Dancer Archive
Thread: A solution to AFK that will make everyone happy.
Hehe, ok, you can never make everyone happy, but here is a great idea to come close.
So everyone can better understand where I am coming from, I will give a brief history about me and the gamming world, and what I stand for in the Online Community.
My first MMO was Meridian 59 back in 1996. I have played many MMO’s from that time, and have a lot of experience with most aspects of on-line play. Every angle you all are coming from, from the “I worked so hard to get here and he is just macroing to my level, that’s not fair” argument, to the “He is making my class look bad” argument, to the “I can’t play with him doing what he is doing” argument. All of these I have been on the side of at one time or another in my online gamming life. So I have a some what unique perspective that only lots of experience can give.
So, that’s a little about my background, now for my gamming philosophy. Here is the Code I live by:
Do what ever you want to in the game that does not break the CoC, but never do anything that reduces your fellow gamers ability to have fun. You pay for the game, you have a right to do whatever you want (other then cheat). But it’s your responsibility to the gaming community to not ruin other people’s ability to fully enjoy the game.
This work well in life too (Replace cheat with breaking the law), but that’s for another post. 
All the people I see in this forum seem to be very nice people. So I don’t know of anyone that would disagree with my philosophy, so until I get a negative response about it, I will assume for the rest of my post you all agree with it.
Now I will exclude a group from the rest of my argument. The group that feels “I worked so hard to get here and he is just macroing to my level, that’s not fair”. I think if your in this group you have a valid point (I used to think like this too), but the only reason I am excluding you, and what I mean by excluding you not trying to solve your problem, is there is no solution. This is an unfortunate dynamic of all MMO’s. People will obtain levels with much less effort then others. In all the games I have played, I have not seen anyone capable of solving that problem. Funny thing is, the closest I have seen is this game (and UO). If you want Dancing XP, you have to dace. If you want carbine XP, you have to use a carbine. This game design helps reduce the issue, but like I said, it will never be solved.
So here goes the part that most of you will flame
I don’t think anyone (with the above group excluded) really dislikes the act of going AFK. And, I think if you agree with my gamming philosophy above, you can’t ask them to stop. It’s there right to play the game how they want to. What I think is the root of the problem is not AFKers, but rude people that don’t follow my gamming philosophy while afk. It’s there responsibility to the gaming community to not ruin your ability to fully enjoy the game. I have described my method of going AFK in other posts, and I have gotten no argument against it, and a few people who hate AFKers say “if everyone did it that way it would be ok”. That tells me it’s not the afk at all, it’s how people abuse it.
So I think I have discovered the root of the problem, the problem is you are forced to live with these people. Every MMO has a large percentage of rude (and down right hateful) people. It’s a nasty would and the gamming community is not void of them. But for every other class (and this is true with most other games as well), the games makes it easy to avoid them. If you’re out hunting and you run across someone you don’t like, just go somewhere else. The entertainment class is pretty much forced to all live together. SOE has boxed you into these little cantinas, and not given you the ability to play your class anywhere you chose. This I think is the root of the issue. You can’t get away from them. Here is what I would do to improve the gamming experience for entertainers, at least as far as the AFK issue goes.
1. No Drift: Get rid of all drift.
2. Remove the ability to use a text spam in a macro while AFK. This one can be easily defeated though. I would say remove all say’s in macros, but that would hurt a lot of classes and people that use it responsibly.
3. This is the biggest one IMO, let the entertainers entertain anywhere. Someone suggested a portable dance floor. This is a great idea. It’s a big beautiful world. Why make a class sit in a cantina all day. I know it’s because the developers had a vision of the cantinas being full and an enjoyable place for people to unwind, but it’s obviously not working for the entertainers.
If those 3 things were implemented it would 1, reduce the ability for an AKF dancer to aggravate the ATK dancers, and 2, if you don’t like what you see, take a dance floor and go dance in town somewhere else. I personally think it would be cool to see a bunch of entertainers lining the streets, with a bunch of patrons watching.
Anyway, that’s my take on the issue, I would like to here your thought on what I have said.
- J
PBJoker wrote:Here is the Code I live by:
Do what ever you want to in the game that does not break the CoC, but never do anything that reduces your fellow gamers ability to have fun. You pay for the game, you have a right to do whatever you want (other then cheat). But it’s your responsibility to the gaming community to not ruin other people’s ability to fully enjoy the game.
A now "classic" court ruling (US Supreme court I think but it might've been a lower court) once said, essentially, "The right to swing your fists in the air ends where the other man's nose begins." In other words, you can do whatever you want, up to the point where you doing whatever you want intrudes on someone else's right to do whatever he wants, and then you have to stop.
Gaming is the same way. You're basically saying, "The right to play the game you paid for the way you want, ends where it reduces someone else's ability to play the game the way he wants." I completely agree.
PBJoker wrote:Now I will exclude a group from the rest of my argument. The group that feels “I worked so hard to get here and he is just macroing to my level, that’s not fair”. I think if your in this group you have a valid point (I used to think like this too), but the only reason I am excluding you, and what I mean by excluding you not trying to solve your problem, is there is no solution. This is an unfortunate dynamic of all MMO’s. People will obtain levels with much less effort then others.
I agree with this also. A guy named Musashi who commented on this with regard to another game, once said, "No matter what the game, you can always count always count on players to find the shortest route to the cheese." In other words, you can't stop people from taking the path of least resistence.
PBJoker wrote:What I think is the root of the problem is not AFKers, but rude people that don’t follow my gamming philosophy while afk. It’s there responsibility to the gaming community to not ruin your ability to fully enjoy the game. I have described my method of going AFK in other posts, and I have gotten no argument against it, and a few people who hate AFKers say “if everyone did it that way it would be ok”. That tells me it’s not the afk at all, it’s how people abuse it.
So I think I have discovered the root of the problem, the problem is you are forced to live with these people. Every MMO has a large percentage of rude (and down right hateful) people. It’s a nasty would and the gamming community is not void of them. But for every other class (and this is true with most other games as well), the games makes it easy to avoid them. If you’re out hunting and you run across someone you don’t like, just go somewhere else. The entertainment class is pretty much forced to all live together.
You're very close to the entire problem. There's one additional ingredient, which is why I have said it is the combination. The ingredients are (1) people are rude, (2) we HAVE to live with them in the same place and (3) AFK = not there to suffer the consequences of your own rude behavior.
(3) is really important. If you are being a toad in the game and AT keyboard, I can let you have it and if you have any conscience at all you will feel bad about what a jerk you have been. At least there is the possibility that you will change your behavior. If you're AFK and being a toad, NOTHING can be done to stop you, because you are not there. If your obnoxious behavior is causing people around you to suffer and be miserable, and you are there, you have to live with that. You have to watch people leaving, being upset, etc, and most of us don't have the stomach for that so we just stop doing it. But if you are AFK and making people miserable, you don't have to see it, and so you can avoid the consequences of your own actions.
So you're right, but the additional ingredient is being able to duck the responsibility for your own rude behavior. An at-keyboard jerk is going to have to deal with the people he is being rude to. An AFK jerk isn't. Now an AFK jerk in the wild, yup, you just walk away and avoid him. But an AFK jerk in the cantina, you can't avoid HIM, but HE gets ot avoid YOU, while still being a jerk.
It's not the individual ingredients. Rude alone, avoidable. Stuck in cantina alone, not an issue. AFK alone, ignorable. Rude + AFK + forced to be in the same room as them = fun-destruction.
PBJoker wrote:1. No Drift: Get rid of all drift.
2. Remove the ability to use a text spam in a macro while AFK. This one can be easily defeated though. I would say remove all say’s in macros, but that would hurt a lot of classes and people that use it responsibly.
3. This is the biggest one IMO, let the entertainers entertain anywhere. Someone suggested a portable dance floor. This is a great idea. It’s a big beautiful world. Why make a class sit in a cantina all day. I know it’s because the developers had a vision of the cantinas being full and an enjoyable place for people to unwind, but it’s obviously not working for the entertainers.
These are OK suggestions. I don't agree with 3 and I am not sure 1 would be necessary if these people knew how to dance. Sultrina and others have already explained how to avoid drifting. If they knew how to write a good macro these people would not drift. Taking drift out of the game sounds like a good solution on the surface, but to those of us who are at keyboard and working at it, we take pride in the fact that we know how to avoid drift and, being at keyboard, we can correct it (and no, you do NOT have to stop dancing to do so -- there are much better ways). To some extent avoiding or dealing with drift is part of the craft, and if you take it out, it's almost like telling a crafter that all expt points automatically are used and succeed. Sounds nice at first (Yay! No more failed experiments!) till you realize that picking resources correctly to get the best experimentation probability for your "buck" is part of the skill and joy of crafting, and if you take that away it makes the thing less "artful." So while I wouldn't object to getting rid of drift, I am not sure it is necessary.
#2 I agree with.. but I doubt it will happen.
#3 I disagree with because the whole idea of the cantina is to have a "social center" to the game. We've done a poll here on the forum. Most dancers are either primarily, or secondarily, socializers. They like to socialize. For some (like me) this = RP. For others it is just online chatting (i.e. not in character). If you let dancers perform anywhere, while it sounds good, it causes player "diffusion" out of the social hub of the town and to just about anywhere. Many dancers who dislike the AFK dislike it because it reduces the social interaction in the cantina, leaving them staring at a bunch of essentially NPCs and stifling their ability to socialize/RP (because when the room is full of AFK zombie-bots, often players who come in, who might otherwise talk or RP, do not, because the room is so "quiet" -- even with one person chatting things up, the effect of 20 people being silent and dancing like robots, is to stifle chat in the room; may not seem that obvious but it DOES happen -- I've seen it). If these active people now go elsewhere and can perform anywhere, the social hub of the town is removed, and that will defeat the purposes of having a cantina in the first place.
The only way it might help is if SOE said something like, "OK, you get this performance mat. AFK elsewhere -- leave the cantinas to active people." I could get down with that.
C
Hehe, I agree with you PBJoker. 
Isn't that unusual. After sitting down and thinking it over, I have no right to complain as they are paying as much as I am to play, and if that's how they enjoy the game, so be it.
It is my opinion that they should not get XP while AFK, but then ppl would not go AFK and just leave their char grinding 24-7.
In the end, it doesn't really bother me as muchanymore.I personallyhave more fun interacting with people anyway.
picklesSW wrote:
...Too often have I heard how entertainers don't deserve respect or compensation due to the fact that we can achieve mastery while we sleep simply by writing a 10 line macro. I'd be interested in hearing your proposed solutions to this latter, and more important, issue.
I am not sure what you mean by Respect, but I will guess. I think you mean that if you turn on your “Master Dancer” title people don’t think “wow, she is a master dancer, how cool is that”. Instead they think “so, you just macroed to it. Anyone can do that”.
If that’s what you mean, all I can say is no class deserves respect. There is nothing in this game that’s difficult. Anyone reading this forum can master any class in SWG given enough time. I do not base respect on how much time a player has to play, I base it on the quality of the individual. I play over 40 hours a week and have mastered and untrained almost every class. I deserve no more respect then the guy that has a family he is supporting and due to real life issued only gets to play 5-10 hours a week. In fact, I deserve a lot less.
But my views are not your issue I suspect, your issue is all the rude people that think less of you because of the ability to easily master your profession with no effort. I think the way to solve the problem is to educate them on why respect should be given. That’s not a realistic solution, so all I can say is I am sorry, I have no solution.
As for the compensation thing, if you’re ATK and chatting it up and entertaining them and they don’t tip, there just jerks. I see no reason why any of the afk issues should keep you from being compensated while you’re actively working a customer. Can you please give me an example of what a conversation would be like that leads you to this conclusion?
Ok, off to write a response to Chessack....
Certainly issues such as not needing resources or the perception that we're just a bunch of chatty people may or may not affect our reputation as a profession. However, not only are those concepts built into the profession by design whereas I do not believe macrotaining is, but the existance of such things does not in any way justify the continued existance of the AFK problem.
In my mind, and based on what I have read, AFK entertainers are the #1 reason people use as an reason to disrespect our profession. As such, no matter what the #2 or #3 reasons are, I'd still like to see #1 removed. Gotta start somewhere.
- J
Just to see, I posted this:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Eclipse&message.id=151749
Just to provide a counter viewpoint, I'm going to take the viewpoint of a game developer. (No, I am not a game developer, but I am a developer, and this seems to be about the viewpoint they take)
Weather or not they want people using macros, they can't do anything about people who are doing it right now. They provided the tools to do so, so they can't really say you can't use what we gave you. What they can do is change how the tools work.
There have been some very creative solutions that allow ATK entertainers to not be disrupted for many aspects of being disrupted. However, there is one fatal flaw to all of these. By taking any move that explicitly addresses AFK macroers without being a move to try and stop them completely, they are condoning that style of gameplay. Even if they don't care at all if people do that, any move that explicitly condones that style of gameplay is going to earn the game a reputation of being a macro game. If you think this is a good idea, go look at Diablo 2 for what this would turn into. Admittedly a bit extreme of an example, but when half the people aren't even playing the game, you start to wonder why you are playing a MMOG in the first place. So as good and creative as all these ideas are, they will never get implemented.
But then it comes back to the fact that there are those who are bothersome in their play style. Unfortunately it is a fine line between someone who does it out of the way and someone who starts adding spam. This goes for anyone, not just entertainers. (I saw someone AFK in coronet standing in the middle of a bunch of meatlumps with a macro that would occasionally /laugh or /smile, mocking the meatlump he'd killed)
So what is the solution? Unfortunately that leaves you with an all or nothing solution, or at least a most or nothing solution.
Right now though, I think everyone should just wait. People wonder what will happen if AFK players were banned... Well I think we're about to find out. In a month, when player cities get shuttleports, suddenly we'll see players empowered with the option to allow AFK entertainers or not, and player cantinas will be a viable alternative to NPC cities. I can garuntee you some cities will enact a rule that their militia has open game on anyone AFK for an extended period of time. I think we should watch the cantinas of those cities very closely to see if it will be the catastrophe some people think it would be to get rid of AFK entertainers.
The problem is a simple one... Lack of content. Lack of content for beginers. Lack of content for masters. Lack of content is killing all of the entertainer professions. Almost everyone who played entertainers back in beta with me has either dropped their skill entirely or to the point where its just for healing theirownBF on remote worlds. Because so many of the original entertainers are leaving and because everyone needs BF healed large guilds and players with extra accounts make their own AFK robot entertainers. If there was enjoyable content for people who pursue entertainer professions to enjoy then people wouldn't feel the need to AFK the skill building.
Lets all be totally honest.. Our dances and musicaren't very interesting. Even the best of us get bored silly some days. That's what kills us about the AFK people... Our skills are so boring that without conversation we are all George Jetson sitting at the computer pushing the big red shiny button over and over.
PBJoker wrote:
Just to see, I posted this:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Eclipse&message.id=151749
interesting results.
Chessack wrote:
You're very close to the entire problem. There's one additional ingredient, which is why I have said it is the combination. The ingredients are (1) people are rude, (2) we HAVE to live with them in the same place and (3) AFK = not there to suffer the consequences of your own rude behavior.
(3) is really important. If you are being a toad in the game and AT keyboard, I can let you have it and if you have any conscience at all you will feel bad about what a jerk you have been. At least there is the possibility that you will change your behavior. If you're AFK and being a toad, NOTHING can be done to stop you, because you are not there. If your obnoxious behavior is causing people around you to suffer and be miserable, and you are there, you have to live with that. You have to watch people leaving, being upset, etc, and most of us don't have the stomach for that so we just stop doing it. But if you are AFK and making people miserable, you don't have to see it, and so you can avoid the consequences of your own actions.
I totally agree with you, but how to solve it... hmm... The problem is, as it stands now, there is a part of the respectable dancing community that always are ATK and are getting negatively impacted by the rude AFKers. The easy solution is to remove AFK Dancing, but there is a part of the respectable dancing community that goes AFK a lot, and then you would negatively impact them. So how do you not punish any of the respectable dancers?
How about this, A booting system where if enough people vote, you get logged out (if your AFK). That way the people that go AFK that upset the people in the bar can get the boot, but the ones that are respecting your wishes and going AFK in a polite manner can stay? Of course, this would open up a lot more problems, so not sure it’s a good solution.
This AFK issue is a tuff problem to solve. I would suspect 80% of the entertainment community would want AFK gone, but 90% of the server likes it the way it is (Cuz they can get healed at all times). Who do you try and please? How do you fix it? I don’t think it’s as simple as just not allowing AFK dancing.
The result is a lack of respect. People call us freeloaders. People say we should get a real job. People say they prefer AFK dancers to live ones because they don't have to tip. Read the forums. It's educational. Just today a doctor posted a complaint about not being tipped and said, and I paraphrase, "It's not like I'm an entertainer in a cantina who can heal you while I sleep, I have to be at the keyboard to heal you!"
This is an issue of perception. No one conversation has convinced me of the problem, no one person. It's in every cantina on every world. You don't see it because the people who disrespect us don't give us the time of day. They usually walk in, heal up, and leave without a word. To them, we're an NPC.
- J
ExoticDancer wrote:
It is my opinion that they should not get XP while AFK, but then ppl would not go AFK and just leave their char grinding 24-7.
In the end, it doesn't really bother me as muchanymore.I personallyhave more fun interacting with people anyway.
I left out solution ideas like the no XP idea in this post, because it’s easy to defeat. Also, it would require rewriting the CoC. As it stands now gaining XP through macroing is not against CoC. SOE would have to rewrite it and that would upset a lot of people. One thing that we always have to keep in mind when making game design change suggestions is this is nothing more then a business to SOE. Yes, they might be nice people that like to see you happy, but the bottom line is profits. If you ask them to make a change that makes 3,000 people happy, and it in turn is going to make 50,000 people unhappy, there not going to do it. That’s the reason for my solutions stated at the beginning of the post. There changes that will negatively impact the least amount of people. And I believe they will make more people happy then unhappy. That’s good business for SOE and one main hoop the suggestions have to jump through before they get implemented.
I think it’s an excellent idea, just one that should have been implemented in beta.
As for your last line, I would like to say Woot! I am sure I had little to do with it, but if something I said made you look at the game with fresh eyes and enjoy it more, that makes me feel great!