Droid Engineer Archive

In the pricing thread man you had a freaking wicked idea!!

Ok, the crafter's name is already attached to every item in the game. Why the heck not make all droids have some updradable, deteriorating, repairable, and perhaps unique parts that can only be serviced by the original crafter of the droid???

**edit**! that would make for some interesting market fluctuation, with some DEs leaving, untraining, being jerks, etc, and potentially leaving customers no choice but to be happy with their Joe Blow Mk I R2 unit or face the possibility of actually buying a new from a reputable dealer!

Maybe this would a good replacement for the broken droid makeup, I mean customisation, which makes no sense at all. "Your doids customisation fades". "I'm sorry, what?".... lol.

Sorry to burst your bubble but once you tame the droid there is no sign of the original builder.

Err are you sure that was me?

Dont remember saying that...........

But thanks anyway :-)

yeah man, you said this,

Doesnt really apply to droids since you'll never see that customerbecause ofthat droid (no repairs, not upgrade, no supplier lock-in because of compatibility),the only reason you'd see them for anything else was because you're cheap (which doesnt count because you dont become a loss leader just so you can sell more stuff in the future at a loss)

There you go, compatibility due to propritary parts that made the droid. You could make this as simple as having an option on the droid durring crafting where the DE could put in a 'proprietary module', changing it from a generic droid to a droid that only he can work on! Maybe even make it so that the only upgradable droids would be the ones with the proprietary module... Doing it this way would at least give people the option to shop around for more than just the best price...

If the crafter's name sticks around long enough to be in the deed, I'm willing to bet that it's still attached to the droid even after the droid has been 'tamed' (taming = a lame, useless stepin my opinion...).

Oh that! :-)

Wasnt really the point I was trying to make but yeah I suppose it could be quite interesting if it were implimented

Supplier lock-in ... I'm sure customers would simply hate that.

So, what you want is people to only buy from players in the same timezone and similar work schedule? Never more to buy from a vendor if the vendor owner is in Hong Kong, and you are in London? This would help how?

While it would indeed be interesting and give a continuing market, it would also gate all sales of anything you might want serviced.

At the risk of this turning into one of my meandering epic posts I feel the core problem surrounding this kind of item is as follows:

DE's can only make established commercial designs, R-series by Industrial Automation, WED by Tredwell corp, Probots (and others) by Arakyd, 3POs by Cybot Galactical, and 21B's by GeneTech (or was that GenTech I always mix those 2 up)

These modules are built to an established schematic and produced in bulk in corporate factories, yet (in the same was as Anakin in Ep1) some joe Engineer with a crafting tool manages to get his hand on copyrighted, probablytop secret corporate designs and throws together an exact duplicate using whatever materials he can get his hands on - and the end result is just as good.

Now dont get me wrong I understand why the devs chose this route (the most obvious reason is probably that a faithful implimentation = NPC market) but its undermines all the reference material on which to build on

Yes anyone with appropriate skills _should_ be able to repair/modify an R2 because they are common and built to a standard design BUT take away that 'factory pressed' model and replace it with a backyard mechanic build and suddenly the quirks, jury rigs, botch jobs and workarounds make that job much harder....unless you built the droid that is

Personally I think it _may_ have been better for DE's to by chassis from the 'proper' manufacturer and then just add in the guts (making the DE more of a customiser than an ground up constructor) this would have put more emphasis on experimentations, tweaks and custom jobs than a load of solo engineers miraculously churning out identical droids and as such would have allowed your droids to be just that little bit different than all the others.

From this point of view it you can see why it would be advantageous for the builder to perform any future work (as opposed to our current situation of no future work) but wouldnt have made it impossible for anyone else to do it either.

Well enough from me, just thought I'd share :-)

Thought I'd drone on a little longer :-)

I remember, back in a time before beta it was revealed by the devs how the droid professions (for there were 2) were going to work.

The original plan (IIRC) was that you would have droid designers and droid constructors (and your skill point limit would prevent you from mastering both).

Droid designers would create the schematics (what we know know to be experimental schematics) for droid production, but would be able to create Prototypes (which is what we now know is anything that comes out of a crafting tool) - each Prototype however would be unique and if droids were required in 'bulk' (i.e. more than one) or to the same spec then a droid manyfacturer would be needed.

Now since this little lot never got off the drawing board I'm not entirely sure if there was a specific droid manufacturer or just a manufacturer class - needless to say this class had the skills to operate a factory

I suppose thats the kind of thing I miss about the current system, the personalised, custom built kind of system - where the focus isnt on mass production but performance and modification - and it 'felt right' that mass production of identical units was only possible with a factory (maybe I'll change my mind on this if I ever get a factory)

Factory producing droids is actually quite limited due to the number of parts each droid requires. The input hopper accepts only 100 items, so that in effect would only allow you to make maybe 10 identical droid. I'm not sure if factories are smart enough to pull items from pre made factory crates and use them as this would make it possible to make a factory crate of R2 units, but quite frankly I'm afraid to try it.

People would love the idea of being able to upgrade their droids. Most people wouldn't even mind going to the same person to upgrade it, just as most people only ever have one smuggler slice their weapon for them. People make friends and are willing to wait for them to come online. Well, that is, people who aren't socially backward make friends and are willing to wait for them. This is, after all, a multiplayer game with a player based economy and the vast majority of players enjoy these aspects of the game, from what I have observed.

Here are some quick bulleted points

• The optional 'propietary module' links the droid to its creator, allowing the droid to be upgraded and customised by its creator with 0% failure chance.


• Droids without a 'proprietary module' can not be upgraded


• DEs who attempt to upgrade or customise a propietary droid made by other DE will have the possibility of failure, based on their customisation skill. Failure wont ruin the droid, it will simply use up the module the DE was trying to put into the droid and the droid will revert back to its previous state. However, the droid will now have a -1 modifier added to its ability to be upgraded by anyone other than its creator, due to some joeblow messing around with its complex customsubsystems. (I think that's fair and sesnible,from the perspective of mybackground in electronics. Perhaps I am just a little too knowledgable about fixing other people's mistakes; though it is possible, most times its just eaiser to start over from scratch! Hence the reason why 99.9999% of people just buy a new CD player when their breaks down.)

So, there you have it, some factors that allow players to have many options when it comes to upgrading their droids.