Ranger Archive

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KiarraFlame wrote:
throw a camp directly between the village and the science outpost, and just sit there crafting camps works a treat

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rofl I never would have thought about that one, I'll have to keep it in mind.

Message Edited by Eyik on 03-02-2005 12:41 PM

Do you have an active and suppostive guild? I know that my guild, which prides itself in helping each other through their grinds was a little flustered when I said I was calling on their help for survival. They were more used to helping combat proffessions work. So I set up weekly fishing/camping trips for a while - XP was pouring in when I had 12-20 people camping with me. And it was great fun too - we had fireworks, dancers, musicians, pet shows, organized duels, etc. If you can swing it, it is great.

The other thing I did was run to middle of nowhere Endor, and live out of there for a week. I brought a couple of droids filled with my food (hey, I like to eat) and stims. Everything else I needed, I could hunt/craft right there. When I was done for the night I logged right there. It was an enlightening experience in how to survive for real in SWG. Oh, and in case you hadn't picked up from my word choice - that tree took me about a month to finish, and that felt 'fast'.

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GraySeven wrote:

Can some one tell me why macroing or AFKing camps AS THEY CURRENTLY ARE is so bad in this community?

Lets face it, camping xp is a long, drawn out drag. The amount you get versus the time it takes to get it is seriously out of line with all the other professions except BH Investigation xp...and they fixed that, to an extent.

Instead of being jerks, how about being nice? Some people don't have the option of a large group they can count on to spend time in their camps. When was the last time you saw a pick-up group of Krayt Hunters or DWB people sitting around a camp? For me, it was over a year ago.

When I was making the final push, those last two boxes I got by sitting in a camp and crafting camps simply because it was taking too stinking long. This doesn't make my accomplishment any less than any other MR, because everything I needed to know about camping I learned in Scout!

So instead of griefing by training MOB's into camps, how about hanging out and healing for a bit to help someone get through the worst profession line in the game.

I am ashamed at the lot of you.

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I think a lot of us object to the "this is stupid; why do I have to do this; this isn't fun; why can't I just be super elite in one day" ultra-entitled attitude, the how can I-circumvent-every-game-system-for-my-immediate-personal-benefit attitude.

It isn't that we think that getting tons of camping xp is a special accomplishment or that we are more special than other people because we've done it once, or in my case, multiple times -- if anything, the seemingly endless spew of hairbrained schemes that get posted in threads like these attest that camping xp is neither hard nor especially challenging to come by -- it's just that after reading these forums for over a year and reading entitled post after entitled post about the apparent hardships of getting camping xp when in fact our own experience tells us otherwise has gotten a little old -- well, actually quite old.

For the record, there's three ways to get camping xp: the easy way (get a crafter's macro, tons of resources, and craft camps in a camp), the easy way (hunt unbuffed and use your camps to heal as you climb the scout and ranger trees), or the easy way (insert some other "creative" scheme here). So, get on with it or get out - just stop complaining - or if you have to complain at least do it in a way that is entertaining.

Seriously - how many times do you see someone posting "hey guys, I need help with my camping xp, so I'm going to set up a camp at this waypoint during these hours on this server and throw a little party; I would really like to meet everyone, so please stop by if you can"? Never - instead, we get, "hey, I can pull and store my pet multiple times to get easy xp" or "hey, I can pitch my tent along some well travelled path so that people have to help me get xp whether they want to or not -- oh, I'm going to be afk the whole time, soI hope that they don't want to talk to me haha."

The irony here of course is thatthese sorts of posts always ask for help in determining the way to avoid getting consensual help from other people in-game. Here, I say "consensual" because, let's face it, parking a camp between the science outpost and the village really doesn't take into account whether or not other players want to help you or not. In my view this sort of behavior is almost as bad as they guy who posted here one saying that he got easy trapping xp by following people around and throwing traps at their mission targets whether they wanted him to or not.

Both behaviors encourage taking advantage of other players. and I think that this is why these sorts ofthreads bother me so much: the same logic that justifies exploiting games systemsjust as easily justifiestaking advantage of other players, andit's a self-interested, ultra-entitled logic that values one's personal ends over even a basic consideration of others. Why should people be forced to drive around yourAFK camp on the way to the village, or back in the days before mounts or speeders, why should people have been forced to swim accross the Theed river rather than cross the bridge and wade through the twelve obligitory afk camps on either end? Yes, there are (and were) only small inconveniences, but they get magnified by their constant and inane repitition -- sort of like these sorts of threads.

And before you say "but my afk scheme doesn't involve other players so it should be exempt from your tirade," you being logged in AFK solely to gain xp takes up server time and memory that could be used by the ATK players, and yes I realize that you pay $xx dollars a month too, but in my book the people playing the game as designed deserve some consideration here too -- is it really fair that some AFK toon parked between the science outpost and the village should be taking up server time that could be used to generate, say, more spawns for those who are actually awake in-game and working towards their own goals?

So to answer the question you have posed, "Can some one tell me why macroing or AFKing camps AS THEY CURRENTLY ARE is so bad in this community?," AFK camps (and the 12 posts a week asking about them) are viewed with such disdain by here not only because we see them to be as unnecessary and ultimately as pointless as complaints about camping xp being too "hard" or "boring,"but also because the constant calls for AFK camping schemesseem to alwaysdependupona self-interested, entitled logic thatjustifiesexploting game systems and other players for one's own personal benefit.

Iseult
Master Ranger / Mediocre Rifleperson
Bloodfin

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GraySeven wrote:

Oh....okay. You aren't against easy ways to earn camping xp, you're against people who do it in such a manner as to intrude upon the game experience of others...

Still, does it excuse dragging critters into someones camp? And have you ever complained about (or used) and AFK entertainer?

I've nothing against AFK that doesn't intrude on others game experience, but is it so wrong for someone to go out into the boonies and run an AFK Macro so that they can use their playing time to enjoy the game experience.

That so many complain about Camping should raise the red flag to the Dev team that Camping needs fixing. I know this is on the agenda, I just wish they'd hurry it up.

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Yep - I would definitely agree that dragging aggros on to people is, as Meredith puts it above, "in poor taste," and I'm not really sure that correspondants should be giving that advice to people. JB's point about not training AFK's makes a lot of sense though, and I think it's going to be my policy from here on out as well. After all, killing some AFK guy might be funny, but it really doesn't solve the underlying problem, which is that the AFK'er is consuming server resources that could be used by an ATK player.

I understand that the Dev's gave players such a robust macro'ing system because they wanted to level the playing field between those who knew how to run third-party macro-systems and thus gain a significant advantage in games like ultima online, etc...and those who didn't, but I think that its potential for AFK'ing is one of the things that is really holding this game back. Someone sitting AFK in the wilderness using server cycles that could be used by ATK players might not be as obvious as all of the AFK dancers in the cantina or the AFK spammers in front of the starport, or the AFK looters,or the ranger equivalent, the AFK campers parked in front of the theed bridge or between the science outpost and the village, but they aren't really helping things either. At best, they're not bothering anyone, but they are still using server cycles that could be dedicated to the activities of the ATK players. Maybe the spawn system has changed, but back in the day TH announced that planets cut back on natural spawns as the player population increases, so I think it's really hard to argue that AFK players, whether they be parked in the middle of nowhere or at the spaceport, are essentially harmless. I do understand that people go AFK for 20 minutes or so to go to the store, etc... -- that's not such a big deal, but the people who leave themselves logged in 24/7 (worse now that the server's don't reset) to farm xp or loot or just spam their store really need to be dealt with.

As for entertainers, I was in the cantina the other night, and this guy was begging one of the dancers for a mind buff -- the dancer just said, "no, you used the Tylor" (the Tylor's were a notorious bloodfin AFK clan), andwalked off. Thatwas very heartening to see.

Iseult
Master Ranger/ Mediocre Rifleperson
Bloodfin

The macro system in this game is aweful. I've never seen any sign that the servers are even 50% loaded.

90% of the problems I hear about people having are on their system not the servers. Even when they think they are.

People commonly reffer to "Lag" when what they mean is Virtual Memory Swapping. Stuff like that.

I constatly have a Ping tine in the 80s to Corbantis. I very much doubt its loaded.

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agent156 wrote:
The macro system in this game is aweful. I've never seen any sign that the servers are even 50% loaded.

90% of the problems I hear about people having are on their system not the servers. Even when they think they are.

People commonly reffer to "Lag" when what they mean is Virtual Memory Swapping. Stuff like that.

I constatly have a Ping tine in the 80s to Corbantis. I very much doubt its loaded.

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If you're in the game and AFK and running a macro to prevent auto-logout, then the servers have to dedicate cycle time to your char, and that is cycle time that is not available to ATK players, cycle time that could be used to generate more wild spawnsto help out witha pvp battle going on somewhere, etc. No, it's probably not a big deal if we're just talking about one character, but on my server, we're talking about 100's, if not more, AFK players logged inat any giventime. Everytime those chars send a message to the server to circumvent the auto-logout mechanism, the server has to deal with them. Whether the servers can handle the loadis irrelevant -- obviouslythey can (or can they?) -- my point is that all of these chars are consuming server time that could be dedicated to people actually playing the game, so even seemingly "harmless" AFK still depriving ATK players of server resources.

And, by the way, "ping time," measures the time it takes your packets to travel from your computer to the server. These packets don't go directly from your client to the server, but are relayed through a number of intermediate steps(if you don't believe me, figure out how to use tracert), so "ping time" is not an adequate measure of server performance. It just measures howlong it takes your packetsto travel from yourcomputer to theserver.

When I'm wandering around in the middle of corellia, and I see no wild spawns, then that would indicate to me that the server isn't performing very well. Of course, it could just be a bug -- wild spawns seem to be very good for the first 24 hours or so after the server reset -- or it could be that the server is running out of resources and has decided to scale back to handle the more immediate demands of the player population, or it could bea combination of both. I'm not a server engineer for SOE, so I have no way of knowing exactly what's going on, but TH did post to say that the servers scale back wild spawns when the player load increases. AFK players, of course, add to this load.

Iseult
Master Ranger / Mediocre Rifleperson
Bloodfin