Ranger Archive

Hi all,

It seems to me that camps were the perfect solution for scouting problems when you need a lot of time to recover from contact with squill and the like. Once I hit Master Scout and start going places like Dantooine where buffs are expected, I'm finding it very hard to think of cases where I might use a camp. Please note the word USE - I'd like to find a purpose for the camps. I have no interest in switching to chef and buy Stim B by the crate so uses that involve making food or Stim A on the crafting station don't really interest me.

If anyone is interested, I've being doing a few experiments to try and get some value from camps.

1. Pop pets in and out to creat visitors.
This is not fun and I think it doesn't work. I am positive it helped at scout level but perhaps its an exploit that's been fixed. At scout level, you spend so much time healing yourself in camps (or at least I did) its hard to tell if other things matter.

2. Run SWG in background while doing other stuff on computer and pop a tent every 15 mins by alt-tabbing.
This works. But only to get 200-400 xp per camp. That kind of messing about is not what I pay a monthly fee for.

3. Hunt without buffs and heal in camps
This works - easily get over 1000 xp per healing session. You do need to get novice medic but most scouts have that anyway. You do need to be financially secure in the game because you waste a ton of time sitting by yourself in camp when you ought really be harvesting with your friends. You have to avoid dangerous hunts like rancor because getting slain when you are in a group is just not good teamwork. Its important to complete your own missions before camping or your group arrives at an empty destination - the old "update to exact location" thing can cause upsets if you aren't there to trigger it.

4. Help injured newbies on edge of cities like Mos Eisley.
How sad. Makes ambulance chasing look respectable. Do you wait til the poor sap is incapped or just down to 10%? Not tried this and don't plan to.

5. Pitch tent on bridge outside Anchorage that everyone passes on way to mission terminal. Write barking macro asking for visitors.
Seen this done - shudder to imagine putting my character through that degree of neediness.

6. Ask your friends to stop playing/hunting and sit about your camp
Nah - its just as pointless for them as it is for you. They don't get buffed to sit about in a camp waiting for me to get 10 mins wilderness xp.

7. Solo - just play alone
This works. Do it without a buff and without good armor. Get killed and don't go to pre-selected cloning facility. Come out with decent wounds to heal. Try to spread the healing over a couple of camps. I like to hunt alone but its hard to get profitable missions alone.

8. Buy a pet and and tell it kill rats, nuna and so on. Heal the pet afterwards in a camp
Pitch a camp for each rat killed and you can get 500-1000 xp each time. If you find a place between a few lairs or on edge on a city, this works. If my template allowed room for creature handling, this would be a great way to get wilderness xp and ch xp at same time.

9. Pitch a a camp after buff expires and hunt is over.
This works. You do need to ask people to use the camp but they understand you need the xp. And if injured, its a nice place to heal them. Remember to a have a camp ready. I wish the system would notice that the lair has been destroyed so I didn't have to blunder about getting stupid "too close to lair" messages.

So what do you use camps for?

As an aside, what on earth is the crafting station doing there? Is there a plan to have artisans set up mobile factories?

I'm looking for what people use camps for in SWG today. The Outdoorsman could be years away.

I have to be honest here. My camps are used for keeping my bank full.

I find that leveling camping is no problem as long as you have something useful to do while in the camp. Both times I have leveled frontiering I have also been in the process of leveling creature handler and trapping and also healing myself with self-made stims.

Usually a tamable baby or two would pop out of every mission lair I did. When my data pad was full I would set a camp and tame and releae them all. Then I would restock my trap supply, heal any wounds I had, and make some more stims. By the time I had done all this my camps were almost always maxxed on xp. During scout I had a problem remembering to put down a camp every so often, but after getting novice CH the full datapad was a good reminder and I didn't have much problem leveling.

Like you said this is a solo activity though. If you are trying to level frontiering solo after having already leveled everything else I can see why it would be really frustrating. Spaceport wait times are proof enough that people hate enforced down-time.

The most fun I had leveling was on group hunts, though now camp time is really only useful when waiting for friends to show up or facilitating speeder pulls. Still, it does add atmosphere and the fast xp gain adds a bit of gratification. Again, on group hunts the biggest problem I had was remembering to pop a camp when ever we had some down-time.

So basically camping is fun for me as long as I have something useful to do in a camp. I hope they allow BF healing in camps because inviting an entertainer out to heal me would be useful and, well, entertaining. Another thing I hope they add in is the ability to make trophies out of things we kill. This would also give people who ONLY have frontiering left something to do while they wait. Depending on how it is implemented it may also be a monkey-maker and so people would feel their time was even more well-spent.

Message Edited by Ailsa on 09-20-2004 03:11 PM