New Haven chests, Craw, Armory glitch farming, Duping – symptoms of a larger issue

[Rhonen]

Edit: TLDR – People glitch and dupe to get rares, which are currently only available as a random drop. If, as an alternative, one could get rares through unique, customized quests, they would do the quests instead of glitching and duping.
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Random loot. The end all, be all carrot on the stick dangled before the player to get them to farm, farm, farm. Duping, New Haven, Craw, and Armory aren’t exploited because players are lazy or impatient to get loot, they are exploited because farming is repetitious, boring, and, by its very nature, random loot means there is no guarantee that a player will ever get it.

So how do you get players to want to spend time getting those rare loots instead of trying to speed up an archaic system of “random drops?” Give them a measure of progress. Just like character levels. Players do the quests, playthrough 2.0 to get to level 50. They asked for, and got, a higher level cap. This is a tried and true way of getting people to play. And unlike loot, people don’t exploit it nearly as much because the game is tailored to make the journey, the measure of progress, enjoyable.

Don’t get rid of random loot (the surprise is still fun). But give players an alternative, a measure of progress, a journey for loot that is fun, that makes them WANT to spend time getting it instead of exploiting to speed up the random drop, the repetition of farming. Crafting, “Weapon Quests of Pwnage”, what have you. There are better ways than just, “here’s a big bad ugly crab, he’s really hard, oh, and he drops the best loot on Pandora. Farm him ‘till your fingers bleed.”

[Drawrof]

But arguably, "here’s a big bad ugly crab, he’s really hard, oh, and he drops the best loot on Pandora. Farm him ‘till your fingers bleed.” is superior to running from roof top to roof top in New Haven.

I have farmed both. I farm when I want a diversion. I think too much at work and I need a mindless break. I find the act of farming an odd zen like activity for me. At the end of the day, being solo and with a +2 find rare never amounted to much in pre-patch 1.3 New Haven and post with Craw.

The fact remains the best loot is gotten from Co-op action. I believe repetative activity is something that should only be done alone. So if I host a game, I will mix it up between Craw, Roads End, and Gen Knoxx.

[Slynky]

I think I see where you're going. Something akin to the socket quest in D2 where you could use it once (per difficulty) to slightly customize an existing weapon. That was very fun and it would be nice to have something similar in BL. Maybe a quest for Marcus where, upon completion, he can add a feature to an existing weapon or something. Gives a bit of flavor of customization. May be prohibitively hard to implement, but it could be fun.

[Rhonen]

Originally Posted by Drawrof

But arguably, "here’s a big bad ugly crab, he’s really hard, oh, and he drops the best loot on Pandora. Farm him ‘till your fingers bleed.” is superior to running from roof top to roof top in New Haven.

I have farmed both. I farm when I want a diversion. I think too much at work and I need a mindless break. I find the act of farming an odd zen like activity for me. At the end of the day, being solo and with a +2 find rare never amounted to much in pre-patch 1.3 New Haven and post with Craw.

The fact remains the best loot is gotten from Co-op action. I believe repetative activity is something that should only be done alone. So if I host a game, I will mix it up between Craw, Roads End, and Gen Knoxx.

So if Craw didn’t drop loot at all, would you still farm it? I sure wouldn’t.
I understand you like the zen-like quality of farming, but I enjoy the humor of character, quests, and the progress my character makes playing through the game more than killing the same boss repeatedly.

Originally Posted by Slynky

I think I see where you're going. Something akin to the socket quest in D2 where you could use it once (per difficulty) to slightly customize an existing weapon. That was very fun and it would be nice to have something similar in BL. Maybe a quest for Marcus where, upon completion, he can add a feature to an existing weapon or something. Gives a bit of flavor of customization. May be prohibitively hard to implement, but it could be fun.

I’m not familiar with the socket system. But it sounds interesting, especially since you could only use it once per difficulty. Torchlight did something along those lines, but let players “retire” their character after a certain level. You could then pick one weapon and heirloom it to new character. You could keep heirlooming that same weapon so it would become very powerful (there was a cap on the number of times you could heirloom).

I was thinking a quest based, custom gun craft. By company. Since you are a famous treasure hunter, they want you to use their guns, like sponsoring/advertising. You could even get posters around Pandora, “Lilith is a hottie, she uses Maliwan Hellfires!” The quest, though, is to customize your own gun using the company parts. You could pick the best part/stats, the better the part/stat, the longer the quest (maybe steal the tech from a competing company, etc.). The idea is the gun has a measure of progress you are working towards before you get the end product.

Edit: I’m sure this “craft quest by company” idea has been thought of already. I’m just saying, as an alternative to killing Craw 50 times to get that cyan Bessie one wants, how about we get to do something like a series of quests to build up that cyan Bessie, much like one levels their character.

[Sunspot01]

So...are you saying you want a "progress bar" indicating how much good loot you have found in comparison to everything that exist? I'm a bit confused...

I know I play because I'm addicted to looting and leveling up. But the game doesn't lend itself well to looting. It's like they FINALLY realized this in the DLC3 with the 3 armory missions. And even then they crippled it so you only get 3 minutes to go through the vast numbers of chest. That's just cruel. And then they didn't scale the level cap correctly so your overpowered everywhere outside of Road's End...so looting is kind of strange now.

Here's a easy implementation that I doubt they'd do: have ALL ARENA'S REPEATABLE. All the built in ones and Knoxx's "circle of duty". But make them longer, like 5 rounders like Mad Moxxi. You last through them all, you get to a room with 10 loot chests. And you would gain experience from the arena's for both your character and your weapons.

That would be awesome fix for looting and add longevity, but seeing as how they won't even respond to us about the scaling issue...here's hoping they look at our responses and think about it harder for Borderlands 2.

[Rhonen]

Not a progress bar.

How many times are you willing to “farm” a boss for a rare drop. 10x? 100x? 1000x? Would you give up, or would you keep farming, killing it over and over, until you got the rare drop you wanted?

What if instead of spending hours, days, weeks farming, you picked beforehand. I want a cyan Tsumani. Ok, here’s this quest that will take you days, hours, weeks. You need this part, maybe you have to do trades with NPC’s to get it. For this part, you need to infiltrate the Crimson Lance and steal their new shock tech. For this part, you need to get the raw materials in a mine that is infested with a midget tribe. Etc.

Again, this would be an alternative. Some would just go to Craw, farm him, and, if they’re lucky, bam, they got their Cyan. Or 2 or more. I’m just saying for me that’s boring. I’ve spent hours farming Craw, I got 2 cyans that are OK, but not exactly what I wanted. I’d rather do it like a quest, build it up, and even if I had to spend longer building it, I would enjoy the process much more.

[Sunspot01]

Ah. That makes sense. Phantasy Star Online had those type of quests. Hell this game already has a couple missions that do it kind of.

It would be cool. I'm in agreement then. But don't get rid of the way it is currently either. The two can coexist happily.

[slyborg]

Originally Posted by Rhonen

Not a progress bar.

How many times are you willing to “farm” a boss for a rare drop. 10x? 100x? 1000x? Would you give up, or would you keep farming, killing it over and over, until you got the rare drop you wanted?

What if instead of spending hours, days, weeks farming, you picked beforehand. I want a cyan Tsumani. Ok, here’s this quest that will take you days, hours, weeks. You need this part, maybe you have to do trades with NPC’s to get it. For this part, you need to infiltrate the Crimson Lance and steal their new shock tech. For this part, you need to get the raw materials in a mine that is infested with a midget tribe. Etc.

Again, this would be an alternative. Some would just go to Craw, farm him, and, if they’re lucky, bam, they got their Cyan. Or 2 or more. I’m just saying for me that’s boring. I’ve spent hours farming Craw, I got 2 cyans that are OK, but not exactly what I wanted. I’d rather do it like a quest, build it up, and even if I had to spend longer building it, I would enjoy the process much more.

I have to say I like this idea. Although farming per se doesn't bother me that much,the idea of being able to work towards a specific weapon is very appealing to me. If nothing else,that would be a whole new set of missions they could add to the game.

[ScootersSister]

I've stopped farming Craw when I realized he usually dropped lvl 56-60 loot, while in the armory, you have quite a chance to find lvl 60-61 loot. Up until now, I have found 2 Avengers and a Jackal. I'd really like to find a Bessie, Tsunami, Nemesis and Aries and when I finally find one, there's still a chance it's a crappy version, farming more for a better one.

I've stopped farming the Armory for that exact reason now. Those elusive items are just too rare to invest so many hours in.

[el expl0siv0]

So you just want more quests? Hey me too! In fact we're probably all in agreement on that one. I would say that all of Marcus' quests in Knoxx were these types of quests. Thing is with more quests is more time in development. More time in development creates people asking "where's the DLC I deserve?"