Droid Engineer Archive

I became a DE because I wanted to be able to build things people need, want and talk about."check out this amazing R2 unitI've got" I wanted to be involved in a struggle where people making their way in the galaxy needed what I was making. Where the tangible things I created made a difference of some sort to a set of characters.

Because Droids are Star Wars, and evidently not part of Hanna Barberra Wars. I'm not interested in combat or in playing with dinosaurs. I wanted to be a "techie" helping out the everyday troops and community members around me. Instead I feel like loose end/third wheelthat supplies novelties once in a blue moon to people. I sell empty shells of droids more than I sell droids.

So I could use some help. I would really like to stay a DE, but I need some help.

Thanks,

D'Ruk of iD Co, Corbantis.

Sadly, I have no idea why I've kept at it as long as I have. My best guess is that those of us that have stuck around are passionate about droids in general and strive for the Star-Warsiness that droids can bring.

Or, we're just masochists......

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Fribble wrote:

Everyone else,

I would welcome short, simple examples of why you are remaining a DE in the present time. I'm soul searching for ways to keep my profession fun and involved. I'm searching for ways to draw people to me, or generate sales or be able to roleplay a Droid Engineer involved in the middle of a galatic civil war.

So I could use some help. I would really like to stay a DE, but I need some help.

Thanks,

D'Ruk of iD Co, Corbantis.

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Based on your statements above, I question why you are playing any character in this game. If your only enjoyment is waiting on The Next Big Thing from the devs, and not just enjoying what you already have, how can you expect to have any enjoyment in the future either? If you move to another profession you will see just as many broken/non-useful elements to it as there is in DE. The complaints will be the same, just the names are different.

You have chosen the life of a crafter. What do you expect to be doing - hunting down and soloing Ancient Krayts and Nightsister Elders? No, the life of a crafter is about cereberal challenges, not how quickly you can spam a set of specials and live. You want a challenge, go drop harvs on Dathomir regularly like I do, with only novice medic and marksman pistol IV skills and live to tell the tale. I can do that quite well and do it about every week (to check on maintenance, resource shifts etc). In addition, there are challenges in keeping sales going, making new customers, etc. If these are not enjoyable to you, why are you playing a crafting-oriented character?

I'm enjoying everything about DE today, it's a great profession to play. I make a huge amount of money at it (cracked 10mil in the account last night), I have a lot of very satisfied customers (I can count on one hand the number of disatisfied customers in 5 months of being a DE) and also repeat business and referals, not to mention some of the cheapest droids on the server. I care not what the devs do to the game unless they completely bork something (like the inability to make any droids for a week, a few patches ago). If we get new stuff or fixes, I am overjoyed as I have more things I can sell. Currently, the only concern I have on the watch list is the merchant vendor changes as that will potentially effect my abilities to be a decent businessman. I sit here to make comments on changes, but I hardly even break a sweat about it, let alone get riled in rage like most do here. Really, what do you think that is going to accomplish. Go out and enjoy whatever you want and don't care about what happens. If something changes to your dislike, sit back and see if it really makes a difference to your or you just are fearful of change. Perhaps make a comment, but at least make it well informed and after much consideration of all sides of the issue - including whether you are being true to yourself and the good of the whole game. Then work out whether you want to keep playing any given profession, or even the game anymore.

I play a Droid Engineer because SOMEDAY we'll get to make combat droids, and I'll actually be useful to the majority of the server population.

I look forward to the day when I can stop making medical droids and crafting stations and start making something that's not just a convenience gadget. I don't want to make Swiss Army Droids. I want to make weapons of war.

And now all of you SOBs are trying to stop me from being able to do that at all for the duration of the game. Really feeling the whole "tyranny of the majority" thing right now. The developers offer to make us actually useful for something, and the ignorant masses view it as a threat and want to close it down. Guess they can't bear a world in which they can make more than cheap medical tools...

From a bug perspective, I haven't had much problems dealing with that with my customers. Usually it takes a bit or a lot of education of the customer (how many times have you been sent a tell with "Hi, I hear you're a droid engineer. I want you to make me the best surgical droid you can") and then walk them through the process of droids. With a bit (or a lot at times!) of patience, you can make them understand enough to get them to come to an order. Almost always that comes down to something like an R2 with med/food/item combo, but not always. One of my spiels is "any module can go in any droid. There are a few exceptions due to bugs right now, so give me your ideal combo and I'll let you know if there are any problems with it currently". That almost always gets a very positive response - you're letting the customer know that what they want is the most important, but there maybe a problem, but you'll try to help them as much as possible, and that you aren't sorry that you took up your profession in the first place. Every profession has bugs, it's a case of playing around them and not letting them be a factor in your enjoyment. Relegate them to a cursorary annoyance, not a major issue.

On the bugs themselves, there are number of more positive, yet subtle signs that I am seeing on the development front from a trained eye. Firstly, the change from a date to a number for each patch. That little change to me signifies that the dev team has changed from the "get it out the door at all costs" attitude to "it will be done when it is ready". That has some really wide-ranging implications of which code quality is a very high factor. Drashk has already stated that a number of the most important fixes are done. I suspect the reason stuff isn't on TC yet is that code is undergoing a lot more internal testing before being tossed out to the sharks on TC.