Droid Engineer Archive

I like this idea, and it makes sense. Right now the only difference between someone like me who makes all his droids by hand (though I do have to do parts in factories) and someone who just runs them off in factories by the hundreds is I can't keep up with my orders. I think to add more of a stylistic element to it as well it would be nice if something made by hand could have a special player written description, to give it more of a custom feel.

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AudioOrgana wrote:

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Jenden wrote:
I like this idea, and it makes sense. Right now the only difference between someone like me who makes all his droids by hand (though I do have to do parts in factories) and someone who just runs them off in factories by the hundreds is I can't keep up with my orders. I think to add more of a stylistic element to it as well it would be nice if something made by hand could have a special player written description, to give it more of a custom feel.

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And penalize those people who are industrialists for what reason? To make the little guy feel better?

If anything, it should be the other way around - if you are going to talk real-world comparisons, I'd say that people that make droids in factories should have better quality droids coming out because they were factory produced to exact specifications by machines. Do you want a car cobbled together by hand by some guy down the street or that came of an assembly line? I'll take the latter when it comes to technology.

This isn't the our "old world", it's a galaxy far, far away. This game already artificially limits the size of businesses because of storage issues, and I don't think punishing people for playing well further is a soloution to anything.

I'm not sure I get the motivation here - or, I guess, why you feel you need motivation in this direction. If you are happy being a small business that's great - I've been there too. When I was unhappy doing that, I turned to factory work.

Isee no reason to penalize someone for playing the game well in another playstyle - why should there be a difference? If it's about making the little guy feel better about being little...well, sorry, I wouldn't be willing to accept a nerf of my products over that.

If you have the urge to be a "casual" droid maker, or a more industrious one (as you termed "powergamer" above), follow that urge - but I don't think they should change the rules because you feel "bad" about wanting to be in one category or another.

Audio

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One statement you made I agree with, is you just don't get it. The Devs have repeatedly statedtheir desire to see people "play" the game, and not power their way to master status, or to googles of Credits. If this is what they really want, then they need to offer incentives togamers of that playstyle. I admit the idea requires some mental agility and finesse to appreciate, and it's certainly not for those that like to bludgeon their way through SWG.

/bow somewhat respectfully

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Lowenblade wrote:

One statement you made I agree with, is you just don't get it. The Devs have repeatedly statedtheir desire to see people "play" the game, and not power their way to master status, or to googles of Credits. If this is what they really want, then they need to offer incentives togamers of that playstyle. I admit the idea requires some mental agility and finesse to appreciate, and it's certainly not for those that like to bludgeon their way through SWG.

/bow somewhat respectfully

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To be blunt, that has got to be the most uninformed thing I have ever read on the DE board.

The most hilarious thing about this thread is that you are advocating rewarding people for making LESS droids. Less droids we make as collective DE's means less droids in the game - period. So your ego is worth droids being even less of a presence in SWG than they are now?

Jenden above said the difference between someone who uses factories and those that don't (him) is that he has a hard time filling the orders.

So the soloution is to make it more attractive for him to continue producing less droids and making the bulk of the total droids sold on his server sub-par?

I'll tell ya what - it's people like me that set the standards on servers and increase the visibilty of droids that helps us all. If it weren't for me, there would be hundreds upon hundreds of less droids on my server. If Jenden doesn't have the time to fill his orders, should they go unfilled? If you hadn't noticed, there is a pretty severe lack of DE's on most servers. People like me make up for that slack.

Do you have any idea what it takes to orchestrate a factory run of 500 Probots? You want to talk mental agility and finesse. I've got a chart sitting here on my desk of which of my five factories is doing what, and what they need to do to get to the end result and which backpacks have the parts that wont fit in the input hopper at once and endlessly matching serial numbers. That's quite a task when Probots now take 23 components instead of 9. Orchestrating 23 factory runs and providing the storage and materials and not going mad in the process isbit more complicated than making one part after the other by hand - banging out 23 parts in a row by hand doesn't require much finesse in comparison, unlesss you think mental agility = how sore your wrist is.

"Bludgeon" their way through the game? So anyone that reaches a certain status and uses the resources available to them is undesirable? People that bang out parts by hand desperately trying to finish an order for a waiting customer because they don't have crated parts or deeds on them - that is bludgeoning.

A factory crate of droid deeds is the PICTURE of finesse and the output of a lot of thought and effort. It's also an elegant, attractive package.

I have been small time like you are now - it's only the the last few months I've built my business up enough to produce such large quantity. It was an evolution that happened naturally - one you yourself said you were tempted to follow! You really shouldn't have admitted your desire above, because you completely validate my point - it's a natural progression to want to expand your business, and you want to punish other people because you feel bad about advancing to a higher level in the game.

So I guess I did understand your motivation in the first place - I just gave you the opportunity to make it more than it is or give some other reasoningand you didn't.

By your reasoning, we should give bonuses to Pistoleers who buy crappy weapons because they don't want to move up in the world and take on the cost/responsibility of buying good weapons. We should "subsidize" the little guy, so to speak.

We have welfare in SWG, it's called Mission Terminals.

Sorry I bothered you thread,I shouldn't have replied; this is another of the"Erase everyone's bank balance because I don't have enough money" /cries and I should have known better.

Nod. Smile.

Have a nice day,

AO

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AudioOrgana wrote:

We have welfare in SWG, it's called Mission Terminals.

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I'm not sure the car analogy was very good, I'd consider droids something more like computers. They take smaller parts that you pretty much have to mass produce in factories (silicon chips, processors, etc), but when you get to the final stage, a custom computer I build myself will be better than something a high volume computer manufacturer (such as Dell or Gateway) will pump out of their assembly line. Its because theirs are so cookie cutter that they aren't as good. A machine (even a droid in Star Wars), just doesn't have the intuition and natural instincts that people do. I can test things out as I'm building it, play around with it some until I find the exact way something will work best for that individual component. No matter how precise you're factories are, not every part will be identical, they will be insanely similar, but not identical. Another problem with your car analogy is that cars really are quite simple things, and you seem to be assuming that this person making your car is just random guy down the street. If that guy had been making cars by hand for 15 years, knew every detail of every part in the car, and had a good reputation, I'd trust him before I trusted a factory made car.

I don't see it as encouraging people to make less droids, I see it as the wealthy that want something special to be able to get something better.

His numbers may have been high, but I don't think it would hurt any of you industrialists. If people couldn't fulfill the demand as you say, then they will buy you're factory made droids. You'll be able to produce them faster than anyone could by hand, and don't have to worry about the critical failures. In compensation, we'd be making a slightly higher quality product.

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AudioOrgana wrote:

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Lowenblade wrote:

One statement you made I agree with, is you just don't get it. The Devs have repeatedly statedtheir desire to see people "play" the game, and not power their way to master status, or to googles of Credits. If this is what they really want, then they need to offer incentives togamers of that playstyle. I admit the idea requires some mental agility and finesse to appreciate, and it's certainly not for those that like to bludgeon their way through SWG.

/bow somewhat respectfully

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To be blunt, that has got to be the most uninformed thing I have ever read on the DE board.

The most hilarious thing about this thread is that you are advocating rewarding people for making LESS droids. Less droids we make as collective DE's means less droids in the game - period. So your ego is worth droids being even less of a presence in SWG than they are now?

Jenden above said the difference between someone who uses factories and those that don't (him) is that he has a hard time filling the orders.

So the soloution is to make it more attractive for him to continue producing less droids and making the bulk of the total droids sold on his server sub-par?

I'll tell ya what - it's people like me that set the standards on servers and increase the visibilty of droids that helps us all. If it weren't for me, there would be hundreds upon hundreds of less droids on my server. If Jenden doesn't have the time to fill his orders, should they go unfilled? If you hadn't noticed, there is a pretty severe lack of DE's on most servers. People like me make up for that slack.

Do you have any idea what it takes to orchestrate a factory run of 500 Probots? You want to talk mental agility and finesse. I've got a chart sitting here on my desk of which of my five factories is doing what, and what they need to do to get to the end result and which backpacks have the parts that wont fit in the input hopper at once and endlessly matching serial numbers. That's quite a task when Probots now take 23 components instead of 9. Orchestrating 23 factory runs and providing the storage and materials and not going mad in the process isbit more complicated than making one part after the other by hand - banging out 23 parts in a row by hand doesn't require much finesse in comparison, unlesss you think mental agility = how sore your wrist is.

"Bludgeon" their way through the game? So anyone that reaches a certain status and uses the resources available to them is undesirable? People that bang out parts by hand desperately trying to finish an order for a waiting customer because they don't have crated parts or deeds on them - that is bludgeoning.

A factory crate of droid deeds is the PICTURE of finesse and the output of a lot of thought and effort. It's also an elegant, attractive package.

I have been small time like you are now - it's only the the last few months I've built my business up enough to produce such large quantity. It was an evolution that happened naturally - one you yourself said you were tempted to follow! You really shouldn't have admitted your desire above, because you completely validate my point - it's a natural progression to want to expand your business, and you want to punish other people because you feel bad about advancing to a higher level in the game.

So I guess I did understand your motivation in the first place - I just gave you the opportunity to make it more than it is or give some other reasoningand you didn't.

By your reasoning, we should give bonuses to Pistoleers who buy crappy weapons because they don't want to move up in the world and take on the cost/responsibility of buying good weapons. We should "subsidize" the little guy, so to speak.

We have welfare in SWG, it's called Mission Terminals.

Sorry I bothered you thread,I shouldn't have replied; this is another of the"Erase everyone's bank balance because I don't have enough money" /cries and I should have known better.

Nod. Smile.

Have a nice day,

AO

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Jenden wrote:
I'm not sure the car analogy was very good, I'd consider droids something more like computers. They take smaller parts that you pretty much have to mass produce in factories (silicon chips, processors, etc), but when you get to the final stage, a custom computer I build myself will be better than something a high volume computer manufacturer (such as Dell or Gateway) will pump out of their assembly line. Its because theirs are so cookie cutter that they aren't as good. A machine (even a droid in Star Wars), just doesn't have the intuition and natural instincts that people do. I can test things out as I'm building it, play around with it some until I find the exact way something will work best for that individual component. No matter how precise you're factories are, not every part will be identical, they will be insanely similar, but not identical. Another problem with your car analogy is that cars really are quite simple things, and you seem to be assuming that this person making your car is just random guy down the street. If that guy had been making cars by hand for 15 years, knew every detail of every part in the car, and had a good reputation, I'd trust him before I trusted a factory made car.

I don't see it as encouraging people to make less droids, I see it as the wealthy that want something special to be able to get something better.

His numbers may have been high, but I don't think it would hurt any of you industrialists. If people couldn't fulfill the demand as you say, then they will buy you're factory made droids. You'll be able to produce them faster than anyone could by hand, and don't have to worry about the critical failures. In compensation, we'd be making a slightly higher quality product.

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I think this is along the lines of what the Devs are thinking too.

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Lowenblade wrote:

If my message is the most "uninformed thing" you have ever read on the DE forum, then you might find the pages of your hometown newspapers hard to comprehend. Since I don't have big, colorful pictures for you to gleam, I'll just say it s-l-o-w-l-y, in the hopes that you will understand.

You have discovered mass production with coordinated factory runs. Well good for you Sunshine! <SNIP MORE INSULTS>

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Lowenblade:

You began with an absurd premise: That somehow producing parts with incredible precision would best be done by hand. You matched this with an implied insult to those who use the tools in the game to achieve efficiency.

Then you respond twicewith rather smarmy insults and further insinuations of your grand superior intellect and/or playstyle, sprinkled with ad hominem attacks.

I don't see why you wouldn't expect your posts to be responded to in the same manner. I find your posts to be much more insulting and denigrating towards gamers whose style you do not appreciate than the responses it generated (The responses were not personally insulting, unlike yours. And they brought up valid points in rebuttal, unlike yours.)

Furthermore, the response given to you was based on simple logic of the intricacies of ANY sort of mechanical processing. You don't get a good fuel injection system from a 'old world craftsman' because that sort of attention to tolerances is just not able to be duplicated by hand. Sure, for wicker baskets and china dogs you may have a point.

But not mechanisms. Ever. (mechanical engineers are nodding vigorously)

That's why your post was labeled absurd. I too find your premises absurd in application to this particular profession.

To further address your points, you are urging a nerf of all players who use factories. This would be across the board. To back it up, you offer 'roleplaying' a character -- as if I cannot roleplay a droid engineer with five factories.

I can't follow your reasoning. Something is missing in there, so I have to say , "Very Bad Idea". If you want to do single droid crafting, go right ahead. We all do it at some point or another.

Nerfing the factories just to satisfy your own particular play style isn't the way to increase participation in the DE profession, since your play style is in no way universal. I for one would have no reason to continue playing a DE, since efficiency would be out the window and quality, no matter what bonuses, would be based on a random die roll for each and every subcomponent.

That's not a good idea. The ramifications are all bad. Demand would NOT increase, but instead decrease. DE's would drop out of the profession. Supply would go down to nil. At a certain point, low supply destroys demand.

As I said, I have to disagree with your idea on this one. Vigorously.

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Handsnake wrote:

Lowenblade:

You began with an absurd premise: That somehow producing parts with incredible precision would best be done by hand. You matched this with an implied insult to those who use the tools in the game to achieve efficiency.

Then you respond twicewith rather smarmy insults and further insinuations of your grand superior intellect and/or playstyle, sprinkled with ad hominem attacks.

I don't see why you wouldn't expect your posts to be responded to in the same manner. I find your posts to be much more insulting and denigrating towards gamers whose style you do not appreciate than the responses it generated (The responses were not personally insulting, unlike yours. And they brought up valid points in rebuttal, unlike yours.)

Furthermore, the response given to you was based on simple logic of the intricacies of ANY sort of mechanical processing. You don't get a good fuel injection system from a 'old world craftsman' because that sort of attention to tolerances is just not able to be duplicated by hand. Sure, for wicker baskets and china dogs you may have a point.

But not mechanisms. Ever. (mechanical engineers are nodding vigorously)

That's why your post was labeled absurd. I too find your premises absurd in application to this particular profession.

To further address your points, you are urging a nerf of all players who use factories. This would be across the board. To back it up, you offer 'roleplaying' a character -- as if I cannot roleplay a droid engineer with five factories.

I can't follow your reasoning. Something is missing in there, so I have to say , "Very Bad Idea". If you want to do single droid crafting, go right ahead. We all do it at some point or another.

Nerfing the factories just to satisfy your own particular play style isn't the way to increase participation in the DE profession, since your play style is in no way universal. I for one would have no reason to continue playing a DE, since efficiency would be out the window and quality, no matter what bonuses, would be based on a random die roll for each and every subcomponent.

That's not a good idea. The ramifications are all bad. Demand would NOT increase, but instead decrease. DE's would drop out of the profession. Supply would go down to nil. At a certain point, low supply destroys demand.

As I said, I have to disagree with your idea on this one. Vigorously.

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Jenden wrote:
They take smaller parts that you pretty much have to mass produce in factories (silicon chips, processors, etc), but when you get to the final stage, a custom computer I build myself will be better than something a high volume computer manufacturer (such as Dell or Gateway) will pump out of their assembly line. Its because theirs are so cookie cutter that they aren't as good.

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nonsense. Dell could take the exact same parts you do and create the exact same box. They dont because of costs, because in the real world there is a differencem using premium parts and cheap parts. If it mattered that a DE used oq 240 or oq 999, and oq 999 was more rare than oq240 (which in reality it isnt since extractors can mine the same amount of each in the same amount of time), then perhaps.

As it is DE as a profession doesnt really make sense if you really think about it. Droids were mass produced by megacorps. A real DE would be frankensteining all sorts of stuff to make a workable product. Not manufacture an R2, wether by hand or factory.

oh, and if old world values were added, would you have enough checkers to pay for them?

last time i checked we were all out of checkers, or they are at least on back order.

If anything, it should be the other way around - if you are going to talk real-world comparisons, I'd say that people that make droids in factories should have better quality droids coming out because they were factory produced to exact specifications by machines. Do you want a car cobbled together by hand by some guy down the street or that came of an assembly line? I'll take the latter when it comes to technology

Soemone asked me once why I make my R2s and now my combat probots in my factories. Here's basically how I broke it down, using two scenarios:

First scenario is I do all my final combines by hand. I gather up the components for 10 of them, and start hand crafting, and then the experimenting. A critical faliure at least has the "courtesy" to destroy the failure, while a "Good" success is far worse than a crit failure sometimes.I'd beleft with a bar at 50 percent instead of the 90+I washoping for, andwhile I can still assemble it, part of me "knows" the droid is substandard. Going through that chance on all ten? No thanks.

Second scenario is the one I use. An example is what I'mdoing now.I gathered the components for 11 Combat probots. I made the schematic without a crit fail, and then experimented the effectiveness bar to max 96, giving me a 1089 HAM, 549 combat rating probot. Now, I can make ten identical ones in my factory, and I still have the resources to make more if needed. Yes, I may crit fail while making the schematic, but once I do succeed, I'll never have to worry about crit fails making that droid again, until the resources run out and I have to make a new schematic. I'd like to see anyone hand craft 10 droids and experiment them without two crit failures at some point, never mind one.

Yes, those two crates of droid deeds are my trophy.

There are other ways to define craftsmanship rather than hand making. Every component in my droids is experimented to the max it can. Level 6 data modules annoy me because due to the crap dioxis gas I have, and it took two times last time to get a quality of 1. The food/chemical modules in my medical R2 units are experimented as well - my current schematic, I was able to get to quality 13. Slightly ticked because my previous schematic, I got to quality 14. I know for a lot of things I don't have to experiment, or it's not known what effect (if any) quality rating has on 90% of our components, but it matters to me.