Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Your not going to believe this.
Or maybe you will. Favoritism can even come close to an explaination. We waited weeks and recieved a vague responce, and now this.
Creature Handler Issues - Designer Responses
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=creature_handler&message.id=46180#M46180
I dont understand. I really dont.
They wrote this big long post about how they cant spend much time responding to issue because they jost dont have the man power, and that it takes them away from actually fixing issues. But, to take that valuable time and creat a detailed responce to a mostly fixed class is beyond me.
It's to the point where id just about bet a million bucks that we wouldnt get something like that for a month or more.
Maybe its because thay just have absolutly no idea what they are going to do that they simply cant reply to our issues. All clue's seem to lead to this. Disheartening; i was hopingg to get some DE attention this next big patch, but with questions like "what type of combat droids would you like to see" leads me to believe they havent even started working on our profession.
-Relic
If you think that sucks, try playing a BE when tamable pets are a LOT more powerful that those crafted 
They are reducing BE to the level of vets at the moment, expect to see this class disappear from the game altogether soon as most Master BE's have already surrendered their skills and taken up other professions.
Next time you see a BE take a screenie, may be the last one you see for a while 
Well several things are possible:
- We don't actually have a developer working on Droid Engineers at this time and that is why we get no attention payed to us, and our responses were so vague as to not count.
- The devs are leaving us dellibrately broken for some reason - something else has to be finished first for instance, but that can't justify all the broken things we have in our class.
- We do have a dev working on DE, but he is completely incompetant and has no writing skills to speak of.
Personally, I dont think we have anyone working on us at all or there would have been some improvement somewhere, and I think that other classes will be fixed first.
Its looking more and more like its time to give up on DE and become a CH.
Future Patch Notes:
Creatures can now heal you.
Creatures can carry modules.
The Probot now has 100 HAM.
The DZ70 now has 4 HAM.
(one day later)
Fixed it so more than one crafting module can work in a pet at a time
Fixed the storage modules for pets
Fixed experimentation affect on module quality
Decreased Probot damage from 50 to 5
Yeah it sucks. Each profession has its own set of developers and the CH/BE or Scoutdeveloper seems to be on top of it more than ours is.
If only all teh developers would post likethey did.
Sin, if you are the DE correspondent you can make a difference.
When you see the correspondent getting despondent you know its time to get respondent
All this negativity is really getting me down. 
Our time is coming, don't worry.
Well, actions speak louder than words, for certain. I just searched *each* profession forum for posts by Q-3PO. Here's what I found:
The vast majority of them consisted of 2 - 4 posts total from him, including the initial "Do you want to be the correspondent?" and"Here is your new correspondent" (where applicable) posts.
A few forums only had the one "Do you want to be the correspondent?" post.
The DE forum has exactly 3 posts from him, the most informative one consisting of vague excuses for the recent DE nerf campaign and many questions answered with questions. Stall tactics.
The CH forum has exactly 10 posts from him, including the truly rewarding and informative one (for the CH's, anyway) linked in this particular thread.
Yeah, I'd have to agree they have a hard on for CH's. My only hope is that the CH profession is merely the first of many at which they intend to take a *long* and *detailed* look. Otherwise, this will prove to be not the game for me. Star Wars wasn't about the animals, Dr. Doolittle Skywalker.
Designer Response: Droid Engineers, February 2004
Q: Why did you rename the profession "Failure Engineers?" No one wants to use it as their title! What was wrong with "Droid Engineer?"
There were some game balancing issues uncovered onTest Center. We needed a profession that ended in "F" because some new box art was skewed by the pixel width of the letter "D."
Q: Also we desperately need to have addressed the bug where a combat droid attacks its owner. We have duplicated this error practically 100% of the time. If it weren't for the impossibly-low damage, this thing might be really dangerous, but as it is it's a huge nuisance.
We've been discussing this bug with Creature Handlers, and they didn't see it as a priority.
Q: If CHs are allowed to have pets that can become Jedi, shouldn't the Droid -- I mean, Failure Engineer, who also commands "pets" of a sort, also receive a bonus?
The reason for the CH Jedi pet fix is simple. We received a lot of complaints from CHs who said they were having a hard time incapping Darth Vader using their dual-AT-ST-wielding rancors. Now a rancor can no longer hold two AT-STs -- it can only hold one, and a lightsaber in the other hand. What kind of bonuses would FEs like to see? We're interested in your views.
Q: Removing the ability to use modules is profoundly affecting our business. Please let us include just one droid module in our droids again! Why were they removed?
The goal here is not to have more than one class fulfilling the same role. Since CHs can use modules in their pets, what would be the point of giving them to FEs as well?
Q: It would be great to get rid of the eight superfluous "Destroy" buttons on the droidradial menu. I lost 240,000 credits worth of droids in two days because I kept accidentally hitting "Release," "Relinquish," "Put Away For Good," "Go Away," "Click Here To Power Up Your Droid," etc.
We're looking into this.
Q: When will it be possible to move when a droid is out? As of the last patch, once you call out a droid, your character is stuck in place until you put it away, or you or the droid is killed. I'm pretty sure this is a bug. Actually, I used to work at LA andI actually know the line of code you'd need to change. It'd take likethirty seconds to change. It's line 4052 of SWGProfDEServices.cpp -- just change TRUE to FALSE in the if statement. Like, thirty seconds tops. So quick to fix, and you'd make a lot of FEs happy again.
We have not investigated this due to time constraints. But I can give you an ETA: expect us to return to this issue in ten to twelve weeks.
In the meantime, what features would you like to see for the future? We are in talks to implement some brand new "droid recharge" animations.
Typical Bull**edit** Again.
StarWars Meets Pokemon. Thats what this game. And the only Starwars in this game is the Places. Thats it.
LOL Prox!
I think that the 200 post, 9 page thread about the essential droid fixes for simple immersion purposes at http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=323535shows that players of all classes want droids fixed more than almost anything. The fact that it has got no dev response after almost a week near the top speaks volumes about the dev priorities.
One poster on the thread pointed out that a problem may be that the lead devs are so into the D&D thing with hides and bones and big monster pets that they simply don't understand the tech aspect of Star Wars. I seriously think that is why CHs are loved on and DEs are ignored.