Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Moving forward... new purpose ideas for Bio-Eng in 2004
Ikti - probably a break would be a good thing.
I started in this game at beta 3, was here when it went live and up until early September. By then I was burned out and completely disillusioned by what they were doing to the game (and to CH). So I took three months off (I'd actually sworn to myself when I left I'd never come back 
) and I'm having a lot more fun now.
If they completely flush CH and BE down the tubes well... I like the idea of TKA/Doctor so I might try that. I guess I'm not as heavily invested in the game as I was before and that's probably a good thing. It's supposed to be fun after all.
Zaket..you're probably right.... I have grown to love to hate this game. I had never thought of really doing anything but BE...and am just feeling, as you put it..burnerd out I suppose. but nowhere else could I vent and have others know what I mean than here on these specific forums...
the roleplaying aspect is an avenue I might pursue...to provide a change. but looking at the big-picture...unless more people get involved in the GCW, and PvP ..this is going to get very "stale", very fast... hell-it already is (I know this probably the right thread to be venting...)
let's just hope the devs are able to truly "fix" the BE profession before they move on to DE and Chef..and others...because as someone else put it..this is our day in the sun...and I think it will be fleeting...
Perhaps making our chef tissues more viable (ie: LESS expensive than the food it goes into) would be a big help. I agree that the buffing market is indeed already very crowded. Perhaps we could find our niche in the semi-perment buff market, an expensive implant-type thing that would have a moderate boost to, say, one set of seconday stats.
I am very boggled on how the space expansion will effect us. I am yet to come up with a viable idea that will make us important in the upcoming expansion.
Anyhoo.... my 2cr.
If Sony plans on keeping this product for any length of time (and judging by the likes of Ultima: Online, EQ, etc., it has years of shelf life), they will need to continuously add and remove content to keep it fresh. The problem with their thinking (ok, I'm presuming to know what they're thinking, but stay with me a bit) is that if you want something fresh, CHANGE PROFESSIONS. It's clear with the holocron/jedi system that this is where they're heads are at. Instead of rewarding (i.e. opening a FS slot) a BE for creating one of every creature from level 10 to 70, they want you do throw role-playing out the window and cycle through professions that you have no interest in. They certainly aren't rewarding players who come up with a character concept, play this MMORPG as and RPG, and try to become the best of the best at one thing.
At some point they will realize that there is a large player population that wants to play a specific character, someone who you might actually bump into on a star destroyer or in a backwater cantina. To that end, I DO believe that in the future, Sony will make improvements/additions/changes to all of the current professions. Here are some thoughts for ours, the beloved BE:
1) Synergize with image designers to bio-engineer other player characters. Want fur like a bothan, frills like a rodian, or a trando's scales? Go for it. Perhaps a tissue or additive that IDs would use to change the appearances. This is likely a hard thing to do as it would involve changes to the character models.
2) Increased synergies with combat medics. When you hear the term "combat medic," one thinks of somebody who heals on the battlefield, not someone who slings hazardous waste at their enemies. But that's the reality we're faced with. Much like what we do with CHs, we should be the ones providing combat medics with their weaponry, and doctors shouldprovide them with healing supplies. At the very least, tissue additives that would change/extend/boost the performance of their poisons. This is likely a moderately difficult change to effect.
3) Make Clone Centers droppable by MBEs only. This is an EASY change that should have been included with the player city release. This would increase our synerigies with politicians. Easy to do.
4) Profession-specific missions and quests (My first vote: a quest for a creature schematic that would allow us to clone a flying creature). Easy to do.
5) Introduce the tranq gun, a weapon that causes the "pacified" special effect. Pacification only works on non-humanoid mobs and has the effect of causing the target to neither attack nor be attackable for the duration of the effect (brief), nor could they run. They would still be subject to DNA sampling, however. A creature with less than half of its health left could not be tranq'd (this would reduce abuse by people using it to hunt and kill the creatures). Moderate to do.
6) Add the DNA beltpouch. This would be an wearable container with twenty slots, only usable for DNA samples. It could be worn with normal belts and backpacks. Moderate to do.
7) More custom options on the clones (colors, phsyical features).
8) The ability for a MBE to create a clone for a FS character (of course, then we'd have all the bounty hunters hanging around, trying to find out who we're doing business with....)