Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Ad Barking droids ... sure its good idea?
And maybe they will set a limit to the amount of 'spam'droids you can have out at once.
How about that?
Right, for a start I don't disagree, advert droids will make places like coronet impossible to live. But asides from that, what about those lovely people who will set up droids saying:
"SWG is really pants!"
"Joe pwnz j00 all n00bs!"
"Sara is a gorilla!"
Bramodolus wrote:
I dont think they will be spamming alot. Just a few lines maybe to say what they give info about, then you have to converse with the droids to get more info.
And maybe they will set a limit to the amount of 'spam'droids you can have out at once.
How about that?
Limit the number of droids ... sure, make it only 1 for each player, how many players will place his advertising droid on patrol? believe me, countless, and only one spam line is more than onough to make it be a nightmare. And unless they change it you can hear others spam when talking to NPCs
Do the droid owners have to be in the general vicinity of the droid or can they leave them barking while the owner skips off to other planets or logs out completely? If the owner has to be around, it'll be noworse than the afk macro barkers now.
Anyway, I'm sure the Devs can code it so theadvertisements are only announced every 3 or 5 minutes or so.
In my opinion, any random barking they do should be rather rare, and very heavily restricted. The real utility should come from the droid 'converse' menu, which should be made rich with possibilities.
I'd set one up in my house, and let it serve as a FAQ/salesman/tutor for droid buyers.
We need to make sure that whatever kind of barking is programmed into the droid will be RETAINED when the droid is stored. I don't want to go through half an hour of programming every day...
Maybe they could get patrol points to stick then, too.
Im sorry Recsa, Im not seeing the problem. I go through everywhere in guild chat or group chat. If I want to talk to someone I do it in /tell. I don't even bother going to spacial. Eliminates 95% of all headaches & its simple to do.
I will sell them and I will use them.
Me (after purchasing a car): Bought a car with a (insert name of feature here, like sun roof) today. It's a lot of fun. It's even got an electric sun roof.
Dad: Electric sun roof? Why would you get that? It's just another thing to go wrong with the car.
This conversation can be repeated with any feature a car might have beyond the factory base options. It boils down to Dad feeling that any extra feature is a possible problem waiting to happen and me feeling that extra luxury features are worth the (small) risk. In my dad's ideal world I guess we'd all be driving unicycles to work.
The point is that a good and useful feature can be worth the possible negative side effects. If the "barker" droid just spews ads into the air, yeah, that probably isn't worth the troubles is could cause, but if if it could provide waypoints to shops, live vendor inventory, accept orders for custom items to be filled by the vendor, that would be a different story possibly. I'd rather have a droid barking out waypoints AND providing real info of value than some nitwit AFK macro shouter who just clutters the air with his waypoint and slogan.
Chris
Havea little circle "i" floating above the head of the droid, maybe a different color than NPC's.
Customerapproaches the droid, left clicks and gets a radial menu.
Radial menu has the option "What am I offering?"
Select that option and the droid begins it's little speech.
Some ways they can keep this from becoming too much of a problem (note I don't advocate all of them, but they are possible...)
* Only Merchants can get the droid to actually "bark" ads. Others just get the little (i) over their droid.
* Droid spamming is kept to a reasonable interval, like 2 minutes (or affected by Merchant levels). Unlike players who can and do spam every 5 seconds.
* Droids near each other take turns barking. So, if there are 50 droids around, each one only barks every 50 intervals. This would encourage people to put their droids in places where there aren't too many.
* Droid spam message is kept very short, or based on Merchant skills. So a non-merchant's droid can only bark 40 characters, just enough for a shop name and waypoint.
* Droid barking requires battery power, so an unattended droid will only bark for X minutes before it reaches *Low Power*.
* Droid barking gets a very small radius, so only people who walk within 5 meters of the droid hear it's message. Maybe Merchant skills increase this radius.
Anyway, there are many ways SOE could make droids less annoying than afk ad-spammers. If they do it right, these might even be better for the advertiser's purposes as well as the listener's.
...If they do it right.