Ranger Archive

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Roroa wrote:

right, 1st off, i am not a ranger (yet, i am going to go for master tho) and i am going with m/rifleman to go with it for PvP. i read the 1st page of this post, and i think its a good idea to give rangers something more to do, but i understand that this idea would not work as not everyone wants to be rifleman with ranger. therefore i think a nice idea would be for ranger to be a recon/anit recon style side to the GCW. so my idea is as follows:

-it will take you off the map, and make you invisable, with your name gone, people on the same fraction can see you, but you have a somthing above your head saying your in stealth.

-this skill can only be used for someone that is overt. (so this brings in a nasty side, get seen for some reason or another, and your pritty much dead)

-camo has to be worn, so if you do get seen, you don't have a uber set of compo on.( camo takes up every slot, eg boots, helm, CP, bracers etc)

-anyone with in 70m of you (on an apposing fraction, who has to be overt) will lead you to been seen, this will therefore mean you can't pop out, and start shooting, this therefore means that melee rangers are kept happy.

-using a form of area track wile using the skill, with a range of 250m will produce a 'picture' like using your ctrl+m style map, which will show a snap shot of anyone (overt or covert) of the apposing fraction. this skill could then me set on a timer, eg it takes 10secounds to produce this 'picture' in which you can't get in to combat, so if someone sees you, you can't fight back, also once you have used this skill, it will not work again for a period of time, say 5min.

-to stop people jumping out at 70m, and then getting with in range with a rifle, there could be a 20secound timer, in which they can't start combat. this again stops people using this to 'jump' other players.

-can enter cites in which you have been banned from, altho if courght you will be worped outside again.

-master rangers have the ablity to see other rangers of apposing fractions wile using the skill, but again this could be set on a timer, and wile they are doing this they can't attack back, this then stops rangers from sitting in a city using a macro to find the ranger that could be there.

-also if they are found, they can't put the camo on for 3 hours, this then stops rangers from carrying nothing, and just dying, then going back to the same place to start spying again.

-set a maxium time of using the camo, like 15min.

i have no idea how this would be put in to the system, but tell me what you think anyway

Roroa

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I've played SWG since Beta. And I played DAOC for 2 and a half years, so I know the mechanics of Stealth in DAOC.

I see 2 problems with your comments:
1) if members of your faction can see you, then it will be possible for "spies" to relay information about your current location. Plus, you'll have the server choose which clients to send information about your location and which clients to skip. This would add overhead and allow for a bunch of exploits similar to a program called "Radar" which was used in DAOC extensively.

2) The proposal for Stealth was for the very interest of adding Ranger to the GCW, if you make it so that it only works for ranged professions with your 70m limit, then it denies that purpose automatically. Rangers should be able to "jump" someone, we are masters of camouflage, and we should choose how to use that mastery. However, I do think the timer to re-stealh like DAOC has would be a good idea.

3) I like the idea of having a "chance" to detect other rangers in the area with /areatrack, but it should be based on the difference between your Camouflage skill and the opposing Rangers.


Now, my comments:
1) Master RAngers should have a way to Camouflage a whole High Tech Field base, along with everyone inside, as long as certain conditions are met: nobody inside is attacking, etc.

2) Stealth should be able to bypass faction detectors, AT-STs, GCW turrets, etc., and, depending on your other skills, allow for different combinations. For example, a Master Ranger/Master in any ranged combat profession should be able to disable turrets; a Master RAnger/Master Architect might be able to disable a whole base's defenses, or a Master Ranger/Master TKM might be able to disable AT-STs, or even turn them against their own factions (yes, all my examples are from a Rebel Ranger's Point of View)

3) Now that we have stealth, give us traps that work on Players. Allow us to set mines for ambushes. Since we already have a great deal of Creature Knowledge, helps us leverage that knowledge and give us the option to craft poisons and antidotes out of those creatures that we can apply to traps, in the case of poisons, or sell to players, in the case of antidotes. Btw, maybe poisons are already part of the CM's template, why not allow us to craft high level poisons that only they can use? Running with the idea, maybe the word "poison" can be exchanged for "substance" and we can craft different substances that do different things (ie. root, poison, disease, confuse, etc.)

My two credits.

• Character's react to combatbased on A.I., not the player's reaction. What I mean by this is that your character always responds to attack by fighting back, whether you're ready or not. How many times have you been wandering out in the wilderness and gotten shot at by a freshly spawned NPCwhen you had no idea where it came from? Did your character just stand there and wait for you to decide which red dot to target and shoot back at? No. Your character starts fighting back immediately making the surprise attack much less of a threat. Consider that compared to a first person shooter style game where reaction is soley based on player input and any "sneak" attack can be quite deadly. Nevertheless, many first person shooters have a turn-off-radar function becausemany people prefer to have stealth included in the strategy of the game. (Ipersonally won't playon any Ghost Recon server where the radar is turned on.)

• There are no one-shot kills in SWG. Even if a melee ranger got a surprise attack on you, you'd still have time to fight back or run, because no attack kills another player in one hit. (Again there are examples in of other games where theopposite is truem yet people still enjoy them. In Halo, you can stay off a persons radar by moving slowly. If youget close enough, a single melee hit to the back is an instant kill.)

• The chances of a stealth - melee attack can easily be counteracted by movement speed, a timer and proximity detection. Forcing a Ranger to walk or even go prone is a reasonable condition for stealth, and would make it a lot harder to actually get within melee range of someone. Similarly, a time limit between stealth and the first attack (making the ranger visible for a few seconds)could help reduce the chance of surprise and lag. As a Ranger gets closer to someone, the chances of being detected could also greatly increase. Its been mentioned that too many checks could cause lag, but as far as I understand the proxmity of you and another target is checked regularly anyway. Notice the little numbers to the right of target as you move, which is your accuracy mod, determined by your weapon accuracy/skills and the distanced between you and the target.

Please discuss...

* I take no liability for anything I said. I'm a Ranger and a Melee profession, so its possible, however unlikely, that my position on the subject might be a little biased.

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BabyRancor wrote:

I have given this thought - and I've come to the same conclusion you have, stealth can only come from complete denial of information to the client. I'd wager that building in encryption at this point would be really complex, and probably lead to crippling lag as the packets are decoded on the client (lag is bad enough already with clear transmissions in some cases).

There is one concern that I've yet been able to solve though. We know that there is a lag from client to client that causes avatars to appear in positions different than the server registers them at. This lag can cause successful melee attacks to happen where the victim registers the attacker at 50m or more.

If stealth were employed in the fashion you suggest, would it not be open to taking advantage of this problem?

For example:

I drop prone at 128m, /conceal and start crawling in. My target's client now no longer has any information on where I am, but the server does. At 63m I pop up and hit a couple of strafe shots, now there is a period where I am effectively invisable as my position is translated to the client and that information rendered. I'm of course moving by that point, so the server has to keep updating and the client is lagging behind my actual position. I see it as very possible that I could pop up, strafe someone and burst-run out of visual range before their client even registers my position. The victim therefore couldn't attack and I could /conceal again and repeat as much as I wanted.

On the flip side, the only advantage a ranged person has against melee is just that - range. If I could crawl in, pop up and burst run in to a target I could probably be there and attacking before they even register my presence on their client. Same situation for combat medics (the ultimate first strike weapon) - it's the same sort of situation encountered with GTEF (unattackable players vs vulnerable targets).

Best case, even if the exploits were not as bad as I fear, the Ranger class would become the home of griefers and uber PvP players. These boards would look like the TKA boards and the GCW boards, and the "hunter" type Rangers would be even fewer and further between.

I personally think that Ranger should remain one of the only PvE oriented classes, and give us/ them (former Ranger here) some more specific (and relevant) content:

I'm thinking of /track, which would cause demand for Rangers to go through the roof as you could now get hunting content "on-demand" and not waste hours wandering around the landscape hoping for a spawn.

I'm thinking of trophy loot only available to rangers, everyone would want a rancor head to hang on their wall.

I'm thinking of factional missions only given to Rangers that result in finding a lost convoy, or a crashed ship, or a secret meeting place. From these missions alone should come the vast majority of the new schematics that the Dev's want in the game. Wookiee armour getting put in game? Armoursmiths now just seem to wake up with the knowledge of how to make this stuff. Instead, Rangers can take missions that send them to given planet, makes them track to a specific location (maybe spawn could be located via a similar interface as the resource survey window), and grants a brand new schematic upon completion that can now be sold to the highest bidder.

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Might not have much relevance, but I feel sure I have read somewhere that the CSRs have the ability to make themselves invisible but can still be found with /areatrack, perhaps this ability could be modified for use as stealth. The coding already exists.

I like it.... but special care should be taken to prevent exploits such as a 5 ranger group coming in and running a stealth shutdown of a base.. they should have to unstealth to run a shutdown....

Also, maybe it would be a nice feature to be able to -un- camo.. like we can un-mask