Bio Engineer Archive

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Rotain wrote:
People are used to abusing ent's.

Ents have low costs, just clothes, instruments and maybe a house/furniture. But compare income that they can make (without anything special like a gig) only 2k in as many hours you can see how they are bit miffed that any other proffesion with combat skills can make 1 or 2 millon that time.

True with gigs you can make 100K or more but that only comes after being a master.

I can understand why people want BF clearing botts in every starport. This a sympton of the problem with the game. Really what people want is a fun class to play that makes a decent wage and they want this just as much as anyone else does in the game. Just by removing macros from game you are not curing the issues that most people have with entaining in this galaxy.

Buffing is painful when compared to doc buffing and its just so damn unreliable. I buffed two people in the same group one got a full buff and the other got 15 min even though both had been animated as listing to me for the required number of flourishes. Personally i think musican buffs and dancer buffs are totally unrated. You would never expect to walk up to a doc and demand them for free, or make the payment optional.

Personally making ent' buffing easier to do, making the class more fun (no clue how) would go a long way to curing these other problems. Though macros do have other down sids as pointed out in this thread very well.

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There are some really good points in this that I'd like to expand on a bit.

Entertainers rely on tips or gigs to make money - both of which are completely unreliable means of income. The problem with using Entertainer as a means of income is that you don't know you have an income coming AT ALL. That house you just put up? Sure, you played a gig and made some money. You bought your very own house with some of the cash, and droppedthe rest in maintenance. But, when that maintenance runs out, will you have any credits to replenish the maintenance pool? WIll travel and vehicle repairs have eaten up all of your funds, forcing you to beg on the street or mooch from your friends yet again? Will those tips and/or gigs you're betting on not surface? I've heard of the term "starving artist" but give me a break - there's no financial stability whatsoever.

If you're combat-oriented, you KNOW you can always go to a terminal and get a mission that pays pretty well. After a couple of missions, you'll have anywhere from 10 to 30kor moreto get you by.

Entertainer have missions, too - that pay 100 CREDITS. That's right, 100 stinkin credits. Maybe if you're lucky, you'll find a 300 credit or 400 credit mission. At 100 credits per mission, that's 100 missions to get 10,000 credits, the same as a relatively low-level combat mission. Let's go low and assume each mission takes 5 minutes to complete. That's a time investment of 500 minutes (or about 8 hours!) to make 10,000 credits on your own. 8 HOURS?!?

Let's say you take the 300 credit missions. That means about 34 missions will net you 10,000 credits or so (assuming you're not LOSING money by paying more to travel to your mission versus what you make FROM the mission). At 5 minutes per mission (if you have a shuttle wait, it will increase your mission time dramatically) it will take you just about 3 hours to make 10,000 credits. That's still absolutely ridiculous.

Who can live on 100 credits per mission? That's nuts! That needs to be fixed ASAP, and is a recurring sore spot with Entertainers. Even all the credits we get with the new Entertainer Quest are pretty much gone with one round trip from Corellia to Endor and back. Hopefully no one has a burning desire to see some Ewoks, because ya know, they were only in Return of the Jedi and all.

Relying on completely unreliable means of income is NOT a fun way to play a game, when other people are spending 3, 4, or 10 million dollars for items they'd really like - yet balking at the prospect of *gasp* paying you a couple thousand credits for healing/bufing their mind. Heck, even then those tightwads try to rip us off at every chance they get!

Why shouldn't an Entertainer be able to afford a nice Auto-Loom Blue Rug for their home? 2 million credits - guess I'll have to pass. I'll leave it for people who can actually control their income and make real money, I'll just go back to sitting in the cantina and desperately hoping I get money tonight, so my house and all my clothing and items don't just up and disappear tomorrow.

Could you please ask the Devs to fix the missions and give us some control over our finances?

Just another issue, among many, that desperately need to get worked out - the sooner, the better.

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Karquile wrote:

I'm really glad to hear that there are itinerant entertainers out there who will come and set up and heal people on commission, and I'm also glad to see the Ent channel exists (although at first I thought that there were large slow-thinking tree creatures in the game).

As an experiment I used the Ent channel on two different galaxies last night, to test out how this works. I asked where I could get some BF healing, and I'm happy to say that in each case someone answered me promptly. I was sent to a few different locations where they knew there were entertainers working. I went to those locations and indeed, there they were - AFK ENTERTAINERS.

Don't get me wrong, these AFK entertainers weren't moonlighting commandos frugging away with a particle beam cannon in one hand, or fresh-rolled generic 'bots with randonames and slitherhorns. No, these were the real deal, tarted up Twi'leks with icky cutesy names and high level skill titles and costumes by Frederick's of Moenia. The pillars of the profession, doing what they came here to do. And doing it AFK.

But of course that's all right, because they're our crowd. And that's why I joke about the fleshwrap Cosa Nostra. Because I've long observed in this game that what socializer Ents really hate is seeing competition - AFK or otherwise - from someone they don't know. It's cliques, it's human nature. And these Forums being what they are, it's inevitable that they would try to get the game mechanics to enforce their clique dynamic.

But here's dirty little nonsecret #1: Your average rank and file SWG player considers BF/Mind healing/buffing to be a necessary evil at best, a major nuisance at worst; and they would rather be dentist-drilled thanbe forced to shlep to Fleshwrap City or Theed and spend twenty minutes listening to Hug'gee Bun'nee make coo-coo hairdresser chat with "her" friends, just to fix the fricken blue bar.

Which is why they pick up that Novice themselves and spend extra time in camp or a house doing autorepair, or they make sure someone in their group or guild has a few skill boxes (or a mule) for the purpose. And I would be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of blue points healed in game, per day, is done that way and not in the Tinkerbell Lounge. (I would also bet that most mind buffs are done in-house from Ent mules.)

Which brings us to dirty little nonsecret #2: The reason the devs put powerful macro'ing in the game was so that the ability to do labor saving stuff would not SOLELY belong to a gifted hacker fringe, as it does in other games. They knew, as I and many others reading this know, that the technical means exist to run bots and do many other things in the game, without detection and without relying on the macro facility. They also knew that by making those technical means less necessary for effective gameplay, they would make them less prevalent. And it has worked. And God willing it will continue to work. But every time you get one of these player driven campaigns of the form "Ooooh they're doing something I don't like, take their macros away" and the Devs knuckle under and do it, it's one more excuse for hacker authors to turn their gaze SWG-ward and say, Hmm, we can fix that. And they will fix it. And you'll find yourself in a 'bot arms race.

I love being aDancer, I loved working it up to Master in the days before the dreaded Holocrons appeared and made professions meaningless. I like the feeling of welcome when you start performing in a room full of banged-up Bounty Hunters and scorched Swordsmen. But I have never been so arrogant as to presume that I was entitled to a stranglehold on healing and gameplay for an entire Galaxy because of my skill title. I live and I let live. I do not need Big Brother to step in and make a bunch of rules changes to outlaw the Wookiee across the room. And I know that there are a lot of other game players (whether or not they hang out on this particular board) who agree with me. Our voice deserves to be heard, whether or not it's popular with the Golgafrinchan establishment. And that is why I spent a few points of star average to post here.

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Look, if you want to talk about YOUR top issues (as you did in your next post) that's great. But most of this stuff you have said here is overly dramatic anti-establishment ranting for the sake of it. I guess you do like to entertain, because drama just oozes in this post.I'm glad you claim to like playing a dancer, but please explain what you like about it.How can that be improved? How can you say you're fine with the way things are and say its meaningless?

Now before I go off on a tanget in Tigg's post calling for our ifeedback, here's mine in yellow about dancing, why I do it, and what needs to change.

I started playing a dancer to test out this AFK thing and see why and what its about having only experienced this class from the other side of being a combat player needing buffs (rarely I admit) and wondering what entertainers do. So I"m not part of the "the party line", unaware of anything but the entertainer perspective. I'm not a hardcore socializer. But I still like to play an entertainer to be a healer and a performer. And if there were one thing I'd cite as a problem, it is that the class can be "played" afk. I'll put it this way...you can use third party software to master ID, but you can't use third party software to PLAY an ID. Couldn't the same be done for dancer?

Now for the tangent...my response to Karguile.

Let's boil down what you said, ok? You've had a few bad experiences trying to get buffs from entertainers when you need them, so you can sympathize with why people want to avoid relying on live players to do things they want them done in the game.Well, I've had good experiences dealing with live players, so I think its not a completely hopeless system. You still aren't telling TIggs what she wants to know about why you play a dancer and how to make that better for you.

If you come here to say that purpose of this class, the game play of it, should be a mule for the "real game', then that exposes you as someone who doesn't think of this as "your" profession, and therefore, worth having a say in how its design is. SOE can gut the class and put blue frogs in that you pay $15 a month to own and save all the AFK "labor saving" work you talk about. Problem solved, they get more money, and now everyone can have the benefits of mules for the same cost as the alt account they automated with questionable third-party software downloads that could sneak viruses into their computer. One problem though--there's no more dancer class to play, but hey, that's. only a problem if you play one which most of those trolling don't have to worry about. After all, they don't play this class.

Now if you would *prefer* to perform for NPCs rather than players (because we know players can be rude whether dancers or patrons), then say that. Talk about how difficult it is to find appreciaative audience members and how we need NPC audiences. Do not talk about how its all just some conspiracy of anti-afk hate because of fear of competition and how things work just fine for you. Especially as you yourself said the professions are meaningless.

There are many entertainers who don't really read these boards and don't agree that "AFK" is what happens when they step away for just a 1/2 hour or are ona second instance or another computer. They think they ought to continue running and buffing, and they are somehow live (even though, to me they aren't). The bot, to them, is the one that's never there, so if they are sometimes there, then they think they aren't bots. That boggles my mind, but that is how widespread all the AFKing is, to the point where people can't even conceive of /stopdance, /sit, /afk but its just walk away from the keyboard and let the game play on for you. Crafters can AFK too, but they can't afk craft (Unless there's a third party program going...oh, so much for your "everyone can do it' theory. It isn't the way the game works now, I'm afraid. Only those willing to cheat and use 3rd party programs can AFK crafting. Anyone can afk entertaining, so much so, that many dont' even know where ATK starts and AFK ends.

And that brings me to the erroroneous conclusion you draw in your "Dirty little nonsecret 2" paragraph. In what way would you say that allowing everyone to AFk has made it less prevalent than it would otherwise be? I think it has made it more prevalent, so much so, that players brand new off the shuttle in Eisley are Afking within twenty minutes and not just for being entertainers. You talk about a "bot" arms race, but seriously, your logic would have the dev's let us dupe credits any time we wanted, because in the current setupnow only those who know how to hack can do it. Or as I said, let everyone AFK craft because right now, only a few can. Let's open up duping, and afk craftingto everyone, to make it "fair' and forget about all this nonsense about "incentive" to play, and "earning" that's just conspiracy talk, right?But wait, forget that, let's just have blue frogs for everyone, because the only classes worth playing in the game are combat ones...no...not even that, even those are just a means to the end of being a Jedi. So let's get rid of anything that isn't a Jedi, and let Jedi's do all roles or have frogs to do the rolesfor them. Hey, if that's what YOU want for the profession, you're more than welcome to say it. Personally, I'd hate that.

And in myopinion, a great dancing profession would be one where, whether or not we *could* use macros to move our charcter for us, to play the game for us, it stillwould require us to think. The hardcore socializers may not want us to have to think about dancing, because that might get in the way of talk. But I don't see anyway to reconcile not having to think about a character's skills, having functional bonuses to those skills and wanting to encourage interaction, while avoiding the desire of other classes to mule it. It has to be one or the other. Either have no functional benefit and thus no requirement to think, or have a functional benefit and have a requirement to think (so its not "muled" by 100% afk play.) Someone can "mule" a crafter, but they still have to basically play one, whether or not they like it. That's all I'm asking for in terms of the entetainer game. And I think many of the posts,from the "scrap buffs" thread to "make more theater quest" reflect the underlying desire of the players of this class to have a fully functional class, not one designed to be a mule for the benefit of some other playing class. I have no problem if the wookie across the room is another player competing with me. I do have a problem if the wookie across the hall is a program written to compete with me, especially if it can provide a better service because of its inhuman nature (er that its a program, not a wookie).Ironically enough, I don't PVP and like PVE, but when it comes to entertaining, I guess I only like PVP and hate...well..cant call it PVE unless its an NPC wookie, but maybe that puts it in perspective for you. I want this class (as well as anything else I play) to require people to play the game to advance however the advancement is defined. For my ID character, I know the others "competing" against me are all other players, regardless of how dedicated or not they are to the class. Why isn't it that way for dancer?

* if you read this far.

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Saabotage wrote:

YOU ARE WRONG!

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1. If you're not a Musician or planning to be, there is no reason to Master Entertainer. One instrument and one song. I've not met one Dancer (or pure Entertainer for that matter) that care about either of the Master dances. Image Designers get nothing from Master Entertainer at all.
   

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2. The timer for Image Design is much too long. I don't mind some timer to prevent the speed clicky method of grinding, but what we have right now is too long. I think that a 15 - 20 second timer would be fine.
   

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3. Entertainer missions are pathetic. Any time it cost more to travel TO the mission than you make ON the mission, there's a problem.
   

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4. The ability to almost completely AFK grind Entertainer (except for the ID tree) with about 20 lines of Macro code is wrong. This extends to the Elite Professions of Dancer and Musician as well. The macros are wonderfully useful and I personally use them to automate a lot of the flourishing that I do. However, I still spend my time playing the game, interacting with others, buffing people who ask.
   

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5. Respect for Entertainers and all the Elite Professions is a joke. This is the one place that the Dancer/Musician Buffbots has a direct and overwhelming affect on the Base Profession. These AFK automatons are able to provide a 23/7 service that is impossible to match for anyone who's actually playing the game.Becuse of this 'service', much of the player base now treats Entertainers like mindless, soulless robots. I've heard the arguments that it's a play style. I have to repectfully disagree. It's a NON-play style.

I have some questions for tigs, maybe they have been answered already, but there is a lot on nonsense in this thread

When would such a ban come into affect?

How would a csr define the term "bot"? (for example we have already discussed it is acceptable to go out for a cup of coffee and leave you character on auto pilot for a bit. Which is something i do! Well tea for me!)

Are the devs going to make this policy change through launch pad? (as the devs and players alike are fond of pointing out to everyone in our player base reads these forms).

Hmm i think i am going to get RSI if i have to type all my floruishes in just to avoid being labled a bot.

My thoughts:

I really don't see MACROS as the problem for dancers i see the need to spam florushes as my real issue hence why people build macros. If we could deal with the flourishes issue somehow ( maybe drop kick them to pluto? ). I do use macros to remove the boring manotany of having to flourih while i chat to people.

I do feel macros need to be sorted for other reasons as they are listed in this forum. Maybe make it so you can't use /join from a macro. That would sort out the buff bott issue, then the issue is closed.

Kib-wan i was not impliying dancer's didn't have wants and needs for housing/av21's/skills tables, which i was saying is they don't need compo, buffs, foods so they do normally have a much lower "running costs". There are some foods that help dancers but i can never seem to find some of them