Scout Archive

Blast you exploration missions! I saw an easy 8k by hunting two minor gulfdrogs. But i had to find them my self! (I should've become a ranger.)

2?? better look again, its probably 45. If it's 2 I will do these all day long.

What you may want to do is hook up with a buddy, get 3 gulf drog missions, go do them. Make sure you get one shot into every drog, it counts towards your explorer mission then. Repeat til ya hit whatever the magic number was (I can't believe it was 2, I get 45 all the time, why I don't do these missions).

JB

Grrr i guess im sticking to Regular missions then

Heheh

Exploration Terminals are a waste of time. I've gotten silly things like finding 45 Hermit Spider Queens. Then spent an hour trying to find hermit spider nests and only getting 2...only one of which spawned a queen.

I got another to find 45 capper spineflap drones...which I thought would be easy...2 hours and 15 drones later I decided I'd had enough of that.

That was over 2 months ago.

Exploration terminals are meant to get you out into the wild exploring, but if you're looking to make money as a scout with it then good luck to you. You'll need it. Some people claim to get an exploration mission for critter X...then find corresponding destroy missions. Its not a reliable method because some critters don't appear on exploration missions -- especially at higher levels.

As with many things in the game, Exploration missions could have been something cool and immersive, but suffer from hurried or unimaginative development.

Sorry, it doesn't always work that way. I've been playing for almost three months now and taken many explorer missions. It has been my experience that it all depends on which planet you're on and what your skill levels are. There can be a trick to it. They may have fixed this, don't know for sure. But on Rori for me to successfully get a destroy mission and an explorer mission for the same creature I had to equip my best weapon on the destroy missions and my worst weapon for the explorer missions, or visa versa, or nothing would match up. Stay away from the high credit explorer missions, they are extremely difficult to complete. Not because the creatures are hard to kill, but hard to find, like the spider queens, or bark mite hatchlings. But what do I know, I'm just a fencer.

Amon,

Hey! I'm a meleer too. It's not that bad.

B

FUna,

It's not exactly "hurried or unimaginative development".

The whole point of the terminals was to provide Scouts an incentive to do something they already do anyway. You are going to go exploring, so why not grab a few Explore missions on the way?

I'm going to go out and kill spiders to get my XP, so why not take a mission and make some dough on it.

They weren't designed to be an ATM, like a delivery or low level destroy mission is. At least, that's not what we asked for.

B

I'm guessing explorer missions are a lot more useful and worthwhile if you have some tracking skill, so you can locate the creatures you're supposed to be hunting.

The real trick to using the exploration missions to their fullest is simple - grab a destroy mission for a certain critter type, then grab an exploration mission with that same critter. Repeat the destory mission until you've got your limit!

---

DeltaXi65 wrote:

FUna,

It's not exactly "hurried or unimaginative development".

The whole point of the terminals was to provide Scouts an incentive to do something they already do anyway. You are going to go exploring, so why not grab a few Explore missions on the way?

I'm going to go out and kill spiders to get my XP, so why not take a mission and make some dough on it.

They weren't designed to be an ATM, like a delivery or low level destroy mission is. At least, that's not what we asked for.

B

---

Oh I totally agree with you what their purpose is and understand...but I do think they needed a little more thought into the missions themselves.

When I say "hurried" and "unimaginative" I mean:

-- Giving missions that are near impossible to complete

An example of this would be sending a player on an explorer mission to find 45 capper spineflap soldiers on Naboo. You could explore Naboo for weeks and never find 45. However you can come across one random nest that spawns only Soldiers and Gatherers and completes the mission only 2km outside town. A mission for 45 Hermit Spider queens is another extremely difficult-to-complete mission where you could search for days or weeks without ever finding that many. When any player chooses an explorer mission the server really needs to increase the amount of times whatever they are hunting spawns. This does not mean it needs to spawn them so often that the explorer is guaranteed to complete the mission in a set amount of time and doesn't just hand the explorer a completed mission on a silver platter. The missions need to be completable within an acceptable amount of time that is cost effective for the equipment decay, resources, money and effort put into it without resorting to "tricks" like taking destroy missions for the same critter to be hunted. Additionally as you progress in combat skills, the missions also get exponentially more difficult with targets that spawn very very rarely.

-- Costs for Explorer Missions have no value when compared to other missions.

I'll explain this in the form of a true story. Back in my early days I posted a thread called "Explorer Missions: Borked?" What had happened was I took a 4000credit explorer mission to kill 45 Capper Spineflap Drones. Drones are easy to find, or so I thought. I spent a few hours trying to find them hiking from Keren to Deeja Peak then across the mountains to Lake Retreat (it seemed like they spawned less than before tho it could have been just my imagination). After killing 15 of them I literally got up from my computer, exclaimed "F_CK THIS SH_T!" in frustration. After grabbing a cold Coke and calming down I aborted the mission. I grabbed a coupla destroy missions back in Keren and got my 4000credits in less than an hour hitting RSF camps, Ankara Gungans, and assorted critter nests. The explorer missions, for the time we put into them, do not compare in payout to destroy, delivery or faction missions.

-- Explorer Missions don't truly reward us for what we already do: explore.

When looking for combat/weapons XP I'm known to hike city to city killing every MOB that cons white/blue harvesting resources along the way. After an evening of this I'll sell whatever hide/bone/meat I've collected on the bazaar. Generally I can walk away from a whole night of this with enough resources to bring in 5000-10000credits as well as making progress in my climb up a skill branch. I've tried taking Explorer missions to help subsidize this income even keeping one open for 2 days of nothing but exploring without completing the mission. However when starting out from a city I'll grab 2 destroy missions or faction mission that happen to be along the way, complete them, and then grab two more in the next city. If I run my normal XP/Hunting loop (Keren->Deeja Peak->Lake Retreat->Theed) grabbing two 1000credit missions at each city, that's 8000credits on top of what I can sell my resources for. (Keep in mind this was back when I was hard-up for cash with poor combat skills...my skills and mission payout have been much improved). What this illustrates is that destroy missions actually are a better payout for what we already do than explorer missions.

Lastly, look at how Explorer missions are used and the advice given for completing them.

1) Grab a destroy mission for the same MOB as the explorer mission.

2) Don't take high-payout missions because they're impossible to find.

3) Don't equip a weapon at the terminal because you'll get very difficult to find MOBs.

The advice given for completing explorer missions reads as a list of tricks and/or "exploits" to get easier missions or make existing missions easier. This is backwards from what it SHOULD be. The tricks should list ways of getting more difficult to kill MOBs for more money. The problem is that the payout for the higher-credit missions is not worth the effort and time it takes to complete them. The MOBs don't spawn enough from higher paying missions to make them economically worthwhile.

I don't mean to argue with you on this point, but I do disagree with you. Explorer Missions really are a waste of time when you can get more money from Destroy, Scout and even some Delivery Missions in less time; far less time in some cases and end up being counter-productive to the stated goal of encouraging exploration by rewarding explorers. So often it is a source of more frustration to those exploring for fun than it is rewarding.

The Explorer Missions do appear to be a product of "hurried or unimaginative development". Scout missions are much more rewarding for Explorers but still don't really reward the player. Unique dynamic spawns like shipwrecks, camps, ruins and groups of NPCs engaging in some activity at the end of a Scout mission would add to the reward of actually going out to a WP and give a sense that "yes I went out to scout that shipwreck and saw it with my own eyes still burning" adding to the immersion in the game itself. That's what made games like Morrowind are so immersive and fun to explore (you can spend weeks and months exploring places in that game). When you hike the Bitter Coasts and find smugglers' caves or wrecked ships you can actually explore them. When you're given a mission to go get something across the country you find yourself in new places and situations. Exploring is truly exploring and finding new things.

Hunting missions are poorly thought out. I cannot think of evidence that denies this when missions that only pay a few thousand credits take days to complete when taking 1 hour's worth of destroy, faction or delivery missions exceeds the payout of 1 hunting mission. Hunting missions would be more fun, rewarding and immersive if they were ramped-up destroy missions where you are sent to a remote waypoint (2-4KM from the city) to speak to an NPC who sends you to a waypoint or series of waypoints to remove an infestation. The problem in SWG is that the explorer mission tells us about the father who lost his son to "some creature" without actually showing it. There would be more fun and immersion to go talk to the father at his house with his wife and surviving children present. He then sends you out to the location where his son died with instructions to eradicate an infestation of nunas by killing 45 of them or destroying a nest. Even better still he could give you a succession of waypoints around his home. Or send you to a far off waypoint where you have to wait for a spawn to appear near there. There are so many options that could introduce both monetary rewards and feelings of accomplishment (and immersion) that its inconcievable to me how we got the missions we do unless it was thru a lack of imagination or restrictive deadlines. All hunting missions are currently is some text telling us why we need to go search for and find some number of some creature. There is no immersion. There is no depth. There is no feeling of accomplishment. There is direction. In many cases the hunting mission is simply impossible to accomplish in an acceptable amount of time.

And that is why I say Explorer Missions are the product of "hurried and unimaginative development".

Very well thought out post. All excellent points, which explains why I tend to nottake Explorer missions.