CUEmu - Thread Posts

ideas

Thu Feb 19, 2004 11:24 am

It's not clear whether this is going to be a "Merchant Only" module or something usable by anyone. That's why I think this was presented only for DEs and not for Merchants.

Maybe a good compromise between making this available for everyone vs. Merchants only, is to give variables to the barking that increase with Merchant skills. For example, the length of the message allowed might be limited. So, a non-Merchant only gets 40 characters (equivalent to an object name), while a Master Merchant can load up a nice sized price list with detailed descriptions.

Other things that could be tuned to allow access to all with boons for Merchants:

* Radius of the bark.

* Frequency of the bark.

* Colors in the bark (e.g. allow colorizing the message for Merchants withAdvertisingLevel X)

* Number of Rotating messages (1 message for non-merchants, up to maybe 7 different messages for Master Merchants)

As for spaceport spamming.... Well, at least if it's an AI, SOE can tune it to a low frequency, make it send messages only to those close enough, etc. They might even be able to set it up so that the droids "take turns" if they are all near each other. This would lend an advantage to putting your barking droid somewhere where there aren't already 50 of 'em.

So, let me get this straight: To advance my character, I have to give up my current abilities?

Flurry: Ikeya Ibye (Master Droid Engineer, Master Artisan, Master Merchant)

IKEYA Grand Mall - Naboo, Moenia - Waypoint 5000 -4000

Zanholo

Thu Feb 19, 2004 12:53 pm

#15

afk ad barkers not only get put on ignore, they also get banned from both my shops.

The difference between in-game spam phags and walking thru your local market is that local market folk shouting out their wares does not cause huge incovenience of lost communications like the ad spammers do when they flood the text you are trying to read.

I run a hella successful business with absolutely zero ad spam. If you feel the need to spam your server and inconvenince so many fellow players, I feel compelled to never let you walk into any of my shops. No powerups, no 99% repair tools, nothing for the ad spammers!

(((Oishii Sou'Na))) - Scylla, Silver Bay, Naboo, SS Ace

(((LAkers Pwn))) - Tempest, CorSec Master Pilot

Furnishings, city items, art, p-ups, best repair tools & more!

Lakers Pro Shop & City Tent, S. Coronet, -410/-5480Interior Visions, S. Theed, -5275/3355

(((Goki Buri))) - Chilastra, South Coronet, Havoc 2/2/1/1

mhal9000

Thu Feb 19, 2004 12:55 pm

#16

BoberFett wrote:

This had better be a Merchant perk only, and ideally a Master Merchant perk. If everyone can advertise at the starport using a droid, then why become a Merchant at all? The one thing we can do (other than vendors, and non-merchants even have that until the devs start deleting vendors when Management is dropped) is advertise. There's no other reason to be a merchant.

If non-Merchants get advertising droids I'm gonna get medieval on someone.

/agree

If they can certify the entertainer modules, then they can certify the adbark module for merchants only.

Federated ResourcesHork Haggis, Retired

Puck_Starfire

Thu Feb 19, 2004 4:55 pm

#17

I'm under the impression that it's an 'everyone' ability. But if I learn something more I'll be sure to pass it on.

And I too have run a very successful business without spamming or even shouting one ad a day in my SWG life. I got successful through the bazaar, through contacts and friends of friends, and through word of mouth.

Although I will say my business has tripled since changing my title from "Master Merchant" to "Master Droid Engineer". I had it on Merchant for so long thinking that it would bring interest for some reason. Nope.

Haruspex77

Mon Feb 23, 2004 9:48 pm

#18

I am really glad to see that a feature announced in the original documentation has been revived after having been dropped from the in-game description of our skills. It used to be in Ad 4, which is now essentially empty. Moving it up to Master might be OK if it works as well as it could. One barking droid per Master Merchant wouldn't be a problem considering the number of AFK macro shouting players that I see.

The posted possibility reads:

Merchant Barker module: This would give droids the ability to bark advertisements, give waypoints to shops, have additional information available so players could list prices, services, etc through a radial menu command. (I had to reprocess it to remove HTML -- very irritating!)

I have some concerns that need to be addressed early in the development process for best results

The droid needs to persist even when we have left town. If it autostores when we get out of range it is close to useless. It really should persist after logoff, just like a vendor. It would be ok to have a limit to its persistance time so long as it was greater than 24 hours, 7 days seems about right to me. A significant maintainance (city license fee?)cost is also ok.

Should be allowed anywhere a droid can go.

Ideally the list of prices should be a real-time feed from the vendors, not manually entered. I would hate to see them able tocontain bait-and-switch ads or draw people to empty vendors.

The bark could be the standard character limit, but there should be a way to put about a page of explanation behind the radial menu. Some products need quite a bit of explanation, and there is noplace to put that now.

The persistance of the informationcontents is an issue for me. If it is permanent until removed, I expect a lot will have obsolete information. If it needs to be refreshedvia a slow processevery time the droid is called it would be a pain to use. I would like to see /commands that could be put into a macro available.

It would be really desirable if they showed us (or at least Doc) the specs on the proposed interface before they coded it. The quality of the interface could be greatly improved with a little user input.

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