Another one of my endless thoughts; it's kind of two-parted.
Proposal:
Randomly placed (not moving but known locations over time) chests that are able to be opened at random intervals by anyone who's lucky enough to try them while they are 'full' of goodies. Second part of the proposal is the ability for chests to sometimes drop an event script style loot where 1-3 exp orbs and 1-3 loot orbs are spawned in close proximity to the chest upon opening it.
Detail:
The chests would be placed within hunting areas, maybe 1-3 per area (of course depending on size) and while hunting lucky attempts to open the chest, which only 'fills' back up through the magic of coding, would be rewarded with the even script described above where a flurry of exp and loot orbs drop all around you (much like how Diablo treasure goblins explode with loot
). The chests would have a chance of being a 'trap chest' and exploding on occasion dealing damage equal to 85% of your characters life through instant fire damge, high poison ticks, a long lasting curse, or whatever dastardly other mishap you can think of (this would prevent people from running through hunting areas to just check chests as they would usually then have monsters on them and if it would explode hitting them for 85% of their HP it could result in instant death). As I am unsure on how your scripted orbs for exp/loot work, this is just a speculation of being able to work, as this plan requires the orbs to scale to the areas loot levels (ex: level 1-200 area chest would drop t1 for anyone whether they are level 50 or 20000, same goes for the exp orbs) this would prevent high levels from trying to farm the low level areas chests as much as they don't reward very well compared to the areas closer to their own level.
Alternative to chests
This same plan could be put through with stone piles hidden around the map and through some sort of purchase, quest, or drop you receive a mining pick that allows you to attempt to 'open up' these caved in stone pile entrances to loot caves. The pick could only be used once an hour and has a 75% fail rate, but if successful you are teleported to a loot room that spawns a bunch of lower health higher exp monsters with a high chance of dropping the loot/exp orbs. The event would last a couple minutes spawning 1-3 monsters every 20 seconds through the process and once concluded would have a teleport appear in the room to bring you back to where you opened the stone pile. This second scenario of loot caves via a teleport would stop any abuse during loot gathering as no two people could be in the same 'loot cave' at a time.
Yours truly, Warthorn