Ranger Archive

"As it is, unless I have a camp ready, I have to stop fighting well in advance of us finishing the mission to make sure that I have the camp ready before the lair's destroyed or the group doesn't have the patience to wait on it."

thats why you carry around crates of camps

"But they shouldn't be required for some of the most basic elements of a camp, especially the pet/vehicle recall module."

personally i like that 1. whenever I am on a krayt hunt i get people from other groups coming to my camp to recall and heal thier pet because for one reason or another they let it die. I was a CH and know how hard it is to keep pets alive against krayts, especially now they got nerfed, but that doesnt mean you should just let it die because you can just call and heal it later. Besides, why should I help the competition beat my group to the kill

"whenever I am on a krayt hunt i get people from other groups coming to my camp to recall and heal thier pet because for one reason or another they let it die."

I still think that my arguments against that being a module on camps is valid, despite that issue.

But you raise a great point that could be more easily solved than by using modules to allow an aspect of the camp that should be inherant. It sounds like camps should have the option to become private, so they can only be used by your group, for any aspect of the camp. This would sort of be the opposite of making your camp broadcast its location to the surrounding area.

So add this:

/broadcastCamp

/campPrivacy

By default all camps do not broadcast and are public. But with Ranger camps (not Scout camps) using the /broadcastCamp command would toggle on or off the broadcast feature. And all camps, even Scout camps, could be made private, or public again, by using the /campPrivacy command.

How's that sound?

Hunting blind camp. I like that idea. Might be even better if this was the only camp that could stay up during battle. Afterall, that's what a blind is for.

Woops, sorry, I read the other thread after this one.

But what's a Hunting Blind good for? What's the effect? Sounds like something that would only be useful if you're a marksman, and not everyone is. Already the Ranger profession favors marksmen far too much, I'd like to see a lot more support for brawlers.

I'm gonna search for the other ideas written about that Blind.

At first blush, the idea seemed to be pretty high in "cool factor." As I keep reading it though, it looks less and less interesting from my view as a Master Ranger as well as how the other professions would view something like this. The idea, I'm afraid, is suffering heavily from "mission creep." If there's any hope of any of this going live, I suggest that you pick some very basic goals and stick to them religiously. The proverbial "KISS" principle (Keep It Simpe, Stupid!) is supremely in need here.

First, why do people use camps now? To call vehicles and pets. To permit the healing of wounds. For the absolute maximum of time, the basic camp module currently does this very well. Why add the complexity of more camp types (modules, if you will)? So, do you take away the functionality of the current basic camp so you can add the complexity of a modular "vehicle recall" tent? Why as a developer, would I want to add more complexity to the system? Why, as a player, would I want to make this more complicated? Is there some sort of joy in fidgiting with crafting tools and schematics that I'm missing? KISS! I can craft a basic camp almost instantaneously. Do I really want to add more to the process?

"But Machs, we want to create a system where there's a benefit in using the higer level camps. So we need to set a baseline with which to expand on." Seems that this suggestion presupposes that desire for complexity is a substitue for true value. Just because we CAN create a complex camp DOES NOT mean that there will be any more demand over the more complex camps we ALREADY create. Why don't people put up the HTFB? Because its a rare occasion that anybody needs the benefit of crafting stations in the first place. People don't want to sit around in the field. They want to fight, and come prepared to do just that. Healers heal so you don't need the 1.0 healing factor vs. the 0.65 healing factor of the basic camp. As for adding the ability to heal BF, we've been asking for this for a long time. Why is it better to create a new type of camp than to simply add the ability to the higher-end ranger camps? I suspect that the dev's have reasons for this that none of the suggestions currently address.

As for garages, turrets, translocation, and faction supplies, why on earth would people need little things like player cities and faction bases if you did this? While some rangers might think this would be good for us, I'm not so sure the non-rangers who've invested in these other more mundane permanent solutions (cities and bases) would find much joy in this addition. KISS! Adding this stuff "sounds" neat, but I'm pretty certain that the likelyhood of them ever making it into a final solution is next to zero. All this does is give cause for the devs to throw the baby out with the bath water. And if you don't have this level of "modularity" in the design, the whole modular camp idea becomes vastly over involved to justify the few changes that could be simply added to the existing camp functionality.

So what to do? First, address the healing issue. People have been searching for a means to enable BF healing outside a cantina for as long as there's been a game. I'd like to either hear why the dev's seem so set against this or see them add them to the RANGER line of camps.

Also, people don't call the ranger camps over the basic camps in most field ops. The difference in the healing factor is pretty much a non-factor, and that's not even considering the drain on material to create the advanced camps. To make people WANT a better camp, have them increase the effectiveness of healerMEDS in addition to the increased healing rates. Stims would go a lot further in the better camps.

How about those folks who need camp experience? With the advent of FSS grinding, this has become more of a factor. Combined with the lack of benefit mentioned above, there's just no reason to tell somebody that they can't grind their camp experience in favor of some non-existant "better" camp. Perhaps if there was a way for the scouts to get exp along WITH the other folks, it would make the situation a bit better. As it is now, camps go up and camp exp caps in half the time it takes to get group back into shape. You are either forced to constantly destroy/deploy new camps or just accept that nobody is getting any exp after a few minutes. Perhaps there could be a "camp counter" added to the ranger camps, where the less skilled people simply deposit a camp kit into a hopper to get the benefit of being in the camp. This would allow camps to stay up longer so that if anyone actually ever wanted to use a crafting station, they'd get the chance.

Then there's the idea of having a semi-permanent field base. Harkening back to the time that the HTFB's were bugged and stayed up for long periods, I seem to remember that this was actually pretty popular. Bring it back! There seems to be decent enough demand. Failing this, add some sort of transfer functionality to the base. Or (as suggested in the other thread) make the HTFB a DATAPAD item, where you can only call one at a time, and then store (destroy camp upon store.. like they do with vendors).

Last issue is with respect to creatures. First, we (scouts/rangers) were under the impression that camps were supposed to offer some level of protection from wandering mobs. Instead of creating new "modules" to add this, just put the functionality into the ones we have.

Along with this is the issue dealing with creature spawn. "Field Blind" and such seemed targeted at this. There should be some means for a ranger to "trip" the dynamic spawns in an area so there is something to track/kill. Right now, its far easier to jump on a swoop and zip around till you find something. Why not add a "bot" to the ranger camps that deploys an NPC that triggers the spawns in the same way as a PC traversing the area? Then, the ranger can use his/her tracking skill to see where the "pops" are located. People save the wear-and-tear on vehicles and rangers get some sort of functionality for their tracking skill. The devs wouldn't have to worry about someone milking resources by "forcing" spawns. The bot would just do the same as any PC would do.

I like the modular camp idea, both because it has the potential to make camps viable and because we can get dependencies on other professions without losing our camps to them.

One thing you might keep an eye on is the Droid Engineer revamp. Droids are already a modular system very much like what is proposed here. Since they are getting a rebalance, incorporating those ideas into this one would likely help this idea get support from the devs.

Good ideas. Specially like the idea for making the fortified modules and allow combat. It's so annoying to builda camp and be the only guy NOT firing at the....wha tha..GIANT RANCOR KILLING MY FRIENDS!!

Team - "Hey you! Yeah, you in the camp! Give us a hand! We need your extra firepower!"

Ranger - "Hmph, silly groups. I'm busy keeping the fire going! I don't have time to help you fight the Rancor!"

Group - " "

Ranger - " "

Group - " ..... (dead)"

Ranger - "Glad I didn't fight. I might have had to rebuild the camp all over again. THEN where would they go to heal those nasty wounds they have....had....???"

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Machs wrote:

First, why do people use camps now? To call vehicles and pets. To permit the healing of wounds.

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And you forgot the biggest reason of all that people use camps: to grind camping experience so they can make bigger, camps that they'll never use either except to grind, lol.

Seriously, this is what I think as well. Simpler = better. 90% of the people, 90% of the time use camps to do what Machs says above (if they're not grinding). So that's where the devs ought to be focusing. To improve THAT, not the 1% case, but the 99% case. And here is a very simple solution to it: give rangers the ability to start a fire, thus creating a very simple but usable camp with no expenditure of materials, no crafting, no lugging crates of camps around, and no hassle, so that they can call vehicles, call pets, call droids, and heal. That's it.

I don't know how many times i have to keep saying this everytime the idea of new camps pops up, but couldn't we just start by getting our current camps fixed? Things like healing BF, stoping rainor repelling creatures?

Heck just make the current ones more functional with more eye-candy! For example, allow us to enter the HTFB bunkers and hold meetings in there , give the laser-fence the ability to "hum" and actually "zap" creatures that cross it (like one of this bug-zappers).

And to reiterate Machs point, we can't even get the dev (we only have one developer allocated to Ranger, and he has several other professions and functions under his belt) to address our concerns ref the current camps, how long do you think it will be before we can see anything like this modular camp? It sounds pretty cool on the surface, but the underlying programming sounds like a major resource drain to me and Sony has still to finish the various phases associated with combat changes as well as thei space expansion.

Also, any changes that do come should only be applied to Rangers. After all, the Scout is just a grind to another profession and should only have the very basic abilities. How many folks do you know that aspire to become just a Master Scout?

While this modular camp is very appealing, I would like to set it aside as one of our wish lists and concentrate on something that we actually have a chance on getting sometime soon.

Love this N'Raas. Very well done in all aspects, particularly the hunting blind at Novice Ranger.

Reading through the responses thus far, I am very high on the idea of the /broadcast camp or /camp privacy commands. I also like the idea of eliminating the existing crafting stations from the HTFB (perhaps as part of the treatise with the devs) to get modules or something else of more benefit to us. I may be thinking waaay out of the box here, but what about having (in exchange for the loss of the crafting stations) a station or module that allowed us to harvest (up to)all three resources from an animal? I'm just thinking out loud so bear with me. Part of this belongs in another thread, but perhaps at Novice Ranger we would get a /drag corpse command enabling us to drag them to the camps to harvest more of one resource, or additional resources i.e. meat as well as bone etc.

The HTFB would include in its basic camp schematic this station that allows the Ranger themultiple resourceharvesting ability. Rangers could progressively harvest a larger quantity of resources in our camps as we move up the Frontiering line.This would make the Frontiering line much more valuable to Rangers, and still stay within the vision. It would also be one of the "rewards" for hitting Master Ranger that we've been desiring for so long.

Just thinking in the simplest of terms, wouldn't it be easier for a Ranger to harvest more and multiple resources from a kill if he had the right tools and equipment for it?

Thoughts?

"and he suggested a mine field made by a commando."

Why not have the option for both? Add some flavour.

"So having some REAL elaborate crafting system for REAL elaborate huge tents that require tons and tons of resources (presumably)and submodules and all this stuff seems like big-time overkill to me."

The crafting system would open up a new market for selling completed camps by the crate.

Those of us who do not want to waste the time making the components and the camp could simply purchase it from a local Ranger Merchant who mass produces them.

I mean, it makes sense doesn't it? I you want the added conveniences, a person goes to the store and buys a manufactured tent, rather than making a lean-to everytime they want to sleep.