Droid Engineer Archive

Thunderheart, you seem to be having trouble understanding what DE's want, and what they want done with their (my) profession. Well let me tell you... forget combat droids. Forget new droids. Forget new modules. What we want is the following FIXED (from Gorantoth's thread):

A.Droids are not giving any UXP.
B.Droid names use the standard name filter.This may beby design, butwe're calling it a bug because droids should use a modified name filter that allows for numbers in the name. Yes, Artoo-Deetoo works fine, but I've seen NPC droids wandering around with REAL droid names. So we should be allowed to do the same.
C.Droids with no attack capabilities none the less have attack speeds and damage base modifiers in the datapad.
D.Experimentation on droid parts has no noticeable effect on final droid. Resources also fall into this area since resource properties influence the experimental property values. There is no point to experiment either on droid components or the final product. The droids seem to all function about the same.
E. Droids often stop following without reason. This is a generic pet problem as it happens to all pets, not just droids.Pets seem toget stuck on invisible zone boundries.Walking up to about 10-20m from thepet and re-issuing a 'follow' command fixes it (most of the time).
F.Item Storage Module 2s coming out as Data Module 2s during the assembly stage. What you seem to get at the end is a Data Module 2. This is only a NAME problem. The module is said to function as it should - as an ItemStorage Module 2.
G.Multiple crafting stations in a single droid breaks the crafting modules in the droid. Only one of the modules seems to work when this happens. Crafting modules also seem to break when the droid's crafting field intersects crafting fields from other droids orstationary crafting stations.
H.Droid deeds shouldn't be tossed into the misc area of the bazaar. They're deed versions of entities. Give droids a proper home so that people can actually find them with ease.
I.EXPLOIT: Cluster modules not only fit into cluster module sockets, they fit into service module sockets.This allows cluster modules to fit into cluster modules ad infinitum. Thishas the added effect thatcluster module slots are nowpointless and allows any number of modules to be placed in any droid. Clusters should only fit in cluster sockets. Otherwise you're further exploiting the idea that the droid frame used is irrelevant.
J.Skills for the Droid Engineer don't reach +100 at Master. Droid Assembly and Droid Experimentation only go as high as +55. Droid Customization (currently useless) goes to +64. Other engineering professions get skill adds like assembly/customization/experimentation at novice. Droid Engineers get squat.
K.Repairmodules do not functionat all when placed in an LE Repair droid or Power droid.
L.Medical modulesaffect the effectiveness of stimpacks. Reports say that a stimpack is more effective when a medical module-equipped droid is nowhere to be seen (unless it contains a level 6 module).
M.Droids and components have been changed so that some of the experimental values have been removed from the schematics. However, these values remain during crafting and experimentation. As such, they are always 0%. If they can't be altered, don't show them.
N.Droid deeds need to show ALL the modules installed and any important properties associated with those modules.
O.EXPLOIT: By telling a droid to stay, running 800m (need to cross a server zone?) or so away and calling another droid, you can effectively call all your droids at once. I've not been able to reproduce this myself. Can anyone who was previously able to do this reproduce it?
P.Droid Storage Compartments use Artisan Experimentation instead of Droid Experimentation. It's a DE craft, it should use DE skills, not Artisan skills.
Q.Item storage modules do not work with Surgical Droids (basic and advanced). The option to use item storage is not available in the radial menu.
R.Droid customization is so borked, it isn't funny. No xp is gained from colouring droids, the colours don't always hold.
S.Droid customization tools give General Crafting xp instead of Droid Crafting xp when crafted.
T.Droids suck batteries like there's no tomorrow ever since they no longer recharge on store. Please find a happy medium.
U.After calling or storing a droid, the datapad radial menu doesn't immediately update to reflect the status of the droid, causing the store item to appear after storing the droid. This seems to be a general radial menu problem as I've also seen it when I unregister my vendor.I have to open the radial menu a couple timesbefore unregister switches to register.

Instead of posting theories, hearsay and posibilities ... post what is ACTUALLY being done and tell us that these bugs are getting fixed.

I don't mean to sound shirty, but I've been waiting over 5 months (since beta) for many of these issues to be seen too. We've been given the "we'll look into it" .. "we're aware DE has issues" .. "just wait a little longer" .. "tomorrow" ... "in the morning" .. "later today" lines for far too long.

Everytime we've felt we get close to things getting changed, we just get given a vague post by a dev full of questions ... with the usual "I cant seem to find this.." or "there are too many threads.." even though there are usualy atleast 3 threads active within the 30 most recent threads in DE that contain new ideas for our profession, what we want see etc.

Please, just drop the sherade that anyone at SOE knows what they are doing. Forget adding to the profession. Just get the **edit** thing fixed!!!

In all fairness, TH isn't the developer, he's a liason...a polite and amiable face for SoE to show to the public on the boards.

It's completely alright to be irritated about things, but getting pissy doesn't help anyone or get things fixed. Once people start letting their tempers and emotions control them, that's when things decay even further and nothing will ever get accomplished.

This is the main problem I've seen for quite a while from the DEs. Even at the beginning, when the issues were first being discovered by the majority of players, everyone ranted and complained. People need to learn that getting upset and copping(sp) an attitude with the only direct contact we have to the SoE developers at this point (the correspondants are to a degree, but TH is a more "direct link") is silly and very self-defeating.

You can't expect him to read through every post we have, nor can you expect him to give you specific deadlines or fixes...he doesn't have them. Sony has long maintained that they will not give exact dates for fixes/patches/updates etc, because then they would be required to provide them at that time...and that's simply something they can't assume will always workout. Having done much work on software projects, be they games or otherwise, I know first-hand that problems will come up and completely throw your time-table off kilter...and there's nothing you can do about it. The sure-fire solution you have one day could end up having far reaching repurcusions across multiple other modules that you weren't aware of when you came up with the fix. This is what happens in large group projects, if your hand isn't in every single piece of code then you HAVE to wait and rely on the other parties to provide feedback about how your changes might hurt their code.

And it's great that many people (yourself and myself included) simply want the list of BUGS from Gorantoth's thread fixed, but that's not everyone. There are quite a few DE who DO want combat droids and new droids and new modules, so saying that those are wanted by the DE is incorrect. Thus the new thread started by TH. It was SUPPOSED to be a place where everyone could post the information about the specifics of what they felt were needed, kind of like a poll so they could get an idea of the major consensus...yet that degraded into people telling him he should read the other threads and such. That's not constructive in any way, he didn't ask us to provide feedback on what we thought his job should entail, so there's no reason to give it.

If everyone would just stay calm and answer the questions without trash-talking SoE and the contacts we have from them everything would go a lot smoother...instead we belittle them at every turn, they get conflicting information from various groups within the professions, and then, when they try to get an overall consensus of everything, they get blasted for not reading the forums. How many of us have read every post in every profession forum and have retained the information we read from one day to the next? None of us, that's too much information for one person to process on a daily basis.

What people don't seem to realize is that they want the game to succeed. No one on the SWG team is sitting around thinking "I wonder how I can make this project fail so I don't have a job anymore." Just because you don't agree with the ideas at all times doesn't give you license to blast them in an unconstructive manner. These boards are famous for the flame-fests that arise from people just completely slamming ideas they don't agree with rather than just ignoring it, or posting why they think it's a poor idea. We all (myself included) need to grow up and realize that the players and SoE are on the same team, a team trying to make SWG better and turn it into a lasting and successfull RPG.

That having been said, I agree that the above posted list should be the central-piece of any and all updates performed on the DE profession.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but I do not believe my post was a rant, dev bash or flame. It was just getting across the general feeling most people have right now.

The biggest problem with Droid Engineer as a profession is that there are three types of DE;

1. Those that want to be like other crafters and make cool things they can sell


2. Those that don't care about crafting and just want Droideka (combat droids)


3. Those are in the middle of the above two

Sadly, its the second group of people that appear to dictate the progression of DE simply because they are (generaly) the DE's that kick up the most fuss. In my opinion, this group are NOT "Droid Engineers" and should not be involved in the future of the profession.

But the fact remains, these bugs need to be fixed. And we need to be told "they are getting fixed" or "they have BEEN fixed" BEFORE we consider what to do with the profession. You see, this has been the whole problem with the entire game right now.. the developers have been thinking up ways to improve something that is broken .. then when they fix it, realise they have to think up new ways because of the fix.

Certain problems in that bug list will determine very important future DE issues. One such issue being the exploit of the General Cluster module ... how can be decide what to do with modules and what droid should have them while that still exists?

Fact is, the profession is too weak and unstable to even contemplate adding to it right now and if people would just get rid of the desire to go kill everything with a droideka then maybe the entire DE profession would be in agreement;

Fix the bugs first