Development Cycle Archive

I have talked till im blue in the fingers on DE forum. I think part of the trouble is you ddidnt hear 'our' will. You didnt hear the masses who expected a "Droid Invasion" and went on quietly harvesting and leveling etc.

Now 'we' are surprised to see we arnt getting the powerfull combat droids, we were led to expect, Long Ago. You dint hear us 'squeaking' cause you said our grease was on the way.

Ive posted bout a hundred posts in DE forum since I heared were being 'invaded' by lev 10 probots.

My feelings are now best simmed up in my 'sig'.

You might want to get the bio-engineer designer involved then, it's taking him 2 months so far to try and prevent CL10 and under pets which have 6000 health, 5000 action and 5000 mind. Or have you actually decided on what the limits for a CL10 pet should be at all? If so, what can we expect so that we in the bio-engineer community can at least try to avoid making soon-to-be invalid pets for our customers.

This iswhat I'm suggesting:

I've heard talk of a Droid Handler profession and, frankly, I feel it's a waste of dev time. Droids are not unpredictable animals. Youprogram a droid to do a set of commands and not train it like an animal (with rewards for taking steps toward learning the command). An animal, on the other hand, needs someone who knows how to be the alpha of the group, who knows how to lead hence the CH profession. If combat droids were given a CL, I don't think it should be used to determine whether or not a non DH can handle it, rather, I think it should simply determine price. A DE might be able to make a CL15 (the oldpet cap)droid, but it would be very expensive to own (and, with the crackdown, itmayeven be considered illegal contraband). This won't affect CH sales in anyway. A non CH can't use any animal above CL10 so all sales of CL11+ creatures go to CHs anyway. Also, I think it's time we are allowed to call multiple droids. I mean, there are commands you can give your droids that require more than one (such as the formation commands). Also, if youmax the CL at 15 it still gives ppl an incentive to go up the CH tree for higher CL pets, and those who have precious little skill pts to spend (I think my fellow BHs would agree) can have a faithfull partner that won't die after only one or two shots.

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SWG-Runesabre wrote:

I have reviewed this thread up to this point. I will be working with the Combat Droiddesigner and the Creature Balance designer and evaluate what we need to do to ensure a CL10 droid is on par with a CL10 pet.

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When you look at making them roughly equal, please don't go on a nerf rampageon the BE pets. Obviously the 6-9K pets are rediculous, but a 3K HAM pet should not be considered an overpowered pet. People are in the game to have fun. Using a pet / droid makes the low level combat grind fun IF the pets are actually useful. There is no fun in having your pets bested by womp rats.

Our BLL should be our shining combat creation (if we aren't getting new chassis that is). It is extremely expensive, time consuming, and rare resource intensive to make and doesn't do much of anything at all. It holds ONE utility module and is a Master made droid. Why is it in the master slot if it isn't going to be worthy of being made???

Whoin their right mindis going to pay more than 10k creditsfor a CL10 "combat" droid that isnt better than a CDEF? You'd have to spend SOO much money on repair kits its not even funny. Its definitely not worth it at all. Might as well just buy a dinky mouse droid if you need to group with something for XP.

I say give DE cl15 droids to be better off than anything else. Make some new "humanoid" droid types to make them combat related and not use astromech droids.

As I cannot edit my old message .. HERE is a direct repost from the DE forum from an INFORMED source that test the nerfs .. err .. changes on TC. It sums up well what I think about Publish 7 for DEs. My first post was just a rant .. here comes some info:

Have fun (?) Novarider

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Thanks to Jenden and everyone esle supplying information. It seems the droid invasion deserves a big @ss one-star, though why anyone would give one to the people on this very useful thread is beyond me.

My theory on this patch: they were headlong into a CH/BE clone in the form of DH/DE and had grind to a halt when community voiced itself. So now we have combat clusters that do not do much because the cap is lvl 10 no matter what. Same, or less than the same, ol' probot with higher resource, time and complexity costs.

Whats worse? R3 may rule the droid roost on damage, but with a measily 250 or so HAM. Plus it would be an uber R3, nuff said.

Its going from bad to worse beign a DE. Before we could use crap resourses to grind out cookie cutter droids at underseller prices. Now, we will need uber resources, +25 experimentation and LOTS more components and factory runs to make the same droids, except that witht the crafting nerf and armor stacking nerf/bug the "new" droids won't be as good as the old. Meanwhile, we have to explain to our customers why the price has doubled.

Am I missing something?

Oh, yeah, droid repair tools. That's a positive. The complexity, again, sucks, but with them pre-nerf probots will be pretty good to use.

So far that's my assesment. This is the Test Center, but its hard to see anything but tweaks taking place in the next two weeks.

(originally posted by Sodan Droiddreamer)

As a Smuggler/CH I fully suport the request to make Combat Droids the equivalent of a CL15 pet. If you can add the Droideka into the game ( seeing as it exists as a mob ) as a craftable combat droid chassis please do so.

You guys work really hard, I m sure and you all try to give us fun playing this game...

But I can´t understand how your gamedesignteam is working.If you want to give players content, that they use in practise, not only in theory,if you want DE´s not only to able toproduce that content but to sell that stuff. How could you design anything, that needs lots of ressources andcomponents, experimentation, therefore cost a lot, but is worse thanthose probots we got allready?? Nobody should need a testing center, to learn that incredible effort has been spent, to program crag, that isn´t in demand in "real-life". You just have think about it for about 30 sec to realize that.

And No, it wont be better, if you manage to up HAM from 200 to 855 and damage from 65 to 78. There is no need for such jokes. Ask your fellow-devs, who play themselves on a live-server, wether they use any non-ch-pet and think about their answers before you make your next designstep.

Sorry, sometimes its hard, to give some positive input, when most stuff you get yourself to read is of such poor quality.

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SWG-Runesabre wrote:

I have reviewed this thread up to this point. I will be working with the Combat Droiddesigner and the Creature Balance designer and evaluate what we need to do to ensure a CL10 droid is on par with a CL10 pet.

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Runesabre Please

If it MUST be level 10 make it BE level 10 equivalent (but for heavens sake why only 10?) It wouldn't hurt to up that a bit to compensate for the fact that BE has other functionality than creating creatures..we can only make Droids.

What was the point in preventing utility clusters in the Probot in the last Patch, only to give back almost the exact same ability now using Utility Modules in Combat Clusters instead?

What exactly is the point of making all Droids more complex by far, and therefore more expensive by far, if they end up being less effective than the current Probot (healing not whithstanding)

After all these months, and months of patiently waiting, is this really the best we can hope for?

I know that after this 7/8 pass DE will not see development time for a long time to come, so please, while the sun is shining on our poor, nerfed profession, take this opportunity to make the remaining few of us at least a little bit more useful.

Thankyou