Ranger Archive

Your economic analysis is spot on, as far as I can tell, and quite insightful. A Ranger who puts all his efforts toward resource hunting will not make as much as a crafter who puts half that effort, or a surveyor who puts half the effort.

But the fact is, we DO make enough, in general, to suit our personal needs. Getting a gun is not out of my abilities. I don't need armor personally, as a wookiee. My house maintenance is fairly low. I've got a static 2m in the bank that hasn't significantly dropped, and has been slowly, but steadily, rising. If I actually put more effort into my creature harvesting, It'd probably raise faster.

Therefore, to me, Ranger is viable. I *like* the Outdoorsman, ultimate-creature hunter focus of the Ranger. Others who do not can go find another profession, for all of me. I also like that Ranger is a rare profession. Sure, it makes it harder for me to get training, but it's a cost I'm willing to pay to keep us the small community that we are. It's not that I don't think we should be better than we are.. But I don't think the focus should change.

Nice post!

Hi, my name is JB and I am a multi-millionaire Ranger (hi JB...)...oops, wrong forum.

For the record 2.7 and change million, peanuts compared to most artisans, but decent enough cash.

Ok, did I make this money selling stuff ? Not even 1/8 of it. When I was selling hide at 2.2cpu to tailors and seeing people buy a shirt for 5k, I knew I was getting screwed and not being kissed.

I got out of the resource business almost entirely. Once in a while I will do an order, yesterday in fact, for the worlds quickest shifting avian meat (lasted less than 48 hrs). Wow boy oh boy, I made 160k for maybe 4 hours hunting. Not bad. But wait. I get 6k per tortur mission, 2 missions a set, 4 sets an hour... 48k per hour roughly... so I lost money hunting avian. Sure, I could have charged more cpu, but I know the guy, friend of my guild, healed me, buffed me here and there, so it was cool.

I sell grindable stuff here and there. I probably give away more than I sell. Or trade stuff for goods or services.

I make most of my credits running missions, both destroy and faction. I have sold some looted stuff, no crons mind you, just stuff. I do missions with noobs quite often and train them when I can. I get my missions, then group with them so they get higher missions and don't drag me down.

Rangers get hosed on the economic scale, period. If we were to charge what the stuff was worth, based on the end product prices, I would be charging upwards of 100cpu for grindable, and 1000cpu for quality. Not on my server.

enuf ranting. I know I am getting hosed, I just don't care and try and live outside the system when I can.

JB

Capn, skill tapes are free bro

Go to Talus, Nashal, the POI is lost village of durbin

maskscent, get on your ride. There are two debris piles on one side of the city, one of those spawns skill tapes all the time, on a half hour schedule. By masking, you don't have to fight the panthers. But be on your ride, as if they do break it, you are toasted, so flee.

Armor segments are in there too. I gave, free, 17 to my local armorsmith wannabe who now owes me some decent stuff when he starts making the good stuff.

Uh, get there early, beat the crowd.

JB

One thing you overlooked is that you can take missions while harvesting, easily covering any wear on your equipment. Even so, I completely agree with you.

Lythender Nirou
Eclipse Server

Reposted from the IC: Ranger thread.

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Darniaq wrote:

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DFH wrote:
Hunters of creature resources will never achieve the kind of wealth their crafting clients possess, because economies simply don't work that way. A blue-collar occupation is not suitable for the skill points demanded by an elite profession

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I don't want to be argumentative, but the above drew my attention.

I think it is way off the mark. When players offer 50, 60 and 70cpu for current shift uber resources, you could easily pull down 500k a day. Profit. Rangers have the lowest overhead of any resource hunter, and given economies of scale, probably the most profit. And you forget just how many resources a Ranger can pull per harvest versus a Hunting IV Scout.

Someone with ten (or unlimited rental) BER13 heavies on a 90% spot has to pay maintenance. And they're not making 70cpu. Maybe they're making 10 at best, or 15 if someone's got wads of millions floating around, but that's unsustainable because it's likely the uberest of resources never again to appear upon the land. And besides, nothing's stopping a Ranger from picking up Surveying and doing this themselves.

Rangers should not be just a Ranger. They've got skill points available and should use them. This isn't a class-based game.

There are many many multi-millionaire Rangers. Some, like me, made the bulk of our money outside of the archetype. But others I know did so entirely on Organics sales. To Armorsmiths

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Sorry, but we do not harvest that much more than a Scout with Hunting IV. My partner is such, and her harvest is about 2/3rds of mine. Considering the skill point differential, that's not much to talk about.

How much you are being paid per unit of resource is immaterial to the question. That cost in resources will be passed along to the crafter's customers as part of the price of his goods. Thus I repeat the point in question: resource providers will never be as rich as the manufacturers they provide to, because economies simply don't work that way. If the crafter isn't adding value to the resources -- if he can't make a profit on his work -- he'll quit.

Rangers do not have lower overhead than harvester managers. In order for me to get that 500K/day, at 70 CPU (currently, nothing on Corbantis commands that kind of payment, modulus an offer of 100 CPU for one type of meat that was made in a fit of pique), I have to harvest about 7K of the creature resource. Doing that in any kind of reasonable time is going to require travel to an advanced world, and the travel fees for such do not compare favorably to the maintainence fees for a good size harvester (2160/day, plus power -- which you harvest yourself). I also have to pay for routine wear on my equipment, insurance fees (I don't die often but I assure you harvester managers die a lot less often), and consumables (in my case, Willpower food and pet stims). There are also consumables that I make myself (camps, traps, camo) which do not directly cost credits, but require taking time out of hunting for profit. Yes, the harvester manager can (and will) run more than one harvester, but each harvester is generating profit, and I can't run more than one Ranger to keep up. (One member of my clique is currently managing 70 harvesters.)

No, a harvester manager won't get 70 CPU for his resources. But he doesn't have to. A BER 13 harvester on a 95% spot pulls about 18K units per day. That means he only has to get about 27 CPU to get 500K per day...off that one harvester. But it's not going to be just one harvester, is it now? The harvester manager can produce a volume of resources no Ranger can even think of touching, even in less than ideal circumstances. If you're pulling in twenty times what a Ranger can, you only have to get 1/20th the price to get the same money. Harvester managers can do that, and they won't put as much effort into it as the Ranger, either.

Mind you, again, all of this comparison between Rangers and harvester managers is only arguing over who is best at being at the bottom of the economic food chain.

Whether or not a Ranger can also manage harvesters is immaterial. The economic benefits of the Ranger profession must be evaluated solely on the basis of what that profession provides. As things stand, if the justification had to be made on a purely economic basis, one could not validly choose even 0-0-4-0 Ranger over 0-0-0-4 Artisan, never mind Master Ranger. The latter produces more income with less effort and less expenditure of skill points than the former. Keep in mind too that a) the Ranger will have had to master Scout, and he will need some kind of weapons skills in order to hunt (elite weapons if he wants to hunt on advanced worlds), further increasing his skill point cost, and b) the Artisan's economic benefit is gained directly from his initial skill point expenditure, and he is positioned to take a crafting profession as well, thus elevating himself another rung up the economic food chain. I would argue that, again in economic terms only, the value of the Artisan path is so much greater than the value of the Ranger path that having chosen to take the former, the latter would offer so little added value as to not be worth taking in addition.

Simply put: economically, Rangers are a total loss. This is why the entire idea of Rangers as "ultimate creature hunters" has got to go. Such a profession has nothing to contribute to this game save its economic value, and the devs could not possibly make an "ultimate creature hunter" profession that could even come close to competing economically with harvesters. They would not even want to, because the current crafting system is predicated upon creature resources being scarcer than harvested resources. Even if they did, Rangers would still be at the bottom of the heap because that is the way economies work: resource gatherers are worth less, economically, than people who craft those resources into goods.

We are being asked to spend too many skill points for the privledge of saying "would you like fries with that?"

Cant agree more

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So, why should I keep Master Ranger? Come on, sell it to me on the basis of game value.

You can't do it.

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That was never my intent, which I imagine you now realize. I've said it already: nobody is forcing players to master anything. And nobody is forcing anyone to exist solely within their chosen profession(s)' archetype.

You wanting Rangers as a singular profession to be economically comparible to other professions still ignores the fact that there are two major avenues to income that don't exist within an expensive skills template at all: Resources and Energy. They are mutually exclusive because the latter is powering a widely diverse group of the former, which itself provides resources to more than just one crafter.

I'm not going to continue arguing the irrelevant. My actual experiences vary widely from what you're describing as probabilities. It's a separate discussion.. I didn't sell 650k of energy per day to one person who turned around and power 90 Heavies to provide resources to one Armorsmith. Let's drop it before we get too off track, or continue it in another thread and get back to your original point from page 6 of the In Concept: Ranger thread and why you're not an Outdoorsman:

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Rangers need to be more than just some kind of big game hunter. That role is already adequately filled by anyone with Hunting IV and strong weapon skills. Additionally, it is nothing but a blue-collar occupation. Hunters of creature resources will never achieve the kind of wealth their crafting clients possess, because economies simply don't work that way. A blue-collar occupation is not suitable for the skill points demanded by an elite profession.

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This tangental discussion on macro economics started with that statement. The silliest part is that I actually agree that there's not enough "bang for the buck" in the Ranger tree. I attribute that to an incomplete profession, of which there are many here in a game rushed to launch. But owing to the reality that no MMOG is ever "done", I can accept that.

You calling it a blue-collar occupation is based on your conviction that Ranger is an economic strata. It's not. You can avoid the point that there's other ways to make money outside of skill trees, but that doesn't remove the reality. A Ranger isn't going to be as rich as a resource vendor by just being a Ranger. That much is true. But what is not true, and what is continually relevant is that there is no penalty to a Ranger who wants to be a resource vendor.

You want to maximize your organics gathering to existing entirely within that business model. Fine. Many do, and are good at it. But you choose to operate at this level, knowing full well there are more lucrative options available. That's your intangible. Your joy. Your choice.

Rangers should add the ability to avoid unnecessary or undesired fights, and the ability to manage fights through crowd control and pulling. . . Rangers should be capable of placing static traps

Traps as defined by the Outdoorsman concept. We can semi-do this already, if you consider the 'Root/Rot' approach from other MMORPGs with the SWG variant being an Adhesive Mesh Trap followed by a Bleed. It's not nearly useful enough. The Sonic Pulse and Flash Bombs are just about useless in fights anyway, at least as I've seen them. And I hit Trapping IV months ago, because I like traps

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Rangers should require standard weapons professions, either their own or other PCs, for primary combat ability.

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We already do. No Ranger can just be a Ranger and successfully kill a creature. I think the two Darts won't even kill a creature (just get it down really low). Sounds suspiciously like how no Ranger can just be a Ranger and expect to be as rich as others. Hmm...

Other combatants should depend on Rangers for stealth and for locating choice targets. (Standard mission terminals shouldn't even exist on Endor, Yavin or Dathomir -- if you want to find Rancors, stomp around blindly or bring a Ranger.)

I agree. The Outdoorsman concept doesn't go far enough to give uniqueness to Rangers in this regard. Vehicles make stealth somewhat moot, and mission terminals make tracking somewhat moot.

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Rangers should be capable of killing humanoids, creatures and even droids with traps if necessary

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I completely agree.

I don't think you're off the mark. I disagree with your data, but agree with your point. Rangers, for the cost of achieving it, should have Traps that work against players.

They should also be able to harvest way more than Scouts (I'd say 200% at least). Being able to harvest more than one type of organic from a mob, as defined in the Outdoorsman concept, may not go far enough. Unless extremely lucky, most times a mob has one great resource and two grind worthy ones. There's something to be said for stocking up on grindables, for camps and traps, but the rest of the concept requires some quality in those resources. I've seen awesome Bone, Meat and Hide, but never more than one from the same mob.

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Setting up camps -- temporary bases of operation or fortifications -- is part of securing territory

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The Outdoorsman concept handles this. Defense, weaponry, support, etc. You said it is irrelevant but I disagree. In fact that contradicts your earlier assertion: "The purpose of a Ranger is to secure territory". The Outdoorsman Camp concept does exactly this

But it would help a great deal if there were no mission terminals on the elite worlds. That would require Rangers to track to a lair, and then set up a base from which to operate.

While it's irrelevant to the larger issue here, it should be noted that most serious resource vendors buy their power from folks who only provide power, they are likely renting lots for a fee and every cost for operating (weapons, travel, insurance) applies as much to them as it does to us, particularly when the best things appear on advanced worlds

They do not have to buy power from other vendors -- if they do, it is because doing so is more economical than harvesting it themselves. It is thus faceitious to clame doing so is an increase in overhead, because if they choose to do so it is because it bring a net decrease in overhead as a percentage of profit.

They may or may not be paying for their extra lots -- many of these "spare lots" are being traded across servers. IE, you don't play on Corbantis but you make a dummy character to place some harvesters for me, and I do the same for you on your home server. No money changes hands because there'd be no point.

Harvester managers do not engage in combat nearly as often as a creature hunter, and ideally do not engage in it at all, so they do not pay nearly what a creature hunter will for weapons and insurance. They don't travel nearly as much as we do either, particularly to the advanced worlds.

There's also the associative cost of failures (both critical and less-than-optimal-results),

Harvester managers don't deal with failures. Crafters do, that's non sequitur here.

vendor hosting

They need one, if that; if they are dealing with crafters by contract, they need zero.

and lot rentals for storage capacity (ask a BE about their DNA or a Chef about their food) given the cap on inventories.

Neither of which are germane to this point of contention. Harvester managers only have to store their resources, and how many thousands fit in one stacK?

How much, exactly, they pay in overhead is almost totally immaterial. Even if they have a higher overhead as a percentage of profits (and I don't concede that they do at all), the higher profits would justify it. If the best economic option Fred has every playing day is to spend 100 credits to make 1,000, and the best option Barney has is to spend 5,000 credits to make 20,000, which is better off? It seems to me that as soon as he has the initial capital, Fred should give up his line of work and get into Barney's business. Now add in the fact that Barney puts in less than half the effort and it's even more of a no-brainer.

This would only be true if there was a Miner profession. And if only Miners could run harvesters. Them not being here is entirely my point.

This being in reply to: the economic benefits of the Ranger profession must be evaluated solely on the basis of what that profession provides.

That statement is 100% correct. It is a general principle; each profession's merits must be evaluated solely on their own.

Consider the following, by analogy: the combat benefits of the Pikeman profession must be evaluated solely on the basis of what that profession provides. You are arguing that the fact that Pikemen couldn't hit the ground if they drop their weapon is irrelevant, because they could be Pistoleers or Riflemen too. Well, that's all fine and dandy, but what happens when they notice they are always using their guns to kill things and never their pikes? Wouldn't that suggest that the points spent on Pikeman would be better utilized elsewhere? If you were going to argue that Pikeman was a valuable profession because it increased the PC's combat prowess, you would be expected to show that its skills were effective enough an addition to the PC's arsenal to warrant the expenditure of skill points.

Likewise, if you are going to argue that Ranger is an economically-viable profession, you must do so by showing how the Ranger skills create wealth for the PC. The fact that the PC could have other skills as well does nothing to justify the investment in the Ranger skills.

As a Ranger, Rifleman and CHer, I'm surprised you didn't mention hybriding.

I did not mention it because it has no bearing on the Ranger profession's value.

Consider the following template in place of my current one:

Marksman: 4-0-0-3 (my current levels, which I don't list in the sig)
Scout: Master
Rifleman: Master
Creature Handler: 4-3-1-4 (again, my current level)
Artisan: 0-0-0-2 (you could make it Novice Artisan and still be able to survey, and get the last box of Ranged Support instead)

This template can place harvesters and hunt creatures. The lowered Creature Harvesting skill is easily offset by Master Rifleman, allowing me to kill creatures faster. Even if we accept the premise that it makes economic sense to both manage harvesters and hunt for creature resources (and I don't accept that), this character will do that better than my current Master Ranger. So, why should I keep Master Ranger? Come on, sell it to me on the basis of game value.

You can't do it.

How much better, economically, would the devs have to make the Ranger profession to just make it an even match? Can they actually make it that much better, without crocking the Big Picture? No. Thus, the benefits of the Ranger profession cannot be economic.

You can do both the 250k per night in 50-70cpu resource sales (-/+ on server) and the 1mil per night in resource sales

Perhaps -- though time spent hunting is time not spent managing my resource business.

But even if I could, why would I want to? I'd be doing three times the work for 25% more income. That doesn't sound like a very good deal. On a purely economic basis, it would be better to invest that playing time and those skill points into a crafting profession, magnifying the value of my harvested resources, and moving myself up the ladder.

And again, see above -- I can do this, better, without being a Ranger.

I know you're 4-3-1-4 CH so you can train your own uber pets. But what's stopping you from dropping the ability to train commands, pick up at least Survey II and dropping 8-10 Harvesters (8 if you're a citizen of a city and not in the 1-lot Naboo Small)?

Because that is not the way the Creature Handler profession works any more. The ability to handle pets of increasing level is distributed over the entire tree, so in order to have strong pets at all I need many boxes. If I were to drop the entire Management line and one box of Training, I could free up enough points for Novice Artisan, and I'd lose 15 levels of pets, knocking me down from 45 to 30. That's a big loss -- level 30 pets don't have armor. (I would also lose the ability to train mounts, though it's not as if mounts were worth anything in this game any more.)

And even if I did -- it still would not carry your point.

I eventually see SOE introducing the Miner profession they canned back in early beta as being "unfun." People have amazing tolerances for unfun when there's beaucoup cash to be made.

They won't do it because they can't. It would have the same problem as Ranger -- lots of skill points to play a blue-collar worker. They can't increase the players' ability to gather resources (it's already too high) and if they try nerfing it by moving part into an advanced profession, the villagers will storm SOE's corporate HQ with pitchforks and torches.

Finally, at the end of it all -- again, arguing over whether creature hunters have it better than harvester managers or whether we should do both is pointless. Both are at the bottom of the food chain.
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I'm going to try to summarize the point here, because people are not seeing the forest for the trees. This is not a rant about Rangers not making enough credits. I make enough for my character's needs too. The point is that by embracing proposals oriented towards creature hunting, we are negotiating ourselves into a ghetto.

Any SWG profession can only have value in three ways:

Economic: The profession produces goods (harvested or crafted) desired by other players, or provides necessary non-combat services (image design, slicing, etc.)

Combat: The profession increases the player's ability to defeat enemies (creature, humanoid, PvP) either directly (weapon professions) or by providing support (healers, Squad Leaders, etc.)

Intangible: People just like it -- it fits some archetype they find desireable. The profession offers a "fun factor" of some kind to some significant number of players.

While every profession needs some measure of intangibles -- if it's no fun to anyone, no one will play it, no matter how good a move it is or even how necessary it is to game balance that the profession exist -- intangibles have no force in debate over balance. If you "just like" being a creature hunter, well, good for you, but that's not reason enough for creature hunters to exist. Almost any profession is going to have someone who will play it just because it exists.

There are only two rewards for creature hunting -- mission payouts and harvesting resources. Creatures that drop non-harvested "loot" only drop resources for crafting. These two really do not overlap much. If you are interested in serious harvesting you will avoid missions, because they dramatically reduce the rate at which you harvest. Wild lairs and herds easily spawn two or three times as many mobs as mission lairs. What this means is that hunting creatures for resources is really an economic activity -- it does not produce intrinsic rewards. Its rewards are only valuable to other players. Anyone with weapon skills can run missions, and missions don't necessarily involve creatures, so Rangers really have nothing to offer in that regard even if our creature combat abilities were increased (from their current near-nothing). You don't need to track your mission targets, they're close to town so you don't really need stealth, and harvests are likely to be incidental to the mission payouts.

Resource gathering, whether by hand (hunting) or mechanized (harvesters) is, as explained, the bottom of the economic barrel. (Though I suppose in terms of income in SWG Image Designers and Musicians are fighting it out for last place....) If we accept a role as "ultimate creature hunters", we are accepting a definition of the profession that offers no value in combat except towards the pursuit of an economic activity that can't be justified if economic gain is the goal. That would leave the intangible benefits as the only real reason to play a Ranger -- which, in turn, would mean the profession would be marginalized. We need combat and support abilities that are useful for more than just fighting creatures.

If Ranger is to be a viable, valid career path with tangible benefits in SWG, it needs the military functions that the Outdoorsman proposal in particular and too many members of this forum in general are willing to discard.