Creature Handler Archive
Thread: upcoming changes
DekardJaxx
Mon Jun 27, 2005 11:36 am
#144
BF has decreased. I spent 7 hours recently in 2 big PvP battles, 12 base raids, other minor PvP battles, and cloned twice during the eventsin the nearest cloner at least 2km away. My total BF was about around 20 for the whole 7 hours. I used to pull more then take in 30 minutes of Janta & Mokk missions.
AD_MK
Mon Jun 27, 2005 11:41 am
#145
i've just completed a 27 hour grinding session on the weekend and the most BF i got was like 5 points. a dancer had them gone in seconds.
Something is seriously buggy about BF atm. but at least it means i'll never break a piece of armor again 
Chessack
Mon Jun 27, 2005 11:45 am
#146
Reachwind wrote:
People who come to you pre-gameplay are in a hurry to get to their fun. They are MORE likely to be annoyed that you are bantering and trying to be entertaining than those players that have already got what they wanted out of their game play and are ready for a little change of pace anyway.
Now, this is the best argument I have seen for keeping BF in the game.
However, the reality is that most players who aren't social in the first place, hate down time of any sort. They might hate post-combat downtime a little less, but in my experience, the ratio of people who hate any downtime at all to those who want to have a nice relaxing "postgame" chat is like 20 to 1.
You make a good point though, that it'll be like 40 to 1 instead of 20 to 1 for pre- vs post-game delays.
C
Chessack
Mon Jun 27, 2005 11:52 am
#147
JediMasterKai wrote:
BF has not decreased, I assure you this. Try going out and PvP'ing or doing some different content than what your daily routine consists of and I'm sure you will notice the effects. >
Well, I don't PVP.
I do, however, have a pure combat alt who does tons and tons of PVE. I think I have gotten all of 50 total BF in the 2 months since the CU. Before, I'd have taken 50 total BF in a single evening of play. So I think it is at least safe to say that certain styles of gameplay now can basically negate you getting BF at all (basically, PVEing against just about anything that you can take on solo, i.e. anything conning yellow or below).
C
Chessack
Mon Jun 27, 2005 11:55 am
#148
JediMasterKai wrote:
I had 598 the other night. But, I also PvP regularly and PvE with friends, so maybe I do more than just standing in Theed to receive it.
That's really condescending.
Many of us have combat alts. As I said in my last post... I have a combat alt who is pure combat (TKA/CH until last week, now TKA/sword). I hunt solo much of the time. I do not PVP, and I am sure that has something to do with it, but PVE, alone, I get little BF, and grouped, we kill things so fast I get even less.
Note, however, that I use the clone terminals. I haven't had an "uncloned" death in probably a year and a half. I'm sure if I forgot to clone my BF would be up there.
C
Maisland
Mon Jun 27, 2005 11:55 am
#149
Personally, I am withholding judgement on the removal of BF untilI see how it pans out. I have not gotten much BF on any of my characters since the CU (the most I have gotten was 100 BF from dying on Tatooine when I was cloned on Naboo). I can remember taking hits in the past and getting wound and BF messages during combat...on one memorable occasion, I got over 800 BF just from fighting... with no deaths. Now, I never see those messages during combat.
I will be glad to see EH xp no longer needed. EH xp is a pain in the rear to get, more so now than it has ever been before, and I got the game at the height of the holo grind, so most of my dancers maxed out their dance xp long before filling the last box of fatigue or wound healing.
Esharra
Mon Jun 27, 2005 12:27 pm
#150
I've not gotten anything from them regarding that.I would think that it could use the consent system ofthe new multiple occupancy vehicles. However, it would require all new mocaps and the coding behind them.
Rabenschwinge wrote:
hm... Eshi, do you know wether they even thought about finding away to implement couple dancing?
Chessack
Mon Jun 27, 2005 1:20 pm
#151
Schardour wrote:
Entertainers weren't meant to be Healers in this game. It's been stated again and again by correspondent after correspondent that the developers DO NOT view entertainers (or performers) as healers.
This isn't entirely accurate. Entertainers are not viewed by the current dev team as healers.
Holocron and the original dev team considered us very much to be healers and designed BF and Mind Wounds with us as their main healers just for that reason. The intent was for socializers to be "social healers" in a sense (by doing their social thing, they healed people who were tired from war, etc).
Now, that isn't how the current crop of devs see our profession, so it's old news... but it's not accurate to say entertainers "weren't meant" to be healers... we most definitely were.
And we'd have been just fine in that role, and continue to be fine in that role, if it were not possible to AFK the role. Because it was, Sinda Blackstar and others started asking for other positive things that only active performers could do, and buffing was born (it was NOT in the original game design). But that turned out to be AFK-able also, and so you had a whole AFK-bot industry that surfaced, which led to resentment from the rest of the player base... this is what led to the bad feelings over BF and the wish to take mind wounds out of the game and ALL the rest of it.
The whole sorry thing can be laid at the feet of allowing AFK macro-botting. If it had not been for that, the whole landscape would've been different. But, that's all water under the bridge now. With the current dev team and the current landscape of the game, entertainers don't work well as healers any more. So they do need to make some changes.
But the original role was very much intended to be healers, and it actually did work well enough, before AFKing took over.
C
Einhinder
Mon Jun 27, 2005 1:25 pm
#152
i dont see why anyone thinks these old buffs will be any diff form the old oneas people will still find ways to afk them and people wil lstill resent having to getthem pre whatever from us.we will never be the psot battle wind down chill party professio nanymore were going to be hurry up and jsut buff so i can get on my way already.
Schardour
Mon Jun 27, 2005 2:04 pm
#153
Chessack wrote:
But the original role was very much intended to be healers, and it actually did work well enough, before AFKing took over.
Alright, replace "weren't" with "aren't" in my previous post, if you wish. However, I would still argue that the primary healingrole in SWG, as with any other game, originally went to a single Medic profession...a profession with 4 lines strictly dedicated to the service of other players. Squad leaders can reduce the effects of wounds, and TK's can sufficiently heal themselves, but I would describe neither as fulfilling a healing role. Entertainers came closest to filling that role (behind medics)...but I would actually label the assignment of the mind pool healingto our abilities as a mistake. Battle Fatigue was never a formidable opponent to the combatant. However, wounds have always been, and always will be, an attrition-based barrier to constant gameplay. We were responsible for 1 of 3 basic health pools (including their sub-stats). I think the design was centered around the supposition that Medics weren'tallowed to work without a pool cost. Negating one's own ability costs would be a strange feat to accomplish...
I'm fairly certain the entertainer ability to heal minds in addition to Battle Fatigue was considered a design necessity at the time. I don't believe we were ever actually intended to fulfill a Healing Role in addition to a Social role, but we fell into that category nonetheless. I think Battle Fatigue was supposed to be the "wound" that we were meant to sooth, and not an actual attribute pool. Alone, it should have been a simple, unintrusive method of attracting players to the cantina from time to time. However, with the super Doc buffs allowing players to tank large creatures for hours on end, BF became another attribute pool, susceptible to wounding and needing healing.
We have a newer, simpler, even less intrusive means of bringing players into the cantinas now: Inspirations. The Healing role was finally removed from us, and our fairly useless BF healing powers were replaced by a positive attraction. Inspirations, imo, didn't replace wounds. They replaced BF.
SianGali
Mon Jun 27, 2005 4:04 pm
#154
JediMasterKai wrote:
Figures. I expect people to read something that does not have the words 'cookie' or 'hawtpants' in it and get a valid reply. Good job, boys and girls.
Valid reply?As in agree with you?
Mmm, see see post 23984902384902384902348, otherwise titled cold day in hell.
As far as yourunprovoked, condescending& hostile postsdirected at Panthu and Esharra go....
Newsflash theyare UNPAID people who relate info back and forth from the devs to us. They do not decide what changes are made to the game. That is made by employees and managers in the company.
The corrstry to help us work with the company to get what we want. In this case the decision on BF has been made, no matter how much you people berate Esh, she cannot get it overturned. Esharra & Panthuare looking to us with a POSITIVE attitude and saying hey, lets see what we can do with our skillpoints/props etc to make this work BEST for us.
Your hostility towards them is unwarranted & childish.I cant believe you can state and really believe they abuse their POWER. Ya, their power to volunteer to be treated like crap by disgruntled players like yourself. /golfclap Intaru
Have a great day!
DanceRulez
Mon Jun 27, 2005 5:16 pm
#155
While I tried to make my opinions on these upcoming changes clear in the dev responded thread on the Entertainer forum, I think I should reiterate those ideas here as I don't feel that others have made quite the same arguments.
I think the removal of BF is a mistake. Why? The main reason is because I think that the entertainer/combatant interaction has always worked best when it has taken place during combat downtime. When this game first started there were only mind wounds and BF that we could heal. People would come in to a cantina after an intense play session to get healed up, and they would often stick around a while because they were taking a break or didn't have anywhere to rush off to right away or were looking for a group. Although there was the occasional person who would complain about "having to go see an entertainer", most people seemed to have no complaints, and often enjoyed the atmosphere of a lively cantina environment with active entertainers and other types of players milling around. People would often even be appreciative to walk in to an out-of-the-way cantina and find even a lone entertainer there to keep them company for a bit while easing their mind. Again, what worked about this arrangement was the fact that it was during downtime when the combat players didn't have something to do right away or were taking a little break from the action. The BF and mind wounds gave them a reason to seek out the cantinas, and this allowed Entertainers to entertain and socialize and add life to the game.
The problem with buffs - at least in the way that they have existed in this game so far, is that they are administered during combat prep time. There is simply a different mindset at work at this time. The combat player will seek one out when they've already figured out something they want to do, and their goal at this point is to take care of whatever prep work they need as quickly as possible and get on to the 'fun' (or the 'grind'). The person who might be seeking a buff at this time probably doesn't care how good a show we can put on, and they're not likely to stay and chat any longer than they need to. Maybe they need to go find some group members, or maybe they're already part of a group that's waiting on them. Once the buff is applied, it's even telling them to hurry up and get to what they want to do because the timer's started and it's ticking away. This is antithetical to the type of gameplay that many of us, as entertainers, want. We don't want a "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" game play, we want an environment where people can come in during a lull in the action, stick around for a little while or a long while, and kick back and relax in a fun atmosphere. While preparation type buffs can still be a part of our gameplay, I would say that our backbone has been and should continue to be the downtime period.
Now some might say that BF is an artificial construct. I would argue that there's nothing "artificial" about it at all. It's a very real issue that even today's military takes seriously. The USO is an important military support organization and one of its primary functions is maintaining troop morale. In our daily lives how many of us can continue working at our day-to-day job for hours on end without taking an occasional break or going home at the end of the day to watch a little TV, read a book, or play a video game. That's all the BF is really trying to model, and it's doing so in a very simple way - the more you fight, the more BF you accrue, and at some point your character needs to take a little break to clear their mind and get rid of the BF. Sure maybe other online games don't model that, but they all have downtimes in some form or another. Some games even do model BF in some form or another - usually making it so that you can't continue to push military pieces nonstop without losing your battle effectiveness, rotating them with fresher units, taking a break for a while, or even contructing entertainment venues to keep your people's minds off the combat.
As far as BF being considered "forced downtime", well it is, but all games of this type have varying sorts of forced downtime. It's a healthy thing. It keeps people from running through content too fast or from getting bored from too much non-stop combat. It forces players to make strategic choices instead of running through the game in "god mode". Now I'm no fan of excessive forced downtime. I think many players were rightly upset about all the hoops you used to have to jump through to get anything going: standing in line for doctor buffs, finding a musician and a dancer for mind buffs, waiting as long as 10 minutes for one shuttle hop and possibly having to make 2 or 3 stops and then possibly having to ride our in the wilderness another 10 minutes or so to get where you want to be. But much of that has been streamlined now which I think is generally a good thing. There's no reason that BF should be considered excessive in terms of downtime. With a proper accrual rate, it should build up only gradually. The successful players should be the ones who realize that when you have a break in the action, or at the beginning or end of a session you take a break at a cantina and get your BF taken care of, and it need never even be considered an inconvenience. The unsuccessful players will be the ones who think they can keep going in nonstop combat for days on end, and then gripe that they're maxed out on BF all the time or gripe that they *have* to go find an entertainer or gripe about forced interaction. Which of those types of players are going to be happier in the long run and more likely to stay long-term players of the game? Which type should the developers spend more time catering to?
To the complaint that BF is "forced interaction", this is again true - if you insist on looking at it that way. I would point out that this is, in fact, a multi-player game - the point of which is the opportunity to interact with other players. If you want to call those interactions "forced" then maybe you're the type of person that shouldn't be playing these types of games to begin with. There are all sorts of "forced" interactions between players in the game. If you want increased XP earning opportunities or access to high end content, find a group. If you want customized armor, weapons, clothing, ships, etc., find a crafter. Want healing or rez'ing, find a doctor. Want hides, bones, or meat, find a ranger, and so on. Not too many people complain about these types of interactions, so why is it that when it comes to Entertainers, the same kind of interdependence is considered "forced interaction"?
The problem, as I see it, is not that the concept of BF is flawed or doesn't work, the problem is that it's not implemented properly (which has become more noticeable since the CU changes), and it's further exacerbated by the persistence of the AFK problem. AFK is the broken system that should be removed - not BF. BF should be fixed and enhanced and there are even combat players who agree with this. My solution would first of all be to monitor the ways and rates at which BF is accrued. For one thing I think that the BF penalty for death is too high. The health wounds received, the loss of buffs, and the time out should be penalty enough without adding a good dose of BF to it as well. If they really think they need more of a penalty, then they could add some kind of "cloning sickness" debuff that lasts for a little while. Then I think BF should be accrued gradually in battle perhaps as a function of time as well as battle injuries. The rate could even be slow overall so that on average maybe you'd gain about a 100 every hour or two.
Then the effect of BF must be modified so that it has a definite and noticeable effect on players when it reaches high enough levels. The basic effect should be that your combat effectiveness is reduced as you get high levels of BF. This could be in simple ways like reduced XP gains, or, more realistically, it could act as a kind of debuff that begins to affect skills like attack speed and accuracy and also your defensive bonuses. You could set levels so that up to a certain amount, BF has no affect, then as you get higher, you start having a low, medium, and eventually a high effect from BF. If done right, players would need to stop in a cantina for healing maybe once a play session and never even suffer any negative effects from BF.
I can even imagine some more advanced ideas such as a BF Mitigation skill which could be earned with advanced combat skill boxes which could do things like helping you earn less BF in combat or shifting the effects of BF so that it takes higher amounts before it affects you. There could be skill tapes for this that might be valuable trading commodities. You could also institute limited in-the-field BF healing. You could set it so that entertainers could heal BF in camps (and even add the same limitations to Jedi BF healing or at least Jedi BF healing of others), but it would be limited by the BF healing skill of the Entertainer, as well as the size of the camp. However it's handled, the catch is that you can never heal back to 0 BF while out in the field. The system could maintain an internal counter of, for example, the highest BF you've accrued so far, and never let it heal below some fraction of that. If you let your maximum amount keep increasing, then the level you can heal down to will keep increasing as well. The only way to get back to 0 again would be to go to a cantina, for example, and get yourself healed back to 0 at which point the internal counter could reset to 0 as well.
The other part that needs to happen is that Entertainer Healing XP needs to go away. With mind wounds gone and BF, even in an improved system, being still small, there's no reason to tie Entertainers to a separate pool of XP that we must fill up in order to advance in our professions. Instead everything that was EH XP before could simply be converted to Dance XP. This would finally free us from having part of our advancement depend on waiting around for people to come in and bring us our XP. Most other professions can simply go out and do what they do and they get all the XP they need. Dancer and Musician have always been gated by EH XP, and while in the beginning of this game, it worked reasonably well, the rise of AFK entertainers and the more recent CU changes have made EH XP obsolete and a hinderance to advancement in our profession.
These types of changes make much more sense to me and I think would improve the game overall instead of this new plan to remove BF. I would rather see them spending their development time to make the BF system work in a reasonable way rather than to remove it. It is, after all, development time either way. However if, in fact, they have their minds set on this and the removal of BF is written in stone, already coded, and in the queue for push to live, then there may be another way that we can preserve the combat downtime interactions that I think are so important. While I think that noncombat buffs are probably a good idea to give us increased interactivity with non-combat folks, I think we could preserve our interactivity with combat buffs by introducing a new type of buff to the game. We could take a page from another popular online game *cough*W*o*W*cough*, and add "timerless" buffs. The way this would work would be that the buff would wear down by use and not by time. For example, a pistoleer comes in and gets a pistol speed buff from an Entertainer. The buff would increase the Pistoleer's speed for maybe 100 shots for example. Once the buff is done, the Pistoleer could run out and use them right away, wait till later in the evening, or wait a week or more to use those 100 shots. The buff would be there ready to use whenever the Pistoleer wants to, and the Pistoleer can feel free to get the buff at any time and use it at any time. This is an improvement even over the current inspiration buff's ability to last between sessions because even if you get one before you log out, you may not know for sure what you'll be doing the next time you log in or if you'll get a chance to use it before it runs out or is too far depleted to be helpful. This also would remove the problem of buffs being only a precombat prep time event, as such buffs could be sought out and applied at any time that a combat player can see an Entertainer and used at any time that the combat player needs it without worrying about timers.
This is the message that I would like delivered to the devs. Don't take away our combat downtime services and diminish our interdependence in the game. I believe that this new course of removing BF and introducing only noncombat buffs, which is as much as I understand so far, will serve only to isolate Entertainers more and diminish not only our interdependence, but also some of the spirit and uniqueness that SWG has. If the devs really want to find out what is wrong with the Entertainer profession and fix it for the better, then they need to carry through with their promise and start with what's really wrong with the profession - removing AFK Entertainers. Until then Entertainers will never be completely happy with whatever changes they make, and no one will know for sure what is or is not working with our professions or what should and shouldn't be done until the lifeless zombies are gone and the sickening question of "What if someone AFK's it?" is finally dead and buried where it belongs once and for all.
I think the removal of BF is a mistake. Why? The main reason is because I think that the entertainer/combatant interaction has always worked best when it has taken place during combat downtime. When this game first started there were only mind wounds and BF that we could heal. People would come in to a cantina after an intense play session to get healed up, and they would often stick around a while because they were taking a break or didn't have anywhere to rush off to right away or were looking for a group. Although there was the occasional person who would complain about "having to go see an entertainer", most people seemed to have no complaints, and often enjoyed the atmosphere of a lively cantina environment with active entertainers and other types of players milling around. People would often even be appreciative to walk in to an out-of-the-way cantina and find even a lone entertainer there to keep them company for a bit while easing their mind. Again, what worked about this arrangement was the fact that it was during downtime when the combat players didn't have something to do right away or were taking a little break from the action. The BF and mind wounds gave them a reason to seek out the cantinas, and this allowed Entertainers to entertain and socialize and add life to the game.
The problem with buffs - at least in the way that they have existed in this game so far, is that they are administered during combat prep time. There is simply a different mindset at work at this time. The combat player will seek one out when they've already figured out something they want to do, and their goal at this point is to take care of whatever prep work they need as quickly as possible and get on to the 'fun' (or the 'grind'). The person who might be seeking a buff at this time probably doesn't care how good a show we can put on, and they're not likely to stay and chat any longer than they need to. Maybe they need to go find some group members, or maybe they're already part of a group that's waiting on them. Once the buff is applied, it's even telling them to hurry up and get to what they want to do because the timer's started and it's ticking away. This is antithetical to the type of gameplay that many of us, as entertainers, want. We don't want a "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" game play, we want an environment where people can come in during a lull in the action, stick around for a little while or a long while, and kick back and relax in a fun atmosphere. While preparation type buffs can still be a part of our gameplay, I would say that our backbone has been and should continue to be the downtime period.
Now some might say that BF is an artificial construct. I would argue that there's nothing "artificial" about it at all. It's a very real issue that even today's military takes seriously. The USO is an important military support organization and one of its primary functions is maintaining troop morale. In our daily lives how many of us can continue working at our day-to-day job for hours on end without taking an occasional break or going home at the end of the day to watch a little TV, read a book, or play a video game. That's all the BF is really trying to model, and it's doing so in a very simple way - the more you fight, the more BF you accrue, and at some point your character needs to take a little break to clear their mind and get rid of the BF. Sure maybe other online games don't model that, but they all have downtimes in some form or another. Some games even do model BF in some form or another - usually making it so that you can't continue to push military pieces nonstop without losing your battle effectiveness, rotating them with fresher units, taking a break for a while, or even contructing entertainment venues to keep your people's minds off the combat.
As far as BF being considered "forced downtime", well it is, but all games of this type have varying sorts of forced downtime. It's a healthy thing. It keeps people from running through content too fast or from getting bored from too much non-stop combat. It forces players to make strategic choices instead of running through the game in "god mode". Now I'm no fan of excessive forced downtime. I think many players were rightly upset about all the hoops you used to have to jump through to get anything going: standing in line for doctor buffs, finding a musician and a dancer for mind buffs, waiting as long as 10 minutes for one shuttle hop and possibly having to make 2 or 3 stops and then possibly having to ride our in the wilderness another 10 minutes or so to get where you want to be. But much of that has been streamlined now which I think is generally a good thing. There's no reason that BF should be considered excessive in terms of downtime. With a proper accrual rate, it should build up only gradually. The successful players should be the ones who realize that when you have a break in the action, or at the beginning or end of a session you take a break at a cantina and get your BF taken care of, and it need never even be considered an inconvenience. The unsuccessful players will be the ones who think they can keep going in nonstop combat for days on end, and then gripe that they're maxed out on BF all the time or gripe that they *have* to go find an entertainer or gripe about forced interaction. Which of those types of players are going to be happier in the long run and more likely to stay long-term players of the game? Which type should the developers spend more time catering to?
To the complaint that BF is "forced interaction", this is again true - if you insist on looking at it that way. I would point out that this is, in fact, a multi-player game - the point of which is the opportunity to interact with other players. If you want to call those interactions "forced" then maybe you're the type of person that shouldn't be playing these types of games to begin with. There are all sorts of "forced" interactions between players in the game. If you want increased XP earning opportunities or access to high end content, find a group. If you want customized armor, weapons, clothing, ships, etc., find a crafter. Want healing or rez'ing, find a doctor. Want hides, bones, or meat, find a ranger, and so on. Not too many people complain about these types of interactions, so why is it that when it comes to Entertainers, the same kind of interdependence is considered "forced interaction"?
The problem, as I see it, is not that the concept of BF is flawed or doesn't work, the problem is that it's not implemented properly (which has become more noticeable since the CU changes), and it's further exacerbated by the persistence of the AFK problem. AFK is the broken system that should be removed - not BF. BF should be fixed and enhanced and there are even combat players who agree with this. My solution would first of all be to monitor the ways and rates at which BF is accrued. For one thing I think that the BF penalty for death is too high. The health wounds received, the loss of buffs, and the time out should be penalty enough without adding a good dose of BF to it as well. If they really think they need more of a penalty, then they could add some kind of "cloning sickness" debuff that lasts for a little while. Then I think BF should be accrued gradually in battle perhaps as a function of time as well as battle injuries. The rate could even be slow overall so that on average maybe you'd gain about a 100 every hour or two.
Then the effect of BF must be modified so that it has a definite and noticeable effect on players when it reaches high enough levels. The basic effect should be that your combat effectiveness is reduced as you get high levels of BF. This could be in simple ways like reduced XP gains, or, more realistically, it could act as a kind of debuff that begins to affect skills like attack speed and accuracy and also your defensive bonuses. You could set levels so that up to a certain amount, BF has no affect, then as you get higher, you start having a low, medium, and eventually a high effect from BF. If done right, players would need to stop in a cantina for healing maybe once a play session and never even suffer any negative effects from BF.
I can even imagine some more advanced ideas such as a BF Mitigation skill which could be earned with advanced combat skill boxes which could do things like helping you earn less BF in combat or shifting the effects of BF so that it takes higher amounts before it affects you. There could be skill tapes for this that might be valuable trading commodities. You could also institute limited in-the-field BF healing. You could set it so that entertainers could heal BF in camps (and even add the same limitations to Jedi BF healing or at least Jedi BF healing of others), but it would be limited by the BF healing skill of the Entertainer, as well as the size of the camp. However it's handled, the catch is that you can never heal back to 0 BF while out in the field. The system could maintain an internal counter of, for example, the highest BF you've accrued so far, and never let it heal below some fraction of that. If you let your maximum amount keep increasing, then the level you can heal down to will keep increasing as well. The only way to get back to 0 again would be to go to a cantina, for example, and get yourself healed back to 0 at which point the internal counter could reset to 0 as well.
The other part that needs to happen is that Entertainer Healing XP needs to go away. With mind wounds gone and BF, even in an improved system, being still small, there's no reason to tie Entertainers to a separate pool of XP that we must fill up in order to advance in our professions. Instead everything that was EH XP before could simply be converted to Dance XP. This would finally free us from having part of our advancement depend on waiting around for people to come in and bring us our XP. Most other professions can simply go out and do what they do and they get all the XP they need. Dancer and Musician have always been gated by EH XP, and while in the beginning of this game, it worked reasonably well, the rise of AFK entertainers and the more recent CU changes have made EH XP obsolete and a hinderance to advancement in our profession.
These types of changes make much more sense to me and I think would improve the game overall instead of this new plan to remove BF. I would rather see them spending their development time to make the BF system work in a reasonable way rather than to remove it. It is, after all, development time either way. However if, in fact, they have their minds set on this and the removal of BF is written in stone, already coded, and in the queue for push to live, then there may be another way that we can preserve the combat downtime interactions that I think are so important. While I think that noncombat buffs are probably a good idea to give us increased interactivity with non-combat folks, I think we could preserve our interactivity with combat buffs by introducing a new type of buff to the game. We could take a page from another popular online game *cough*W*o*W*cough*, and add "timerless" buffs. The way this would work would be that the buff would wear down by use and not by time. For example, a pistoleer comes in and gets a pistol speed buff from an Entertainer. The buff would increase the Pistoleer's speed for maybe 100 shots for example. Once the buff is done, the Pistoleer could run out and use them right away, wait till later in the evening, or wait a week or more to use those 100 shots. The buff would be there ready to use whenever the Pistoleer wants to, and the Pistoleer can feel free to get the buff at any time and use it at any time. This is an improvement even over the current inspiration buff's ability to last between sessions because even if you get one before you log out, you may not know for sure what you'll be doing the next time you log in or if you'll get a chance to use it before it runs out or is too far depleted to be helpful. This also would remove the problem of buffs being only a precombat prep time event, as such buffs could be sought out and applied at any time that a combat player can see an Entertainer and used at any time that the combat player needs it without worrying about timers.
This is the message that I would like delivered to the devs. Don't take away our combat downtime services and diminish our interdependence in the game. I believe that this new course of removing BF and introducing only noncombat buffs, which is as much as I understand so far, will serve only to isolate Entertainers more and diminish not only our interdependence, but also some of the spirit and uniqueness that SWG has. If the devs really want to find out what is wrong with the Entertainer profession and fix it for the better, then they need to carry through with their promise and start with what's really wrong with the profession - removing AFK Entertainers. Until then Entertainers will never be completely happy with whatever changes they make, and no one will know for sure what is or is not working with our professions or what should and shouldn't be done until the lifeless zombies are gone and the sickening question of "What if someone AFK's it?" is finally dead and buried where it belongs once and for all.
Drygo
Mon Jun 27, 2005 8:44 pm
#156
DanceRulez wrote:
This is the message that I would like delivered to the devs. Don't take away our combat downtime services and diminish our interdependence in the game. I believe that this new course of removing BF and introducing only noncombat buffs, which is as much as I understand so far, will serve only to isolate Entertainers more and diminish not only our interdependence, but also some of the spirit and uniqueness that SWG has. If the devs really want to find out what is wrong with the Entertainer profession and fix it for the better, then they need to carry through with their promise and start with what's really wrong with the profession - removing AFK Entertainers. Until then Entertainers will never be completely happy with whatever changes they make, and no one will know for sure what is or is not working with our professions or what should and shouldn't be done until the lifeless zombies are gone and the sickening question of "What if someone AFK's it?" is finally dead and buried where it belongs once and for all.
qfe