Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Droids: Efficiency and Marketing. Some tips I wish I had known earlier.
I have listed some stuff here I wish I knew when I started out in the profession. It helps save time, money, and cuts down on stress. I hope I list something here that can help my fellow DEs. If anyone else has some good advise they learned that they would like to share, it can only help make our DE community stronger.
Efficiency Tips:
Make sure your harvestor extraction rates are high. I had Meds that mined at 4 for a long time without knowing better. I see now I can get 8 to 10extraction rates for Meds. At 8 I can get twice the output for the same amount of $$$ put in.
I flew to every planet looking for resources a few times when I got real despirate for Duralloy Steel at one point.That was such a waste of money especially after finding out most resources out there every week are the same ones on different planets. Go to a site like swgcraft.com and click on current resources to get the latest resource spawn updates.
Factories are a great place to store crated items unless/until you need them. I used to put them in my house and have to pay more house maintence. As far as I have seen maintence does not go up with more items in factories. Great storage like the bank.
Mounts are notgreatfor surveying but aregreat for harvestor runs (as if anyone didnt already know that). More time selling and less time harvesting has to make a better business.
Marketing Tips:
The best advice for marketing I can give is to get good word of mouth. Having other people giving your waypoint to a potential customer is the greatest thing you could ever get because it can happen at any time when someone says "I need a droid/anyone know where I can get one". The way I have found that works the best is to give an uber droid to someone who can't afford one but really, really wants one. Medic/Doctor Noobs are the best if you can find one because they make up a lot of droid sales right now. Just make them the droid on one condition, that they tell/recommend others to your service. Send them your waypoint to give to others. I have done this a few times and it is amazing the business I see from this. Docs especially will tell other Docs... wait and see the results.
Get merchant skills. Global Advertising is key. I didnt get this until recently because of the problems with it but I can tellit is already starting to make a difference.
Become well positioned in a popular player city if you can. People will soon like the convience of shopping by flying into a city instead of running somewhere into the wilderness. See if you can at least get a permit from a city to put up a merchant tent.
Offer discounts to Guilds or join a guild. There are many Guilds that would like you to join just because you have DE above your head. If you are not into guilds, and you do not know the person who asked you to join, most likely they need a DE. Make a deal to sell at a discount to them until they get a DE to join and they will bring you much business. If you join a guild, chances are you will find support resources and other perks at your advantage. Depends on your cup of tea but you will most likely be opening the door to more customers both ways.
Keep your vendor stocked if you advertise it on the global maps. Easier to do after the most recent patch. A lot of complaining has occured on the boards of late by non-craftersthat crafters dont have items in the vendor when they run out there. If you are reliable with items on there, they will come back time and time again. Seems like a simple concept but much harder to pull off because you have to keep crafting to replace items sold. Sometimes that extra effort also makes your vendor look like a happening store.
If you can, handling droid orders as they come in in an efficient manneror spending time explaining droids to a customer can go a long way to leaving them with a favorable impression. Once again the extra effort can lead to a lot of word of mouth references. Make sure you give every customer your waypoint coupled with a friendly offer to have them send you a tell incase they have any further questions.
Well I hope this can helpsome DEs out there. Most of it seems common sense now but it was stuff I learned along the way that I felt needed to be shared with others. Good Luck with your businesses everyone. Happy DEing!
Cameo
What are good extraction rates for medium and heavy harvestors? What is average?
A medium , 4 was average
and a heavy 10 was average.
Now , Personals are still 2
Mediums can get as high as 7
and heavies as high as 12
mansemat sells Medium 7's for a great price at my waypoint in my sig.
Sodan-droiddreamer wrote:
What are good extraction rates for medium and heavy harvestors? What is average?
Hmm this is a good question, from what I have seen, this might have changed slightly after the patch that just went in. From my understanding Architects also got 10 experimentation points when we DEs did as well. Plus they changed the part requirements for the Heavy Harvestors now. The best Mediums I have seen have up to 10 for the extraction rates. Most I have seen have 8 or 7 however. If you can find someone who can make you one buy it because it is amazing how many more resources I can mine per day.
I think I have seen a Heavy around 13 extraction but cant confirm it right now. I am not so into heavies right now because they do cost a lot for just a small amount of extraction improvement. I will trylook into this when I log on tonight.
Cameo
It seems to me you might as well use junk components since I'm not really seeing stat's changeing at all.
Also, anyone know how to figure out the time it takes for a factory to make runs? Them seeker/probe crates seem to take forever!
I blew a whole bunch of phrik aluminum with 1700+ combined OQ and conduct to make a bunch of components.... then later as an example used some of the worst material I could find... and what do you know... not much difference. There are a bunch of vague numbers throwing around terms like quality and effectiveness and from one product to another they seem to have no meaning whatsoever.
I make 14.73 effectiveness handtools... the best craft module I could make was 12.
What does that mean? worse? same? better? nothing?
I have actually gotten personal harvesters to go up to 3 base extraction rate.
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Yoto Romad
CEO RomCo
Tarquinas server
After the patch I rebuilt all of my personals to a minimum of 4. My PA's Resource Dept. Manager is rebuilding all the mediums he has to be minimum 8, average 10 and I don't have the numbers for the heavies.
parax4477 wrote:
before the patch , a personal harvester was capped at 2 (for mineral )
A medium , 4 was average
and a heavy 10 was average.
Now , Personals are still 2
Mediums can get as high as 7
and heavies as high as 12
mansemat sells Medium 7's for a great price at my waypoint in my sig.
The Architect Harvesters need to have experimentation done on both the sub-components and the final combine. You can't just use crap resources on the final anymore, it's got to be good on both. A lot of the people I've talked to didn't think there was much of a difference till they did full experimentations on both with good resources.
parax4477 wrote:
Now , Personals are still 2
not any more! Ive made a bunch of personal mines at rate 4!
doh sorry for the bad info from me , i'm still using mediums with a base rate of 4 , rofl
I'm just going to add some Marketing tips, hope the original poster doesn't mind.
1. Plan ahead. Certainly, you can stuff everything in your scematic list into a MSE. But only the D00ds want them. Other people want either efficiency or flavor. Probots with Crafting and med/item are hot sellers. Protocols loaded to the gills fly too(Yes, it's nesting, but dammit the Master Droid should be worth something! At least if you next you're giving your customers the best Master Droid possible and justifying it's cost) R series, especially R2 are also very popular. Some people don't realize that a Med unit functions in any chasis and want surgicals because they think those are the only ones that help heal. It's easier to sell them a surgical than argue, or lose a sale because they went elsewhere, so Surgicals are a must. Ignore Treadwells, Repair, and Power. They don't sell. BLL's are nice, but I wouldn't stock more than 2 of them, they aren't big sellers. In fact, I'd even do them special order only. They take too many resources.
2. Carry everything you need to make any droid with you. Keep your MDE tag up. On one notable occasion I got an impulse sale from someone who wasn't happy with their previous MDE. I made it on the spot, to their specs. He asked me for my waypoint, and I've gotten at *least* 2 dozen sales from just him.
3. Deliver. We sell these things for a decent profit. If you deliver, you just got repeat buisness.
4. Advertise on your server boards once every few days. Shop name, location, stock you have and what's on the droids. People will impulse buy if they see posted what they want.
5. Find out exactly what someone wants when they @tell you. Sure, you may have it on your vendor. But finding out exactly what they're looking for before sending them to the vendor makes them feel like they're getting better service. "Certainly I can make you a Protocol, do you know what modules you want in it?" is 10 million times better than "I've got protocols on my vendor, here's the waypoint".
6. Never, ever, get into a discussion about other MDE's. Let customers form their own opinions. If you bad mouth other MDE's, they WILL badmouth you. The customer also feels like he's drawn into a war rather than making a happy purchase. The best response possible is "I'm sorry to hear that, I'm certain I can make you what you want, what did you have in mind?" We'll cover our dirty laundry in other places, best not to have customers involved, make them feel like they're buying, not participating in mud-slinging campaigns.
Remember, variety, location, and customer service is the difference between making a mint and not making a dime. Go the extra step, and you WILL profit.