Droid Engineer Archive

Greetings Fellow DE's

I have been reading various DE issues for some time, many good ideas have been posted on "how to improve the DE profession & droids in general". I supposed each profession forum has its own issues on improvement ideas & wish lists. With the CU coming soon to a server near you, the devs have more than likely have their project plans done and are in the implementation & execution phases for the May deadline. What I am doing here is just some ideas that may or may not be a repeat of other posts and hope that other DE can take these ideas and develop them further or add in their own suggestions.

In considering these ideas, I have tried to create a balanced approach and not an uber wish list reasoning. So here we go...

This droid's primary function is quite simply communications of all kinds. As such, i believe that this droid should be able aid its owner more effectively in this area. Consider the following...

1) More robust email functions....email is a big communication method in SWG, so why not have more/better features for your in game email if you use your email in the presence of a protocol droid. More features like copy/paste for example. Here the droid owner would benefit from the use of these features while those that don't use the protocol droid for this function can use the standard in game email as it is. There is not much of any form of advantage here other than minor perks that the droid owner gets that anyone in the game cannot get themselves.

2) Maintenance Reports....how about calling out your protocol droid and ask it for a building/structure maintenance report. For example it can report back "Your medium house on Dantooine (2340, -4125) has 22 days, 3 hours maintenance left; your Wind Generator on Yavin IV (3340, 2221) has 6 days 15 hours maintenance left; your Food Factory on...." Yes with automatic bank account deduction its not a big thing, but its still a little handy even just to get a location, maintenance reserves, and power reserves from one instance rather than going to each building and checking them out one by one. Those that don't own a protocol droid for this function just simply have to do just that the old way of checking buildings status. Again the advantage is saving time and anyone can own a droid so it does not prefer one profession over another.

3) Planetary Faction Control / News Net....instead of running to your local recruiter for planetary faction status, why not have your protocol droid tune into Imperial or Rebel frequencies and give that information to you at your finger tips. Again a slight easy access versus the old way (in a new a sense) of recruiter finding. No big advantage but still useful.

4) 1 Item Auction....why not give your protocol droid a couple of minor features that exist on bazaar & trade forums. Let your protocol droid hold an item you want to auction, people can come up to the droid and "examine" the item and make a bid on it. The winner of the auction gets the credits deducted from his/her bank account when the item is picked up from the droid. If the droid owner logs off before item is picked up then no money is ever transferred (ie no one loses anything). An email notification can go out to the winner of the auction. They must return to the droid to pick up their item. Question becomes how do you know effectively there is in fact an auction going on?? see #5

5) Minor Barker Ability....In not trying to take away from the merchant profession, how about a minor barker ability with say a maximum of 60 characters that is shouted in both Spatial and Auctio chats at 2 minute intervals. Lets face it, a protocol droids main function is to "communicate" and even if you own a protocol droid witha merchant barker module no one can use it unless you have adversting IV. So by the inability here to perform its main function, protocol droid in this regard becom mute ticket collectors. You can "own" a droid to fight for you but you can't own a droid to stand there and just speak. So my idea is a watered down version of merchant barker ability for the protocol droid. 50-60 characters long and spam the message at 1-2 minutes intervals would be its primary ability and yet for merchants who have advertising IV their message could be much longer and sooner intervals with the get WP from droid ability. If a merchant wants a protocol droid with a merchant barker module in it, then the module would overide the minor barker abillity. Maybe even add color to the merchant barker message to have it stand out more in the message box about the characters head for merchant only...

Again I hope these and other ideas come to life. Any DE's out there with other ideas for protocol droids or modification of the ones post above please feel free to add em here. Also I have tried to keep it "BALANCED" as not to give any great advantage to having the droid vs not owning a protocol droid, so please bear that in mind. Also thanks to Drashk, Jenden & TheRealTK421 for their continued presence on this forum.

In Game Name
DaiShobaqqa (TKM / MDE / Scout)
Lords of Darkness
M'oon Clan Vendors { 4366 -4720} just outside Mos Eisley

Sorry about the triple post gotta investigate this...

In Game Name
DaiShobaqqa (TKM / MDE / Scout)
Lords of Darkness
M'oon Clan Vendors { 4366 -4720} just outside Mos Eisley

Interesting, most of these ideas are on the origional side, which is pretty rare these days.

The email functions would be great to see, but i dont see why we would need a droid for them, copy/paste etc are functions we really need anyway and are blatanly missing, but should probably belong to the general game.

The idea of maintenance reports is an idea that has gone back and forth pretty frequently and its already been discussed. I think we all want it, but i feel the majority of people would like to see that as a conventional module, but hey.

The planatary news idea is new, and quite good, i'd like to see that, but its mostly a toy function and im not sure how much drawing power that has. As an inherent function its good though, it may just provide the incentive to buy a protocol over another droid, but as an indevidual module, or by itself it wont sell.

The auction idea is also neat, as a module a mobile vendor is probably our number 1 most wanted idea, a one item vendor function isnt terribly usefull, but thats for the best since we dont want to displace merchants provided we eventualy get a vendor module (it will most assuridly go to merchants) so your going in the right direction. My only concern is the burden on the system if everybody could suddenly have a mobile merchant, it would take alot more processing which would effect game fluidity especialy in coronet, the server will have to process the vendors presence, mechanics, and ware(s) not just the droid model and its functions. Might see some problems with implementation of this thing.

About the minor barker ability i have some concerns, i think it draws to much away from the modular version of this item. I think the conventional version is fine as it is, and might be enough for the way things are. Maybe Protocols could rattle off a pre-packaged text like a barker, but would not be as customizable. I think it would be cool enough if protocols could rattle off random statement strings now and then according to thier personality chip (as of now i have no reason to make these, i cant even remember the last time i used one.)

All in all interesting, i know is hard to come up with origional content these days, pretty much everything that anyone could possibly imagine in a droid has been mentioned, and the last 8 months or so have been people repeatidly stating the same ideas. So its good to see new material, and new incarnations of old ones, inherent functions are the rock.