Scout Archive

All,

Here is a copy of the email that I sent to do Q and Xahn earlier today about our issues. Please let me know if I missed anything, or if you have any ideas for next week's email!

Brisc.

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Q and Xahn,

Here’s my first week’s email regarding Scout issues. These have been culled from the boards and my conversations in game with other scouts – both hardcore and casual.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions on these issues. Thanks!

1.) Maskscent – The maskscent nerf continues to be the biggest beef within the Scouting community. Most of the members don’t have a problem with the timer, but they do have a problem with what is perceived as an extremely high frequency of failure rate.

There are three proposed solutions that seem to get the most play with Scouts. The first is to make maskscent much more reliable – so that it is rarely broken – but decrease the XP significantly. The second is to make maskscent only usable against aggressive “red” creatures, not the docile “yellow” ones (and only able to be broken by “reds” as well). The third is to tier the timer, so that higher level Scouts and Rangers can maskscent faster than the lower level characters. This is the most contentious issue for the profession right now.

There are multiple threads regarding the maskscent nerf. Here is the longest, and most well thought out one:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=scout&message.id=1954

2.) Camping XP – The second biggest issue is the issue of camping XP. The amount of time it takes to successfully negotiate the wilderness survival tree is frustrating to some Scouts, especially those who intend to go Squad Leader or other professions that require it.

This is one of the complex paradoxes of Scouting. Wilderness survival XP is obviously designed to get Scouts into groups. The incentives for camping with a group make that clear. But the issue with harvesting in groups (the next issue) is a disincentive to grouping. Therefore, you’ve got a lot of players out there grinding out the camp XP, grumbling to themselves the whole time.

This is the longest thread regarding camping XP:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=scout&message.id=3082

There was also a concern that there may be a bug that is affecting camping XP, which was discussed here:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=scout&message.id=4097

3.) Harvesting in Groups – Being a scout in a group is almost impossible because of the limitations of the “one kill, one harvest” problem. I know, based on what I’ve read in the holocron and the game manual, that this was not what you all intended, and that you are most likely working on the problem. But just to reiterate, you’ve got a lot of Scouts (myself included) who eschew joining groups because they aren’t going to gain any XP from harvesting.

Fixing this bug will go a long way towards making the Scout a happy grouper, and should fix some of the issues people have with camping XP

Here’s a thread that discusses this problem:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=scout&message.id=618

4.) Foraging and Fishing – These are two underutilized skills (well, fishing technically isn’t a skill) that many players have requested have some XP given to them, to make them viable.

The primary suggestion was to make Foraging provide, like Sampling for an artisan, a minimal amount of XP per successful forage. This XP would be Wilderness Survival XP, which would assist in solving the camping XP rate concerns.

A good outline of this was posted in this thread:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=scout&message.id=3881

Here’s the petition for making Foraging an XP giving skill:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=scout&message.id=2503

5.) Incentives for Exploring – One of the other requests that has gained some ground on the boards is a request to provide an incentive for Scouts to get out of the cities further and off world as well. This has been suggesting in terms of XP – a “mileage odometer” has been mentioned. Discovering new locations, or visiting new locations, particularly on rough worlds like Endor and Lok would result in some XP gain. This provides an incentive to get Scouts out of their primary hunting grounds and explore the world.

The previous link had some good ideas, but this one also brings up this idea:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=scout&message.id=2804

My “pet” issues:

A.) Money making opportunities – As scouts, we don’t really have a significant number of monkey making opportunities. There is already a glut of hide and bones clogging up the bazaars. As a result, destroy and delivery missions provide the easiest means of gaining money. That being said, I would think that providing a Master Scout with the ability to take up to 4 missions at a time would provide an excellent incentive for those casual scouts who may be waffling on whether or not to go the whole way. This could be introduced not only as a Master Scout incentive, but any of the combat professions as well.

B.) The Imperial Hat bug – I would just love to get this fixed.

"Money making opportunities – As scouts, we don’t really have a significant number of monkey making opportunities. "

I just want to say I am violently against scouts making any sort of monkeys! That is just a sin against God!

(Sorry, couldn't resist. )

Thanks, Brisc. Nice to see how much work you put into that! Keep up the good work.

Also, do not make monkeys. That way lies dragons. Also, monkeys.

Ack!

**edit** spell checker.

I hate monkeys - that's what I call the Sharpaunts that camp outside my house. Little buggers always making me run around to get to my front door.

Ugh.

So let's get rid of the monkey making opportunities and just focus on money.

B

Hey thanks for taking it on yourself to make it known what we as Scouts want to see happen with our profesion.

I for one agree that they can't fix it if they don't know it's broken. Also I feel it's good policy to give them examples on what would be good alternatives to fixing or encorporating other skills in the XP tree.

Thanks for your time and efforts,

Zerick Shurshot

PS. I look forward in reading if you get any responces.

I'm not going to be a scout by trade but since I need it to get to Bounty Hunter any extra stuff it gets is a bonus. I like what I read keep up the good work. Only thing you left out was Traps ...they should be usable on NPC(People). besides that you hit the rest specialy the forage always figuere you should get some exps for it.

Excellent email! Says everything it should - except -I do agree it would be cool to have higher level traps work against people. Keep up the good work!

Zar Atreides

Novice Scout

Talus

Love the fishing/foraging suggestion. A little xp on success of both would be nice and since non-stackable objects are placed in your inventory when you have success I don't see people macro-foraging. It would be nice to get some bonuses on fishing success as well.

Also like the exploration xp idea. It could easily be something like so much xp per mile outside a city with you getting more xp per mile on the harder planets.

As far as the traps working on NPCs, I think this should be something that bounty hunters get exclusively.

Hey Delta, this first email of yours to the Devs looks great. You hit on all of the major issues we scouts have, and the most popular solutions we have discussed on the boards. I'm happy to have you as the Correspondant.

I have one suggestion to add for the next weeks email. To go along the Survival/Wildernes xp problem, here is my thought. I have atually seen this mentioned several times in the forums here. Besides the forage skill giving survival xp, how about crafting traps and camps? That is a major part of what scouts do, and it something unique to them. It doesn't need to be a lot of xp, and seeing as we make a lot of traps, and some camps, it would help eleviate the Survival xp "grind".

The idea is that making traps to hunt animals is a bit of survival skills, because it helps you survive in the wild. Same with the camps, this is how scouts survive long trips in the wild with out needing to go back to town to get healed up. I have spent many, many hours of exploring Corellia with never going back into town. If I start getting beat up to bad, I just set up camp, sit and craft some more traps.

It appears, from a friend of mine who is novice crafter and novice scout, that the crafters get crafting xp for making scout traps and camps. I was surprised to hear this, seeing as I don't get any xp for making those items, and those items are unique to the scout profession. So it seems the Devs consider that to be valid crafting, to make the crafters get xp for it. Now I don't care if the crafters get the xp for it, but I definately think the scouts should get some Survival xp for making traps and camps. Again, it doesn't need to be a lot, just something to give us another way to make survival xp, and to help get rid of the survival grind.

Thanks,

Great report.

Only other things I would mention are:

1. Traps -- I too would like to see some traps able to be used agaisnt NPC/Players. Flash Bangs for instance work well for the Army, why not hear as well? Would probably need to coordinate with the Ranger correspondent though to make sure that everything is appropriate in terms of effect and cost, etc. Perhaps even if we have to go to Ranger to get humanoid targettable traps.

2. Camps -- I would like it if we got some sort of a running XP total, or at least a meter showing how much we are earning. What I mean is to have something that would update the XP earned on the camp while we are camping instead of having to wait until the camp is disbanded to see if we had capped out yet. Just as an example, when I was still trying to get Survival II, I had just enough XP to get to Survival II with my basic camp when it maxed out. So I was in camp, doing a little healing and some forage. Checked the status and it had been up for 22 mins, and I remember hear 20 mins as the magic number, so I disbanded and got . . . 580 XP, leaving me 20 shy of Survival II.

3. I realize that this could be used as a tool for the powerlevellers, but considering it takes anywhere from 15 - 20 minutes to max out a camp, I don't think its so bad. Worth a shot anyway.

Squid,

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'm happy that I hit the mark solidly right out of the box.

As for your question regarding crafting XP - we do get the crafting XP as well. It was actually kind of funny - novice artisan was the last novice skill that I picked up when I first started. I was halfway through scouting at the time, and the instant that I learned novice artisan I qualified for the first level of artisan skills because of the my trap crafting.

But your idea is good - most of us aren't going to be artisans as well, so the crafting XP is kinda useless. I'll add it to the list for next week.

B

Hey Delta.

Great post/e-mail. I think you did a really great job summarizing the issues that keep getting air time on the board. I especially like your summary of the Camping and Exploration issues.

I'll be interested to see the devs reply, if you get one. Hope you do.

Keep keep up the good work. You're doing the best job of any of the correspondents I've seen.

I dont understand the money issue. I almost never take missions from terminals anymore. I check the map for where I am, pick a city far away, and walk to it. I kill things on my way and pick up missions from moisture farmers and such. By the time I get to my destination I have 600 bones and 400-600 hides.

These sell quickly on the bazaar and I charge 5 credit, so my stack of 600 bones sells for 3000 credits, my various stacks of hides also sells for good credit. Stack of 100 goes for 500 credits.

I never have problems selling them. If the bazaar gets overstocked, I will drop my price to 3 or 4 credits. Even 1 credit each would net me over 1000 credit at each destination.

If I added delivery missions, I could pick up 3-5K credits at my destination.