Droid Engineer Archive

Well done Sintrosi. As always great work. Your candid thoughts are quite useful, I think most of us deep down knew this to be the case but wanted to believe there was more out there.

For putting it into perspective I salute you ...as always you've got my respect and admiration. I also know I for one plan on sticking it out here until they do fix us. catch you on the flip side.

-Kralis

Master DE Bloodfin.

Whew. Thanks Sin! One thing I think all of us here appreciate is your quality to be blunt and say things as they are. There are always extremists out there, but I think sensible people appreciate blunt honesty more than sugar-coating.

One big question I have is....how are they going to define "bugs"? That's going to be a really sticky political problem, because some things we see as "bugs" and they see as "changes". See, I don't mean new content, I mean making existing things work which don't. It all depends on what they "intended."

For instance....allowing any module to go into any droid. It seems to all of us that this is a bug, because it makes all droids after the Mouse droid essentially unnecessary, since every single module can be Clustered and put into Mouse Droids. This also makes Advanced versions of droids useless as well. Now naturally we can't believe that the Devs intended to make all the droids past Novice Blueprints as being unnecessary (though they did say they wanted customization), but is it considered a bug to be fixed, or would they see it as a gameplay change? It's a problem, that much we know, but does it deviate from the design intentions?

Another thing would be inherint uses of Droids. Surgical Droids actually being able to heal, etc. Every droid having a particular use of its own, despite whatever extra modules are put into it. Now is that a bug? Was it their design choice to have droids never have an "inherint function" but rather place all the function in one of four types of modules that can be installed?

It just seems to me that, because of wierd quirky ways to evaluate our problems, we may not have many "bugs" to be looked at. Instead, they're all bad design choices which are inconsistent with the overall idea of what the class was supposed to be.

The question now faced to all of us: can we suffer months in a class that is so underutilized? Or, do we ditch it, reacquire back our 63 skills in the DE class, and move along to other not-so-broken classes and enjoy the game?

Why not return the probots back to their original status as a temporary relief for us DE?? Being a manufacturer of portable crafting stations is rewarding in its own right but we need something more now than a promise that we will be fixed in I hope a few months from now.

Thank you. Your analysis seems reasonable, it will be interesting to see how many will make it through the dark months ahead.

I think the BIGGEST problem is the we don't hear NOTHING. Would be nice if the devs would post SOMETHING....

btw just hit Master Droid Engineer couple days ago, oh well i'll just go play my Commando on my other account

All I can say really is just take up other professions on your DE. I know that's what I'm doing right now as I progress, just becoming novice droid engineer recently, and am working on rifleman at the moment. And I'm no clear cut fighter, being a Mon Calamari with relatively low HP, I still can hold my own pretty well in combat and go on hunts. And it's fun. I like droid engineering despite it's rather low-ness at the moment, but that's okay, I can get through on rifleman and other professions as I wait. You do have a fair amount of skill points even if you have achieved master droid engineer. So don't let it get you too down guys.

Aye, I concur with what you've said, Sin. I am very glad to see that the frustration you had a month ago is somewhat abated with some contact from the devs. Keep on keeping on, and thanks for dealing with not only the situation, but the negativity on these boards.

Sintrosi, since you brought up choosing another character. I was wondering if you started another character, if so what proffession did you choose.

Sintrosi, your comment is deeply appreciated. I dunno how long more will we get to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but keep up the good work .

I'm going to go on record as saying I find this extremely frustrating. I'll explain why.

Our class has been broken sice Day 1. We've only had 2 usefull products, 1 of them was nerfed to uselessness. BH droids, though a nice token effort, aren't sufficient to support a class with these resource requirements.

Meanwhile, every other class in the game except Tailors and Chefs have recieved extensive updates/reports/support. At this time they're proceding with a complete rebalancing of all combat classes.

And here we sit, with no word. No improvements. 1 or 2 blurbs in patches if we're lucky, most of those the code from CH's.

It tells me that they're method of task distribution is extremely flawed when fully functioning classes receive extensive support, but a class critical to the mythos lies stagnant, with the excuse that cities/mounts/vehicles take precedence.

Especially when one considers that all that must be done to restore some viability to this class is to take 5 minutes to change the numbers of Probots back to pre-nerf levels or even give them some damage capability with these HAM numbers.

In short, realistically, it's safe to believe that it isn't a case of pre-release promises taking precedence, it's a case of the Dev's don't care to spend time on this class. As other's have pointed out time and again, the excuse used to nerf Probots doesn't hold true when one considers Non-CH pets.

Sure, one could argue that the DE's will build some of the vehicles. But relistically it doesn't matter, because there won't be anyone left to build them when they're implemented. With the extreme costs associated with this profession, the very limited market for it's products, and the complete lack of any support from the Devs, the profession's going to be dead before they can be bothered with it.

Thank you Sintrosi!

Does SOE not understand that this is really all we wanted from them? Just a 'state of the profession' post. Wellthat's what you're on the 'imaginary' payroll for I guess.

-Anyhoo-

Thanks again for the honest post. Now I just need to decide if I will close my shops down for a while and work on TKA, or keep slowly building the bankroll and ignoring my friends who are out in the world having fun. Either way, it's nice to know that everyone's conjecture is fact.

You're our champion, Sin.

Gosh, makes me glad I went back to playing Anarchy Online.. as much as I enjoyed SWG, the droid profession was the one true profession that i wanted to play.... i had a hunch that SOE would put us on the back burner.. whether or not thats the right thing to do.. i dunno.. i realize they need to keep promises to the player base.. but what they should do in the mean time is un-nerf the probots until they can find the time to fix us.. instead, they just seriously wounded a profession, then left it for dead to implement player citys.. and they expect us to do what.. for <blank # of months>??

My allegiance for SOE has diminished significantly over the DE "Nerf and forget tactic" At least funcom realizes their mistakes.. and doesn't leave the player base out to dry.. AO has come a long way.. and pet professions are good, but the game isn't pet wars either.. and engineers (droids) in that game.. are how they should be in this game.. truly viable weapons.. They may not be better than a soldier (soldier=commando in AO) but they can hold their own , unlike here in swg where droids are nothing more than house decorations.How sad

Garison

Not sure if someone answered Junko, but yes you are right man, Holocron posted here that the DE dev was also the general crafting (artisan) dev, so likely he is also the chef weaponsmith armorsmith tailor architect dev?? why not .. why DE will be the only crafting profession suffering from this status..??.

And yes more likely the ch dev is also doing the droid pet part of DE.. and i am betting he must also be the dev for SL ranger scout BE hahaha

SoE really need to spend some of our cash to hiresome news devs...

But well you can also think what Holocron posted was fake and we have 1 dev for DE only that is too busy smoking crack to fix the profession, after all Holocron is ALLWAYS full of lies and totally CLUELESS about this profession (and the game in general) when he comes post here..