Droid Engineer Archive

The Rational:

Star Wars Galaxies is a game of gives and takes. When you spend skill points you gain special abilities but you give up getting other abilities. That concept is duplicated in every facet of the game, from armor to guns and houses. Droids should of course be no different.

The reasoning behind Droid Handler is that you give up skill points to gain droid handling abilities. This is a very sound idea because it has already been done once with Creature Handler. This is only one type of tradeoff however. Armor for example encumbers a character’s stats in exchange for added resistance to damage. Every player in the game can make this tradeoff no matter what skills they posses. In other words, no one has to trade skill points to wear armor.

In the same way that it doesn’t make sense that one would need extensive schooling in order to don a piece of metal, it doesn’t make sense that one would need any more training to push a button. The tradeoff for droids should be technologically based, not skill based as Creature Handler is.

You might say that pushing a button on a droid and pulling a trigger on a gun is no different, yet there are many professions dedicated to doing just that. The difference is that those professions don’t grant the ability to use the weapons. Anyone who picks up a T21 can pull the trigger and make it fire. What you gain in the professions are actual character skills to enhance the effectiveness of using that gun. In the case of droids, there are no skills which can enhance their effectiveness. That has already been determined by the programming of the AI and the crafter that made them.

Now you might say that CH is in the exact same situation as DH would be. You would be correct. However, the character skills granted in CH have no parallel to droids. Taming, training, etc are what CH is. All those things are meaningless in computers; they do exactly what they are programmed to do.

Actual balance:

The main concern to not forcing people to make a considerable investment in some skill in order to have high-level combat droids is that it multiplies the combat ability of a player without the player giving anything in return. In effect, no sacrifice or investment has been made. But of course we have already seen this happen. It is possible to multiply a player’s combat ability 5 fold with the right weapons, buffs, armor etc; none of which require sp investment.

Combat droids will undoubtedly be very expensive requiring resources, some probably rare, and players willing to make them. Droids will also most likely have high decay rates when used in combat, increasing the financial burden on the player. Creature Handler has no such restrictions. A player has both the ability to acquire animals for no credit investment and the freedom from other players or professions. Creatures also exist for an extremely long time with little to no maintenance. This already has a marked difference. A sacrifice has already been made.

I now make the proposal that combat droids have a restriction placed directly on them instead of indirectly on the player. There should be a camp-like structure that when droids are deployed from facilitate their use in combat. This is akin to the droid control ships seen in SW Episode 1 and 2. The droids that are deployed are only viable within a limited radius from that camp. The camp should also be attackable or have an attackable structure that when destroyed disables the droids under its control for a limited time.

Creatures AI as well as players facing droids in combat have the choices of attacking the droids and disabling them, attacking their player controllers, attacking the camp, or running out of the range of the droid camp.

I feel that this is a tradeoff to the use of combat droids big enough to not have to have it dependant on a meaningless and contrived skill set.