Bounty Hunter Archive
Thread: Infinite seeker droid.
Fizzy wrote:
This is an interesting post & it raises a few topics that I feel may be beneficially discussed.
Not all of us MDE's started as a DE. I had no clue you could buy seeker droids from a vendor at some point until I read this post.
Yep, and there was a storm when it happened. The DE's thought it was a good perk, some BH's thought that the DE's were going to rip them off. As Rho posted, the DE's began making the BH droids at near cost, and by the crate even (seekers take 3 MA parts, probes 4).
What did they cost from the vendor?
They used to cost 200 per seeker. But the old seekers only had one charge.
What would you BHs like to pay for a crate of 5?
I sell mine at 1K per crate of 5 seekers, 2K per crate of probes. This covers my factory time, and is in line with the per charge price on the old terminals. It is a lower cost per unit resource / factory time charge than anything else I sell, but those have been my prices since charges were added. To go much lower would be loosing money when you take into account that to do one run of seekers or probes takes 12 hours of factory time (1 run for the EMM's, one run for the BP's, and one run for the actual seekers / probes).
My pricing policy is to charge what I myself would be willing to pay but having no experience in Bounty Hunting, I'm somewhat at a loss. I like to think I charge a very low rate for my seeker crates but this has me wondering if it's a correct assumption or not.
So, discuss & share
I thought it was rant and flame...
Loqutis15 wrote:
There are just so many other more important things about the bounty hunter profession that need to be fixed then a bug that hurts us. The devs also posted in here?? why not in the DE forum?? wouldn't that make more sense?? OH well it will never change.
Well, I guess it beats the Chef forum....
HythosSWG wrote:
Been this way for at LEAST two months now.
I don't sell any more probes because of it (me, was master DE)- you BH's can fend for yourself.
OH, and btw:
Smashkin Nakull BH 3-4-4-4 NM 2-1-3-0
Master Pistoleer 158 SP remaining
Master Rifleman 158 SP remaining
Master Carbinner 158 SP remaining
Master Commando 81 SP remaining
Master Bounty Hunter 33 SP remaining
*any quesitons?*
MBH < Jedi Novice w/no skills (235 SP remaining)
pwned. *any questions?*
kk thx bye!
LMFAO TROLL!!!
Well I never even considered it was a bug. I remember reading something about them making a change to seekers awhile back then when I got INV III thats what I figured it was. Oh well I hope they do fix it. I know at least 1 DE that has quit the game because the profession was so lame, and it is why they bought it. I personaly have no probs paying for droids, and I hope all the DE's out there think we were intentionaly taking advantage of them because I dont think we as a community were...at least not intentionaly until this thread came up....
For us it's like WOW a bug in our favor at that point. So sorry DE's don't take us personaly...we know your eating a shi!t sandwich too...as we have been. Notice the rejoicing from actualy having a DEV post in our forum LOL. I actualy have enuough crates of seekerrs to get me through investigation I think but if not and this gets fixed in the next couple of weeks we'll be chatting 
Warp1001 wrote:
My experiences with DE's were very negative...
They all tried to price gouge me... Even a DE friend of mine whom I hunted with and had given some great powerups to for free priced gouged me on a crate of Seekers.
Well that was it, from then on I bought all my seekers and arkyds off the Bazaar.
I found that Seekers and arkyds on the bazaar went for under 1k even as low as 300 credits.
I now have more seekers I know what to with and maybe will put them on the bazaar for sale just to get rid of them... Since I no longer will do anymore BH missions.
OK, let me explain what it takes to make a seeker droid.
You need 3 parts made by a master artisan as sub components of the finished droid - 2 EMM's and 1 BP.
The total materials cost of this droid is 171 units, IIRC.
Now, if you want to make a factory run of these, every single EMM and BP in the factory run must be identical. Therefore, say you want to make 100 seeker droids. You must first do a factory run of 200 EMM's, and 100 BP's. That is 8 hours of factory time (and remember, you can't schedule factory runs in advance - e.g., stack factory runs. You have to be on line to change the factory schematic).
Once you have the crates of master artisan parts, then you do your third factory run of the final seeker droids.
Now, when DE's first got seekers, they were single charge items, not multi-charge as they are now. The DE's were asked to sell them for the same price per seeker that they were priced at in the terminals (200 credits). That is about 1.2 credits per unit resource used - and does not cover factory time, maint, and power, not to mention the DE's time. This was not feasable. It was not gouging - it was just that DE's of all classes were being asked to subsidize BH's.
With this said, those DE's who could often grossly undersold the droids to try to help out the BH's. There was a considerable flame war at the time that is not worth revisiting, but the bottom line is that the DE's did make an effort to keep the price as low as possible.
Now that they have charges on them, at 1000 credits per crate of 5 seekers, with 5 charges per, allows me at least to sell at the same price per use of the droid as the terminals charged.
Oh, and in my blue text post, I misspoke.
It is 1K per seeker, 5K per crate (i.e., 200 cr per charge) and 2K per probe, 10K per crate of 5.
Just for the record.
Hrmmm... the other DE's I have spoken to on Chilastra were saying this was what they were selling them for, and I thought it was a pretty good price, given that the per charge was the same as the old terminals, plus all the factory time.
However, a price check might be in order
BH's, let me know what you are currently paying for on them (don't flame, don't say 1 cr per)... I am interested.
Also, do you BH's know how much the quality of the droid counts?
I usually use pretty good materials, and experiment on the droids.
Does a highly experimented droid help?
My BH friend saidthey fixed or raised investigation XP. So there's something I guess. 
How about instead of worrying about charges on droids, if they run out and if that hurts the DE they just give us some droids that are actually useful and some droids that are good in combat. Then DEs wouldn't care if our only seller quit selling.
Nice to see not everyone here is looking to squeeze a few hundred credits per charge from their local DE though. Iread a post about how sucky investigation missions are and I feel for you guys too.
Sketh wrote:
Also, do you BH's know how much the quality of the droid counts?
I usually use pretty good materials, and experiment on the droids.
Does a highly experimented droid help?
I don't think it matters, but I am not quite sure. After Investigation 3 is learned, you get the new droid track feature, but it does not work every time. There is a chance maybe the resource quality has something to do with that, but it most likely has to do with our skill in droid track, which is likely the case.
Having done very little experimentation on items when I actually had some kind of crafting skills I don't know much about the subject. However, I do remember that when you experimented you got some information on what aspect the experimentation was supposed to affect. What experimentation parameters do you get for the seekers/Arakyds?
At first glance it seems as though experimentation on these items would be a waste, but maybe something about the quality of the droids affects whether or not we actually get to track the target at Inv 4 and master. As somebody already noted we use 'find and track' but the tracking doesn't happen 100% of the time. It's more like 25% of the time from my experience.