Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Publish 8: Droids Rebuilt Feedback
harvest droid - useful, love it
survey droid - no stats and 38 mins? useless, add stats to the survey report
bomber droid - how do you expect someone to use one of these things in PvP? cumbersome to use, perhaps useful in PvE, otherwise useless
Bug fixes for PC bounty missions no there, this patch took you that long to come up with? Fire/demote/promote/get him/her out of therewhoever is in charge of this project. So far most of these publishes have been more hype than actual content, and the community is getting annoyed by your ignorance and inability to deliver enjoyable, bug-free content in a timely fashion.
Well, since I only got experience on the survey droid, I will restrain myself on commenting on that one and post some general insights on droids. Our armorsmith got one and used it to survey for chemicals. Took the mentioned 40+ minutes to survey and returned with a nice list of the ressources present. In principle - considering SWG alone - not too awefull. But unfortunately some points need to be made:
- The ressource stats are not mentioned at all.
- Not knowing the stats, the person looking for a specific ressource will have to fly to the planet the ressource was located on, anyway.
- Since the ressources are the same on all planets they spawn on, this does not actually safe that much time.
- There are websites, which currently supply us with ressource locations and stats, which I can check for the 5 - 10 ressources I need in 15 minutes, tops. Then I know to which planet to go and if the trip is worth the time, since I know the stats beforehand.
Please explain the advantage of using the droid to me, since I fail to understand it. It will most likely only be a help to those new players, who do not have the required ressource-list-links for their profession, yet.
I understand that you did not want to enable droids replacing other players and their professions, allowing people to solo everything. It is a reason to game-mechanics and community management. Nonetheless, some support is hard to find and you broke - to my understanding - with this concept with the Stim A dispenser droid. As I understand robots and as fictional development of those the droids of Star Wars, some thoughts come to my mind:
- Droids have been designed to assist and to replace humans.
- In Episode IV the medical droid (forgot the serial, please forgive me) actually performed the healing of Luke Skywalker on its own. No human doctor was ever in appearance.
- C-3PO is entirely capable of translating without an actual human translator being in the vicinity.
- The mouse messenger droids on the first Deathstar are able to deliver messages, without a human accompanying them.
- In essential, those droids are designed and able to perform tasks, the owner is not able to perform, when properly directed. Probably not half way at the same level a human expert could perform the tasks, but still they could.
As things currently stand, I find my old probot a total joke as a combat droid (and calling an AT-ST as imperial, or some razor cats with my CH is usually much, much more effective). The medical module is actually a nice addition as is the crafting station module, but I bought that droid once about 3 months ago and totally lack a reason to conduct any more business in this regard with a DE.
I truly can feel for the DEs, since I see a lack in the understanding of one of the most fundamental marketing concepts: AIDA+R by the design of the profession. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action and last but not least Repeat. I still lack to see any reason to have repeated business with a DE except then procurement of batteries. Droids last and last and last. At least weaponsmiths, armorsmiths anddoctors are getting repeat business because their products are actually used up. Nothing like this for the DEs I can see so far.
Wire3k wrote:The survey droid came SO close to actually being a highly sought after product.In the DE forums - very nearly 100% agreement on that they need to return stats as well as the list.WHAT is there and WHAT the stats are aren't the challenging or profitable part of surveying - FINDING and HARVESTING are.This droid came so very very close to be used a LOT by a ton more people. Yes, it's marginally useful now they made it more affordable with multiple uses - and yes, if you have harvesters on Yavin you want to check without having to trot there to see if you need to pull them - some use there, but I weep to see the missed opportunity in this one. There is every reason in the world to add stats - and virtually no drawbacks to it.
That's exactly what I thought... they are always close to implementing cool things in this game and they come up short. DE would have one hell of product to sell in these droids if they reported stats. Frankly, they're just not worth the time.
*sigh*
I am quite dissapointed in this publish... atleast as far as the droids go. Anyone who thinks otherwise has either not played with them or just hasnt even bothered to read details on things. They probably just read the title of the module and think things are great.
Stimpack droid module: Stimpack A's? Do you even play the same game we play? When was the last time ANY of us used stimpack A's? A's and B's are both medical use 5 and using B's we dont keep up with the damage we take unbuffed. A stimpack-A made by a master doctor is just effectiveness rating of 99-100. When a master doc applies it WITH +25 in bio-clothing this is just a 200 point stim. This is considerably lower when done by the droid. Stim A's are only useful to someone within his first week of gameplay tops and ANYONE who can do missions to afford this droid is WELL BEYOND stimpack A's. Not to mention, exactly how much INFLUX are we really seeing in this game? 2 new playersa day? MAYBE. This is partial circumcision.. either go all the way or F'in forget it.
Thunderheart wrote:
Profession: Droid Engineer
Added an Interplanetary Survey Droid - This droid is capable of using survey tools and traveling to other planets to report on the resources present on that planet.
Thepeople are crying left and right about this one, proclaiming it "useless", are trying to make it out to be something it is not.
This is a survey tool to see if a shift has occoured, or if a rare resource spawns on a certain planet.
It is not meant to be used every time you want to casually survey. If someone is looking for a rare resource, say a duralloy steel (which disapears off some servers for 3-4 months at a time) it doesn't matter if it's got good stats or crappy stats - you need that resource.
People crying about this are looking for the game to play itself, it seems. It's a heads up, not a replacement for doing the work yourself. If I live on Dantooine, and I find out there is no extrusive ore for me to mine on Rori, it's saved me some time.
Finally, people keep saying SWGCraft - well, it's only as perfect as the players who update it, and the whole point is that many people don't wish to leave the game for help.
If these aren't for you, it's great - ask for a SAMPLE droid as well, that will haul back a unit of a specific resource for you to look at - but don't expect a SURVEY droid to do it for you.
That said - this droid takes too long to report. Five minutes should be the max. This isn't very detailed information, and if you want it to be useful it needs to be less time consuming.
Added Merchant Barker Module to the DE skill tree: This module allows for the owner to input a short message that is continuously transmitted to nearby players as they walk by. It also allows him or her to place a waypoint in the droid that is given to any player that requests it via the radial menu on the droid.
Wonderful. There are a few people crying about this one as well, but it comes down to this - advertising in a game like this is absoultely 1000% unavoidable, no matter how much you complain - and this helps seperate the true crafters who need advertising from those spammers who yell because they are desperate.
I can't tell you how many people have THANKED me for having mine out at a starport - other DE's on my server don't seem very on top of things, and they all said how much they appriciated having the patch day droids available to them.
People seem to be in a snit about starport advertising, and they need to either learn how to get over it...or learn how to get over it. Turn off spatial if you don't like it. When you choose to go to Coronet or Theed, you know what you are in for. There are lots of options to avoid it if you want, but some people like to cry that their hand is getting burned while the other hand holds it over the fire...
Functionally, it seems to work great - however, I would really like to be able to enter more information to be accessed from the radial menu. Perhaps a description of the shop, etc. 128 characters is enough for the actual advertising message, but not enough to get someone to hop a planet, for instance, without more detail about what is available.
I would also really like to see a count of how many people have requested the waypoint, but that's just a wishlist item.
Added Structure Maintenance Module to the DE skill tree: This module will allow a player to pay maintenance on structures they own from a remote location.
Another one people misunderstand.
Every other post seems to ask, "Needs to give power!"
People don't seem to get that this is a structure maintainance droid, not a HARVESTER maintainance droid. A harvester droid is a great idea - but this isn't it.
People that call this "useless" haven't had a dozen or more buildings under their care at once, or only own structures in one spot in the galaxy. To those of us who own structures on multiple planets, locations, and have admin and manage others structures, this one is invaluable JUST because you can see the maint presently on the building.
So ask for a harvester maintainance droid - in the meantime, managing my house, factories, and shops just got a whole lot more pleasant.
Added Auto Droid Repair Module to the DE skill tree: When this module is activated, it sends out a “healing pulse” which repairs every other nearby friendly droid within a 15’ radius. The pulse fires every 10 seconds and heals an amount equal to the droid’s Auto Repair Power. The more auto-repair modules that are added to a droid, the higher this attribute will become.
The new stats on the combat droids (which are the best part of the publish, IMHO) will make this more useful. Groups who organize will really be taking advantage of the combat droids (when a single Probot adds 250dps - damage per second - to your party, having four or five of them could be very valuable indeed). I haven't tested this one a whole lot, but it does seem a bit weak even when stacked.
Added Stimpack Dispenser Module to the DE skill tree: This skill allows a player with Pharmacology IV to load up a properly equipped droid with Stimpack A’s. Once loaded, any player within the droid master’s group may issue a /requestStimpack command to receive healing.
First - immediately, you guys need to add to whatever hotfix you do a change to the text description of this item - no where does it say on the module or anywhere else that it takes Pharm IV to load one, and like the merchant one it has made me glad I have not sold utility (only combat) on vendors. I have gotten a dozen tells today asking how to "use" merchant and stim droids; my answer is becoming "if there isn't a menu option for it, you can't do it with your skills". Using them seems rather self-explanitory, if you have the skill to use them. While the merchant module at least says on the schematic itself what you need to use it, the stim one does not - meaning lots of consufsed and disapointed people that unless you are a message board junkie you couldn't prevent.
As to the usefulnees of Stim A's...I really don't see this droid coming in to heavy use, especially since you cannot request one while incapped. That's the only real use I could see for such little healing power - to "wake" you up from an incap. I would really like to see Stim A+ able to be used, or some new proprietary product that medics can make to fill the droids that is better than an A but maybe less than a B if that has been deemed "unbalancing".
Added Musician Playback Module to the DE skill tree: This module allows an entertainer or a musician to record a musical track onto the droid. The droid will then be able to play back the music that was recorded as accompaniment in the player’s band. Multiple modules of this type will stack and allow multiple musical tracks to be recorded, although only one track can be played at a time.
Although this is nice to fill out an entertainer R3 droid...dubious usefulnees. Those that have used it have said, "so?" Most people are sick to death of the entertainer music after all this time and either have it turned off anyway, or like to keep it as quiet as possible. Novelty at this point.
What would be useful would be a recorder that temporarily records a entertainers performance for use in the wild - say, a 1 or 3 time use to heal some BF in the field. Not that repalces, but gives a boost to get you through between real live viewings.
Added Entertainer Lighting Effects Module to the DE skill tree: These droid modules can have up to 5 unique lighting effects that can be used by dancers and musicians.
I'm pretty indifferent on these - they are pretty, but not essentially useful; it remains to be seen if they are simply an elite niche item for the very few entertainers that can afford them, or if they will fall into common use. They need to give some other benefit besides visual for the latter, I believe.
Added Scout Trap Module to the DE skill tree: This module will allow any player with the novice scout ability to program and arm a droid with player made scout traps which will then fire when given the command by the player.
This is the one droid not a single person has even inquired about. I think this is a fault of traps being useless, not the module itself. Very, very few people like and use traps - the minor state changes aren't enough for most scouts to bother past grinding. /shrug
Added Creature Harvester Module to the DE skill tree: This module will allow any character with the Novice Scout ability to program and control an equipped droid to advance on the look-at target of the player and harvest the resources on the creature. The player can preset the droid to harvest one of the three types: meat, hide or bone. Or the player can just let the droid pick a random resource type.
I cannot tell you how many times today people have asked me "u got harvest droids?" and I have had to ask if they mean this one, the survey one, or the structure maintainance...in any case, this one also seems like a bit of "huh?" module on the surface, but initial reports confirm it gives a slight bonus to harvesting, and it's good for lazy rifleman who don't want to run up to the corpse. I need to test both scout droids out more before I suggest fixes.
Added Detonation Module to the DE skill tree: This module grants Bounty Hunters and Smugglers the ability to destroy his droid causing damage to every enemy target nearby. The destruction is ordered by the /detonateDroid command or via the droid’s radial menu.
Funny, but ultimately not a whole lot of practical use. Too expensive to be used casually,but once things like player bounties and assasinations are possible they might fall into heavier use. Haven't had any serious inquiries on these past, "can i have one to try out?".
Droid deeds now have the appearance of the droids they represent and are customizable. The customization will carry over to the droid pet when generated. (Correspondent Issue)
This is nice, and the newly available colors are great. I have yet to test how long the last, and droids are having the same low-detail problems as all objects in the game seem to (wrong colors showing up at distance), but I am pleased with the implementation. I'd like to see the the colors refined a bit - a few less redundant shades and a few more distinct colors on some models - but overall is working well so far
Fixed Droidsmith Tool Belt schematic to use the proper item in the Tool Set slot.
Working on this now...
Fixed a problem with installed modules not displaying properly when examining droid deeds and control devices. (Correspondent Issue)
VERY BIG ISSUE HERE : The new combat droids are awesome, but their actual stats need to appear on the deeds, not just "combat rating".
A combat rating of "535" means nothing to the purchaser - because not only is there no way for them to see a translation unless the DE puts the stats on the deed but it's compounded by the fact that a 535 rating means one set of stats on an R3 and an entirely different set of stats on a Probot Adv. It's not good to have to put the stats in the deed title because a) a DE has to waste too many droids "testing" just to see what stats the droids they make are, b) people can put whatever they darn well please in the deed and the buyer has no way to verify it until after the sale, and c) it's just too confusing and messy for customers using vendors no matter how many signs and "read me's" you put up.
You wouldn't ask someone to buy a T21 without seeing it's stats first, and it's a double blind system here that's working against DE's and against those who use our droids. This is a very, very important issue to anyone who sells combat droids on vendors.
To reclaim radial menu space, the droid pet Store and Recharge radial menu selections, as well as droid Inventory and Datapad selections (if available) will now show up as sub menus under the Droid Options root menu.
To be honest...I hate it. It used to be a "~" and "2" to open up my item storage, now you've added another step. I know it's new, and new things take getting used to - but in this case, you've just added an extra click/mouse motion for all the things I do commonly. Please, recharge and storage need to go back in the main radial - put the things like merchant module controls in a deep menu. That stuff doesn't need to be accessed as quickly as item storage or recharge - I feel like this was done backwards.
Please, give me back easy access to the things I use constantly...
You can now see the number of charges available when crafting or examining a droid repair/reconstruction kit
It's nice to see while crafting now - examining it doesn't change much (since you could just look anyway), but it's nice to see how the charges develop over the crafting process.
Droids
Anyone can use a droid customization kit on a droid pet (although experienced droid engineers will have more customization options available). (Correspondent Issue)
Wonderful. The only question I hate more than, "What's the best droid u can make?" is "What colors do you have..." Let me make the tool, and let them play with it all they want. I'm sure some DE's have fun coloring droids for people all the time - but some people like eating frogs legs too. To each their own...I'm just glad I don't have to ever do it again.
Made "Recharge" the default option on the "Droid Options" menu.
This alleviated some of my irritation of the new menu positions, but really - item and data storage are the most commonly used things for many people (their main reason for owning droids) and it just shouldn't be buried. Again, make the more periodic, less time relevant things - like filling the droid with stims, or turning on the barker - into the submenus, but put the stuff we use constantly back where it belongs - please. The time-sensitive things (like /requeststim) are in verbal/line commands - open item storage and recharge are not (though if you add / commands for them I'd be satisfied...).
Droid customization kits now have an extended lifespan before the custom colors fade. (Correspondent Issue)
Again, haven't seen how long yet - anything less than 3-4 days of decent use is too little. We'll see on this one.
Displaying remaining battery power when examining a droid pet (Correspondent issue) Increased the effectiveness of combat droids so that they are more effective.
THIS should have been at the top, not the bottom. Probots with 3200HAM, R3's with 4500HAM - Probots doing 250dps...these are great droids. People are absoultely loving the combat enhancements. These droids have better stats than Prenerf Probots now (I destroyed all mine finally today) - which only did about 90dps. Damage wise, these would kick the prenerf model's asses. Yes, the loss of medium armor still hurts - but if you take care of them these are very valuable droids.
I saw people testing on Dathomir today. A group of five people, all with an R3 or a Probot. One person was their player tank, and they unequipped all weapons. The group of droids they were using gave them a total of over 1200dps, and with the player tank they were taking out 10K mobs with ease with just the droids.
Easily, the best thing about this publish is these combat droids. These ain't droidekas, but as tools in the right hands these things are hot. If you are still bad mouthing these droids, you haven't used them or your expectations are too high. A single droid giving you 250 damage per second additional at ranged mode and kept protected/stimmed is nothing to turn your nose up at unless you are trying to solo the Corvette.
Overall, many of the new modules aren't finding much of an audience - but with tweaks many of them could be considered useful. The combat droids are the true hero of this patch - now if only you guys could fix some of the remaining bugs (LET US NAME TALKING DROIDS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!) DE is on it's way to being a more relevant profession and not the odd/lame duck it has felt like for so long.
AO
PS - Thanks TH for putting these threads in quotable format. It really helps us get the information to you that needs to get accross.
What exactly is the point of a "survey droid" that can notsurvey ??
I was going to go into a rant about how silly and uselesswhat sounded likeanothergreat addition to the gameturned out to be, but I just do not have the heart anymore.
But on the bright side EQ-II Beta was just announced............
.../wave.......
Aluvia wrote:
What exactly is the point of a "survey droid" that can notsurvey ??
I was going to go into a rant about how silly and uselesswhat sounded likeanothergreat addition to the gameturned out to be, but I just do not have the heart anymore.
But on the bright side EQ-II Beta was just announced............
.../wave.......
/jumps for joy
Finally, swg will be dumped like a stone when eqII arrives. That is really good news.