. Nobody forces you to spoil it for yourself. But if every boss has the same loot table, that would drastically shorten the life of the game and make it pointless to go back to different dungeons.

162

Yeah, but it really sucks to have to kind of police yourself and make your own rules. Kind of like if there were no hardcore mode, “I’m gonna delete my character if I die”.

The fact is that a seeming majority of players go online and min/max their characters and find all the best loot in the game and stuff.
So if I don’t do these things, I feel gimped and kinda bitter that it seems like everyone is “cheating” but me.

Of course that’s just my perspective and how I want to play the game. If others want to go online and min/max, who am I to say they can’t?
But I would argue that if you have to leave the game and look behind the scenes so to speak, just to get the most out of it and to stay “competitive”… There is something wrong with the game.

This has been true of pretty much every ARPG, and I’ve always thought of it as a major problem… If a bit unsolveable.

I think it would be SO AWESOME if the devs could think up some mechanics that would discourage leaving the game, reading guides, farming and what have you.

I’m all for making your character the best it can be and getting the best loot, but if there aren’t tools within the actual game to do this, then you have to kill your immersion and your sense of achievement by leaving the game and “cheating”.

I wouldn’t really care if some people want to spoil their experiences, but in this type of game it quickly becomes the standard to “cheat” like this.
If you want to talk to anyone else in-game and you’re not up on the best items, the best builds, all the outside names and abbreviations… Well you’re going to have to go learn, or you might as well not bother socializing.

I would like hard rules and “walls” that keep the game self-contained in the game world, and the experience from leaking out onto the internet/forums/guides/etc.

That’s just the ideal scenario, imo. I have no idea how to do that in practice.

163

How about this for a solution:

Make the loot tables for each boss different, but generate some of the table randomly each time you start a new game.

That way, nobody could make a guide that would spoil it. You’d have to farm different bosses but you couldn’t know ahead of time which boss drops what.

I don’t know, just throwing it out there as a compromise. What do you think?

164

I don’t like farming for specific items, but I do enjoy farming in general - from time to time.

Using diablo2 as an example, me and my friends were happy to farm for runes, but during our (literally) dozens of level 50+ characters we have never ever farmed for a unique or set item, even when we were just 1 piece short of a full, awesome set.

I suppose it takes some of the excitement out of it when you are expecting it to drop. It’s a great feeling (though a psychologist could probably tell me it’s for the wrong reasons) when you see that green named item appear on the ground and you realise you or someone in your party is wearing part of that set.

165

Yeah Roros, I like farming just to see what will drop… farming to get one specific thing that never drops gets old pretty quick.

That’s what I love about TQ… I just collect everything and then make new characters inspired by the loot that I find. I’ll get a couple great items that suggest a new class/skill build and then I’ll make it and twink it out.

166

Your character gets deleted if you alt-tab out of the game, for any reason.

I would like hard rules and “walls” that keep the game self-contained in the game world, and the experience from leaking out onto the internet/forums/guides/etc.

On installation, there’s some subliminal images (along with a psychotropic drug that’s absorbed through the skin on the DVD) that install a small applet in your brain that encrypts any knowledge/memories of GD preventing you from accessing them until you watch the startup screen again.
As for the digital download, when GD shuts down a team of your country’s elite Special Forces are sent round to your house & inject you with a drug to induce short-term amnesia for the same effect.

What you want is impossible, sorry. Unless Crate serve DCMA notices on every forum/site/etc that discusses GD.

167

I’m not talking about literally stopping people from leaving the game; I’m just talking about implementing game mechanics and features that make getting outside info unnecessary.

168

I do not feel there was any need to get outside info for TQ to begin with.

Just by playing the game through once you already know what items are dropping where, certainly for monster-specific ones. If you are interested in farming, you look out for such things even more than a casual gamer would, but even the casual gamer would have noticed. So outside info was not needed at all for this.

The same was true for unique items, they dropped in a wide enough ‘region’ that you did not need to farm a specific boss to get specific uniques, so it is not as if you really had to know which boss to farm depending on the item you wanted - and even if that were the case, it is not as if that item is really essential to continue.

So casual gamers will not look for such info and yet know enough about what drops where anyway, while a few item whores will always search on the internet and create tables to prove that farming Typhon has a 0.002% better chance to drop the uber-armor-of-unneededness than the second most likely boss, the crazed swamp rat :wink:

169

How about this: In the same vein as TQ, bosses have the same sort of classes and abilities (in general) as players have. As well, they drop what they are wearing, same as normal critters.

So if you are, say, a hunter, and you want good hunter gear, you can grind the hunter type bosses. Need a good shield? Grind a boss that uses one.

No fancy loot tables, and it makes a logical kind of sense. I think bosses should have a better chance to drop the same items as can drop anywhere, personally. I also dislike the idea of certain items only dropping of particular bosses with small % chances, needing an online guide.

170

Oh Betrayer, you crazy so-and-so.

How about the game being so good, that “needful” articles are created by fans of the game to catalog information about the game that they feel necessary? There is impetus to fame. Information blackout imposed by the community or developers is not something I want to see. That is a surefire way for me not to be interested in the game because, in my opinion, it shows lack of interest from other people as well.

171

I think it would be SO AWESOME if the devs could think up some mechanics that would discourage leaving the game, reading guides, farming and what have you.

You do realize, some players LOVE guides. I can’t tell you how many annoying nubs come on the TQ forums BEGGING for a guide on a conqueror. I mean seriously, of all the possible guides you need, a CONQUEROR? Some players enjoy farming, and it’s not like it’s cheating. How is killing a boss multiple times cheating? They’ve been using that mechanic for who knows how long, it worked in D2. And in D2, there was no way to kill various bosses without farming the prior ones. I remember my first run in with Baal, I was level 30 something, and obviously died many times. I checked up online and saw most people took on Baal at 40 something, and after farming up to that point, I was able to take him on. It’s just player preference. If you don’t like it, no one will force you to do the same.

I wouldn’t really care if some people want to spoil their experiences, but in this type of game it quickly becomes the standard to “cheat” like this.
If you want to talk to anyone else in-game and you’re not up on the best items, the best builds, all the outside names and abbreviations… Well you’re going to have to go learn, or you might as well not bother socializing.

This sounds more like a personal problem than a cry against farming…

172

I’m not talking about information blackout.

Guys, I was just discussing a problem with ARPGS in general. I’m just talking about game design. I put forth no solutions or ideas. Just what I’d like to see in an ideal world.

The crux of my blabbing was this:

In a game where choosing skills and choosing what loot to use (from the loot that you find) are pretty much the only big decisions you have to make and pretty much the only things that determine the power of your character, it would be nice if it weren’t so easy to figure out what the statistical best decisions are.
Yes, if you like doing that, it’s totally an ok thing to do, but these games are played online. When you have a game that’s played online, everyone should be on equal footing.
Indeed, I could just not play with people that do this, but the mere fact that they exist in the same online community that I do is enough to alienate me and other like-minded players.

This is in fact the reason I DON’T play these games online. I don’t like to have my experience and the “mystery” spoiled by people who know the statistics of the game and have min/max’d their way to power (which, is a pretty big portion).

I played torchlight, and I couldn’t care less how other people played the game. It was a single player game, there was no community, unless you count a discussion forum or something.

I’m not saying the way I want to play is the right way; I’m just saying it’s the way I want to play, and I personally would like games to play how I want them to (obviously). I’d like to be able to play online in a closed environment where everything is not “figured out”.
And yes this is a “problem” with just about every single (co-op OR versus) online game in existence. Soon after release, online games devolve into games of statistics and guides, instead of discovery. In a game like Diablo, where randomness and rerolling are paramount features, the immersion and the excitement are destroyed by the statistics. It’s a Role Playing Game, not a spreadsheet.

That’s just what I think, and I wanted to talk about it in a decidedly esoteric manner.

173

Ok, just to get this straight :wink:

You would like to be ignorant as to what gear is better and what skills / builds are better when playing this game and would like everyone else to not figure this out as well so you are on equal footing.

As obviously most people will figure this out, you would like the game to make this ‘hard’ to figure out, so your lack of knowledge is less severe.

(Yes, I may be exaggerating a bit, but this is in essence what you are asking for).

Quite frankly, this will never work. As long as the game shows any kind of statistic players will figure out which skills and items are superior and will discuss this online.
I also very much doubt any ARPG would get away with not telling you the stats of items or skills, so in essence, there is nothing which can be done about this - short of you looking for a different genre :wink:

174

I’m not ASKING for anything, and I KNOW it’s really hard (if not impossible) to solve, I’m just saying WHY I don’t play these games online.
If there is something keeping people from playing online (like me), it could likely be construed as a “problem”. To get rid of a “problem” you have to acknowledge the “problem” and find a “solution”. To acknowledge the “problem”, the “problem” has to be discussed.
I’m not asking the grim dawn devs to perform a miracle, I’m just giving my perspective on farming and farming related issues per the thread topic.

175

fair enough

If there is something keeping people from playing online (like me), it could likely be construed as a “problem”. To get rid of a “problem” you have to acknowledge the “problem” and find a “solution”. To acknowledge the “problem”, the “problem” has to be discussed.

agreed, however I believe that more people would find a solution to this ‘problem’ to be a much bigger problem for them.

People like to farm and discuss builds and gear, otherwise they would not do it. Of the ARPG crowd I would assume this is the majority (certainly of the people who so far have heard about GD, I am not necessarily talking casual gamers here, there the ratio probably is different).

So one persons ‘solution’ here will be another persons problem. Farming and build / gear maxing is intrinsic in this genre, if you were to take that away you take away incentive to play (fun).

I really think there is no solution to your dilemma other than finding players who think alike (open a game called ‘non-tweaked chars’ or something and ban everyone who appears tweaked - these guys are easy to identify and most people adhere to the topic).

176

I still think it’s an odd reason to stay away from online games… I stay away from online games with people I don’t know cause most of them are idiots. :slight_smile:

177

Well a couple steps toward a solution would be specific items not dropping from specific bosses/monster types, and all items being Bind On Pickup. CERTAINLY not having a “shared stash” and not having wanton trade of whatever items you want whenever you want.

Hahahaha…
I know that’s a really unpopular opinion.
I’ll just stop talking. :stuck_out_tongue:

178

not sure this would really help all that much, instead of farming some monster types, you just farm them all then. It certainly takes away some of the fun however :wink:

and all items being Bind On Pickup. CERTAINLY not having a “shared stash” and not having wanton trade of whatever items you want whenever you want.

that would help you more, the problem with it obviously is that most players would hate that

Hahahaha…
I know that’s a really unpopular opinion.
I’ll just stop talking. :stuck_out_tongue:

:smiley:

179

Well I’m not talking about farming so much as “targeted item finding”. Like… Just the ability to figure out what item you want, and then to go and get it (because you know where it drops). It kind of defeats the purpose of the random loot gameplay, imho.

But yeah.
You’re right, I don’t really have a solution. :wink:

180

While some farming is a necessity I would try to make it as fun as possible. there needs to be a comfortable median. Let’s face it, camping a spawn point in EQ with a group for two weeks to get one fucking drop got old quit. I think however that farming works a bit better in ARPG’s due to the already quick pace of the games.

The worst thing is a silver spoon and a guide to even the local acorn that just fell off a tree in the middle of a thousand acre wood. I hate dumb downed versions that carrot ans stick bait you the entire way. On the flip side, I also want to be rewarded for going the extra mile to get a good drop.