Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: OFFICIAL Droid Engineering Report August 4th, 2003 (Please read.)
Droid Engineer Report August 4th, 2003
This is the second official droid report compiled from the Droid Communities vote over the last week. There is much concern that we are continuing on and choosing a new set of top five issues without the last five issues at least being commented on. Official word as to where our prior top five lists sit would be much appreciated. I understand that the issues need to be filtered and looked at, as well as categorized according to difficulty, etc. but official word from the developer in charge of Droid Issues would go along way in building customer satisfaction.
The following are the top five for the first week in August. They were culled from many posts, filtered by me and created as a numeric list that the community then chose as their top five. The first one chosen by a given poster was assigned five points, the 4th four points, the third three points .. and so on.
Suggestions given in each issue are merely that. Suggestions. We realize all final decisions and methods used to find a conclusion will be yours, the development team, based on class balance and your long term vision for the game.
1.) More than one droid out at a time.
We are not asking for multiple combat droids out at one time. Merely one combat and perhaps mutiple crafting/multi-service droids. It does not make sense to us that we can only call out one droid at a time, many people citing the actual movies with C3PO and R2 as an example. There is a place for formations in the program radial leaving many of us to believe that multiple droids were once going to be in the game but have not made it yet.
Possible solutions?
A system like you will be implimenting with CH's would work fine here. Impliment some type of diffulty rating and give us a number of "difficulty" points that we can control at any given time, perhaps based on the user's certification level. Give DE's built in certification to use the droids based on one of our trees.
2.) Redo the skill tree, adding new blueprints .. modules..etc.
All of our schematics are in one branch. Spread these around. Change the way the skill tree works. Once implemented it should be easy to credit the DEs with a respec that would allow them to get the XP and skill points back so they can change their path. Add more droids and give each skill tree different droids. Many DEs are unsatisifed with the way our tree is laid out.
Posible Solutions?:
Here is a suggestion by “Gron_DM” that is well liked by the community. AS stated above this is just an example of what the community as a whole likes fro a solution.
Novice DE:
......... MSE droids, armor 1, wpn kit 1 ranged and melee, ect, ect of the normal
Combat Droid Blueprints:
......... 1. deed for dz70 (improved over current stats),
..........2. deed for adv dz70 (ditto)
..........3. next higher combat bot manipulator arm pack, droid brain
..........4. probot or other top end fighting droid
Non-combat droid blueprints:
..........1. deed for r5, treadwell, adv droid frame, manipulator arm package
..........2. deed for r4 and power droid, droid brain
..........3. deed for surgical and repair droids
..........4. deed for binary load lifter...you see were i am going with this.
Droid Accessories
..........1. level 2 med, wpn, armor, storage, surveying, sampling, public craft station, slicing....personality chip stupid
..........2. level 3...ditto...sarcastic
..........3. level 4 ditto
..........4. level 5 ditto
Droid Experimentation
..........levels 1 to 4 as normal
Master DE
..........level 6 everything, droidekka's...rest of current master DE list
3.) Droid decay and more reasons to have a customer return to us.
As of right now there are few reasons for a customer to return to us, the Droid Engineer, once we sell them the droid of their dreams. Some reasons a customer would want to return to us is to heal the black wounds in their droid by using a droid with a repair module in it. The issue with this is, any droid with a repair module in it can repair the droid ... thus we are not needed after all.
Possible Solutions?:
We would like to see some type of system implimented that causes a droid to decay slowly overtime, or something similiar that only a Droid Engineer can fix. Other suggestions have been to have modules wear out over time instead of the droid so modules have to be remade and replaced. Perhaps make the Repiar module only funtion with a DE as master of the droid, or remove the repair module completely and give DEs the innate ability to repair and "heal" droids like a medic can a humanoid.
4.) Remove Bounty Hunter droids from vendors.
This would go along ways to solving the issue of returning customers. Right now it is not affordable for us to compete with BH Droid vendors. A seeker droid only costs 200 credits, and their other model 1000. We want this market where it belongs, back with us. If this is not an option then perhaps impliment another reason for a BH to buy from us instead, such as a seeker droid that has a "count" and can be used a certain number of times before being destroyed.
5.) Droids only a DE can use.
As a perk for being a DE we would like a droid model or two that only we can use. Something that people would consider being a DE just so they can use. Some argue that we are merely the crafters and as such should have no droid using capability outside any other player but I argue that realism dictates to a point that there must be some machines so complex that only a Master could program and control, perhaps arguing that only we have the skill to maintain it since we understand its inner workings. If not DE only droids a suggestion was made that perhaps we could have DE only commands that we could program.
The sixth and final issue for this week is my personal choice, which was granted to me for my work as Droid Correspondent. It is merely the sixth issue to rank in the vote so I will place it since coincidently it would have been my choice anyhow:
Deeds.
Examining the deed needs to display the stats and the service modules etc. To much faith is being taken on by the customer. There should be no reason for them to have to trust us. It would make our lives easier. And it also helps us sell a droid if we know what its stats are without taming it. We should also have the ability to "re-deed" a droid so we can take trade-ins and resell the older model. We have the ability to sell droids from the datapad via the secure trade feature but this is bugged and teh droid does not show up.
Sorry for my typos ... I excel at math but not proper english techniques 
I havent been by the boards in a while I have noticed a problem with storage containers/modules ... the droid storage container and droid storage module level 1 and 2 are not the same in terms of being able to be placed in crafting stations, and I believe they should be. Also the level 2 storage module makes a schematic for data modules whenI try and make one for my factory.
What a fun profession we have.
--Dolomite
Dolomite Droids Inc (645 -3897) Just NE of Coronet on Corellis - Corbantis
4.) Remove Bounty Hunter droids from vendors.
This wouldn't work right now. The upper level bounty hunter missions (which, by the way, is the only way to get bounty hunter xp, and all of our skills require BH xp) actually lose us money because of all the droid and travel costs. If the prices of these jump up (and I don't know how much it costs to make a seeker doid but I'll bet it's more than 200 credits) then we will have to spend all of our time doing normal missions just to get enough money to do ONE BH mission. These prices either have to be fixed or the bounty hunter reward has to go way up before this is implemented.
*BUMP* on the post, great job!
One thing about the BH droids that Linea was concerned about:
Should crafted BH droids work substainally better then vendor bought droids? I'm not sure how the BH class works, so correct me if I'm wrong.
-Laird
-Engineer
-Corbantis
JorTrile wrote:
*BUMP* on the post, great job!
One thing about the BH droids that Linea was concerned about:
Should crafted BH droids work substainally better then vendor bought droids? I'm not sure how the BH class works, so correct me if I'm wrong.
-Laird
-Engineer
-Corbantis
One of the reasons I started looking into droids was because I had a freind that was going into BH. I have actually learned more about BH then I wanted to know 
The fact is that we can't make them reasonably for 200. Most I'm seeing out there are between 2-3000 each. Just to give you an idea.... when my friend first started working on Investigation 1 missions (the first point where you need the seekers) he was using about 10 or 11 of them per mission. Seekers are a one-shot... one time use item that tells the BH where his target is currently... but the target moves, so they have to use many to eventually find it. As he's gotten better, he still uses 5-10. Now granted, there are probably tricks that he has not learned yet that can drop this number further.. but consider it as it is for now, because not all BH's are going to be crafty fighters.
At (oh... lets say) 5 seekers per mission and one prob droid (now probot.. probe droid that tells a BH what planet he has to travel to).... from the BH vendor: 2k credits.... from one of us: 15k (assuming 5k fro the probe droid and 2k for the seekers) Add an average travel cost of a nice 1500 (becuase some are on endor, others on Naboo... so costs vary widely)... and your looking at vendor cost: 3500, DE cost: 16,500.
Now take into account that his Inv1 missions only paid 8k each... See the problem??
What SHOULD be done about this is to do one of two things (or maybe both)... Up the BH pay so that a crafty BH can make uber cash, but a less mentally apt one makes squat because of waisted costs. the other option is to make seekers have charges. Once experimentation is fixed, this could go along way to making some DE's products better then others... rewarding creative thinking and good game strategies in both classes.
It's called class interaction... and its something that SWG promotes in theory, but has trouble right now in practice.
ill have my wookie claws crossed on this :/
Vilance EGC, Corbantis
*Crosses lekkus and hopes for best*
Great job, sintrosi. I hope they can respond to our first set of issues before we send in our third.
Sintrosi... I made a fairly good, and what I would think is reasonably doable, suggestion in another thread and thought I would paste a link to it here since I'm not sure if you happened to read it.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=droid_engineer&message.id=9372
Thanks