Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: OMG, best idea ever, seriously. Ok a not so modest title, but this is great.
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Straker_Atrella
Mon Aug 16, 2004 3:31 pm
#14
Steel-Rat wrote:
I don't think I've ever had a pet or droidor vehicle take more than 5 seconds to appear. Personally I love my harvester droid. I take him out when I've spotted a pack of creatures, but before attacking, begin the attack, and issue the harvest command as I drop them in melee. So if I end up in a protracted battle I don't lose resources to disappearing corpses.
I don't think the saddlebags thing is such a terrific idea, if limited to droids and pets. Should be able to store a certain number of items, period. So maybe you're collecting a certain resource and don't want it to get mixed up with your regular inventory, put it in the saddlebag.
SR
Every single time that you call a pet outside of a city or camp, it will take 15 seconds to come. Your mistaken about your 5 seconds.
Malitew, I agree with what you are saying. People do need a reason to use droids. Once you master, the reasons certainly taper off, hopefully the combat revamp will fix this.
Yet at the same time there are people who do look at droids and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of droids. By taking one away, or lessening it, you give them more of a reason to use them.
I KNOW people who wont use a Harvy because of the 15 seconds, solo hunters who find standing there a pain. That 15 seconds is pointless.
TK, what do you think of this plan?
Straker_Atrella
Mon Aug 16, 2004 4:19 pm
#15
Malitevv wrote:
Straker_Atrella wrote:
I KNOW people who wont use a Harvy because of the 15 seconds, solo hunters who find standing there a pain. That 15 seconds is pointless.
I know people like that too. the 15 seconds is for balance purposes I'm sure. it is fairly pointless otherwise, but it isn't really that long. If it was, nobody would use the harvestdroids, but a lot of people do use them. It is my most commonly asked for custom item, and people are willing to pay inordinate sums for the ones that have the best rating for the server. I sell to those people. People who are easily turned off by a 15 second delay prior to each combat are likely never going to besatisfied and I don't worry about them. /shrug
I'm not saying 15 seconds isn't annoying. It is, especially if the lairs are dropping fast or you have impatient team mates who run from lair to lair at break neck speed without ever stopping to breath. But it's managable and isn't a big deal in the long run.
I do agree thatit would be most excellentif there was some way for the droid to keep up with the vehicles soit doesn't have to be called at the destination. Binding it to the vehicle in some way as you are proposingis definitely a way to do it, but if that is going to happen I consider it likely that it wouldpiggyback off of some post-JTL update that adds multi-passenger functionality to the land vehicles and wouldn't likely be considered for implementation by the dev team sooner than that. But either way, I don't expect droid sales to increase significantly at all because of such a change. People who are completely unwilling to use the droid because of a 15 second delay on calling, are likely to complain about the time it takes to target the vehicle and select the radial item that pulls the droid out instead.
Yeathe 15 seconds was for balance purposes, mostly with vehicles. They don't want somebody to peace out, and pull a droid or vehicle in a matter of seconds, in between attacks. I can understand that I guess, but I can't think of a single case where this could be exploited.
Let's face it Droids and Pets are not exactly uber in PVP. If I am pvping and keep my vehicle out, I am an idiot anyway, it wont last seconds. In pvp the vehicle is always the first thing targetted, dying has no cost, but vehicles do. So PVP balance is really a wash.
Detonation droids would be the only concern, but people bypass the combat and 15 second thing by pulling them from a Deed anyway.
I sell a lot of Harvestors as well, probably my number one item. Yet at the same time, a lot of times when I ask somebody how they like it whenI see them, they gripe about the 15 seconds. Not saying they don't use them, but they do gripe. ANYTHING to increase droid sales is good.
Plus this would be craftable by somebody besides a DE, good for the game.
People wouldn't gripe about targetting the vehicle and getting it out, they would just use the /dismountpet command in a macro 
Malitevv
Mon Aug 16, 2004 4:42 pm
#16
Straker_Atrella wrote:
People wouldn't gripe about targetting the vehicle and getting it out, they would just use the /dismountpet command in a macro
except for the ones that complain harvest droids are horrible because typing the harvest command takes longer than hitting the hot-key for their creature-harvest macro. 
Malitevv
Tue Aug 17, 2004 12:30 am
#17
This is a great idea. I don't think it has ever been expressed in exactly thatmuch detail,but its not a new idea either.
The notion of making land based vehicles "multi-passenger" is something the dev's mentioned in one of the JTL interviews as the sort of thing that would be easy to do once the JTL was done and the basic code for managing multi-user vehicles was in place (as it needs to be for the multi-passenger spaceships). I would think being able to put a droid in the vehicle isa natural extension of that.
I don't think this will address the fact that a lot of players just don't use droids. In my opinion, the reason a lot of players (especially the old timers) don't use droids is because they've learned how to play with out them and know how to do everything without them and don't see any appeal in learning a new style of play that involves droids since they've already maxed out their templates in an environment in which combat droids were not useful. With that mind set, every inconvenience, however minor, becomes a reason not to use droids. But I've been on guild hunts. They spend more time discussing mindless nonsense before an attack than it would take to pull out a droid, so clearly, the time it takes to pull out the droid isn't the realproblem, its just the excuse offered. The real reason is they don't know how to use them and don't care to learn.
For newer players, or players looking for new ways to do things, droids are usedmore oftenit seems to me. Take my alt for example. She is working up her BH investigation xp. I've gotten lots of advice from long time master BH's about how to work up the xp and do the investigation missions and avoid dieing too many times. They oftenrecommend leaving the vehicle some distance away, placing a wp on the vehicle, saving enough pool point to burst run to the vehicle if things go badly.... that kind of thing.
Waste of time. What do I do? I bring an R3 along with 5 auto-repair modules and 1 combat module. I pull him out, tell him to guard me, put him in ranged combat mode, turn on auto-repair, and tell him to stay about 100m from the target. Then I run off a short distance from the droid and tell him to engage my mark. Once the mark has committed to fighting the droid (these are NPC marks I am talking about...), I crouch down and start laying into the mark with my LLC or whatever gun I am using. The droid distracts him and lets me get a lot more shots in. If the mark focuses on me and is able to wound me badly, I don't try to run usually (unless the mark tries to melee me, which, having no brawler skills, I never allow to happen). I just let myself go incap, knowing full well that the mark won't come to DB me until he has finished off the droid. I also know that I will recover from the incap before he finishes off the droid because of all that auto-repair power I'm pumping into the droid.
Bottom line is: I can solo these medium-to-high level NPC BH missions no problem with the droids help, without ever having to run and without ever dieing. That's not possible for a player of my intermediate combat abilities without the droid. Long-time master BH's would say basic combat droids are a waste of time, but if they went back and redid their beginning and intermediate XP boxes and used droids along the way, they'd have experienced what droids are for and how they can be used and they would think differently.
It's a question of experience and practice and whether or not there is anymotivation to experience or practice a new style of play that involves droids. Even if you removed ALL the annoyances, if that motivation isn't there, the mentality of the long-time players who've never used droids before is not going to change.
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