Hunting Hunting on Arkadia, twice the costs for half the fun?

The title may seem a little provocative, but as i will explain, i base this on some facts, and i believe that condensing the argument into a simple statement helps to get the point across.
before i explain i would like to point out clearly this is not a complaint about loot or TT returns.
the feedback here is in some ways a continuation of my previous feedback about mining on arkadia and the effects of arkadian mobs on the enjoyment of mining here. for those that dont know my avatar, i am medium health and have been playing this game on and off since 2006.

the issue:
many/most arkadian mobs have higher than "normal" regen
many/most arkadian mobs have higher than "normal" hitrate
many arkadian mobs are highly aggressive.
many arkadian mobs are found in huge spawns.
mobs in entropia universe now have what players are calling "ninja respawn"

now none of these features alone are that problematic but when you combine all these together you get a very different situation. to cut a long story short, when combined these features cause the cost of hunting to double at the very least. i know this because i actually track/measure my results after each hunt.
i say cost specifically because as far as i know from all my years playing this game the TT return is decided by they damage you do to a mob and your defensive costs are in no way compensated for in the TT returns, this is something i do not have a problem with, i understand that this allows for players to have different results depending on their skills and gear.

to explain the statement twice the costs for half the fun i need to go into a little detail.
when i hunt a mob i try to match my gear to the mob based on the information available to me, i then test this until i find a combo that allows me to hunt the mob, to me this means being able to shoot the mob rapidly without dying or having to heal much, otherwise i dont consider it hunting and i would call it wrestling or fighting a mob.
the mob i have been hunting on arkadia for the last few months ticks all of the "boxes" i listed above under issues, on the entropia life website i now have the highest number of globals for this mob.
while using what i would consider normal lower-mid level L gear to hunt this mob (500-1000HP) i found myself constantly healing/dying/reviving, i would try to return to my half damaged mob only to find it completely surrounded by respawned mobs and i would have to attempt to plow through a mass of creatures to recover my lost peds, by this time the creature would of healed completely and i was back to square one. this process could take up to 20 minutes leaving me feeling a lack of progress and at the end of the run my armour and fap decay showed me this was unsustainable. it sometimes happened that i would get a critical hit on returning to the mob and this whole process would start again, i have spent up to a hour this way trying to kill that one mob on more than one occasion.
my testing showed me that to hunt this creature i had to use some of the best available L armour in the game (i used a mix of hermes and cetus), i could now hunt the creature and not spend most of the time healing or at the revive or fighting my way back into the spawn, but this caused other frustrations, i dont think i need to explain that it isnt much fun having 2-3 high hitrate creatures hammering away at expensive armour.
im sure you could say hunt a creature at a lower level than you chose, but that does not change the fact that the cost of that will still be at least double the cost i expect.

what i dont understand is the reasoning behind these choices, while mining and hunting i hardly ever come across other players hunting these huge spawns, the "ninja respawn" means they arent even needed unless you have 10-15 players hunting the same mob at the same time at the same place. i also think that these choices/issues are the reason i dont come across many players hunting, people vote with their feet.
as a player i also fail to see what i get in return from these choices that cause me to have at least twice the hunting costs im used to having. i hope the devs understand why i dont feel that i am getting more fun in return.

there are many things i love about arkadia otherwise i would not have taken the time to give this feedback, i hope the devs can look at these issues from a players perspective and explain their reasoning for these choices and/or make drastic changes to the behaviour and spawn sizes of arkadian mobs.

 

I assume you're hunting larger Oratan, or else you're using inappropriate armor

Oratan is the oddball mob of Arkadia. Read the storyline... Oratan are mean and violent and are supposed to be that way. They are dangerous to hunt and fun when you have some peds to burn or want to skill some dodge, but they're not suitable for endless grinding because defensive costs are too high (unless you're super high dodger, I suppose). They're designed to be a mission mob (not IFN mission, but storyline mission) and an event mob. We're starting to see the first of that with the Oratan camp wave spawns.

In any case, they're not representative of other Ark mobs.

 

I've not noticed an overall problem with regen/agro/hitrate. I've whipped a huon to death, and a number of mobs can be hunted with just a pistol without getting swapped. Hitrate doesn't seem to be a problem except on the bigger mobs which u would expect (evade is 52 so this helps).


Good sized spawns are not to be complained about, many many mobs on caly can't be hunted at a decent speed due to poor spawns.

As for oratan, yeah they can be tough to hunt but who want's a world full of bunnies and pussy cats?

 

If someone were to plot a comparison chart of mob defensive costs between the different planets what I think they will find is mobs on Arkadia and RT are considerably more costly as compared to Calypso. This goes for all comparable mobs i.e. of similar level between Calypso and Arkadia not just Oratan.

Mobs on such planets are designed to be more costly to rake in a greater profit.

 

You could also argue that it is the reason why mobs on these two planets are easier to break even/profit on when geared and hunted properly than on calypso......

 

not really because that profit is at the expensive of other players. Consider this, say everyone used optimal gear and made no mistakes the defensive costs of these mobs will still be higher than Calypso.

 

Profit is always at the expensive of the players. Figured you would know this

This game is not you vs MA, its you vs everyone else.

 

i appreciate your input, there is no denying you are far more experienced than i am
i also know you have done some serious hunting of oratan as i saw you global a lot while i was still testing my setup.
i also agree with you that oratan are a fun mob to hunt, i dont want to kill bunnies, i dislike mobs with high HP that do no damage, the most fun i have had in game was spending hours with my back to the revive knee deep in bots at hadesheim during the robot wars
but at your level with the evade you have i would hope you dont notice these things in the same way a "medium" player would, your evade is almost exactly twice my level, but, my dodge is higher than my evade and i think that says something about my experience with more challenging mob types (at my level).
but experienced or not the repair terminal tells its own story, and i have the same issue whatever level of mob i kill on arkadia, even with a lvl18 mob i can kill without armour the combination of the high hitrate and "ninja respawn" means if i get a third mob on me i need to be so over armoured to survive and i find it painful to watch the constant hammering with 1-5 damage on my L armour, it also gets pretty tedious switching between armours many times during a hunt to avoid that. i believe this also has nothing to do with my choice of weapon as i really hate shooting 1 mob more than 15-20 times. i also team hunted the oratan quite a bit with the 2 of us using ark-30 deserts with a combined dps of 100 at 70m and we still struggled at times.
what i forgot to mention in my first post was the other issue with the high hitrate of arkadian mobs, it brings with it a increase in critical hits, so more trips to the revive and more time for mobs to respawn.
i understand your point about small spawns being difficult to hunt but it is the combination of all these factors that i have a problem with, and with the new respawn speed i think this is much less of a problem than in the past.
i dont want or expect the dev team to drastically change everything but i do hope they would consider looking at the balance, and what they are trying to achieve with the planet, and if these issues, when combined, help or hinder the growth of the player base on arkadia.
personally speaking, as soon as the excellent events on arkadia end i am stopping hunting here, and if i want to have a little fun hunting between mining runs i will grab a warp to caly for 5 ped knowing i can easily save this cost from my repair bill. this may sound harsh but this is the reality for me, and because i really like what the team here is doing i thought i would take the time to explain my view instead of just voting with my feet.

 

Maybe the thread title should be changed from Hunting Hunting on Arkadia to Hunting Oratan on Arkadia, since that's what this discussion is really about.

 

neil, plz
i do not want to argue with you, this is the second thread where i have made sincere feedback and a arkadia adviser comes in to try to negate what i say, it is my feedback to the devs, i am not looking for advice. i will say that i am thankful that you are not ridiculing me and bragging about how good you are, unlike the adviser in the other thread, i respect that you see things differently but i would hope that if you want to give feedback on how happy you are with the high regen high hitrate ninja respawning mobs that double the cost to hunt that you know you can start your own thread about that? i was quite insulted by the reaction of the adviser in the previous thread and let it slide because i was new around here, but as a customer i do not appreciate it at all.

 

i am critical of others so i should also be critical of myself, i noticed that in my first post on this subject i made the statement that drastic change was needed, after reflecting and replying to slither i said that drastic change is not needed, this is not really a defensible position.
so i would like to rephrase that and use the word comprehensive, on reflection it boils down to two things, the rest is all secondary.
1. the high hitrate doubles the cost to hunt when compared like for like with the mobs i am used to hunting.
2. the fast respawn when combined with the high hitrate takes out a lot of the fun for me.

and i dont understand the purpose of it.

 

I'm sorry if I came across as being overly contradictory of your feedback. My intention was merely to point out that Oratan is not a typical Ark mob with respect to defensive costs, and that it's supposed to be that way for that mob.

 

Try different tactics to find out what the best way is to hunt the mobs you encounter... if it really takes over an hour to kill a mob, you definitely need to reconsider what you want to achieve! Go do something else, skill up and come back when you are more prepared ;-)

 

and im sorry if i came over a bit annoyed but my avatar was "born" on dec. 2006 and while im still learning i do think i have enough experience to know what i am talking about. but with respect, the oratan might not be a typical mob with respect to defensive costs, but there was a reason i spoke generally and not specifically about the oratan, i think my defensive decay on oratan is even higher than 2x "normal" but i accept that part of that increase is due to the nature of that particular mob so i did not mention that.
you really cant tell someone of my experience that the hitrate of most if not all creatures on arkadia dont have a elevated hit rate.
that is also probably part of the reason your post annoyed me, you are telling me that what i see with my own eyes and in cold hard figures at the repair terminal is not real. the same goes for the "ninja respawn".

 

ty for that advice
i think you misread my somewhat long posts, im using a ark30-desert on mobs where the average health is less than 1K, i kill most of them pretty fast. but when i die, revive, heal, fly back, the ninja respawn and huge spawn size means i have to plow my way through respawned mobs to get back to the half damaged mob that by that time has regenerated, if i get crit a second time (elevated hitrate=more crits?) or more than 1 mob respawns on me a second time and i have to repeat the revive journey, the spawn is so dense it can take up to a hour to reach that 1 mob that already has "my" peds in it. i could always forget these half damaged mobs but i would count that as a increased cost to hunt too

 

Fallen,

maybe u could vtol to ur injured mob? but sometimes the smart move is to write a mob off as wasted peds. I've had that happen with korwil, have one nearly dead only to be ninja'd. Sometimes I head back, other times I figure my chances, curse and target something on the near edge of the spawn.

 

It all depends what you compare the mobs too, araneatrox and scipulor for example hit me all the time as well. It's mostly on the lower level mobs on arkadia that i notice a difference with the hit rate. I guess it's just a matter of time until my evade gets high enough.

 

This is where the tactics kick in... I understand your troubles, apply tactics to prevent you get into the trouble you describe .

 

i could vtol in, but due to the dense spawn and ninja-respawn behaviour i would have 3-4 high hitrate mobs hammering my armour if i do that
and believe me i do curse lol
its kind of you and others to offer advice how to hunt this creature, but i like to think i prepared myself, tested setups, stocked up on weapons/armour/fap and have been camping them for quite a while now. but the only reason we are discussing the mob i am hunting and how is because some people (other than me) want to make the discussion about that mob instead of about the overall higher cost to hunt on arkadia compared to what i am used to thinking of as normal. i must admit i havent hunted every mob on arkadia, but every one i have come across while mining or hunting, large or small has this elevated hit rate.

 

Lol, you are very diplomatic Fallen.