Jedi Visibility/Life Rework

While I do think the system could be more engaging, and needs a less afk meta, I cannot support removing Vader... sorry just one of the dangers of omnibus PVs.

-Vader should stay but needs some rework , for example once a Jedi gains the maximum visibility and he/she has been on the BH terminals for more than 3 days or whatever number of days then Vader goes active , Vader should also be given more dmg and maybe speed , because if the ultimate goal of Vader is to kill the jedi then he isn't doing a very good job atm , also make Vader just target the Jedi he is after , no more collateral damage
-Jedi tef , i don't really like it BUT i can support it
-Yes to limit time spent on the Ranch
-IF a time limit is implemented on time spent on the Ranch then i would think the visibility should stay the same |
-Maybe add some quests to reduce visibility , maybe they are already planned for all we know , there are a few npcs already at the Ranch that have yet to be activated
-for the lives , perhaps have a 12hr time out between deaths and once all lives are spend then 24hr glowie status

You can leave vader as an ultimate menace for RPers if they reworked how it works, like the comment above once you have been on the bh boards for a few days and your vis hasnt gone lower then he appears or something like that. Important note here that out of the 7 ways to decrease visibility that they told us in the dev's diary only 3 made it into the game, and they happened to be the most afk oriented mechanics (see image attached). It would be cool to also limit the amount of visibility you can rack up at once, because currently you can go from no vis at all to Vadered in no time and that doesnt seem good. Lets say add a timer everytime you reach one of the visibility threshold so when you first reach 1k you cant go above that for a certain amount of time, and scalate that accordingly with every vis threshold.

1. Leave Vader as the ultimate anti-jedi, but improve him so that he can't so easily be escaped from. Perhaps he spawns with other inquisition/troopers/etc that instabreak/snare vehicles and/or paralyze/daze the target Jedi so that Vader can approach and destroy the Jedi without the Jedi so easily kiting him or escaping. Perhaps a TIE Bomber does a flyby first and incaps/weakens the Jedi first. Something along those lines. There needs to be something where becoming too brazen/visible pretty much guarentees the Jedi's death, and this system needs to be able to target and eliminate the Jedi (almost) anywhere regardless of available players/bounty hunters. This should be in addition to either perma-TEF or increased player bounty hunters after a certain threshold. In short, if your vis gets high enough to summon Vader, it should be an almost guarenteed death for the Jedi.

2. Keep number of available lives as is to account for the game crashing/being dumb at the worst times and also to give some leeway for non-minmaxed players, but change the ghost timer from real hours to account-hours played. This would make it so that the player must either play as a ghost or on their other characters before they are able to respawn as a Jedi again, as well as limit AFKing the timer since the timer is based on account time instead of being able to alt-tab between characters. Somehow I get the feeling people will be less likely to do obvious things with their Jedi if the penalty for running out of lives is 24 account-playhours before their Jedi can respawn.

The other suggestions are fine, including making it harder to insta-travel to a safe haven from almost anywhere as well as giving Jedi more non-afk avenues to reduce their Visibility.

I am going to upvote this, as I think you raise some good points.
Obviously all we have seen so far is the impacts that have come with the content we have recieved, there may be more planned such as Ilum and Nar Shadda which may adjust some of these, but yes I think with where we stand right now it makes sense.

What I like from your proposal
Compensating Jedi Lives with reduced Ghost time
I really like this. 24 hours is long but if you only play this game for 2 hours and die then it doesn't really affect you other than make it more of an inconvinience when you log in the next day. I think making the ghost 4 hours or something is a better balance along with reducing ghost time to compensate as you suggested.

Nerfing Vis Reduction in the ranch
Yes please. You can pretty much wait until NPC's give you warnings about being known (1,000) and then afk in the ranch for 100 mins and reduce it to 0. If for example the glowy time would be 4 hours, then scale that amount to at least that too.. so you're effectively as good as ghosted but not actually a ghost, in a way.

What I don't quite like
1 life
I think 1 life for PvP is fair, but I would think 2 lives would be better in cases where you die in an instance and then can clone and come back without ruining the instance for all other 7 people. We've had cases of people crashing a lot in instances and dyng to mechanics because of it, other people shouldn't be punished for instability in those cases so 2 would be fairer in my opinion. These people weren't Jedi but if that did happen it wouldn't be cool.

Removing Vader
I think removing Vader takes away a cool little flair from this feature. I'd be more comfortable if it remained but had a much larger timer associated with it which still allows player bounties to occur and then Vader to finish off if it unsuccesful.

Locking Ranch Time
There might be other plans for the ranch like the NPC's there giving quests. so locking it off isn't a solution.. maybe lockin a room off, and only while in that room you get the vis reduction however, might be okay.

As a side note, I think there could also be better ways to communicate when a Jedi is on the terminals. Maybe some random BH's can get a comlink, or maybe a discord channel you can subscribe to like the GCW channel.. or maybe some NPC's say to BH's "did you see the new target on the Mission Termianals??" which ties in to the same AI system that Jedi do for vis. Hitting refresh at the terminal isn't fun and just contributes to burnout.

That's fair. It means then you still get punished if you die in PvE legitimately to a hard mob, or in rare cases where a PvE mob might land the db in a PvP fight or something.

Why is everyone so married to the idea of the NPC that comes and kills you? It brings nothing to anyone. As long as some unkillable NPC is on the table, it will reinforce the meta of doing whatever it takes to reduce your vis.

You want to really shaft the Jedi? Cap vis at like 10k, put in the "x time at each 1k tier" of vis thing and make each 1k vis after 5k reduce your max force.

Because Vader can kill you before a player Bounty Hunter can. I got vadered on Jedi release day during prime time, the BH's didn't have a chance and probably even wasted time getting to me anyway.

Yeah so remove that shit so we can play a sandbox game.

To me, Vader is the final guard rail to enforce jedi scarcity/visibility/etc. He exists to handle cases where other systems fail to contain jedi to their designed playstyle. Without Vader, there could come a build and a group that just runs around max vis and deals with any attackers through various strategies. Vader is the final solution.

It does need some tweaking for sure. Seeing Vader even as a non-inciter way too much, so I can only imagine. Also, not seeing many reasonably long opportunities at a bounty on the boards. Agreed that Vader should be an absolute last resort, and only long after the players have been given some time for what should be player content going on here.

Is there a high possibility that players will fail to contain the Jedi? Absolutely, especially in the short term until we work out some strategies, but definitely should at least be given that opportunity.

colt45 said:

I'd be fine with having to take multiple instanced PvE death's for you to go ghost.

Click to expand...

Middle ground could also be to give 4 lives, but have PvP deaths count as 3x. That still means that even with 4 Padawan/6FRS Lives, the most a Jedi could get would be 2 PvP deaths before ghost, but still give people enough room for weird things to happen in PvE instances/crashes. Then still increase the penalties of death so that dying is more impactful so that people are less likely to be brazen

I definitely like some of the ideas I'm seeing here, however I think adding all or too many of these at once will do the opposite of what you want, and you will find most of the jedi player base just stops playing them at all. However, I will say a few of the ideas that have been thrown around here are already in the works or at a minimum being discussed prior to this PV so that says we are on the right track.

PVP jedi bounties will take care of themselves. as the jedi can still have a player bounty placed on them this is seperate from vis I believe.

The better reverse of this is this.

Remove VIS-based player bounties. Instead

If you escape Vader, vader places a bounty on that jedi this bounty does not clear when vis gets low and instead remains for 72 hours.

If you kill a BH hunting you buy yourself 24 hours from the terminals. stacking up to 72 hours if you kill three at once.

Jedi can go to a smuggler, the smuggler can, using a special loot item from smuggler pvp underworld mission, remove a jedi from the BH terminals once per 72 hours. This does not remove you from a PVP bounty.

JaxRiens said:

PVP jedi bounties will take care of themselves. as the jedi can still have a player bounty placed on them this is seperate from vis I believe.

The better reverse of this is this.

Remove VIS-based player bounties. Instead

If you escape Vader, vader places a bounty on that jedi this bounty does not clear when vis gets low and instead remains for 72 hours.

If you kill a BH hunting you buy yourself 24 hours from the terminals. stacking up to 72 hours if you kill three at once.

Jedi can go to a smuggler, the smuggler can, using a special loot item from smuggler pvp underworld mission, remove a jedi from the BH terminals once per 72 hours. This does not remove you from a PVP bounty.

Click to expand...

Removing vis based bounties absolutely destroys the whole purpose of jedi bhing and effectively makes certain jedi immune to bhs because only a handful of them will pvp and even a lesser number of them will get DBs and a pvp bounty. Killing a bh should not remove you from the terminal either because you can easily kill a shitter and automatically you are getting content away from other more skilled bhs that didnt have their opportunity to take and attack that bounty target. The smuggler thing would be okay if it wasnt abusable and had a quite long CD