Bounty Hunter Archive

Ok, let me start this by saying that my favorite profession in this game was Bounty Hunter - I mastered in Oct '03, before vehicles/mounts, player cities/shuttleports, buffs (were around but very uncommon), before wookiee armor, before defenses in the BH profession, etc. I had to do 320 missions to get investigation 4, and each mission took on average 45 min-1 hour.I had no defenses, no buffs, no transport but myhairy feet, against 10+k ham npcs.I loved it. There has never been a time since then that at least one of my chars was an mbh.

That being said, my favorite char, and my favorite game experience now is with my Jedi. Mpowers/Menhancer/heal3000/def0020 . Full template, maxed on exp. This really is the only char I play at the moment. He's got nothing to lose, he's fairly capable and the template is a lot of fun. Wasn't always this way - I lost over 3.5 mil exp during the grind to BH's, deaths, being stupid, etc.

As a BH I have hunted jedi, and frankly while the hunt was cool and the combat was challenging, killing a player jedi was really not all that much fun, and getting an in game reward for it just made it ugly. Furthermore, there's this ugly and artificial schism in the community between BH's and jedi's and it's only basis is a severely flawed game mechanic based on a completely ignorant game designideathat the devs won't let go of, namely that somehow, someway, player BH's killing player jedi is somehow going to make jedi rare. The only way a jedi is going to be rare after a completed BH mission is if he doesn't play period. That's just precious - let's have the players who play the chars we (the devs) don't want to see out in the open quit the game. Pretty stupid, and completely unnecessary. Here's my solution to this SNAFU.

1. NPC BH's/Imperial Hunterstarget all playerJedi. Let the same mechanism that's in play for calling in reinforcements to probe droids doing contraband searches be there for NPC bh's or Imperial SWAT teams to come calling on the player jedi when visibility gets high enough. If the jedi kills the BH, or the team, send in another one after some random period of time has elapsed, and make it stronger - a level higher. Rinse and repeat. Simple. Here are excellent opportunities for cool cameos like Darth Vader or Boba Fett.

2. NPC Jedi available to player BH's to hunt. Let the same mechanism that's in game for the Mellichae mission (FS Village exitquest)be available for NPC jedi bounties for BH's to take. Let the level vary, based on the mission level, from level 75 on up to whatever the BH wants to target. Let up to 5 BH's work together on very high level NPC jedi to get the cool group dynamic going. Let the NPC jedi have some other non-jedi support npcs be around to help him.

3. Special Forces Jedi huntable by player BH's Here the jedi has made a specific action choosing to be attackable by other players. Player Bounty Hunters taking these missions should be expected by such jedi, in the mechanism as is in play now. I would even advocate the removal of the 5 mission bounty hunter limit. Bring em on.

4. Death - to - Life QuestWhen a player jedi dies to a pc or npc BH, they resuscitate at the bottom of an instanced warren-sized(or larger)cave. The only way to rejoin the "land of the living" is to perform quests for Blue Glowies inside and to fight appropriate leveled enemies that block the way. Cool way to bring famous jedi like Obi Wan and Qui Gon into the story as blue glowies, make BH deaths somewhat an easier pill to swallow for a jedi player, and succeed much better than now in keeping the player jedi population _LOWER_ in public areas via Bounty Hunter actions. Perhaps make this a choice for the jedi, either clone with loss of exp or do the Death-to-Life quests.

I'm hoping that these kinds of changes would help alleviate some of the major problems for both BH's and jedi, and address some of the issues of jedi in the GCW as well as the just general jedi hate that some players feel. It will also sweeten the sting of targetted death for jedi - I know I'd have much less of an issue dying to Boba Fett than to "Eye-kEEL-U-L0lz".

What do you guys think?