Droid Engineer Archive

Here's how I see the market shaping up on the server I play on, Eclipse. Which is one of the top populated servers with most of the population being advanced players.

1. There currently is no demand for a Creature Level 10 anything, pet, droid, or otherwise. Rare that anyone uses those things because at the level most of the population currently plays at, a CL10 pet dies in two or three hits. I recently got a friend to come over from another server. I sponsored her with decent gear to help her skill up. Even gave her my old CL10 mountain krevol. She skilled up past the need for it in about two days. Most new players coming onto Eclipse are people joining friends and are being sponsored by advanced players during startup. Demand for the new CL10 combat droids will be just as flat as demand for the current nerfed probots. In the context of the Eclipse Server, adding new CL10 combat droids is a waste of time.

2. The new utility droid features will cause a surge in sales for a very short time. About two weeks to be specific. Once everyone has what they need in the new features, droid sales will fall back to its current low turnover level which is driven by the trickle in of new players onto the server that replace the trickle out of old players who cancel account. Reason is, droids last forever and once they have the new utility features in droids that they want, they will never need to replace them. Even if utility droids did wear out, it would be so slow that it really wont generate that much more demand. Heavy wear, tear, and replacement of items is combat related. If you want to sell a high turnover product in this game, it has to be something for which a combat oriented player have a need.

Per the DEV's, Certs are dead. And we can say pretty much that the "pure crafters" have won the day here with this new publish. I expect that it will be at least a year or two before the DEV's get back around to us again. We now have to live with what's coming in Publish 7 and 8 which is good stuff, but just isnt the substitute for the missing combat droids. I find one consolation in the situation tho. By the time the one or two years rolls around, most of the DE's here now that stand a chance of still being DE's by then will be the hybrids who enjoy a range of activities in the game besides just crafting. And I'll be surprised if any of you "pure crafters" survive that long without burning out and cancelling your accounts. Maybe then, the hybrid solution will get a chance after practical application of the other solutions fail to pan out.

One star me all you like. I'm digging in and getting ready for the long in-game winter that's gonna fall out from these publishes and I'll come out of hybernation long after you "pure crafters" freeze to death.

And to those that are crying over the Droid Commander getting axed. I still can't believe you guys want a repeat of the Bio-Engineer/Creature Handler disaster. I mean what stronger argument against it do you need that the proven failure already in the game? On Eclipse, Bio-Engineers are practically extinct. The one's that are around are 2nd account characters for people who player Creature Handler or Chef as a primary. Bio-Engineer has to be one of the most boring professions that anyone could possibly think of playing. Can't imagine why anyone would want to do that as a primary character. And you "pure crafters" want DE to be just like that!

The Hybrid Droid Engineer would have been a first. The first horizontal character type that allows those who want to enjoy the crafting and the adventuring aspects of the game. Would it have been the most powerful combat class? No. Would it have been the most powerful crafter class? No. But it would have been the most flexible character class ever. And it would have measured its success in having on of the longest duration of player rentention of any of the classes. It would have been the one class were people switch activities to get a change of game without switching characters.

Well, have fun being chained to your crafting stations in the basements of your houses. Maybe someone will dust your skeleton off and clear the cobwebs now and then.

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ArdenStarmariner wrote:
And to those that are crying over the Droid Commander getting axed. I still can't believe you guys want a repeat of the Bio-Engineer/Creature Handler disaster. I mean what stronger argument against it do you need that the proven failure already in the game? On Eclipse, Bio-Engineers are practically extinct. The one's that are around are 2nd account characters for people who player Creature Handler or Chef as a primary. Bio-Engineer has to be one of the most boring professions that anyone could possibly think of playing.

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/ignore Kollos

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Kollos wrote:

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ArdenStarmariner wrote:

The Hybrid Droid Engineer would have been a first. The first horizontal character type that allows those who want to enjoy the crafting and the adventuring aspects of the game. Would it have been the most powerful combat class? No. Would it have been the most powerful crafter class? No. But it would have been the most flexible character class ever. And it would have measured its success in having on of the longest duration of player rentention of any of the classes. It would have been the one class were people switch activities to get a change of game without switching characters.

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Would you like some cheese to go with your whine?

The highlighted sentence is exactly the problem. The profession you want is simply too good. That's why it can't and won't happen. Whine and cry about it all you want, but unless and until the balance of the entire game is changed, Droid Engineers cannot bethehybrid profession you want.

You want flexibility? It's called picking up a combat class to go along with your Droid Engineer. Give up Master Artisan - you really don't need it, especially if you're going to play a hybrid character - and pick up Master TKA. Or Master Rifleman. Or whatever you want. You do actually have plenty of skill points to create your own hybrid character. You yourself have already done it, so what are you crying about?

The game is designed so that no single character can do everything. The reason you're frustrated is because you want that one uber character that can do everything, and the Devs aren't going to give it to you. The game requires you to pick and choose in order to develop an interesting character. Sorry, but you just can't have it all in one nice easy package.

Don't worry, I'll be around long after all the short attention span syndrome hybrid wannabes have quit the game.

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DarthBukai wrote:

So you're saying that becoming a hybrid is too much and we will become too powerful? What are you, a member of the Self-Castration Club? DE has been a weak profession from the get-go and you want us to remain weak? Cut off your own schlong or wear a **edit**-lock but don't force the rest of us to do the same.

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ArdenStarmariner wrote:

The Hybrid Droid Engineer would have been a first. The first horizontal character type that allows those who want to enjoy the crafting and the adventuring aspects of the game. Would it have been the most powerful combat class? No. Would it have been the most powerful crafter class? No. But it would have been the most flexible character class ever. And it would have measured its success in having on of the longest duration of player rentention of any of the classes. It would have been the one class were people switch activities to get a change of game without switching characters.

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Would you like some cheese to go with your whine?

Richie,

I sell a good number of crafting droids. Most popular are the R3 ADV's. Surgical droids seem to move a good bit too but not as much as the R3 ADV's. Far as selling probots, well its a trickle and strongly considered just not stocking them anymore.

But lets put it in perspective and put DE sales volumes up against Weaponsmith sales volumes and not item amounts but $$$ earned. The difference is more than a factor of 100 greater in favor of the weaponsmith. You can actually earn 100K faster doing group missions on Dantooine or Dathomir than you can earn 100K selling droids. In the same amount of time, you can make 1M as a weaponsmith. The reason for this is that the weaponsmith sells directly to SWG primary combat driven item replacement market. While we DE's are shunted off and restricted to only the secondary crafting related market.

Even if the DEV's put more decay on droids, it wont do any good. 99% of the time, a crafting droid is stored in the datapad until the player needs to make something. Wear as their weapon is out and armed just about 99% of the time. In fact, weapons are so heavily used that some go from new to 50% condition in a single day. And the owner isnt at all concerned given the amount of cash earned from group missions while that gun was being wore out.

So while you can scape out a living as a DE, compared to the big three (Weaponsmiths, Armorsmiths, and Doctors) we're a bunch of second class citizens.

Richie,

Something else want to point out. One of the most successful markets on Eclipse is Doctors selling to other Doctors. To explain this, what's going on is that most of the doctors have skills of 0340 which means, they have no crafting skill trees. They buy their supplies from a smaller subset of doctors who are Master Doctors and who are crafting the supplies. In some cases, these master doctors just about sell out a full 1000 unit factory run the same day they roll off the output hopper.

I feel that DE should go the route of the PROVEN MOST SUCCESSFUL MODEL now in existance, the Doctor/Doctor model. It would not only allow us to sell greater than CL10 combat droids, we can also use them outselves. But the pure crafters here keep wanting the Bio-Engineer/Creature Handler model which is the PROVEN MOST DISMAL FAILURE now in existance. All so they can sit in their little houses that they never leave and get a rush off counting their virtual coins. With the Doctor/Doctor model, they still could do that. But they all seem to have a major friggin problem with any of us doing anything different and want to ram their way of playing DE down the throats of the rest of us. Kollos is a prime example of exactly the attitude of the pure crafters here on the forum. Hence the nature of his replies and his refusal to go away. He's got to have 100% of us playing DE the way he sees and nothing else can be tolerated.

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ArdenStarmariner wrote:

Something else want to point out. One of the most successful markets on Eclipse is Doctors selling to other Doctors. To explain this, what's going on is that most of the doctors have skills of 0340 which means, they have no crafting skill trees. They buy their supplies from a smaller subset of doctors who are Master Doctors and who are crafting the supplies. In some cases, these master doctors just about sell out a full 1000 unit factory run the same day they roll off the output hopper.

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This is a perfect example of why Droid Engineer should NOT be turned into a combat hybrid.

In your own example, there are 2 kinds of Doctors. The Master Doctor is the crafter, while the 0340 Doctor is the hybrid who has decided to not take the entire Doctor profession in order to add some other profession and become a combat hybrid. And why is that? Because Doctors don't have combat abilities built into their profession. If they want to do combat, they have to make hard choices about how they build their characters.

Which is exactly how Droid Engineers should to it as well. If you want to be a hybrid combat Droid Engineer, then cut back on the skill points you put into Master Artisan and Droid Engineer so that you can pick up a full combat profession. Don't try to get the Devs toadd combat abilities to the Droid Engineer profession, because then all you'll end up with is a gimped profession that isn't any good at combat and isn't any good at crafting. You know, just like Creature Handlers.

The reason that the BE/CH model doesn't work is that Creature Handlers don't really need Bio-Engineers. If they were totally dependent on Bio-Engineers for their pets the system would work better. Note that this does not mean that I'm in favor of a Droid Handler profession - I don't see the need for a full profession in either case (DH or CH). Drashk's micro-profession seems like a pretty reasonable compromise to me, but evidently the Devs don't think so.

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ArdenStarmariner wrote:
But they all seem to have a major friggin problem with any of us doing anything different and want to ram their way of playing DE down the throats of the rest of us. ArdenStarmariner is a prime example of exactly the attitude of the hybrid combat wannabes here on the forum. Hence the nature of his replies and his refusal to go away. He's got to have 100% of us playing DE the way he sees and nothing else can be tolerated.

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Go away Kollos. If you haven't figured it out. I'm not even bothering to read your post anymore.