Droid Engineer Archive

Its been stated that nothing will happen in the area of combat droids (aside from tweaking) until after space expansion... I see it as good, others see it as bad, take it as you will.

Yea....that's the basically the deal. The schedule is pretty full with other things first.

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Echewarr wrote:

Hello. I am a Master DE on Starsider. I don't post much here but I was just curious about something.

Is the idea of allowing DE's to make Droidekas and 'roger roger' droids and the like abandoned? Or is there still some shred of hope we will be able to make these droids :]

Thanks in advance.

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You might as well consider it abandoned. At least for most of us. Not many DE's will still be DE's by the time they get around to this again. I'm sure some of us will survive that long. Don't know if I will or not. Even when they do get around to us again, they will probably just throw a bunch of utility droids at us again. Most likely because that's what a whole new generation of DE's will ask them for. None of the new DE's will know the history here and will repeat the same mistakes again. I've come to believe theat Battle Droids and Super Battle Droids will never be craftable. When they shot down Sodan's solution, they pretty much wiped out the last remaining hope I had.

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ArdenStarmariner wrote:

None of the new DE's will know the history here and will repeat the same mistakes again.

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Jenden wrote:

you think asking for utility droids was a mistake? Its was one of the best things (in my opinion) that could have ever happened to the profession.

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I'd agree with you if we had some sort of Droid Decay. This really needs to come back into the game (not the lame pet vitality system we had tho). Sales went from fairly nice to barely noticeable within weeks of the 'Utility publish' The only way to really sell droids now is to Spam Coronet again....

Not my idea of fun.

They COULD keep us happy releasing a new chasis every 2 or 3 publishes at least. I know we won't see the craftable super combat droids this year, unless they get snuck into the GCW revamp as craftable faction pets.

/crossfingers

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Jenden wrote:

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ArdenStarmariner wrote:

None of the new DE's will know the history here and will repeat the same mistakes again.

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you think asking for utility droids was a mistake? Its was one of the best things (in my opinion) that could have ever happened to the profession.

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It was the best thing that could have happened to the profession? Well, for all of about two weeks. Sure seems like a hellva lot of energy was put into something for such a short term market. But then the DEV's were told from the beginning that utility modules were a secondary market at best. Sorry, Jenden, but there's nothing you can say that will convince me that utility modules were the "best thing" to happen to DE when I see the DE market returning to the same exact flatline it was before any of these droid publishes happened. I see no difference in sales volumes now than I saw before any of these publishes happened. Until I do, your wasting your time try to convince me that utility modules were the best thing to happen to DE. They aren't good and they aren't bad. Except for a two week burst, they simply had no effect.

eh, I could care less about number of sales, its the diversity and usefullness of the droids we can make that I care about. Combat droids would have gotten us absolutely nothing in the diversity area (there would be one, maybe two different combat droids people buy, same thing you see happening with armor and weapons). Yes, some form of decay would be nice, but getting some more choices and options for droids was just as important.

I agree with Jenden on this It is the best thing that I've ever seen happen to DE. Yes the sales aren't that great but I don't think that sales are an appropriate measuring stick without having droid decay. Without utility droids and with droid decay we would see a sales increase; however, with utility droids I think that there would be a much greater sales increase and there wouldn't be this "flatline".

This really comes down to what do you consider to be "Great" sales. I average out to having 100k per day sold from my vendor. If i spam the starport obviously my sales are higher. I think this is just fine for now. I have been making good money as a DE. Now do i make as much as an armorsmith? No way.

Anything that increases the diversity of our droids is a good thing. Would I like to see higher level combat droids? Yes. But who is to say that the same inital spike and then "flatline" wouldnt happen with them?

Probably the most important issue to DEs is Decay. This should be issue #1 after JTL. We should be lobbying for Decay not Vitality.

I judge the publishes solely by the amount they increased the demand for our products long term. They didn't increase the long term demand at all, therefor, the publishes are failures. If the products were "useful" as you put it, then there would be more demand for them now then before the publishes. The demand isn't there. Even the new expendable droids aren't in demand. They gimped them too much to be of worth to people. People tired of playing with bomb droids rather fast. And they tossed the survey droid soon as they found out how little information it gave them.

If and when they put usage decay on droids, I expect that most of the people who own the new "utility" droids won't replace them. Why? Simply because the novelity has worn off. They are kinda like fireworks. Pretty but don't really do anything. Especially the special effects and music playback droids. Medical droids I expect will continue to be in about the same demand as they always have been. Since doctors have to have them to buff people, they have a real use and if they wear out they will be replaced.

If the utility modules really created diversity and usefullness then they would create larger market demand. They don't. So I really fail to see how you can arrive at any logical conclusion that these utility droids are all that useful. Diversity, yes. But what's the point?

I'd have to dissagree that there isn't a larger demand. I'm selling more droids now than before the patch, even some of these so called gimped expendable droids. I can't keep the detonation modules in stock (and you have to realize I do absolutely no advertising and my vendor is in the middle of nowhere and not on the map, the only way I get sales is through word of mouth and repeat business), and repair kit sales have picked up some too. Yea, some of them aren't selling, some of them are more novelty than anything else, but then some aren't. As soon as a nice avian meat spawn popped up on my server, I was swamped with orders. People saw that with this droid they could increase their profits by 20%. When I started demonstrating the stimpack droids to some people, I started selling them pretty quick. The ability for anyone without medic skills to heal themselves at about the rate of a master medic (100 dps) is a huge benefit. Maybe its my crazy screwed up business, maybe my server is that much different than yours, I don't know... I just know what I see happen with my business.

I like the fact that we got utility over combat, I justwish we got the same attention that Chefs and Bio Engineers got. I mean I would venture to bet that 70-95% of the population has some Chef food in their inventory right now. It can do everything. Crafters want it, combat types pretty much NEED it, and Bio Engs went from the worst profession to one of the best (at the time). Now the the fixing (some say nerfing, I say fixing) of the Creature Handler profession people don't dable in it as much so some of the sales of BE have gone down, but still it's an awesome profession.

What did DE's get that people can't live without? Nada, zip, zilch. Sure it's nice to have a harvesting droid, but it's also a pain to take it out kill, harvest, store it jump on your bike, take it out, etc. I love the survey droids but no one else seems to, I still have my original batch sitting on my vendor.

DE's just didn't get the attention that some of the other revamps got and it's a little dissappointing.