Ranger Archive
Thread: State of the Profession (Sep 12 / 2003)
State of the Profession (Sep. 12 / 2003)
- Alrighty then. Time to consolidate the issues into a single post.
- These issues are in no particular order
General
- Many Rangers have noticed a reduction in the number of random (non-mission) spawns when travelling far away from any towns, was this intentional?
Harvesting
- Grouping with pets (either Creature handler or Faction) invokes the 60% harvesting rule
- The addition of /group harvest off to turn off the 60% harvesting rule and revert to the earlier rule set
- Issues with creatures with skinny resources appearring for 24 hours after the resource has shifted
- Request to add in single-corpse multiple-resource harvesting at the Master Ranger level
/conceal
- Many Rangers find the current implementation of /conceal to be cost prohibitive. The effective of the camoflauge kits does not offset the incredible resource cost associated with the command.
- By the description given in the Coorespondent Responses it was expected that conceal would rarely break, that has not been the result that the Rangers have seen.
- There is no default macro icon for the command
- When a person with camoflauge skill has a camoflauge kit applied to them by another player, whose camoflauge skill is used when camoflauge is checked by creatures?
- Request to have only aggressive creatures attempt to break your camoflauge
- Issues about concealers being unable to tell whether their group members are concealed or not
- Request to reduce the likelyhood of camoflauge break causing a creature to attack you
- Issue with creatures warping to your location when they break your camoflauge
- Issue where You can not /conceal if you have /maskscent enabled
Camoflauge Kits
- Request to remove the specific resource types from the camoflauge kits. Most Rangers feel that having the resources Planet Specific is sufficient (rather than having to find a specific meat on the planet
) - Several of the resources required by camoflauge kits are so rare, that no Ranger has yet to find them (Lok domesticated meat for instance).
- Factory Crates of kits have no charges, and each kit therefore has infinite charges
/examine
- Request to display the "fat, medium, skinny" quality of each resource
- Request to display the bone resource
- Request to display the Social Assistiveness of a creature
- Request to display the speed of a creature (so we can know whether we can outrun it using burstrun)
/forage
- Many Rangers have requested that /forage pull up the flora components required by the camoflauge kits.
/areatrack
- There is no animation when the skill is being performed
- There is no default macro icon for the command
- Request to increase the range of the command to 1000m
- Request to increase the number of items listed in the window to greater than 50
- Issue with the command and the vertical plane. Namely problems using it on mountainous terrain
- Issue with the command registering dead animals, house signs, vendors in homes, etc.
/takecover
- Issues with moving after performing this action
Camps
- Do Ranger camps actually repel aggressive creatures?
- There is no experimentation possible on Camps
Traps
- Request to use traps on Creature Handler traps (possibly receiving no exp for doing so)
- Request to use traps on Humanoid NPCs
- Request for a macro command for throwing traps, such as /throwtrap bonespur
- There is no experimentation possible on Traps
Creature-to-Hit bonus
- Many melee based Rangers have requested that this bonus be applied to melee weapons as well
- Ifthe bonusisalready being applied to meleers, kindly change the text description to reflect such
- Request to add a Creature-to-Dodge bonus for melee fighters
Skill Experience
- The experience caps are apparently still set to pre-patch values, and were not adjusted with the increased Scout experience requirements
-----
- Comments are welcome and pretty much required. 
- Please note any omissions, or errors.
- I have not been asked to submit anything, so therefore is no Top Five issues. But you may suggest themif you wish. 
-Please post anythreads that shed more light on these issues, that I don't have listed in the link below.
-- Request a developer make a master ranger and go to Endor. Request to see webcam picture of developer's facial expressions when aggressive animals attack you from outside their normal attack range.
Stuff that attacks at about 30 meters will attack you from over 64 when maskscent fails. So if you could fix it so the aggressive creature will only attack you when maskscent fails when you're within their normal attack range, that would be great.
1. Logic: Why would an animal that doesn't attack you when you're outside it's range suddenly go rabid when it smells you outside it's range? I know you're trying to balance the benefit of maskscent, but it makes maskscent a liability. It's like having the keys to your Porsche but a 1 in 20 chance that the Porsche's engine will explode when you drive it.
2. Gameplay: Just make it so if an animal detects you it's not more likely to assault you than if you didn't have maskscent on in the first place.
Thanks,
YP
Camps
- High Tech Field Base should stay up longer or until the Ranger logs out or chooses to disband the camp.
- A HTFB should not disengage when a Ranger enters combat.
/maskscent
- The ability to use mask scent should not dissipate while gaining higher ranks with Ranger. If anything, mask scent should remain the same or slightly greater in the ranger class
- Mask scent should stack with camo-kits for added protection.
Nice Work N'Raas. Couple of small things
/forage - Fix the inventory full bug
/Examine - Put back the base numbers of harvest amounts in parenthesis like it used to be.
As far as fat and skinny, I don't think we're ever going to see this because the same mob will fat if harvesting hide or skinny if harvesting meat, depending on the resource shift. Perhaps if the base numbers reflected, that would be a great indication. But it doesn't make sense to say that it's fat for one thing and not another.
I'm not mentioning the harvesting thing because I know N'Raas and Delta will be tackling GreenMarine if he's back in the office Monday to get the numbers back (or at least real close) to what they were and ask that they monitor, as Delta outlined in his email.
"The ability to use mask scent should not dissipate while gaining higher ranks with Ranger. If anything, mask scent should remain the same or slightly greater in the ranger class"
- /maskscent actually reduces in effectiveness in Ranger? That definitely doesn't sound correct.
- Has anyone noticed this problem?
"Mask scent should stack with camo-kits for added protection."
-Depending on how they fix the /conceal problems, this might not be necessary.
"But it doesn't make sense to say that it's fat for one thing and not another."
- I really don't think you want me to ask for "skinny" on all the resources on a creature, do you?
"I'm not mentioning the harvesting thing because I know N'Raas and Delta will be tackling GreenMarine"
- Thank you for reminding me. I've added a couple more elements to my next list to reflect this:
- The across the board reduction in harvesting seems to be far greater than intended. Many Rangers have asked for a return to the original values in lieuof the recent camp resource increases.
- Harvesting bonus seems to be no longer significant enough to make it worthwhile.
After you /conceal, you can not toggle it on/off like you can for mask scent. The only way to get rid of it is to log for an extended period of time, or if it actually does get broken by something. Running around in the middle of nowhere, to be honest, it's hard to get /conceal to break.
You will get a message eventually saying your masked scent has worn off (same message as for /maskscent I believe). You think, ok great, now I can mask scent ... not gonna waste another camo kit, so I'll just mask scent. Well, what happens is, it will still tell you that you can't mask scent while you are concealed. But supposedly you aren't /concealed anymore since it said it wore off. Anyway, you get the picture.
This is highly repeatable... please try it, a couple others have verified this as well.
Thanks,
"After you /conceal, you can not toggle it on/off like you can for mask scent"
- Interesting. But why do you need to turn it off? Is there something you can't do while you have it enabled?
- Once it wears off normally, you can simply /maskscent, I don't see why you need to force the command.
- Give me some background for the need on this one.
"You will get a message eventually saying your masked scent has worn off"
- This one has been noted for next time.
"it will still tell you that you can't mask scent while you are concealed."
- Noted.
NRaas wrote:"After you /conceal, you can not toggle it on/off like you can for mask scent"
- Interesting. But why do you need to turn it off? Is there something you can't do while you have it enabled?
- Once it wears off normally, you can simply /maskscent, I don't see why you need to force the command.
- Give me some background for the need on this one.
"You will get a message eventually saying your masked scent has worn off"
- This one has been noted for next time.
"it will still tell you that you can't mask scent while you are concealed."
- Noted.
Well, a little background. Back when /maskscent wasn't working very well a few weeks ago, I got into the habit of toggling it on when i approached reds and then off again when a yellow was on the radar, to avoid having it broken. So in the process of testing the new /conceal and the /maskscent changes, I just did the same thing. That's why I noted that you can not toggle /conceal like you can for /maskscent.
But what you said was incorrect, once it wears off normally, you can hit /maskscent, but you still can't toggle it like normal. You will get the message that you can't mask scent while concealed. Only when /conceal is broken by something is it officially "off".
Admittedly, this isn't gamebreaking, but just stuff I noticed because of my own play style. You also noted that you can't /conceal while mask scent is on I believe. I think that this points to the fact that something is screwy with the status the game thinks you are in and the issues are probably related.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
- Interesting. But why do you need to turn it off? Is there something you can't do while you have it enabled?
Using the conceal macro that I had in the other tab of the command window takes my conceal on and off when I use it more than once. And there are a bunch of reasons to take it off. If you are hunting with a large group of people to kill krayts and you want to coordinate your attack, and some idiot (like me) has conceal on and gets to 64m, the krayt will detect and attack before everyone else is ready, and can (and did) result in death.
"But what you said was incorrect, once it wears off normally, you can hit /maskscent, but you still can't toggle it like normal."
- Yes, rereading my own post I noticed that I simply answered my own question along the way (the other errors should have been obvious)
- Now both rek17 and FactionsJim noted the same reason for toggling off /conceal... To get around blatant problems with the skill itself.
"has conceal on and gets to 64m, the krayt will detect and attack before everyone else is ready"
- The solution to this one has been noted in another thread. Simply don't have aggressive critters begin attacking if you are still outside their aggression radius. The skill can still break sure, but they shouldn't come running at you from across the dune.
- I have noted this.
"off again when a yellow was on the radar, to avoid having it broken."
- I presume you did this because of the issues regarding critters attacking you when they break /maskscent.
-The solution to this is have only aggressive creatures bother checking /maskscent and /conceal. Having non-aggressives break the skill is just plain annoying and sort of pointless.
----
- I will add the request to the list, but it may be unnecessary depending on how the existing issues are resolved.
NRaas wrote:
"The ability to use mask scent should not dissipate while gaining higher ranks with Ranger. If anything, mask scent should remain the same or slightly greater in the ranger class"
- /maskscent actually reduces in effectiveness in Ranger? That definitely doesn't sound correct.
- Has anyone noticed this problem?
"Mask scent should stack with camo-kits for added protection."
-Depending on how they fix the /conceal problems, this might not be necessary.
While I cannot verify that /maskscent loses effectiveness when advancing up the Ranger tree (without surrendering my skills and making the slow trip back up), I can say that I have noticed that many Novice Rangers of various stages of advancement seem to have much more success with /maskscent and /conceal than I do.
Other than that, I think you covered most of my concerns rather nicely, and what you didn't PhiGon did with regards to Camps.
Good job!