Droid Engineer Archive

The Seven DEadly Sins of Droid Engineering: Sin #1, The General Droid Module Socket Cluster

/bow to Fastgun

Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe. Or rather, an alternate-alternate universe. It looks like Star Wars Galaxies, but you just logged in and you are immediately confronted with a player character who tells you he is MCH, master pistoleer, master architect, master TK, master smuggler, master bounty hunter, master chef, master medic, master doctor, master bio-engineer, and some novice Entertainer.

Gasp! Is this a terrible thing or a good thing? Make your decision before I reveal my answer. Read the setup!

Now that I've framed some thoughts on diversity, let's look at the GDMSC.

The way droids work now is that they have several different types of module slots, as follows.

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  Defensive module slots take only armor modules

  
  
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  Service module slots take any kind of service module or socket clusters

  
  
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  Socket cluster slots take only socket clusters

The General Droid Module Socket Cluster component is a single component for service module grouping. The description in the game states that it fits into a variety of module slots. This is why I am not treating it as a bug or an exploit. The aforementioned “variety” however is only two: service module slots and socket cluster slots. One crafts a GDMSC from a few resources and up to three service modules, for example, crafting, medical, and storage. However – you can also nest cluster modules into other cluster modules, as below.

(turns out I can't use TABLE html...ya gotta go read the article over here)

I've never been personally asked for this exact droid configuration (5 high level modules in a mouse), but the reasons for that have more to do with the fact that having a MSE droid makes ya look pretty lame. However, I have certainly been asked multiple times for “the best driod u maik”. More on that in a moment.

How many service modules are there? Six each of medical, storage, and data, four of crafting, one droid repair. Combat abilities are not a service module. That gives us a total of 23 modules to choose from.

TWENTY-THREE! Surely that should be enough for you, Droid Engineers!

In reality, it's not. Not even close. And it's not that Droid Engineers are greedy and their pleas for more modules is so they can out-earn everyone else, it's that they recognize, with varying levels of brightness and dimness, that the existing number of modules is not sufficient. Why wouldn't twenty three service modules be sufficient, Thunderheart might ask?! That's durned abundant, isn't it?

No.

Here's Why!

Some of my links got stripped out, apologies.

The full article is over here.

Well done. Great piece. Yes, the Level 1-6 is stupid. Once again we are confronted with the commonly held belief that the Devs designed this game with some rigid view of how the Users would play the game. Then when we got in and blew the he77 out of their "carefully designed" system of balances and checks, they were stunned.

You are correct too, that there are effectively only 8 droid modules. No one wants a friggin level 1 ANYTHING! Novice DE dont sell stuff usually, they are grinding like mad trying to get up to where they can make stuff that is WORTH it!!

Bah! I cant believe I'm posting again...DE are so **edit**ing borked

wow, great article!

with such excellent reasoning and execution, I would imagine the devs would be more compelled to fix this "bug".... if they ever read the article.

I am fully aware that the mysterious cloaked figures behind the scenes (no wait...that one's just a shrub) are unlikely to be listening. After all, there are so many voices, and I'm not exactly vocal. Frankly, yapping's overrated.

I'm pretty sure you ganked that 7 deadly things but your content is dead on.

What does "gank" mean?

I think he means "gank" as in "stole" - I don't think he read the introductory article where you make reference to the original thread of Seven Deadly Sins.

Ok,

For the amount of time I spent reading this, I could have Grinded 10,000 xp making seeker or Aykard Probes... A - Probe, sounds familiar.... HMMMM.....

Ahhh..yeah I didn't "gank" it. The "Seven Deadly Sins" thing is an homage to Khaldun's work. Also, this article *is* rather long. But tomorrow I'll explain why you are economically better off at novice than at master, so no apologies for interrupting anyone's grinding (unless you are trying to get through your Holocron demands, and then, for goodness' sake, RUN don't walk away from this forum! It will suck you in with all the talking and the replying and the other talking over there)

I think "variety of sockets" is the key that should tell us that clusters were designed to fit into more than one socket. They don't say they accept a variety of modules. Being there are only two types of non-armor sockets we can assume this is working as designed.

What they did however was prevent you from dabbling by forcing you up 2 lines to make one droid, the R2. They also limited the effect of infinite module stacking by setting caps. So while you can stack an infinite number of modules in a mouse droid, who is going to spend the resources to do so? It is just not practical. But it is an option should you should to use you keen engineering skills.

Multiple crafting stations working, not working or working sometimes I think has to do with your proximity to the crafting station. When using a crafting tool you use the station you are closest to. With more than one crafting station in the exact same location and you being equal distance to both the results can be and are unpredictable.

Maybe what we need some additional socket types like crafting sockets, medical sockets, storage sockets and a generic socket. Something along the lines of a MSE-6 having a storage socket. MSE-6a could have a storage and a generic. This would give droids a specific purpose while getting rid of this cluster F we now have called cluster modules.

agree fixing clusters would be a great thing