Merchant Archive
Thread: merchant barker droids
1) Up to 5 Merchant Barker Droids can be in a Merchant's datapad
Salporin_Wookie wrote:
*They only stay active as long as you're logged in
Yeah, but this is a good thing really - if they stayed active after you'd logged out, Bestine, Coro & Mos Eisley would be full of the damned things 24/7.
Also, I heard (but haven't been able to replicate) that if you crashed out of SWG rather than logging out that your Merch Droid stayed active. Not that I'm recommending crashing out of SWG!!!
*100% power only lasts 1 hours before they shut down and stand there like a lump of metal
I thought they'd upped this? From my own observations, it's more like two hours, which I reckon is reasonable.
they have a tendancy to autostore
Can't remember who it was that figured this out, but there was a post on this forum that indicated that the autostoring is triggered by one's vehicle autostoring. Since reading this, I've not allowed my vehicle to stand idle while my barker is at work - generate vehicle, go to destination, store vehicle immediately. Since doing this, I haven't had many instances of the droid autostoring at all (can't think of a single one off-hand). Further, if your attempt to store the vehicle fails, and the vehicle later de-spawns on its own, this won't autostore the droid.
message is a bit too short
aye, 100% agreement here.
128 characters??? I simply can't get enough info into 128 characters to conduct a decent publicity campaign. It should either be doubled straight off, or tackled in another fashion... I like the idea that you should be able to record three or four messages, and the droid would repeat each in turn (or randomly). Would also make droid spam less irritating to customers, and a single droid could advertise for more than one business. Hell, others could pay you to rent one of the iterations for their own advert!
I can't leave my barker to advertise and still be able to pull my crafting droid
Well, that's not going to change - even Droid Engineers can only have one droid pulled at a time, afaik.
Of course, you can have a barker & a crafting module in the same droid... I've done that, but I find that in any case I use my private crafting station in the house, as the rating on a droid crafting module is 0.00 as opposed to 40+ in a private station.
DEs should treat barker droids as special order items
To be frank, DEs treat almost all their products as special order items (with the possible exception of tracker droids)!
But yes the limited amount of characters are annoying, If we could just add a description to them hat people could watch with an examine, just like the PC barker do. Then it would be a lot more useful.
I can't leave my barker to advertise and still be able to pull my crafting droid
Well, that's not going to change - even Droid Engineers can only have one droid pulled at a time, afaik.
That is correct. As a master droid engineer I can only call one droid out at a time.
DEs should treat barker droids as special order items
To be frank, DEs treat almost all their products as special order items (with the possible exception of tracker droids)!
It really depends on the DE I guess. I sell a LOT of BH seeker and probe droids. MSE detonation droids and MSE item storage droids do well also.
I try to keep a good selection on my droid vendor. I've been a DE since August of '03 and know what to stock and what to make as special order items. I keep ONE barker droid on my vendor at all times...but that ONE barker droid has been on there forever.
Not my idea, but I'd like to see a merchant barking droid that also acts as a portable vendor...with say a 50 item limit on it. It would sure do well in starports when waiting on the shuttle. Just missed the shuttle and have 10 minutes to spare? Why not browse the portable merchant barking/vendor droid and pick up some stims...or some pups?
Message Edited by TheOrb on 08-03-2004 10:43 PM
TheOrb wrote:
Not my idea, but I'd like to see a merchant barking droid that also acts as a portable vendor...with say a 50 item limit on it. It would sure do well in starports when waiting on the shuttle. Just missed the shuttle and have 10 minutes to spare? Why not browse the portable merchant barking/vendor droid and pick up some stims...or some pups?
Now that would be a proper merchant droid!!!
Reckon if this was put in as a perq for M.Merch a lot more people would be interested in mastering the profession.
Ah, well, I can dream, can't I?
Ethalsar wrote:
Now that would be a proper merchant droid!!!
Reckon if this was put in as a perq for M.Merch a lot more people would be interested in mastering the profession.
Ah, well, I can dream, can't I?
If the spam messages were much longer, then it would use too much of peoples' chat windows, scrolling out their other conversations too quickly. I like the idea of a droid having a longer customizable description that can be seen when examined though.
And I like that droids log when the player does - otherwise we'd have a million of these spamming 24/7.
Same thing for having more than 1 or 2 droids - would clog up the common areas too much. It's not necessary for each merchant to be able to spam every person in the galaxy simultaneously. Can creature handlers who are merchants have more than one of these droids out? Are they treated as pets? If not, either CH's or droid engineers should be allowed to have more than 1 droid...
I think the droid battery should be fairly limitless though. One or 2 hours isn't enough. And if you want some roleplaying justification for it: the droid acting as a glorified tape player boombox will use much less power then the one acting as a fighting droid. There is a workaround, but it's probably a bug: if you leave the planet, your droid will stay on the planet where it was placed, will continue its spam, but won't use up its battery power. I don't know if it's been fixed recently though.
I would like the ability to store more than 1 message though - and I'm sure anyone near the droid would appreciate the variety too. And being able to use the droid as a portable vendor would be sweet too.