Ranger Archive

Reasons to increase harvests:

1. With the new chef changes, we now have four groups heavily dependent on meat. We have Bioengineers, Combat Medics, Doctors, and chefs all needing extensive amounts of meat. The meat coming in from Rangers/Scouts is not enough to supply everyone.

2. We get a trite increase in harvesting with our Master Ranger title in comparison to a Master Scout title. This is not consistent with other elite professions. A Master Swordsman has more accuracy, speed, and specialmoves than a player at Master Brawler.

Oy vey!! Are you kidding me?! I thought we went over this, and over this..in the thread specifically FOR this! <sigh>

1) Not enough of a differentiation between us and a Novice or Master Scout. This should be enough in and of itself. We're not much better than a Scout as has been pointed out repeatedly in the other thread, with numbers to support it.

2) The Dev's have determined that we are the "Ultimate Creature Hunter", and while we object to being pigeon-holed into this title pending review of the Outdoorsman Proposal, we should be able to do what the Dev's envision us doing.

3) Harvesting is one of the few productive reasons for BEING a Ranger. We should be allowed to harvest more if for no other reason than to save our sanity. It's tough to market your wares when you only get 7 units of wooly hide off of a Paralope.

4) See number one.

Respectfully,

Personally I think ranger should have weapon tree, rangers in star wars after all were hired soldiers. The Antarion Rangers (sp?) were jedi protectors. They were masters of their weapons, tracking, concealment,and gorilla warfare. I think we should be modelled after the true star wars rangers as BHs are. Rangers just harvester? No! They are elite soldiers.

IMHO, reasons to increase harvest.

1. As it stands the 30% difference in harvest between Master Scout and Master Ranger is not sufficiant to off set the skill points used to reach Master Ranger. As has been noted many times on this board, any one with Master Scout and elite combat profession can out harvest a Master Ranger 2 to 1. Just does not seem right to me.

2. The ability to harvest multible resources would be at the least an incentive to go the Master Ranger route. I would love to be able while grouped to not only harvest more then 5 to 7 more hides or meat, but to be able to grab two other resources all at once

Ebe

Message Edited by KaiRaene on 03-31-2004 04:42 PM

OK, I'm going to bullet this for easy reading:

For general harvest increase:

• 10 professions need organic resources for at least some of their goods (Architect, Armorsmith, Artisan, Bio-Engineer, Chef, Combat Medic, Doctor, Medic, Smuggler, and Tailor)


• 2 professions are able to harvest resources


• The majority of crafters need large stacks of resources for factory runs (most people don't bother with hand crafting)


• The number of dedicated harvesters in this game is much lower than the number of crafters depending on them


• People arebeing forced to do things they don't enjoy in order to obtain the resources they need


• Hunters are having to spend most of their play time hunting (often hunting boring creatures) in order to come close to the supply needed by any crafter able and willing to pay them


• Crafters are having to hunt, even if they don't want to, if they cannot afford to pay the hunter


• Even if the crafter can afford to pay the hunter the cost of the resources is increasing the price of any goods on the server leading to inflation and making it difficult to start a new character (although many crafters would still charge the same price if they got cheaper resources...)


• The increase in harvesting gained by obtaining Master Ranger over Novice Scout is not nearly enough to offset the loss of the skill points


• A Master Ranger only gets a 74% increase over a Novice Scout and a 33% increase over a Master Scout


• This leads to people who would be most interested in obtaining these resources not being the best suited to do so

For multiple harvesting:

• Of the 10 professions needing organics, at least 4 of them have at least some goods for which they do not care about resource quality (Architect, Artisan, Smuggler, and Tailor)


• In addition, most people learningcrafting professions use large amounts of worthless (grind) resources to speed up their experience gains


• The time spentobtaining low quality resources makes their cost very close to that of good resources (there is very little reason to ever hunt grind grade resources because something will always pay more for the time spent)


• Multiple harvests would allow us to fill this niche market without detracting from our ability to harvest worthwhile resources


• It would also allow crafters to have several lines of goods (some of worse quality than others) because the cost of low quality resources could be significantly lower than that of high quality resources


• Also, Rangers and Scouts need their own organic resources to make tents, traps, and camouflage kits


• There is currently a market for low quality organics that is largely ignored. Multiple harvesting would give this market a chance.


• While one might argue that larger single resource harvests would make a lot more money for the Ranger, multiple harvesting would be better for the community in general. With single harvesting, the price of low quality organics is close to that of high quality ones. With multiple harvests, the Ranger will have spare resources to either use themselves or sell cheaply.

I hope that is enough for you. I can probably give even more information if you think it would help but keeping it short is important in this situation. The Devs are busy and are likely to miss things in a longer document. Also, would they consider looking at the trapping mod at the same time? If they are going to look at us at all, we might want to throw a bit in there. Something like:

• Currently, traps have very little effect on larger creatures


• Most Master Rangers are also Masters of an elite combat profession


• When solo, traps fail extremely often on creatures that the Master Ranger has little trouble killing with their elite combat profession


• When grouped, the creatures a Master Ranger is fighting are usually harder (and therefore have an even lower chance of being trapped)


• This makes traps almost useless for normal hunting once a player has finished their skill set (there are some uses, like helping lower level characters advance more easily, but not enough to justify the skill points)

As for giving him a letter, it might be best to just bullet it. I don't think Thunderheart cares too much about presentation. It's more about making it clear, easy to read, short, and informative. While making it into a story (like NRaas was so good at) would be more interesting but I'm not sure there is enough information to present to really warrant it.

Also, getting the support of the crafters on this front might help even more now. Looking at a proposal is one thing. Implementing it ASAP is another. The crafters could help us push this up on the Devs schedule.

Lythender Nirou
Master Ranger/Master Rifleman
Eclipse Server

Edit: Congrats on the editting, KaiRaene. It really is nice to have it

Edit 2: Info on the actual percentage of harvest increase (in green).

Message Edited by Nemo0 on 04-01-2004 01:37 AM

Message Edited by Nemo0 on 04-01-2004 01:39 AM

Be sure toinclude medic to doctor comparisons when showing the need to have more harvesting than scout. That's the closest analogy to ranger/scout comparisons, since Doctors are elite forms of the entire medic profession (whereas combat professions are elite forms of only one branch of a novice profession, so it is a less accurate comparison) Doctors are hugely more beneficial than medics, but the game would survive with only scouts harvesting (albeit with a heavily borked resource market - but the entire economy is already messed up anyway) and no rangers. There needs to be a need for rangers over scouts, and increased harvesting over scouts is a step in that direction.

The posts above explain the reasons well. IMHO the concluding question should be, is a Bounty Hunter or a Master Scout + Combat professions intended to be a significantly better harvesting combination than Master Ranger + Combat profession? This is currently the case.

Increased harvesting and trapping mods would help a Ranger (and hence the community) become a better harvester. Multiple resource harvesting would create distinctiveness from the Scout profession without changing the role of either profession.

Ok I didn't read the above posts, I just wanted to get my reasons in.

Rangers are supposed to be the players that are relied upon for the organic resources. The masters of the wild.

Ranger is not a combat profession

A Commando with Novice scout can collect more organic resources over time solo than a ranger can due to his ability to kill creatures more effeciently.

The Harvest Mod needs to be adjusted to compensate for this.

Currently the Ranger class is looked upon as a waste of skill points, and this is one reason why. If someone can be a commando and participate in pvp and then spend the 15sp on novice scout and out harvest a master ranger, then what is the point of being a ranger? (this of course basing the question on the harvesting issue alone)

Rangers need a reason to exist at this point. Increasing the Harvest mod to a point where a Master Ranger who has Carbines 4 (or Rifles or Pistols) can out harvest a Commando with Novice scout over time would bring some sense of purpose back to the profession.

Also other classes complain about Rangers (and only Rangers even tho some other classes are known to inflate their prices) inflating the prices of resources. Well increasing the Harvest mod would deflate the economy (in theory) and therefore be beneficial to all classes who require organic resources for their trade.

Following up, I posted a story on the SWG Rangers site asking Rangers to come to this thread and get their inputs in.

I think Nemo0 covered just about everything I could think of, but there's one thing in particular that is extremely important:

Our economic function is to supply organic resources, but as it stands our bonuses are not enough to make us more effective at gathering them than if we were to just take two elite combat profs, instead of an elite combat and ranger. We need the edge in order to actually fill our market niche.