Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Very good ideas, very poor implimentation
Survey modules that only return a list of available resources?
Stim modules that only take Stim As?
Creature harvest module with a 40M range, and no loot capability?
All of the best ideas wrecked by poor implimentation. After "fixing" droid engineer, the devs will move on to "fix" other professions and we'll be stuck with almost useful droids.
Was it too much work to code complete modules, or were they intentionally made half-assed? Either way, shame on SOE and shame on me for supporting them.
So close yet so far.....
Mild7 wrote:
Harvester tenders that only pay maintenance?
At least you can make sure they're not taking damage. Besides, harvesters are not the ONLY thing these droids can be used for. Houses, factories, vendors, etc. can all be added to this modules "to-do" list and none of them take power.
Survey modules that only return a list of available resources?
Again, droids should add to a player's abilities but not act in leiu of them. This droid could save you some trips to a planet by telling you in advance whether or not a particular resource is located there, but it's not meant to do all your surveying work for you. If you want to mine that resource, you're still going to have to fly out there and find a good spot. Otherwise there would be NO REASON to gain skills in the harvesting tree, and that's why these droids will never give you statsor waypoints.
Stim modules that only take Stim As?
So given a choice between no stims and Stim As you'd take no stims? I'll repeat: this acts as a supplement to a medic/doctor, not a replacement. If you want to get better heals than Stim As you'd better bring a doctor with you or take up the profession yourself. These droids will be useful because sometimes your group medic is otherwise occupied and can't get to you quickly enough. If one of these droids is in the group, it could keep you alive long enough for the PC medic to get to you.
Creature harvest module with a 40M range, and no loot capability?
I know a lot of riflemen that are really looking forward to this module, because 40m is still a lot farther than 5m or whatever it is now. I'll say it again, in case you haven't got the idea yet: supplement, not replace.
All of the best ideas wrecked by poor implimentation. After "fixing" droid engineer, the devs will move on to "fix" other professions and we'll be stuck with almost useful droids.
If what you're looking for in a droid is something that will do everything for you, then you might as well give up, because that's not going to happen. Ever. In the real world that's probably what droids are for, but in a game universe you can't take skills away from a player and give them to a droid. If you can't find uses for these droids than you're not using your imagination.
Was it too much work to code complete modules, or were they intentionally made half-assed? Either way, shame on SOE and shame on me for supporting them.
Guess what. These modules are complete. They're not half-assed, but for the umpteenth time, a droid will never do your job for you. I'm sorry you want a droid that will let you run 20 harvesters on 8 different planets without ever having to actually visit them. I'm sorry you want to find the best spot in the galaxy for that uber copper without spending any time looking for it. I'm sorry you want to be healed for 1k a shot without giving your medic friend something to do. I'm sorry you want to snipe mobs from 75m away and expend no effort in extracting the spoils of your victory.
Ok, actually, I'm not sorry at all.
So close yet so far....
OrionsByte wrote:
Keep in mind that droids are meant to supplement a player and not replace a player. Just because the droids won't play the game for you doesn't mean they're not useful:
If droids did everything for you, whats the point?!
The only thing from the list I would have liked to be able to fuel havesters as well as pay maintenence. That would have made an uber-useful droid!
Still... I don't mind too much... I can harvest a load of extra energy without too much bother... money is a bit more straight in and out of my pocket!
So now, I can harvest energy, build up a bit of a stockpile, and stock the harvests once a week. Then I just need to use the droid to pay maintenence as an when I have the cash, rather that the round trip I have to do at least every couple of days at the moment. Even so, it would be useful if the droid could me if the harvesters energy was low though...
Why shouldn't a droid help a surveyor pinpoint good concentrations or resources and or report on the quality of resources? Scaled to the surveyors level.
Medical droids make doctors MORE effective.
Why shouldn't droids use precise cutting tools to make scouts and rangers MORE effective?
Droid crafting stations can be used ANYWHERE, a crafter can make any item anywhere at anytime.
Why shouldn't artisans be able to tend to their harvesters and collect the resources from them from anywhere?
Droids should make the users life easier, end of story.
What group is going to say no to a doctor because they have a stim dispensing droid? The droid will improve the doctor's group experience because they can focus on fixing states and rezing. CMs can focus on poison/disease. Novice medics or docs can ask to have the droid stored and do the job to gain xp.
I'm a droid engineer. I "play" the game to make and sell droids. Collecting resources is a means to that end. Having a droid travel to, power up, pay maint, and empty harvesters would make my life easier, and allow me more time to "play" the game the way I want to play it. It would also afford me a nice renewable source of income from selling these droids.
The harvest module is just stupid. Would a meele player even bother with a droid when the body is right at their feet? No, unless it could harvest more than the player. Ranged harvesting would only be usefull to ranged players, especially rifleman. Rifleman get the best accuracy mods 50+ meters out, and at that range the droid is useless. That's poor implimentation.
I don't want droids to play the game for me. I do want to use droids to make me a better player, or more effective player. I also want to have a nice selection of droids on my vendor that people want, need, and use to make their game play better.
The bottom line is the devs took the best ideas from droid engineers and implimented them very poorly. They could have made droids and droid engineers very usefull to many players, but they missed the mark.
OrionsByte wrote:
Keep in mind that droids are meant to supplement a player and not replace a player. Just because the droids won't play the game for you doesn't mean they're not useful:
Why shouldn't droids use precise cutting tools to make scouts and rangers MORE effective?
Well I don't know if they use precise cutting tools, but the harvest modules DO give a bonus on top of the scout/ranger harvest abilities.
Droid crafting stations can be used ANYWHERE, a crafter can make any item anywhere at anytime.
Kollos wrote:
Both of you - Mild7 and OrionsByte - have good points.
However, I think you guys may be misinterpreting what Mild7 is saying. He's not asking to have the game played for us, but like me he is underwhelmed by most of the new modules. They had so much potential, but we're getting pre-nerfed versions of the modules for some reason instead of really good ones as one might have expected after seeing the changes to Chef and Bio Engineer.
Are these modules useful? Yes, most of them are, at least to some people. Are they useful to most people most of the time? Resoundingly no. And that's the problem.
In order for these droids to have a good market, they need to be high demand items. Few, if any, of these droids are going to be high demand items. I can see demand for the detonation module and the stimpack module, but that's about it and I don't expect the demand to be high. Virtually every person I have talked to in-game has said that the Survey Droid, as currently implemented, seems nearly useless. Same for the Maintenance Droid - since it can't add power it doesn't actually save most people a significant amount of effort.
Giving the Survey Droid the ability to return stats on a smaller subset of resources (e.g. "Metal" instead of "Mineral") would not have allowed it to play the game for us. We would still have to visit the planets to find a concentration and plant harvesters. Limiting the scope to a sub-category would require more of the droids to be used as well, further increasing the market.
Allowing the Maintenance Droid to deposit power would also not have allowed the droids to play the game for us, it simply would have eliminated much of the tedium. Which, by the way, is exactly the point of droids - do the drudge work and eliminate tedium for their owners. Even if the droids could deposit both maintenance AND power, we would still have to do harvester runs to retrieve the resources. (People I talk to laugh at the concept of using these droids just to tend to buildings - they visit their structures so regularly for other reasons that they see no need at all to use a droid to pay the maintenance.)
Note that neither of the above droids infringe upon the core responsibilities of a profession. I don't have a problem with the stimpack module only dispensing Stim A because anything greater would infringe upon the core responsibility of Medics, Doctors, and Combat Medics.
(I have no real opinion on the harvesting droid because even if you doubled its output I wouldn't use it... harvesting organics isn't something I do or have any interest in doing. However, the trapping module sounds pretty cool to me on paper.)
I can definately understand why you would be underwhelmed, honestly I do. I guess I came in to this with a different perspective: knowing that the devs designed certain processes to have very specific time and money sinks, I knew that we probably wouldn't get droids that took a good portion of those sinks away. I had cautiously low expectations for the new modules, so when they came out I was excited rather than dissapointed.
I may have been a bit harsh in accusing Mild7 of wanting droids to play the game for him, but in essence, if you give them too much functionality that's exactly what happens. Would it be nice to have droids deposit power as well as pay maintenance? Yep, but that's one thing that the player doesn't have to do anymore. Would it be nice for survey droids to return some rudimentary stats? Yep, but that's one thing the player doesn't have to do anymore. I know that that actually sounds like a good thing, but from a game design standpoint it's not. It might even make sense that this is how a droid would actually do it's job, but in the end you have to consider what the net effect is on the game.
For instance, let's say you introduce droids that return stats on resources on remote planets. Now granted, you can get the same info from swgcraft.com, but a great majority of players either don't know about that website or don't use it for one reason or another. If you were able to get the same information in-game, that would be a good thing, right?
Well what I think would actually happen is that people would be much more cognizant of the higher-quality stuff. That means that everyone with a survey droid would probably end up harvesting the exact same resources. That means that virtually all products on the market would be using the same resources. That means that there would be no diversity in quality (aside from skill level). That's economy-breaking.
I know I'm being really over-simplisticand this probably isn't the best example, but my point is that the devs aren't going to add droids that significantly alter gameplay. Does that mean that not everyone will be clamoring to buy a droid? Yes. Does it mean that more people will be buying droids than right now? Also yes.
"More sales" isn't as good as "most sales," but it's better than "same sales."
Kollos - my original point was focusing on the Devs thinking behind making new content. They dont want you to save time. They want you to spend as much time as possible doing everything you do so you acumilatively spend more months playing thus pay more subscrition. So what I am saying is that although you have a valid point, it makes no difference with the restricting factors in place.
I agree with you that the modules have a lot more potential - maybe there will be further changes down the line. The maintenance droid in particular, even if it just displayed the stats and status of my harvesters I would at least know when I would need to go out to relocate/add power/ maintenace, or alternatively add power too. I think the resources would be too much to ask. But it is basically useless except for an emergency 'omg its about to blow up' situation.
The survey tools I agree with though, there are other, more sublime benifits such as having a written record you can refer to all the time, and forward to your buddies. If it did give you all the stats then there would be very little point in spawning crap resources at all, and the only reason they do mix in crapresources is so you have to take the time to find out which ones are suitable for you. Otherwise they may as well only ever spawn one type of steel and makeall stats 900+. So in that respect it would undermine a core function of the game - TAKING UP YOUR TIME!
This is it for the DE overhaul, and we got very little. They won't get back around to us for a very long time. They could have easily made these modules very usefull but decided not to.
I realize SOE is in the business of keeping players playing to turn a buck, but I know in my case I wouldn't cut back my SWG time because droids saved me 2 hours a week.
Who gets negativly impacted by having droids tend to harvesters? Who gets negativly impacted by having droids report the stats of resources? Who is negativly impacted by having a 70M range for droids to harvest bone?? NOBODY, but DE's get negativly impacted by a fix that is just more uselessness.
You SOE appologists make it easier for them to half-fix other professions and move on.