Bio Engineer Archive

The only reason I don't recomend changing BE requirements to hunting and exploration 4 is because it messes up the template of BEs who don't have explore 4 already. They have shown that they will change the requirements for a class, but they have never added new requirements, they have only lowered the requirements.

Removing medic requirements wouldn't require you to drop medic, but it would allow you to put those points wherever you see fit. You could use them for exploration 4 (to help with DNA collection), or organic chemistry 4 (to make low level stim components), into artisan (toward getting a vendor), or anywhere else you see fit. It isn't an ideal solution, but it would at least give us more choices. We are, after all, the only pure crafting class that is required to take two different starting professions and two lines in order to reach novice.

Not good. Dna sampling is a big part of both the "fun" and "challenge" of being a BE. Making it simpler just in the name of reducing some pre-requisits makes the class less fun to play, which after all is the bottom line is it not? Also, engineering 4 is absolutely, completely useless to us. We'd be able to make like ber 3 harvesters, badweapon powerups, and bad bone armor... wohoo! Realistically speaking, most BE's already have artisan, or we have alts that have artisan, so adding on engineering 4 pre-req only makes things worse.

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joined42904 wrote:

What do you folks think?

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Question 1 proves that crafters are willing to take the only reliable option[1] available to them in order to sell their goods.

Question 2 proves that few merchants go out of their way to do something the game mechanics make very hard.

Question 3 proves that few merchants would sell other people's goods if that meant they would not be able to stock as many of own items.

Ask how many crafters would drop the merchant profession and sacrifice their vendor if they were able to get admin rights to someone else's vendor, safe in the knowledge that they could put their items up for sale at a time convenient to them and that only they could withdraw those items from sale.

Ask how many merchants would sell other people's items if they were able to charge a fee for the privilege and if they could still sell the full complement of their own items.

Ask how many people would take up the merchant profession to take advantage of these opportunities and others (ability to restrict item sales - special orders - to specific individuals).

[1] Getting someone else to sell for you requires that you trust the person and that you are able to meet regularly to hand over the items you wish to sell. Much easier just to place your own vendor.

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joined42904 wrote:

I hope you folks don't mind a master merchant coming and posting in your forum regarding the vendor issues.

I've posted this in the merchant forum first and at least one BE who is unhappy with the new vendor setups has found this acceptable. I wonder if this would gain acceptance in the broader BE community.

1. Change things so that animals don't have to be happy in order to be sampled for DNA. Permit BEs to sample from any corpse that the BE has looting rights to whether from being in a group or from killing the creature himself or herself. This eliminates the scouting exploration branch as a requirement to sample good dna from aggro creatures. It also makes fairly good logical and rational sense though not necessarily good gameplay sense from the perspectives of the devs. (Aren't today's DNA tests run off cells taken from people's cheeks? Do those cells decay instantly on death?)

2. Change the hunting pre-requisite to an engineering 4 pre-requisite. After all, aren't you guys bio-*engineers*? This changes the pre-reqs from novice scout plus hunting 4 to novice artisan plus engineering 4. The change is entirely skill point neutral. It does mean you will have to spend extra points on hunting if you want to gather and sell hides for a living, but more importantly it gives you 15 points toward getting to merchant since merchant derives from artisan.

This would bring BE in line with other crafting professions with the exception of a medic-line pre-req which considering the variety of things BEs can do including making pet stims seems to have a rational basis.

What do you folks think?

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I completely dislike this idea. Take away scout as a requirement, then you are saynig BE's must be a combat class to get their DNA. I'd prefer Exploration IV over Hunting IV as a pre-req but I do not want to be forced into spending 29 skill points just to be able to gather DNA like I do now - solo and w/o combat skills.

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joined42904 wrote:

I hope you folks don't mind a master merchant coming and posting in your forum regarding the vendor issues.

I've posted this in the merchant forum first and at least one BE who is unhappy with the new vendor setups has found this acceptable. I wonder if this would gain acceptance in the broader BE community.

1. Change things so that animals don't have to be happy in order to be sampled for DNA. Permit BEs to sample from any corpse that the BE has looting rights to whether from being in a group or from killing the creature himself or herself. This eliminates the scouting exploration branch as a requirement to sample good dna from aggro creatures. It also makes fairly good logical and rational sense though not necessarily good gameplay sense from the perspectives of the devs. (Aren't today's DNA tests run off cells taken from people's cheeks? Do those cells decay instantly on death?)

2. Change the hunting pre-requisite to an engineering 4 pre-requisite. After all, aren't you guys bio-*engineers*? This changes the pre-reqs from novice scout plus hunting 4 to novice artisan plus engineering 4. The change is entirely skill point neutral. It does mean you will have to spend extra points on hunting if you want to gather and sell hides for a living, but more importantly it gives you 15 points toward getting to merchant since merchant derives from artisan.

This would bring BE in line with other crafting professions with the exception of a medic-line pre-req which considering the variety of things BEs can do including making pet stims seems to have a rational basis.

What do you folks think?

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The only problem with this is you are adding requirements that don't already exist. What would this do for BEs who already have their template laid out as MBE/MCH or MBE/MR or even just MBE/MS? Those are some very popular templates that would actually lose out with adding artisan as a requirement. Adding requirements for a class just doesn't work well at this stage of the game.

joined42904, not bad ideas. It is workable if both of those suggestions are implemented.

My concern is that it would be a huge paradigm shift. To me and a lot of others, what makes BE interesting is the need to sample living critters that occassionally want to sample you in return.

I know the argument will be, "You can still do that if you wish," however simple human nature will mean we won't. Killing the critter and sampling it is easy. People will take the easy way out. When you're competing with a someone that can slaughter endlessly, you are forced to as well.

Maybe if we combined one of the blood proposals with this it would lend more credance to it. When sampling a live animal you get a blood sample (whether the quality-rated stackable extracting kind or the sampling random quality DNA kind) and when sampling a dead creature you get DNA. Getting the blood would be more dangerous but give you more uses. Getting the DNA is easier, but fills up your inventory. Plus it allows for mutliple playstyles (wow!) to achieve a similar end result.

[Edit - I do agree that shifting requirements is probably a very bad thing. I'm trying very hard to look at the good points of all the suggestions though.]

Message Edited by Seiryuu on 08-20-2004 01:08 PM

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ArthurDentOnBria wrote:

Here are several possible solutions:

1. change our scouting pre-requisite from hunting to exploration

pro: for those of us interested in making creatures, this potentially gives us back 14/29 skill points that are being "wasted"

con: no clue how they would implement this since all be's currently have hunting and not all may have exploration 4. does nothing for non-creature making BE's.

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I agree with this proposed solution.

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NancyJ wrote:
moving the scout line from hunting to exploration would mean losing the ability to see creature stats... just food for thought

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that's ok. That's what swgcreatures.com is for.

bah

Wheres the fun in that, I love driving past and animal, hitting /exam and going ooooh *turns bike around and goes to grab a sample*

furrycat,

It's true that at the time I asked this question, the proposed limit for master merchants was like 200 items or something like that, so I used the 300 number in question #3. It would be interesting to re-ask that question now with the new numbers. However, that doesn't change the fact that right now pretty much all merchants are advanced crafters, and pretty muchno merchants are currently carrying other people's goods. I think you can conclude from that, if nothing else, that those with merchant skills today, right now, are unlikely to be a viable solution to a vendorless-crafter of tomorrow, because they are very occupied selling their own goods. So yea, maybe in the distant future there will be more tools, and maybe we'll see some new people enter that class with the idea of selling other people's goods, and maybe there will be enough of those people to make being a vendor-less crafter viable. But that is an awful lot of maybes and as Nancy said it's nowhere close to being a reality. If I were a project manager on the SWG team, I'd even have a tough time justifying spending development effort in that area (merchant tools) given that it is so uncertain whether there is anyone in the game that would use them.

WHAT??? You mean you don't have them memorized by now?.... and you call yourself a bio engineer.. pfft

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Kevm wrote:

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NancyJ wrote:
moving the scout line from hunting to exploration would mean losing the ability to see creature stats... just food for thought

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that's ok. That's what swgcreatures.com is for.

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