Save/Quit boss farming. A gaming mechanic of yesteryear

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

Quiting out of the entire game in order to repeatedly farm a particular boss, mob or area is an outdated and antiquated game mechanic that really needs to go.

It’s simply not engaging looking at load screens and no game should ever have one of its most often repeated endgame activities revolve around actually quiting the game.

Surely there is something Gearbox could do to make farming endgame bosses(and endgame locations) better?

I doubt there is much of anything to be done to help certain people if they already dislike this style farming but I will now list some major Reasons why it is tedious for those of us that do enjoy repeatedly farming.

  1. Load screens. I often feel like I’m spending more time waiting for loading screens than actually killing the boss. This issue is especially bad on console. Waiting to be in the game is unfun while playing and being in the game is immensely fun!

  2. Logging out and back in ruins my immersion and breaks my engagement of playing, especially when it takes so long(above).

  3. When farming bosses with a multiplayer group, I am forced to reform the party after every completion. This is extremely arduous as it takes a ludicrous amount of additional time to send out the party invitations and reform the group.

Suggestions on how to make this issue better/more enjoyable.

A)Perhaps make a button in the menu(near the map?) that resets all instances of mobs and locations in the game. Even if this action took a short moment to “reload” it would be much preferred to being forced to logging out entirely. This action would simply start you back at the nearest New-U Station.

B)Put the bosses on a timer. After being dead for X short amount of time, the enemies will simply respawn. (Not sure if this is possible due to if the game decides loot drops on loading into an area or not but could be another potential change to make farming more streamlined and enjoyable.

Either way, I think this would be a godsend in quality of life for anyone that plays Borderlands for any amount of time.

If anyone has suggestions of their own or comments, please feel free to share below.

Thanks for considering this as a feature to include going forward Gearbox!

*NOTE: The Circle of Slaughter and Proving Grounds are a step in the right direction, although they have a seperate issue of not being rewarding enough to be desirable to engage in repeatedly completing for anything more than simple fun and challenge.(Slaughter Shaft excluded as it is challenging and equally rewarding to repeatedly complete). However, this is a separate issue.

**Additional note: I’m not going to forego making suggestions to make the game better because there are currently already a ton issues going on.

Quality is something we should all expect at all times especially from an awesome developer like Gearbox.

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This game is a Min Maxer's worst nightmare
Small Quality of Life BL3 Suggestion
#2

If you think that’s tedious, you should try farming a Bekah on the PC.

That’s something you have to basically plan from the start of your character to make sure you don’t complete all of the challenges to get it until you’re level 50.

Once you’re level 50 complete all of Hammerlock’s hunt challenges up to the final one (Order doesn’t matter). Then when you reach the save point right before that final creature, save and quit your game. Then make a backup copy of your game save file. Then restart your game, beat the final boss, and check your mail to see if you got the Bekah you wanted. If not, quit the game, then replace the current save file with the backup you made, restart the game, then make sure you have the save file conflict upload your older save to the cloud, then replay the last creature and see what Bekah you got in the mail.

Point here is farming is farming, and they clearly don’t want it to be any easier. In fact, it appears that for all intents and purposes they are intentionally making it tedious and unrewarding.

1 Like
#3

It’s much worst on XB1 or PS4 - the load times are extremely long. And you can’t read-only farm at all. Basically, you get what you get.

Which, quite honestly, appears to be the way all Borderlands games were designed to operate. The fact that min-max players have read-only/dashboard farmed there way around this limitation from the beginning is largely coincidental to the actual game design.

7 Likes
#4

Oh yeah, read only farming is equally if not more convoluted on PS. You have to do all those steps but additionaly you have to manually close out of the game and replace your cloud save each time! And with horrid load times…

But just because it’s been this way doesn’t mean we can’t ask for better.

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#5

Gear locked to quest/challenges is already dumb enough. Give that gear a dedicated drop source so we can actually farm it.

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#6

You can ask, just don’t expect to receive any better. These methods of farming have been in place since BL1. The fact that they are still present and haven’t been altered or locked out demonstrates that they are not accidental, they are deliberate choices and the system as it is now is exactly what the developers intend it to be.

As such it’s extremely unlikely that they will make an easy method to bypass it. Just look at what’s going on right now. A Farming Frenzy event promoting how great farming in this game is. They aren’t going to change that.

4 Likes
#7

You have to do that on the PC too, but it’s not anywhere near as bad if you’re loading the game from an SSD. It takes me about a third of the time to start the game on my PC as it does on my friend’s PS4. Not even going to discuss the game on the XB1, that version is crippled IMO.

2 Likes
#8

I don’t think this is true - if they wanted players to have a shot at rolling the dice more than once for a mission reward, they wouldn’t have made it so you have to manually stop and restart the game at a specific, unmarked/specified point in the reward process to re-roll the dice (much less futz with one’s save game files and wade into the gray areas of the terms-of-service of some consoles to make this mechaic work).

Is this save/quit boss farming any more legit than full UCP weapon crafting/duping? It’s not an intended game mechanic, so once that line is crossed, who cares? With a mission reward, you get a single roll of the dice for a piece of gear. Thwarting this by intentionally interrupting the game at the point between previewing the reward and committing it to one’s save file is just a clumsy way of hacking one’s way into the save file itself and making what you want. That this method doesn’t violate the terms of service on consoles doesn’t mean it’s legit.

For the record, I don’t care how/where people get their gear.

3 Likes
#10

All I’m saying is the exact same game mechanic has been in place since BL1, and has been exactly the same in every Borderlands game made. It’s the only way you can farm certain items. To think that they just overlooked it all these years and didn’t fix it because they just don’t know about it is silly.

There’s just no possible way they didn’t know about it and didn’t leave it in place, exactly as it is, deliberately.

And we haven’t even started with save file trading and item duplication and how that can be exploited, and how Gearbox has made it even easier to exploit in BL3 than it was in BL2. How many Bekahs do you want? I can duplicate over 300 within the hour.

#11

The only way to really lock out this behaviour would be server-side save files. Which means that those with poor internet access would be locked out of the game. (Or relegated to only ever playing solo.)

The fact that Borderlands games use local save files and host-to-host for on-line co-op means more people get to play the game (as well as not costing GBX more to keep the servers on-line). That actually adds to longevity. That comes with a trade-off, which is that quest farming methods become possible. That does not mean GBX chose local saves expressly so people could do such things though; it’s just one consequence of a choice made for entirely different reasons.

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#12

I’m sure they know about it, I just don’t think it’s worth the time and effort to design around this to close this single loophole, but to say they left it in deliberately for us to use is putting words in their mouth that I’m not aware were spoken. If they intended for this mechanic to be used, they could just make the mission immediately repeatable (the same way a boss is repeatable by restarting the game and killing it again for ‘actual’ farming).

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#13

Not true at all.

You could easily encrypt game saves with the encryption key tied to the game’s registration key. If your game executable doesn’t have the right key it won’t decrypt the game save. Simple.

Alternatively, you could prevent duplication by having both the characters storage space and the bank be part of the same game save file so you couldn’t duplicate items by leaving a copy in one save while replacing the other with an older game save file.

These are easy things to prevent. Other similar games stopped this kind of really basic item duplication and game save farming back in the 1990s. The original Diablo had patches that stopped this type of game save manipulation.

#14

Do you know how easy it would be to stop that sort of game save farming?

Don’t RNG the reward. Give a single, specific version of the award item.

There. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.

Game Save Farming eliminated. Farm all you want, you’ll never get anything else.

Now, if they wanted to stop that sort of farming, why wouldn’t they just give a single fixed reward for those few places where this sort of farming works? These are 100% drop items anyways, you would only have to fix the stats. Probably wouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

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#15

You say this under the assumption that the way you are doing it is the only way. But how I saw you explain Bekah farm is like way more steps then is actually needed. It’s a lot more simple then that and doesn’t require replacing saves at all. In the properties you apply read-only and you set a rule to block writing to the file so it stays on read-only. Then in the game you just kill/log to char select/select other char/select farm char/log in/kill… That simple. There is no need to quit the game or replace saves or anything like that. They already did try to prevent this method and that’s why now you need to block write permissions to the file instead of only applying read-only. They cannot stop PC players from doing it without server sided files.

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#16

In response to the OP, adding an in-game button to every boss fight location - which when pressed by your character, sends them out of the boss arena and resets the arena with a new copy of the boss - would give the effect you’re talking about. Like when some bosses glitch and respawn each time you exit and re-enter their area, but done deliberately in response to your actions.
So, once you enter the area and beat the boss, and collect any loot you want, hit the button and re-enter the area to start again.

If you want to make the button more lore friendly, you could say that it makes a hologram of the boss, for training reasons, or something.

2 Likes
#17

I’ll just be in my corner now…reminiscing of the by gone days of yesterye-I mean, olden times…

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#18

Clumy and arduous.

Maybe they simply didn’t put the work in to update it because not enough players took enough interest to questioned it before?

I very likely am not the first person to have this(it any other) thought but it’s definitely not something you see as a common request in the forums.

You can’t very well fault Gearbox for not diverting development recourses to something if no one seems to really question or care about it.

Gearbox employee have mentioned this “type” of thing before when discussing servers and such and are on record as saying it’s something they are aware of and don’t have a particularly strong opinion of either way. They basically shrugged and said, “It is what it is”.

Exactly this^^^is what I was referring to in my comment(immediately above).

Not a bad suggestion! Hear, here!

2 Likes
#19

Exactly. All the more reason to support this suggestion thread with a “like”.

I highly doubt they have left boss/quest the way it has been for the sole reason of making life difficult on their players, as you suggested:

I don’t buy that for a minute and by the comments you’ve made here, it looks like you don’t really either.

Yeah, this is what us console plebs are stuck with…ugh… damned Mendels Multivitamin…damned matching grip Rustlers prefix Orphan Maker…damned Twister, Hail, Lady Fist-BAH!!! The time I’ve wasted on this damned “farming”…

Vendor farming is one thing…dashboard/clouding is a whole other beasty.

EQUALITY FOR CONSOLE PLEBS!!!

:rofl:

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#20

That’s just a limitation of the game engine. No game that plays like this allows what you want.

#21

Don’t know about the xbox, but you can do the equivalent on PS4 with playstation+. Cloud save loading. It’s tedious, and has driven me to focus on trades for mission and challenge rewards instead of farming them like I would have in past BL games, but totally possible

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