Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant Barker Droids on TC
The 30 sec bark could get pretty annoying, but so long as the batteries run out after awhile... 
The spambot is a TERRIBLE idea....we should be trying to find ways of reducing the spam...not making it a "skill"...
What i would prefer is a REAL merchant droid.....a droid i could load with merchandise and the set loose in a town....
Instead of spamming and trying to get customers to go 2k out of their way, it makes better sense to put the goods where the customers are...
even if i could just load 10-15 items i think this would give me better sales than having 10 spambots and 10 players all spewing the same idiotic phrases over and over.
I already refuse to go to Coronet at all due to the spam...i do not go there unless forced by circumstance.
Aside from just selling merch, it would also be cool if ity had an auction module so i could do short term auctions...
I just really hate this spam droid idea...
I don't know whether to laugh at the idiocy of making more lag in the game or cry over the fact that our most basic UI is still less useful than a box of kleenex tissues.
Fivo Asia
DocSavag wrote:
The spam won't be any worse if the droid is doing it than it will be if I am doing it so I don't see it as being worse than it is now.
droids...
Naufragus wrote:
DocSavag wrote:
The spam won't be any worse if the droid is doing it than it will be if I am doing it so I don't see it as being worse than it is now.
OH REALLY???????????????????
You can have 5
so i get 5 spambots an program them to circle the ticket droid spamming the exact same message......or station all 5 in a row at the entrance to the starport...
or better yet , blocking the entrace to someone elses shop!
You can only have one droid out at a time. And you have to be near it. (on the same subserver) So for your scenario you need 4 other people and all of you have to hang out there for the duration of this "spam in"
Not necessarily....I could think of good use for it.
For instance, it shouts at the starport for me that I'm slicing in the cantina while I slice in the cantina. I can do my business in the city and it can take care of my need for city advertising. I'm looking forward to it.
DocSavag wrote:
I am just reporting on what the module does. We weren't asked to design this it was just presented. The waypoint request feature is a nice little feature. People are basically lazy about creating their own waypoints and this makes it easy to give them one. The spam won't be any worse if the droid is doing it than it will be if I am doing it so I don't see it as being worse than it is now. You can't leave the droid to spam and go do something else becuase if you leave the subserver the droid stops working. In the end I don't see how it hurts anyone.
I agree that a small mobile vendor would be a good thing. I am told that isn't technically possible to do right now. We have talked about other ideas that make sense too such as remote management of vendor offers and stockrooms etc. We'll follow up on all of those ideas. If the merchant barker module is going to exists we should understand what it does and make suggestions on how to improve it. I agree that it should not be 30 seconds. The briefest should be 45-60 seconds.
I think the idea of a longer text that can be viewed on the droid is a good idea as well and one I'll pass along. I encourage any of your to reply to the In Testing Threads as soon as they are up with your ideas about this feature.
We were not explicitly asked for design suggestions on this, but we have been asked for feedback in general, and I and others provided quite a bit that was ignored to the serious detriment of the feature. I agree that the waypoint was a nice feature, and it was included in my suggestions, but they really failed in other ways.
The "must be in the same zone" rule is going to make the droids more hated than the un-adjustable short timer. It means that the merchant has to be logged in the same city, and I expect that means that many droid users will be AFK running a similar spam macro. The droid will just be a way to extend their shout range, and will probably be left in the cantina, bank or other populous area. Any barking droid user is willing to be a spammer by definition, so the range extention will seem good to them. Spam haters will just find it harder to get away from, and will hear a bark that already irritated them comming from the droid as well.
If it were possible to leave and do something useful, or to logout, there would be less of a problem. But this way, the character has to be nearby and macroed to do something to avoid auto logout. I am sure spamming is the most likely solution. Even a 30 second frequency is going to miss some people who are running away from a spam filled starport as fast as they can, they will want the faster spam rate from their character located there, and have the droid pester people who are staying put.
I had expected that the original description would be followed:"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." That would have allowed a non-spam advertizement of some real depth to be presented to only those that asked the droid for it. Sadly they failed to complete their work in even the most simplistic way and left only the bark for information.
The choice of novice merchant for the right to use these is insulting, and will make the problem worse. At release, this was a promised (but undelivered) skill at Ad-4, an otherwise empty box. Novice merchant is far too close to having that first vendor, and is too likely to attract people spamming more for experience from people looking at their empty vendor rather than to make sales.
To rescue this module to the point of being acceptable, at a minimum, they must:
- Provide an adjustable timer so those who wish to can avoid being irritating
- Provid a substantially larger messagepresented only through a radial menu command, and only to the requestor. Note that it needs to be accessible from a patroling droid, so it must allow substantial range once the window is opened.
- Have the droid persist and continue barking when the character was far away or logged out.
- Make the operating requirement Ad-4 not just novice merchant
BTW, since there is only the name (other than spam) to attract people to the droid, the inability to name many droid types makes them unacceptable as barker modules. Oddly, these are exactly the ones, like protocol droids, that would seem to be the best choices.
The spam feature of the merchant module is the feature with the greatest risk for abuse in my opinion. However, there is still possibilities to make it more palatable.
Suggested improvements:
On the module end:
- increasing the time between messages (adjustable slider: 30 seconds to 10 minutes)
- increase the amount and type of information the droid can be able to give via the radial menu
- make it possible to create a short FAQ that can be stored in the droid for example, with up to 10 common question and answers for example...
On the player end:
- Option to turn on Time-limited autoignore when same player or droid repeats same sentence in a short time-frame. When a certain time has expired, the player/droid gets auto-removed from the ignore list. The autoignore list should be independent of the ignore-list.
You don't have to put it in front of the spaceport and leave it there.
It's a moving advertising.
I was already using droids as advertiser for my shop making one patrol between all the shuttleport and the spaceport of theed. (no barking, just name shopt-at-city)
It's more fun than replace the swoop parking in front of spaceport by a droid parking.
For the record I answered one of the questions last night. If the droid's power goes below 1% the droid will turn off the ad bark and it must be re-enabled after the droid has been recharged.
He patrolled just fine with the ad bark turned on.
Tonight I will test the skill requirement to operate the module and hopefully confirm that it does or doesn't operate when the merchant leaves the local subserver that the droid is on.
Message Edited by DocSavag on 04-14-2004 07:46 AM