Ranger Archive
Thread: Harvesting Levels, a fix is needed.
Eklectrick wrote:
Veebrose wrote:
How about Rangers getting a bonus to the OQ of the resource? Say a bonus of 50 points at Novice ranger and then another 50 at Master ranger. This would reflect the rangers ability to harvest superior resources. A change in the levels of OQ would enable Rangers to harvest a higher quality product than other professions making ranger harvested resources more in demand. Choosing OQ as the stat to increase works because it is used for all calculations in crafting.
Any thoughts?
I don't think that the resource stats can work like that. in other words, the quality of a resource is set by what type it is on the server, to add a variable that increases a stat depending on who harvested it would be very hard to code.
There is another way tho - we could give rangers the skills to improve the quality of meat,hide & bone after the point of harvesting.
Wayfaring: Keep Camo. Top out Terrain Negotiation @ scout (I mean really, is anyone crawling?). Add Defense vs Creatures ('cause Mask and Camo don't always work)
Frontiering: Kill me off. All I use them for is getting more xp to further complete this line of skills. I would use them to heal, but I have a droid. Novice scout was all I needed. (Replaced below)
Tracking: Keep me the same. Make area track spawn creatures, or at the least make it work.
Advanced Trapping: Think Combat Medic vs Creatures and you've got the idea.
Big Game Hunting: More Harvest Bonuses (to get to that percentage we deserve) . Harvest Trophy ability (uses up the harvest of the creature). Creature to-hit Bonuses (which I must insist work in melee)
We're the profession to go nuts with. We're PvE. Very few people will whine over us smoking creatures like mad. At least let a Elite Combat Master/Master Ranger creature kill as fast as some of the pure combat+ Novice scout templates.
Maximum_Overload wrote:
(I mean really, is anyone crawling?)
Yes.
darmokVtS wrote:
Yes.
Well, I'd stick it in the Scout level Terrain negotation and move on at the ranger level. I'd honestly forgotten completely about rifleman...
I mean, I became a scout so I could camp under the stars, hike and eat granola. I became a ranger to be a master of the wilds, not to camp in a bigger (but no more useful) camp under the stars, hike marginally faster and eat granola.
Eklectrick wrote:
...snip another valid point...
DFH wrote:
...snip a valid point...
Yep 
I think we should think "outside the box" on this one. Perhaps the third way is to increase our numbers. We can't have a profession (fun as it might be) filled with us crazies that even if all the skill boxes were empty would still be here.
That won't happen unless there is a real paramilitary function for us. I have said it before, I will say it again, the only thing that fits is stealth. REAL stealth, one that affects how a battle is planned. How this is implimented can be debated. How strong an effect and how to quantify that can also. But this is really the only thing that would even come close to grabbing folks attention.
Jump on over to the Doctor or BE forums, and listen to the complaints of crafters who can't get enough meat to keep their vendors stocked. From the players' perspective there is definitely a shortage of creature resources. It is simply my contention that this is by design.
Obviously if the Devs increased the harvesting levels too much then it could indeed wreck the economy but from my very simplistic observations It appears to me that the harvesting levels could be increased another 20 to 30 % without that happening.
Sorry, but only the devs have the information needed to make that judgement. They see the Big Picture -- we don't.
There is another way tho - we could give rangers the skills to improve the quality of meat,hide & bone after the point of harvesting.
No, it can't be done. In programming terms, the attributes of a named resource are static variables. I can think of ways around this but they'd be prohibitively expensive.
"You don't want to sell at 150cpu. You want to go home and examin your price."
You're right...I want to sell at 200 CPU....
DFH wrote:
There is another way tho - we could give rangers the skills to improve the quality of meat,hide & bone after the point of harvesting.
No, it can't be done. In programming terms, the attributes of a named resource are static variables. I can think of ways around this but they'd be prohibitively expensive.
Why?
Every other
DFH wrote:
.
There is another way tho - we could give rangers the skills to improve the quality of meat,hide & bone after the point of harvesting.
No, it can't be done. In programming terms, the attributes of a named resource are static variables. I can think of ways around this but they'd be prohibitively expensive.
Why? Even we have schematics and every other profession has schematics based upon the qualities of the meat and hide. Surely they could create schematics where we could input meatthat thenoutputs meat with a greater OQ for example.
And apologies for the triple post. Must remember not to press tab 
They would have to generate at least one additional resource type for each creature resource type -- an additional type for every attribute that could be enhanced. This gets prohibitive fast.
Example: you harvest Naboo Insect Meat "Fred", with DR 380, FL 491, OQ 500 and PE 290. If you have a process that improves the OQ (to, say, 550), the only way that can be done is if at the same time the game generated Fred, it also generated Naboo Insect Meat "Barney", with OQ 550 and all the other stats the same. If you can improve the other three qualities, then we need Wilma, Betty and Pebbles too. And this has to be done for every specific type of meat in the game, because it matters if that's Naboo Insect Meat or Dathomirian Insect Meat (and no, you can't homogenize types that aren't currently specifically called for because you don't know what future schematics will call for) -- so we just doubled at least, maybe quadrupled, the database requirements for meat types. (Bone and hides have five attributes so they're even worse.) And nota bene: you can't feed Barney into the improvement process, unless we generate even more resource types, and so on....yecch. This means making a change to the data type for creature resources, too, so we can have some kind of pointer showing what the upgraded resource is, one pointer for each improvable attribute...fundamental changes to data structures are Bad. (You'd probably make a lookup table to avoid having to change data structures...it's still going to be ugly.) To make matters worse, creating these new resource types means creating instances of them, as players make two or four stacks of meat where they used to only make one -- meaning more items in the game, meaning another performance hit.
On top of all of this, how big an improvement in quality do you think you could get? Would all that programming effort be justified for a mechanism that lets Rangers improve resources by 10%? Remember, high quality resources are rare because they are supposed to be rare. And finally, again, we are still talking about improving our ability to do a blue-collar job. The people who buy this stuff from us are already trying to get us replaced with machines.
I can't see it happening. Too much work for the level of improvement they could even think of giving us.
Not to mention that all the miners would whine that they don't get to refine their products.
DFH wrote:
Why? Even we have schematics and every other profession has schematics based upon the qualities of the meat and hide. Surely they could create schematics where we could input meat that then outputs meat with a greater OQ for example.
I can't see it happening. Too much work for the level of improvement they could even think of giving us.
Nah, don't think so, no way. It would actually be balanced. It's not like these folks with 0-0-4-0 scouting and an awesome combat template have 100 or whatever skill points just burning a hole in their pockets. Those folks would say "wow, I want to be a ranger" but then realize they'd have to invest 60 more skill points just to get the *novice* ranger box, and then they'd realize they'd have to give up a lot of their firepower, and pvp viability to get it, and that would be the end of that for most of them. Also if the concern was to discourage the "ranger dabbler" (i.e. those who would get 0-0-4-0 in ranger and walk away with 90% of the benefits of being a ranger), no problem, just do it like they did it in CH. Spread the harvesting bonus through every box of the ranger tree and scale it so high level boxes give more.
If they did that, Gold, people would stampede into the Ranger profession and send resource availability through the roof -- and the economy and overall game balance into Wacky Land.
Message Edited by GoldMemberBria on 03-09-2004 02:27 PM