Bio Engineer Archive

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Kal_Serrak wrote:

My Revised, Second Edition Bounty Hunter Top 5 Issues
Then I'm off to post my Top 5 on the Smuggler's forum *grin*


ISSUE 1 - WHAT IS A BOUNTY HUNTER?
Simply put, what distinguishes the Bounty Hunter as a profession vis a vis a TKA/Rifleman who kills people for money? Technically, Bounty Hunting isn't its own combat orientation - but a manner of making money. Bounty Hunters have only one profession tree of distinguishment (Investigation) which is bugged, misbalanced and on the whole restrictive and boring. BH Carbine is an substandard version of Carbineer, BH Pistol is a substandard version of Pistoleer, LLC is a mockery of the Commando Profession, no defenses to speak of. Bounty Hunter needs to be disbanded as a profession and opened up to all combat classes, or remove its combat elements and SP requirements - allowing combat professionals to take up their favorate combat professions and tie on Bounty Hunter for the bounty system, tracking, investigation and added little dirty tricks.


ISSUE 2 - COST VALUE OF MASTER BOUNTY HUNTER
Exclusive of Issue 1 "What is a bounty hunter?", comes the question of the value of mastering bounty hunter versus dabbling the bounty hunter investigation line with another combat profession. We're not a profession made for dabbling, our Mastery costs are second only to Jedi. Mastering Bounty Hunter should be an exponential growth rate, and we should be X times stronger than a combat offense/defense templates just because we focused our character's development.


ISSUE 3 - IMPROVE THE BOUNTY SYSTEM
Not only adding Player bounties based upon illegal activities (Slicing, Smuggling, Spice use/manufacture, Doctor's 'enhancements,' killing 'innocent' imperial/rebel NPCs, destroying installations, etc.) or ill-repute with a noteworthy syndicate (Corbal, Jabba the Hutt, Nym, Empire, Rebel Alliance, etc). This can be anyone, including other bounty hunters. Players who fall to a bounty hunter with a bounty must lose something - money, faction, skill boxes, experience, skill points - something to make getting a bounty placed upon your head mean something. Plus, the tracking experience is too easy - bio signature, droids, vehicle. It must be made more complicated! Slicing terminals for information (travel plans, purchases, etc), shaking down NPC informants, increased amount of tracking droids, use of other tracking devices and so forth to add spice and enjoyment to tracking down marks. Finally, all the bug fixes and exploits must be repaired - including balacany AFKing, /quit or /logout and so forth.


ISSUE 4 - IMPROVE THE PVP SYSTEM
There are many very overbalancing issues in the PVP/PVE game : Buffs (combined with a Zabrak is gamebreaking), Jedi (unchecked population growth), Weapons too powerful (Super-Krayt Weapons with super/double slices and powerups, pre-nerfs, exploited weapons), Armor too heavily relied upon (There was a reason Wookiees wore no armor - in Star Wars, no one can hit worth crap), Accuracies too high (see prior), Available defenses either too high or too low, and so forth.



ISSUE 5 - EXPAND THE JEDI ORGANIC CONTROL SYSTEM
Reinstitute a stricter death penality for Jedi players; expand benefits of killing Jedi to the Imperial soldiers/officers with faction points, unlockable perks and so forth; end holo-grinding. Increase crackdown patrols to combat the Jedi Invasion, and increase imperial presence throughout all worlds uniformly by x4 the current amount.

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If I had to pick one to push the most, I'd recommend pushing Issue 1. Before we move on, we really need to understand what in bloody hell is a bounty hunter.

[EDIT]
Hey, this means alot to me. Bounty Hunting is the only thing I have ever wanted to do. And I don't even have an active Bounty Hunter anymore - that has to tell you alot.

Message Edited by Kal_Serrak on 04-06-2004 11:58 AM

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DrkSensei wrote:

1) Humanoid Traps( Making Scout Useful

1a) Make our Rifle Skills Useful

2) Offensive Upgrades ( they have already said they don't like knockdown/dizzy, fine give us options..make me want fast blast )

3) Fix the Misson Bugs

4) Defense ( not as much as offense but cmon we aren't artisans we are a combat professional)

5) Customization (gadgets,skill allocation changes any of the greatideas posted on these boards to make it where Bounty Hunters can be different)

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Personally I don't like the humanoid trap idea.

I would just rather have an immobilzation shot that doesn't let the target move for 10 seconds but they can fight back or heal but they are basically rooted. Though hit and run tactics could be fun to if that was possible. Traps are a pain, they immobilize you while you are throwing so a melee can run up on you and they almost never do anything that I notice is useful.

I mean do you actually ever use your scout traps on creatures? Why? Because they really arn't that useful but they do make pretty sparks.

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ForceAssassin wrote:

Well, I've tried writing, reporting bugs, notifying customer service, so I'll try this... but this is my last avenue.

MARKS ARE NOT NON EXISTANT. MARKS ARE INVISIBLE. THIS MAY BE AN ISSUE WITH CERTAIN GRAPHICS CARDS, OR IT MAY BE AN ISSUE WITH THE WAY THE GAME LOADS NEARBY CREATURES. IF YOU HAVE THE /AREATRACK SKILL YOU CAN ACTUALLY SEE THE INVISIBLE MARK AND PINPOINT WHERE THEY SHOULD BE STANDING. I HAVE EXPERIMENTED WITH BOTH TYPES OF BUGGED MARKS (CLIPPED IN BUILDINGS, INVISIBLE) AND THERE IS AN EASY FIX,

I WILL REPEAT, THERE IS AN EASY FIX.

IF YOU DRAW ANY MOB (OR EVEN DUEL A FRIEND) NEXT TO WHERE THE CREATURE IS INVISIBLE/CLIPPED AND USE AN AREA OF EFFECT ATTACK (I USE LIGHTNING CONE 2), THE MARK WILL AGGRO YOU AND WILL BECOME VISIBLE/ STEP OUT OF THE BUILDING.

THIS MEANS ONE THING. DON'T ASK FOR MIRACLES... JUST ASK THE DEVS TO MAKE ALL BOUNTY HUNTER MARKS EITHER HOSTILE, OR ACTUALLY MOVING WHEN THEY SPAWN. THAT'S IT, THAT FIXES IT ALL, AND WE CAN ALL START FOCUSING ON THE TERRIBLE MISBALANCING OUR PROFESSION SUFFERS.

That represents a TINY change in code, something we can actually ask for. So I guess I'll make that issue number 1.(and sorry about the caps guys, I'm frustrated and wanna be noticed, lol)

1) Make all marks aggressive (they know they're being hunted), or moving (how unrealistic is that?) This fixes invisible/clipped marks.

2) Give us a BH specific skill that uses our mods for /scentmask to /maskradar. Set the difficulty for this action to 1/2 of the skill points accrued by a Player (ie a master bounty hunter with no other skills would be a Creature Level 113 for purposes of the mask). This means that masking in cities should be near impossible(mult. checks), as it should, and hiding ourselves from inexperienced players would be much easier. This would also give us a reason to go up the camoflage tree in ranger, which could give us some well deserved dichotomy as a class... (do you stalk your prey or overwhelm them?)

3) Give us more bounty hunter specific weapons. Instead of skill rebalancing it may prove fruitful to give us new weapon certs as we advance, weapons with nice range mods, low HAM, and stun damage. It makes no sense that a bounty hunter would only gain access to two new weapons in their profession. It equally makes no sense that we're an "offense" class and can't hit anything. At least one stun damage weapon makes perfect sense because often a bounty hunter does not want to kill their mark (remember Bobba... "He's of no use to me dead."). If anything its inappropriate that we get area effect attacks litcone2 etc, and have no ability to kill one on one, which is where we should excel.

4) Give our NPCs different titles. As of right now 90% of the Bounty Hunters on my server all migrate daily to Kaadara on Naboo, because no one had the courtesy to drop enough of our NPCs or give them different titles so we know which ones to talk to. This whole thing of having 15 spynet ops npcs in a city but having none of them be the right level to start your missions adds to our frustration and makes it VERY HARD on folks who start the game and want to try out our profession. Part of this request HAS to be an NPC drop for our PA cities. We could drop 15 BH terminals in my hometown, but the needed spynet ops never spawn among the npcs there. All and all this issue has made BHs everywhere into shuttlewhores (can I say that? lol) and takes away time from our missions and money from our pocketbooks. I have spent more of my gaming experience staring at that darn ticket collector.....

5) Please Please Please give us pay commensurate with our work. Hunting a person across five planets should give ya more than 15k, especially when just travelling to and from a planet can cost up to 5k. Bounty Hunters (successful ones, lol) should be able to afford the better items in the game and eventually our own ships (and I swear I'm gonna nuke that freakin ticket collector from orbit when I have one). Multiply mission payout by two or three and you'll be in the right area.

TANKS!!! WE'RE ALL COUNTING ON YOU TO MAKE SURE THAT THE DEVS DON'T FORGET ABOUT US IN THE SPACE EXPANSION. IF EVERYONE GETS COOL SHIPS BUT BOUNTY HUNTERS CAN'T FLY EM WE'RE GONNA HUNT YA DOWN WITH /AREATRACK AND LOB ROTTEN FRUIT AT YA!

Thanks for the ear. Hope it wasn't too long.. but going off of the TERRIBLE customer service experience I've had since I've owned this game, I'm sure I'll just be ignored anyway.

/salute Fellow_Bounty_Hunters

- Mephistopheles

Corbantis

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Erelas wrote:

Not to be a smarta$$, but does this count as it now being noted in the new Top 5, lol.

And please, factional head-hunting, ie. player marks other than jedi would be wonderful, and moving jedi marks to Master level. I know some do not agree with this, but, it is something "I" would like to see.

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Ranwa Ranur wrote;

YES! there are too many BH on Tarq now just for the invest line and jedi hunting at 3. The influx of these people are going to errode the core foundation of BH. Most of these people didn't care about BH before Jedi hunting was fix so why should they after....Move em to MBH.

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Hi, Im a Tarq bounty hunter working my way to master now. I disagree with the idea to make jedi bounties master only. And to counter Ranwa's statement , there isnt too many bounty hunters on our server. The problem is there are too many bounty hunters on Tarq who dont know how to be bounty hunters & cry & flame all over the place. When SWG was 1st started, Bounty hunter was the pride of the game. We kicked butt. Knocked out teeth & tormented every other combat profession. We were made weaklings by the other professions' changes to defenses.

So to see the top 5 changes to bounty hunter at this time:

1) For the Bounty hunter purist, add master level only bounty hunter weapons for the true Master Bounty Hunters

2) Fix all the specials that dont currently work

3) Add other player professions to bounty hunter terminals for us to hunt for our "money"

4) optionA;Reduce the number of skill branches from scout for us to get to novice bounty hunter or remove it all together. option B: add bounty hiunter traps to be used vs our bounties , npc & player alike.

5) Make us the feared people of Star Wars again.

nuff said