Droid Engineer Archive

Thread: Seekers...should we even bother?

GnomeAd
Fri Jul 09, 2004 4:06 pm
#14

Don't get me wrong, I'm really not recommending one way or another. If we don't want to keep making them, I don't care if the devs ever fix the bug/exploit. If we decide we do want to keepthis line of business, we need to start seriously leaning on the devs to get this fixed. Eight months of this bug is WAY too long.
Plzurpilot
Fri Jul 09, 2004 11:26 pm
#15

Since i started proclaiming my self As Eclipses leading supplier of Bounty Hunter droids, I have only ran out of BH droids4 timessince febuary. I keep ussally keep 100 Probes and 200 seekers on my vendor. Right now its about 2.5 time that.


I have never had too much dificulty crafting them in mass quantites.



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Gribnitz
Fri Jul 09, 2004 11:33 pm
#16






Buzz1096 wrote:

I'm going to yell at ourselves a little here.


DEs are notorious for not re-stocking our vendors. I know of plenty of BHs that buy seekers but never burn ALL of their charges out of fear that it might take a couple of days to get their hands on more - should they run out.






I have to agree with this 100%, but the problem isn't so much lazy DE's, but the amount of effort that has to go into making these BH droids for so little return.


For all the GP's and Mem's that have to go into making Arakyd's or Seekers, I can make a ton of Advanced Droid Brains for R3's that make a hell of a lot more than BH droids ever will. Factor in factory time eaten up and it really becomes apparent why these aren't stocked a whiole lot by DE's. Unless you have multiple accounts, cross server factory trades, or dedicate yourself to making BH droids for your main business, they really just aren't worth making.


Dev's need to make these easier to make is the bottom line. I get around to making batches of BH droids maybe once a month and I feel guilty about it.





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OckVofad
Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:06 am
#17

Well I do sell them but they go in spurts. I sell enough to make it worth my while to make them. The arakyd probe droids obviously sell better, in fact, someonecleaned out my vendor last night.


I'll give the devs the benefit of the doubt and assume that this bug is a massive pain to find or fix. I just wish they would give us some info on it.


I have noted an uptick in probe droid purchaces since Tuesday. Hmmmm...wonder why?



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GnomeAd
Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:08 am
#18






Kylania wrote:

Is the solution so far than just to not sell seekers in crates since the Devs have ignored this issue for so long?






It's not the crates that do it. If a BH uses the "Find and Track" option on a seeker droid, it doesn't use a charge. My MBH on TC2 has been using one seeker droid ever since he started. I've tracked ~75-80 marks and never used a charge.
GnomeAd
Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:17 am
#19






OckVofad wrote:

Well I do sell them but they go in spurts. I sell enough to make it worth my while to make them. The arakyd probe droids obviously sell better, in fact, someonecleaned out my vendor last night.


I'll give the devs the benefit of the doubt and assume that this bug is a massive pain to find or fix. I just wish they would give us some info on it.


I have noted an uptick in probe droid purchaces since Tuesday. Hmmmm...wonder why?






I think a better way to judge this is how many BHs come back and buy seekers from you. Typically a player will make BH, go out and buy crates of seekers to grind through Inv III. Once they get there, they never buy another seeker.
Buzz1096
Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:36 am
#20

I'm going to yell at ourselves a little here.


DEs are notorious for not re-stocking our vendors. I know of plenty of BHs that buy seekers but never burn ALL of their charges out of fear that it might take a couple of days to get their hands on more - should they run out.


I once saw a thread on the BH boards about this that basicallymost BHsfeel bad about it when they do it, but whenever the devs talk about fixing it they say, "Great, because it's so much fun traveling to 4 planets and spending 21/2 hours to find a stocked DE vendor."


I think that the majority of BHs would stop using the unlimited feature, if we made it a little easier on them by keeping our vendors stocked.


On the other side of the coin, we say, "why stock the things when BHs don't really need to buy any?"


It would probably get resolved if the devs would do their jobs and fix this OLD AND TIRED BUG!




Drege Duece
Master Smuggler
Master Doc
Generally Stoopid for Speccing this way...
Kylania
Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:44 am
#21

"I think that the majority of BHs would stop using the unlimited feature, if we made it a little easier on them by keeping our vendors stocked."


It'ssuch a pain to keep these things stocked with the factory components they use.. the SAME factory components that EVERYTHING else I made uses. I simply can't keep enough resources in stock to keep pushing out thousands of GP modules every few days and have no where to store 'em all.
GnomeAd
Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:45 am
#22






Buzz1096 wrote:

I'm going to yell at ourselves a little here.


DEs are notorious for not re-stocking our vendors. I know of plenty of BHs that buy seekers but never burn ALL of their charges out of fear that it might take a couple of days to get their hands on more - should they run out.


I once saw a thread on the BH boards about this that basicallymost BHsfeel bad about it when they do it, but whenever the devs talk about fixing it they say, "Great, because it's so much fun traveling to 4 planets and spending 21/2 hours to find a stocked DE vendor."


I think that the majority of BHs would stop using the unlimited feature, if we made it a little easier on them by keeping our vendors stocked.


On the other side of the coin, we say, "why stock the things when BHs don't really need to buy any?"


It would probably get resolved if the devs would do their jobs and fix this OLD AND TIRED BUG!







And this is really my point exactly. They are such a pain to make for the small return we get. The subcomponents would be better spent on more profitable droids. Should we ask the devs to start up the old BH droid vendors?
Buzz1096
Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:52 am
#23

I get plenty of business selling probe droids that I'd like to keep.


I found the key to this is to run huge amounts of subcomponents and make these 330 or so at a time.


They sell fine on my server for 4k per stack or 20k per 5 stack crate. I get no complaints about price from BHs and it acts as a decent addition to my steady battery income. When I sella 50 or 60k droid, its gravy.



Drege Duece
Master Smuggler
Master Doc
Generally Stoopid for Speccing this way...
Marissa_
Sat Jul 10, 2004 3:05 am
#24

Pain in the ass to make?

That is entirely inaccurate. They're actually one of the easier droids to make. I'm a DE and my other char is a MBH. I am constantly making Arakyds and Seekers. Seekers a bit less yes of course, however once I get low on them, it's no effort at all to run some gp modules and mem mods. Then a run of the droids. Myself personally, I have 2 equipment factories so I do the modules both at the same time, then 1 run for the droids. It's no brainer work, start the factory and forget about em till they're done. They don't take all that much in the way of resources, not to mention you can use cheap resources on them.

I put 10 times more work into 1 custom droid for a player than I put into a run of 300 BH droids. And to be honest, the 6k I charge for a crate is a huge profit margin. The only reason I charge 6k is because everybody else on the server charges 7k or more and already I'm the recipient of many hate mails accusing me of under cutting prices. And it's not uncommon for me to find crates of my arakyds and seekers on somebody else's vendor at a jacked up price.
GnomeAd
Sun Jul 11, 2004 8:54 am
#25

OK, so I spent some more time looking into this. Just when you think it can't get any worse...


All along, we've been told by the BHs that this isn't really an issue since they have to use seekers to grind their way up to Inv3 where this "bug" starts. Sounds ok, right. Surely they must need to use hundreds of seekers to get to Investigations 3.


Well, first off, you don't need to use seekers until you get Inv 1. Up to that point, the Spy-Net Operative gives you the waypoint to your mark. So you can get to Investigations 1 without using a seeker. Inv 2 takes 5000 XP and Inv 3 takes 10000 XP. Currently I'm averaging about 150 XP per mark. You should really only need about 4-5 charges per mark to find him, but lets just say you're using all 10 per mark. This means you can get to Investigations 3 using only about 100 seekers. Yep that's right. Even the worst BH will only ever need to buy 4 crates of seekers. Yep, 4 crates. Sound bad? Hold on, we ain't done yet.


The current recommended way (according to the BH correspondent) to grind up the Investigations tree is as follows. Don't train Inv 1 or 2 until youreach the 10000 XP cap. The reasoning is that Inv 1 and 2 missions take much longer to complete than Novice BH missions. After you get 10000 XP and train Inv 1 and 2 you only need 6000 XP to complete Inv 3. So based upon the conservative numbers used above, a BH will only ever need to buy a grand total of 40 seekers. 40 seekers per BH. This means that if you've ever sold more that 2 crates of seekers to the same BH, he was either doing the honorable thing and deleting them after 10 uses, or he's got a real seeker storage problem.


Since this bug has been in existence since at least November, can you imagine how many credits we've lost to this bug? With the sudden increase in the number of BHs hunting Jedi since the latest patch we should be selling seekers like hotcakes. Yet the devs have ignored this bug since then and everytime we bring it up, we get told not to worry about it, it's just a minor bug.


I've said it before in the threads listed above, and I'll say it again. If you're a Bounty Hunter and you're not deleting your seekers after 10 uses, you're exploiting. Period.
Khavren_Gorath
Mon Jul 12, 2004 12:28 am
#26

Dude, don't get so wound up about it.

As somebody who plays a BH and a DE I can tell you, you're really over reacting.

First of all, there's a bug where if the BH uses 'Find and Track' instead of just 'Find Target' (which is where the seeker doesn't get consumed) the BH can no longer use a shuttle because he/she will crash to desktop at the next seeker update. So most BH's (and pretty much all of them that I know personally) always opt to use the single use seeker mode which does indeed consume the seeker.

Second, many bug fixes dealing with droid tracking are currently being tested on the test center server, and some BH's have reported their seekers are being consumed.
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