Droid Engineer Archive

I guess I'll be a little more specific...what does the "Mechanism Quality" rating have on the final results of the survey the droid performs?

I'm guessing when you exp on a droid the durability determines the "uses" and the effectiveness determines it's mechanism quality?

Yes, and mechanism quality determines the time taken to get survey information.

ok great thx...so then really unless you're impatient I would think the more uses the better

At 77 quality a survey took 25 minutes.

At 86 quality a survey took 19 min. 30 sec.

For those who say these survey droids are not usefull: I just found out Tolium Reactive Gasspawned on Tantooine thru a mail from my survey droid.

oh these droids are great...but they're not worth 20k a pop for something so disposable, like many DEs are charging

that's why I asked these questions...to find out what the biggest consideration was. I made all my parts exp'd for durability and had a DE do the same with the schem so I got 12 use stacks. It takes 48 minutes to do the survey but who cares...if it's not instantaneous, a difference of 20 minutes is of little concern.

...but spending a few hours getting the stuff together netted me 300+ "stacks" at 12 uses each...I can send out 10 a day and not use em all up for a year RT...woohoo

In another thread we talked about pricing on these.

If you figure that a minimum round trip to another planet is about 1500 credits and 10-20 minutes of time, then at about 1K a charge or so (plus 100 credits for a survey tool) the survey droids are more economical and save you time.

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ZenDragonMLS wrote:
In another thread we talked about pricing on these.

If you figure that a minimum round trip to another planet is about 1500 credits and 10-20 minutes of time, then at about 1K a charge or so (plus 100 credits for a survey tool) the survey droids are more economical and save you time.

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I'll agree more economical to make, but not to buy.

I don't get your "add 1k a charge"...it doesn't cost more resources to make more charges

You're comparing 20k to 2500 and saying it's more economical?

I'll hold back on my typical rant about people who think there is a relationship between *cost* and *price* other than price must be more than cost.

STRICTLY from a customer's perspective if they are on planet A and they want to see what resources are on planet B, they have 3 basic choices:

1. Look it up on www.swgcraft.com. Pros: very quick and easy to do, zero in-game cost; Cons: could be minutes to even *days* out of date, depending on the type of resource and the planet

2. Take a flight to the planet and open up their survey tool. Pros: *if* there is something that they want there they can then go survey and find it because they are already there, *if* they already had harvesters there and *if* the resource has shifted away, then they can go tear down the harvesters; Cons: it costs a minimum of 1,500 credits (likely more) and typically 10-20 minutes of their time (during which they can't do much of anything else except wait for the shuttle)

3. Launch a survey droid and do something else while it surveys. Pros: requires *zero* of their game time, costs them less (if the DE prices at 1K a charge or less) than #2, they can survey for serveral types of resources or several planets *in parallel*! Cons: (kinda) if it shows a resource that they want or shows that something that they are currently mining has stopped, they still need to fly there (but of course they would have had to do that in #2 all the time), it may take more wall clock time (30-45 minutes instead of 10-20 minutes if they fly) to have the results


So when I say "from a customer's perspective, a 1K per charge price tag on these is more economical than their primary alternitive (#2)" - that is what I mean.

Quality 30 takes more than 46 minutes.

What quality do I need to get below 20 minutes?

I think you're leaving out one VERY important factor...all your formulas assume a perfect world and that the player ALREADY has the survey droids in their possession or every DE will have them readily available when the player shows up on their doorstep...this isn't the case. You can't discount that time wasted.

So now you have to add-in potentially hours wasted running from planet to planet, sending tells to DEs, who in my personal experience are finally experiencing what the rest of us have ALREADY been going through for months in terms of demand...and many of em are copping attitudes about it. Then you could run to a dozen DE vendors and not find a single survey droid.

I started this thread for other reasons because I was sick of dealing with the attitudes I was encountering and I'm a master artisan so I decided to just make my own...but the few survey droids I DID buy were grossly over-priced (20k ea)compared tothe amount of time it took me to finally get ahold of a DE, and one that had them on their vendor.

...not to mention when I got there he had all of 3 cases left...at that price, I'm not about to waste hours on end every week running around looking for a few cases of these things when I can simply pay 50-100k and have a schem made for a lifetime supply. Think about that for just a sec. I think people are paying the high prices now for the novelty and the short-term convenience...but remember most of the people who ultimatley use these are other crafters, crafters who are prolly master artisans themselves and already have tons of the vertex now. Ifthings stay where they are, I forsee a great many people wising up just getting their schems made than going through the hassle of running all over looking for finished droids. DEs definately have some growing pains they need to get through, now that they have a disposable commodity.

In any event friend, I'm covered for the next year or more and not interested in arguing with ya over your prices. You sell em for whatever you want. Just remember though that these are NOT like guns or armor where people NEED you the DE to get them...so don't cut off your nose to spite your face. You can take my experience for what it's worth and use it or discount it and think you know best. In the end the DE is really onlyrequired for the final step and that's a 5min job that once done, will last the buyer a year RT. It took me minutes to get the resources, the memory and gp modules running, and to find a DE to make a schem (all with resources I already had sitting around for other things)...as opposed to the hours I wasted trying to find a DE, with the finished product, and ended up with only 3 lousy cases at a whopping 300k. Keep that in perspective when you hop onto your pedastal and preach about the value and cost-savings of your product...you're only as necessary as you are convenient. If you act as if you're sitting on the holy grail, in the long-runyou're liable to make your customers consider other alternatives as I did...that won't keep the droids from being made, it'll just mean you won't be the ones making em.

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vevy :

oh these droids are great...but they're not worth 20k a pop for something so disposable, like many DEs are charging