Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: droid storage beating the imp crackdown?
Kollos wrote:
RaiCella wrote:
I'm sitting here wondering why Kollos and others are trying to argure that this is INTENDED and should be LEFT ALONE instead of working with us to find a solution that allows BOTH of our professions to rise in promenance and become the envy of the gaming community.
I don't recall saying that I think it was intended. I'm saying that it just might not be considered a bug. Sometimes "features" aren't realized until after the software ships.
Any thing you do that lets you circumnavigate game mechanics is a bug. There would be no point to death and decay if all you had to do is buy a 5k droid. It s was stated that death and decay were added to give meaningful consequences to player death.
But anyway, what you're asking for would cause everyone, not just Droid Engineers, to have to change the way they play. Retroactively. What if someone purchased several crates of Muon Gold (from a Smuggler, mind you) so that they'd always have it available to use? What if someone had all of their weapons sliced so that they'd be a little safer while out tending harvesters? What if they now consider the risk of carrying these now-illegal items to be too great? How are you going to refund their money for theequipment and spicethey can no longer use? Remember, when they made the purchase there was no risk for doing so. You're attempting to add risk after the fact.
There is much precedent ffor that in SWG. The most obvious is the great pet nerf of dec03. Many CHs had to delete pets from their datapads as there was no pet exchange for creatures over CL15. To expect the BEs and the CHs who sold these pets to give refunds,would have been an unfair burden to put on them, unless they had prior knowledge that the nerf was coming.
You're not just asking for a nerf, you're asking for a nerf that penalizes players for actions they took in the past. You need to find a way around that retroactive penalty.
See above
Smugglers should smuggle. Other's maybe can hide.. but we can move the merchandise. Arguements about the grouping effect MEAN NOTHING IF EVERY PLAYER CAN HAVE A DROID THAT SMUGGLES! I can't believe that you honestly think your arguements answer our call for fairness here. Especially when your own members have mentioned the ease of hot-keying droid storage items for easy use.
As someone else has already mentioned, don't shoot yourself in the foot. Do you seriously don't understand that making contraband undesirable is going to cut into your market? I've never purchased spice before, but I was about to start trying it. Not now. I'm not a combatant and I'm a covert Rebel. If I get scanned, I'm dead. Think I'm going to buy any of your spice, or have you slice any of my weapons? Or are you going to be my personal lackey and follow me around all the time so I can be grouped with a Smuggler to avoid the scans?
Contraband wont become less desirable, only the risk of moving it, Thats why you would need a smuggler. And the best contraband customers are more likely than not, combatants.
(I'm being facetious. But the point is valid.)
Besides, what you're asking for is not the ability to smuggle, it's the ability to conceal contraband on your person. Smuggling implies that you're in the shipping business on the underworld side of things. THERE IS NO SHIPPING BUSINESS IN SWG. There's no encumbrance, thus there's no need to hire someone to carry things for you that you cannot carry yourself.
I would have to disagree and say that carrying contraband from point A to point B, whether it be on your person, in a spaceship or in a truck, all fall under the definition of smuggling.
DE's should make devices that benefit and compliment EVERY profession. Droids should be helpers that help us to target mobs, craft items, and smuggle contraband.
I agree. And despite their name, Smugglers in SWG are mostly crafters. Sure, they have a few"dirty fighting"combat related abilities, but they primarilycreate and sell spice, and they slice weapons. I'd love to see Smugglers able to slice other things as well! Slice my Probot for me to give it a faster firing rate. Slice my harvesters for me to increase their extration rate. Make me a spice that "steadies my hands" so that I fail less often while crafting. Slice my PSG to alter the protections it provides.
Agree
There are a lot of ways that Smugglers could be improved that do not involve retroactive penalties for actions players took in the past.
Im not even going to get into how silly the "Houses arent scanned" arguement is. BRING YOUR HOUSE TO THE KOR VELLA CANTINA THEN!
It's not silly at all, it's completely valid. Even modern day smugglers are rarely caught while actually in transit. They're caught at their warehouses. If you're not going to scan houses, then why should you scan droids that aren't even present?
Well, you can drag items from your droid's compartment to the TOOLBAR. The item remains in the droid, and you can even put the droid away. When you press the appropriate F-Key, the item pops into your inventory. So, for example, you can keep your sliced weapon in your droid and have R2 launch it out to you when you need it to fight. If you have enough empty F-keys, R2 can launch your spices and armor out as well.
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I've been doing this very thing, however unintentionally, as I just put the items in my droid for "safe-keeping." Then I noticed that the items' icons were still on the toolbar -- UNTIL I took a shuttle anywhere, after which the icon disappeared! So it may not be all it's cracked up to be, and you'll have to take the time before hunting or pvping to stop, take all items out of your droid back into your inventory, and re-insert their icons into your toolbar.
I noticed that the items did not stay on the toolbar after "shuttling" on both my DE character and an alternate character who uses the armor and weapons more.
CapnSteve wrote:
"Please recognize when a portion of one profession completely negates another's profession."
Wait a minute, storage droids completely negate slicing, spices, and the pistol specials? And you wonder why people accuse you of being melodramatic.
We all agree that this is bad design. But how can it completely destroy the smuggler profession? Was the smuggler profession completely destroyed up until two days ago?
Yes but slicing and spices are not the core of our profession. Smuggling however is. So why should we be denied the namesake of our profession because of an oversight by the devs. I realize that you DEs are a struggling community as well, hell I have many DE friends. Fighting about it is not going to change anythng. We need to WORK TOGETHER on this. I'd be the first one to admit that I'm very much looking forward to the DE revamp. Driods are an important aspect of the SW universe and should be buffed. However they should be providing a skill mod, not replacing the profession it's self. I mean a person can hold what, 5 droids? That's 50 items that cannot be scanned. For most people I know that's more contraband than they have. This leaves their reg inventory open for other things. Will it destroy the smuggler profession, no. Will it hurt out namesake ability, yes, very much so.
"Exhibit 1: Droid storage evaded 1% decay. This is proven."
It seems that this would support the fact that it's intended, since there have been several threads on that, too, without a response.
BS
"Exhbit 2: MSE Storage droids have trippled in price, are selling like hotcakes, and no one is crying "foul" or "rip off". "
I don't see how this one proves it's a bug.
If it is a dev oversight and people are selling droids by celling them 'scan evadors or the like then it is an exploit. I mean an exploit is somethig that someone does to work a bug or oversight in the system I think this would qualify.
"Exhibit 3: There has been NO OFFICIAL word confirming or denying this. "
I don't see how this one proves it's a bug.
Again BS
novakaine wrote:
Kollos wrote:
Any thing you do that lets you circumnavigate game mechanics is a bug. There would be no point to death and decay if all you had to do is buy a 5k droid. It s was stated that death and decay were added to give meaningful consequences to player death.
Irrelevant. It has yet to be determined whether or not either of these issues are bugs or features. Since the avoidance of death & decay has existed for an entire patch cycle now, and has been /bugged relentlessly by Droid Engineers, one must assume that a) it was intentional, or b) it was unintentional but the Devs don't care and are not going to change it. If a) it was a feature all along, and if b) it was retroactively proclaimed a feature due to Dev indifference.
The Devs recognize that both death & decay and the new Imperial Crackdown cannot be implemented ham-handedly. Death & decay still adds an extra level of risk to all players upon death because you cannot store everything that might decayin your droid(s) at all times. The Imperial Crackdown adds an extra level of risk to all players because you cannot store all of your contraband in your droid(s) at all times.
There is much precedent ffor that in SWG. The most obvious is the great pet nerf of dec03. Many CHs had to delete pets from their datapads as there was no pet exchange for creatures over CL15. To expect the BEs and the CHs who sold these pets to give refunds,would have been an unfair burden to put on them, unless they had prior knowledge that the nerf was coming.
I see, so you're equating this to the pre-nerf situation when Creature Handlers were vastly overpowered and were dominating the game? I fully understand the need for nerfs; this most certainly is not one of them.
Besides, isn't it an unfair burden on all players to risk purchasing items that might havesome new and unacceptablerisk associated with them next month? The people who bought creatures from BEs and CHs had no prior knowledge that the nerf was coming either, so why are they being penalized? At least in that case, though, an extremely valid game balance argument can be made. In this case, you don't have that argument. This isn't a game balance issue.
Again, you're not just asking for a nerf, you're asking for a nerf that penalizes players for actions they took in the past. You need to find a way around that retroactive penalty.
Contraband wont become less desirable, only the risk of moving it, Thats why you would need a smuggler. And the best contraband customers are more likely than not, combatants.
Contraband most certainly will become less desirable. Most of your current products are only useful if you have them on your person so that they can be used when needed. Since those products would become risky if you get your way, those products will become less desirable. You're not enhancing your products in any way with this, but you are most definitely making them worse by adding risk that some will find unacceptable.
I would have to disagree and say that carrying contraband from point A to point B, whether it be on your person, in a spaceship or in a truck, all fall under the definition of smuggling.
In that case I would have to argue that everyone should have some ability to smuggle. People do it every day without being smugglers, so that same ability should be allowed in SWG.
Smugglers in the Star Wars universe are the people who either move large quantities of illegal goods, or who specialize in moving small quantities of exceptionally dangerous materials. I don't believe that spices or sliced equipment fall into either of those categories - those are personal use items that virtually anyone should be able to smuggle to some extent.
Kollos. Some abillity isn't being better at it than a smuggler, and if droids don't get scanned, well that's pretty much it. If the only difference between a smuggler and everyone else is a smuggler can carry a little more then that's not exactly us filling a "unique role." That's us getting made obsolete by a droid bug. An oversight. Like I said, I realize you guys want to keep one more thing to validate your profession but we're trying to HAVE a profession here, and this is one more INVALIDATION to ours. There are PLENTY of other roles for droids to fill, even in smuggling, without making them "The first 50 items scan free!" pass card.
JTGAlpha wrote:
Kollos. Some abillity isn't being better at it than a smuggler, and if droids don't get scanned, well that's pretty much it. If the only difference between a smuggler and everyone else is a smuggler can carry a little more then that's not exactly us filling a "unique role." That's us getting made obsolete by a droid bug. An oversight. Like I said, I realize you guys want to keep one more thing to validate your profession but we're trying to HAVE a profession here, and this is one more INVALIDATION to ours. There are PLENTY of other roles for droids to fill, even in smuggling, without making them "The first 50 items scan free!" pass card.
Kollos wrote:
Obsolete? Hardly. The only thing that is even arguably obsolete - and I disagree strongly - is this new feature that was crammed in at the last second. That is NOT your entire profession. Stop with all the exaggeration, already, that's a large part of your problem here.
Smugglers can get an entire group past a patrol that drops on them while they're in battle, or while they're in transit to a battle. Droids cannot do that. What droids do is allow solo crafters (or adventurers) to carry their weapons with them while they're tending harvesters - something that Smugglers DO NOT WANT TO HELP WITH ANYWAY. Why do you insist on making life miserable for a bunch of people that you're not going to want to help after you get your way?
You already HAVE a profession - you make & sell spice, and you slice weapons and armor. Both of those are invaluable or we wouldn't even be having this little discussion, now would we?
You have to understand that most of us signed on with the promise that smuggling content would be coming in the future. Many of us would gladly surrender the ability to slice and spice in exchange for that to be the reality. But if anyone can own a storage device that 100% conceals contraband, we will NEVER be needed to smuggle, and our honly hope to smuggle would be through smuggler mission terminals. But we want to make smuggling actually mean something by being able to smuggle for players.Our title is not drug dealer or slice monkey it is smuggler.
And yes, the existence of a 100% scan proof storage droid totaly makes our bonus obsolete. The cheapness of those droids makes it more cost effective over time than using a smuggler, unless of course we only charge 50cr to group with you.
Message Edited by novakaine on 02-13-2004 05:58 PM
Well...I don't know what to say. Some of us came here not because we expect you to fix anything, as obviously you can't, but because we wanted you to understand our concerns, and how this affects the smuggler community. But some of you can't see past the crackdown and see what this means for our future. I understand that DE is one of the most broken professions in the game, but I did not expect as many of you to be so mired in self pity that you cant sympathize with our problem. If the the droid storage problem is not resolved, the countless promises from the devs, to add content and meaning to the smuggler profession,will never be realized. You Don't NEED to make scanproof droids to fix your profession. Taking them away would be a temporary setback at most. They are not vital to your profession. You will get a fix. But leaving them in will guarantee that smugglers, will never be able to smuggle.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT USE THE WORDS " taking them away would be a temproary setback at most"
THEY SAID THAT ABOUT OUR GOOD PROBOTS!THAT was supposed to be "temporary"!push for a fix all you want, but DO NOT USE THE WORDS "TAKE AWAY", or "TEMPORARY FIX"
saying that is asking for them to remove storage on droids from the game entirely! that's how they do things! don't you get it!!? you scream exploit, they cut us even deeper!
Balaam23 wrote:
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT USE THE WORDS " taking them away would be a temproary setback at most"
THEY SAID THAT ABOUT OUR GOOD PROBOTS!THAT was supposed to be "temporary"!push for a fix all you want, but DO NOT USE THE WORDS "TAKE AWAY", or "TEMPORARY FIX"
saying that is asking for them to remove storage on droids from the game entirely! that's how they do things! don't you get it!!? you scream exploit, they cut us even deeper!
Gotta love the 1 stars
Im not asking for them to be taken away. I just want you to understand that there is more than one point of view, and more than just your profession isaffected. I would rather see them fixed, though there is rumor that Taurin saysthat they are working as intended. We have waited endlessly, without complaing for the promised content to materialize,. Now it is starting to look as if it will never come. I envy DEs, sure our professions works better than yours, but your time will come. We now have nothing to look forward to except spamming in front of starports, and, if were lucky, FedEx missions.