Ranger Archive

This is a list of Ranger problems. One throughThree must be fixed to keep the profession worthwhile. Number Four is still very important.Five through Seven provide problems and solutions with Ranger in Player vs. Player.Eight through 11 are wish-list items. Please read and comment to keep this post alive, and to offer suggestions or anything I have missed. have carefully compiled it from the boards and my own Ranger experiences. -- Ypiana Ikilfi / Master Ranger - Starsider

1. Resource Bugs

Many Rangers and Scouts, ungrouped and solo, are getting either 50% their normal harvest or less as compared to the amounts before the September 8th patch. In many cases Rangers and Scouts are getting 1 unit of bone, hide or meat off high-level creatures. For example, the writer of this post is getting 1 unit of hide off of Rogue Banthas. Also I am getting 1 unit of bone off of Giant Baz Nitches, which previously gave 104 units. I get 1 unit of hide off snakes on Lok. Cutting resources in half or down to 1 unit is making it difficult for Rangers to harvest enough resources to sell, or even to have enough resources to make camps and traps.

Solution: Fix the harvesting bug so animals provide their pre-patch amounts.

2. Group Harvesting Option

The group harvest idea is a good one, however it should be optional. Especially at Ranger level, there might be only one Ranger in the group. Even though the Bounty Hunter and Creature Handler have Scout abilities, they may prefer not to harvest. So if a Ranger is the group's resource guy, they automatically get 40% less resources. Also, when grouped with pets the Ranger or Scout gets the group harvest amount. Unless pets have a need to sell resources on the Bazaar, this needs fixing. Simply turning group harvest on / off, controllable by group leader, should suffice. ie: /groupharveston, /groupharvestoff

3. Maskscent Liability

Maskscent for Rangers and Scouts has a chance to aggravate a creature if the maskscent or conceal check does not pass on that creature. Though the check works the majority of the time, the times that it fails cause an animal that would not normally have attacked you if you were not masked to attack. This makes using maskscent unpredictable and a liability as compared to simply carefully navigating through mobs. It seems that an animal attacking you when maskscent fails is meant as a balance for the benefits of maskscent, but the liability it brings is a danger to the Ranger and especially dangerous to the group she's with, since they could have gotten through the animals if the Ranger's failure to maskscent or conceal from an animal is the reason the animal attacked. Out of all the players in the game, Rangers and Scouts should have the least likely chances of being attacked.

Solution: Modify it so that an animal will not attack you if maskscent or concealfails unless you are within the animal's normal attack range. Also, non-aggressive animals should not attack if maskscent fails. Currently, they do.Losing the maskscent, or having a chance that an animal could aggro you while you walk through them, is enough of a game-balancer. There is no reason that an Eopie should go rabid and attack a player from 60 meters away simply because the maskscent broke, but this is the current situation.

4. Examine Window no longer shows harvests

Previously, before the patch, the examine window showed how much meat, bone, and hide, and the types of meat and hide on an animal. This was critical in hunting. This is now gone and sorely missed. Please put that information back in the examine window.

5. Camp abandonment

A high-tech field base costs a Ranger 320 credits to make. This is the average marketprice of 40 units of hide, 30 units of bone, and 20 units of metal used to make the camp. Yet, if the camp is abandoned for two minutes or the Ranger enters combat, often to defend his camp against aggressive creatures, which are NOT deterred by the camp, the camp disappears and the Ranger must find a new place to put the camp.

Solution: Besides fixing camps so they actually ward off aggressive creatures, camps should have a timeout inherent to the level of the camp. For example, a basic camp kit's abandonment timeout should be five minutes, a multiperson camp 10, an improved camp 15, a high-quality camp 20, field base kit 40, and high-tech field base should have a timeout of 60 minutes. This would not clutter the landscape with camps, since they will still evaporate, and the larger camps are as rare as Rangers. Also, as a means of 'preserving' the landscape, Rangers should get back 1/4 of the resources used to make the camp if they take it down. This reward would ensure no camps are left around.

6. Concealment

Concealment should work against player characters the same way concealment works for NPCs against player characters. This means that if a concealed Ranger succesfully hides from another player, she does not show up on his radar or overhead map. The body of the concealed Ranger still appears as normal to the other player visually and graphically. But, the Ranger does not appear on the overhead map or radar until the player manually targets the concealed Ranger by facing in the appropriate direction and hitting the tab key. This is exactly how NPCs such as Tusken Snipers succesfully use conceal against players, and this should be a viable Ranger skill in Player-Versus-Player. Many Ranger-Riflemen have waited for conceal so they could work like the Tusken Snipers, only to find that for someunexplained reason conceal does not work against other players. If conceal against players is never going to be in the game, the Ranger community would like an explanation to stop the speculation and wondering.

7. Traps and Player-owned Pets

All animal traps that are working against animals should have the same affect on player animals. Logically, there is no reason they should not. As far as gameplay goes, this would merely enable the Ranger to have unique player-vs-player skills just like the Combat Medic or Doctor who are also specialists in a martial art. Currently, when a PvP group is building, Rangers are only valued for their camps, and since camps cannot stand if the Ranger is in combat, they are relegated to holding the base. If Rangers could provide semi-permanent bases as well as trapping player pets they would beusefulin player-versus-player. If this is never going to be in the game, we would like an explanation.

8. Wasted Harvests

Many Rangers are also people who appreciate nature. Currently a Ranger can take one out of three harvestable items from an animal. This is akin to the disgusting practice of so-called 'hunters' who would only take the buffalo hide and leave tons of meat to rot. The best Rangers in history ie American Indians or any peoples who make the land their home, can use 100% of an animal's corpse. Of course, this also demands an intense knowledge of properly harvesting and preserving resources from an animal. Rangers should be able to harvest more than one resource as they advance, so that a Ranger with bioscience (formerly hunting) 4 can harvest all three resources from one animal corpse. Since there are very few Rangers with bioscience 4, this shouldn't affect the economy. Even if it does, one need only look at the bazaar costs and the artisanboards to see that they are starving for materials anyway.

9. Areatrack

Currently, Areatrack does not give proper distance for players in buildings. It also shows vendors and buildings. This can block the areatrack function from properly reporting the distance of a player and clogs the results screen with information that may block useful data.

Solution: Areatrack should show the last location of a player before the player entered a building. Vendors and houses should be blocked from the results window.

10. Areatrack Concealment

Anyone who's an expert in tracking is also an expert in hiding their own tracks. Rangers with Tracking Fourshould be invisible to the arearesults of another Ranger - unless that Ranger has Tracking Four.

11. Earning Scout XP with Counting Coup - Not in Forums, my idea.

Counting Coup was the Native American way of showing how elite you were. Since they often feuded between tribes, but didn't always have the will or cruelty to kill one another, a brave would 'count coup' by sneaking up to an enemy and touching them. There was also the practice of slapping bears, in which a brave would sneak up on a grizzly, slap him on the rear, and get away without getting eaten.

In the game Scouts and Rangers should be able to get Scout Xp by 'counting coup' on aggressive animals. The XP earned would be equal to the animal's creature level. The coup is done with the /pet command when not in combat. So, if a Ranger is able to /pet a level 36 Mountain Squill will not in combat, he should get 36 Scout points - once for each type of animal. This would be easy to arrange, but if we could get a Coup Stick - a craftable item, it'd be even cooler. The Coup Stick would automatically keep track of the types of animals the Ranger has counted coup on. It should also count aggressive NPCs succesfully touched such as Dune Stalkers and Nightsisters and Tuskens. For example, my Coup Stick would have everything from Servorrts to Mutant Rancors. No Krayts yet, though.

Counting Coup may sound lame, but Rangers get bored of killing animals sometime. Counting Coup would be a new challenge for Rangers, and people in the Ranger community would have something to mark their skills with the Coup Stick. It wouldn't be too hard to program, and would add a whole new aspect to the game.

12. In-camp Games in High Tech field base.

Fishing and Roullete are game-in-games. Lots of Rangers wish they had minesweeper or solitaire on the big computers that run the crafting stations. If we could get an in-game game it would be neat. Also, if Field Bases and High Tech field bases had a planetary or galactic beastiary database, that would be a neat thing to reference while hunting.

13.Littering

Thrown traps simply lie all over the ground. This is not a practice a Ranger would follow. Anyone with as intimate an understanding of the natural environment as a Ranger would not leave garbage around. Traps should evaporate soon after use, not when server resets as is currently situation.

/sign Ypiana Ikilfi

Master Ranger - Starsider

Good post, disagree about concealment working on players. As much as I would love it, the devs were pretty vocally anti-stealth during beta, and I don't see them budging on this. Also I have never once every had a non-aggressive aggro on me due to mask scent failing. Not refuting your personal experiences, just find that odd, personally

/sign

Yeah to all. Some comments:

1) Resources

In addition to the aforementioned harvesting reduction, the organic requirements for ranger's crafts have also increased. I haven't calculated them, but I believed they had doubled (eg a basic camp now cost 10 hides and 5 bones as compared to 4 hides and 2 bones, if I recalled correctly). I understand the intention is that since there will be more organic resources available, the increased cost is needed to sink the increased available resources. However, scout and ranger do not buy from the bazaar. Instead, we use what we find, then sell the rest. So this hit us at both end. Since the organic cost is more to craft our tents and traps, we have less available to sell. Since there are more available resources, the price will drop. Thus our income sources is greatly reduced. The only scenario where a ranger will gain more is if he group with CH/BH who will donate the extra harvest to him. This is an exception, yeah an "exploit", which shouldn't be used to penalized the rest of us rangers. Bring the organic requirements to pre-patch level.

3) Maskscent xp not in line with risk of using mask scent.

I believe maskscent will yield 60% of the aggro scouting xp. Since a ranger maskscent won't break often, this make it too easy to gain scouting xp. The risk of using maskscent is being attacked, but this is usually not a death sentence, thus is not really a deterent to using mask scent.

3b) Conceal usage xp no in line with risk of using conceal.

See above. This make it easy to gain scouting xp with zero risk.

9) areatrack

Areatrack only list spawned creatures/peoples. Out in the middle of nowhere, where this ranger like to be, areatrack is useless. Areatrack should trip spawn all creatures within 500 m. There need to be a delay to re-trip, say 10 minutes. This will prevent exploit of spamming areatrack to trip spawn zallion of creatures/people.

50 listing max is too small a limit. (See endor). Need to increase to 100.

14) Lok conceal ingredient of domesticated meat can not be found easily. Need to change requirement to something which can be found in the wild.

Heya:

The maskscent function works exactly as I described. After I had suspicions about it, I spent about three hours testing it once I got Master Ranger. There is always going to be an animal at some point who A: your maskscent check fails against, and then that animal has a high probability of going aggressive on you, whether it's naturally an aggressive animal or not.

Try it out, just put it on and take a long hike. I'm pretty sure you'll see it happen eventually.

Happy Rangering!

-- YP

/sign

They are all issues, good job Ypiana

The only thing I disagree is in the order they were writen, but I dont know if they are in the order of importance, regardless, excellent post

Outstanding. I agree on all issues.

JB

Master Ranger - Scylla

Yp,

Good post.

B

In regards to resource amounts, I think that two things need to be taken into account.

1) The difference between the amounts that rangers can harvest vs. scouts. Right now, I think there is only a minor difference and that needs to be larger.

2) According to what Delta has shown, there is an intention for developers to reduce, in general, the number of hides some creatures drop.

I'm not opposed to the pre-patch numbers,andI do not agree with the amount thatharvesting has dropped (it seems fairly significant for the larger creatures), but I am okay with a general reduction. What I think is important is #1 above. I want the difference between scouts and rangers (and even rangers of different skills) to be significant.

I think your camp abandonment numbers are too high. I'd go to 30 minutes for a HTFB with no camp abandonment even if the ranger enters combat. I also don't like the resource retrieval idea. I don't think any other items in game currently do this and I would only be happy with it if such "resource retrieval" is available for other items as well. I'm not saying that I'm 100% opposed to it, I just think it's an unfair advantage over other professions that do not have this ability for their things.

The improvements regarding PVP play for rangers is something that the developers need to address with us. If none of our abilities could affect NPCs, I would be fine with believing that we can't extend it to PVP-land... but the developers have added conceal which works with NPCs and now people are suggesting extending those abilities into the PVP. I'd like to know what the developers intend with the class and make the changes logically consistent with that intention.

"The maskscent function works exactly as I described. After I had suspicions about it, I spent about three hours testing it once I got Master Ranger."

I've been a Master Ranger for weeks, and have used Mask Scent for many weeks worth of play. Never once had a yellow dot on the radar attack me. Like I said, not refuting your claims, just saying it has never happened to me, and I play a lot more than most people...

/signed

/sign

Now having signed my personal thoughts are

1) My scent mask works 99% of the time

2) I think that the camp numbers are too high, unless you are going to leave a scout behind to tend the camp. Only ranger camps should have a stay function. Possible 5 minutes for the 1st, 10 for the 2nd tier, and so on.