Dancer Archive

Before I went to bed I did wish to extend a 'thank you' to someone here.

Panthu, I was really glad you explained to me the "why" behind your post....that was what I wished to know, so I didn't get more confused about why bards were mentioned.

I know its late, and I am grateful you took the time to answer my question, instead of shush me into submission. Thank you for realizing that my husband and I weren't trying to twist your words, we just wanted to help me understand the big picture of what was going on. It was most kind of you.

Sincerely, Lady Oqua Alsan

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Oqua wrote:

Panthu, I was really glad you explained to me the "why" behind your post....that was what I wished to know, so I didn't get more confused about why bards were mentioned.

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Thank you for the thank you! I understand that this is a confusing way to go about this topic, but it is a really hard one to talk about!

If anyone has questions ever that I don't answer in any thread... please please please PM me... I like happy dancers... not confused ones.

It's just sometimes better not to re-explain something in a thread you already didn't explain well enough the first time. (yeah, why would it be hard for people to understand me with sentence like that? I can't imagine! )

Sorry for the confusion!

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Sultrina wrote:
Ok here is a wild idea. Lot's of folks think entertainers should be able to play the spy so here is how to do it. When a dancer/musician does /setp they choose weather to aply the buff or expose a covert. The patron wont knwo wich they are trying to do. The dancer must wait at least 2min and may wait up to 8min before they /expose the longer its runing the better chance of switching the victim to overt status.

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Neat idea! How about, instead of an either/or, make it an and? The targeted player gets the buff, the entertainer gets the option (if they are faction aligned) of exposing them. The target won't know if they were exposed, but they will certainly get their buff.

We all know who are friends are currently because of the way the dots and name tags appear. We are not sure who is neutral or opposite aligned (yes, we can make pretty good guesses by what guild they are in. I wish they would make guild tags optional.) If you try to expose a neutral, give a chance of exposing yourself! Maybe there should always be a chance of exposing yourself (a spy always takes that chance), but the chance is increased if you try to expose a neutral or fail to expose an aligned character.

Sounds good in general Potshot2k but I'll use my character as a quick example. I'm a Tailor/Dancer with a few merchant skills. I have a few ways that I incurr HAM costs.

• Dancing, the way I would obtain most fatigue under your system above.


• Burst running, for the rare times I'm not on my mount/vehical and need to get away from a kreetle.


• Surveying, for placing harvesters but I've not used the skill for a month as I have enough resources stored.


• /tellpet'ing tricks, storing, following etc.

Thats it, as a tailor, I expent no HAM at all in crafting. Basically your model would just need to take that into account and assign an amount of fatigue to be generated for crafting.

What I don't like the look of is that % of your maximum fatigue is how effective you are. There ought to be a safe zone, say similar to 10-15%, maybe, that you are working your best with no reduction to effectiveness.

I agree in principle that mind wound healing ought to be given to the medcail professions but not our buffs, or at least give us something to replace them. Buffs are pretty much the major way entertainers can really earn good money. Leaving us with fatigue healing only would just make us reliant on what tips are thrown our way rather than us having something useful to "sell". And we really need to keep some way of actively generating an income as opposed to a purely passive way by tips alone.

WOW! There are some REALLY good ideas coming out!

I tend to agree that General Fatigue WON'T drive people away. When explained...I think most people will see the sense of it. I'm also glad the someone mentioned that performers would also accrue fatigue. I didn't make that point clear in my first post about liking the General Fatique idea.

I also agree with the "safety zone" concept for General Fatigue.

I LOVED the "combat example" of Tailors sewing zippers shut! LOL!!!!! I agree that Dance/Music/Ent should remain "noncombatant". If we want to fight....all we have to do is pick up a combat skill.

The Spy idea is a good one. That way faction members would have to carefully choose who buffed them. This would also help to make those "ethical" buffing questions easier when buffing members of the opposite faction.

I'm thrilled with the prospect of having some of these ideas presented to the Devs.

Cha Bu'Dwo
Brand-Spankin' New Master Dancer
Starsider

If we are in a speculating mood, let usspeculate as tohow some of these concepts may effect our gameplay. Because I'll tell you how universal fatiuge would effect mine.It would destroy any notion of self-sufficiency to do my in-game functions. Entertainers are rare enough as it is (at least the live ones), and even more so at out of the reach places such as Wayfar, Endor, pretty much anywhere on Talus, and other such places. I always was quite well received at the smaller cities and outposts. Even player cities, under the right conditions, were great places to go solo, providing my services for an entire region by myself, simply because nobody else would go there. I could spend an entire afternoon in such places.

However, if I accrue fatiuge that makes me less effective, then I will always have to break away to the "grind capitals" in order to get my own BF or GF healed. This means that you may potentially have an even worse situation with the distribution of entertainment resources right now, and will only persuade the very largest PAs and cities to get a second account to mule simply to macro alongside another unattended mule healing eachother's BF. I want the ability to be a one-person travelling act. I have that now. I won't have that ifI accrue a penalty for simply skill animating.

Which is why I conclude that this new innovation we are pondering will be a tether on my gameplay, and thousands of others, that fulfills no other function than to throw more entertainers and patrons in the already well staffed cantinas without any rationalle of why they should be there other than tohandlea statistic that makes playing the game a crime. This UF thing makes every action subject to a penalty of sorts. It will ENCOURAGE unattended play, because you will need two unattendees to do the function of one previously, and will almost certainly be a prerequisite for any serious city where ANY KIND of activity, including the very flourishes that heal such activity,is subject to penalty.

We already have plenty of in-game incentives to do our work in groups in the form of experience, buffs, and training. We do not need another one. Instead, we need an incentive to go away from other entertainer groups to service the galaxy. This UF is not the way to encourage that, and will only make travelling to practice our craft more of a issue than it is already. Because not only will one have to ponder the prospect that there may not be many customers for the dancer to perform for, but it turns servicing areas where one is the only entertainer in the entire region into a crime of sorts, subject to a UF penalty.

So hereare my questions to you. If UF were instituted, how can my concerns be addressed?Does having UF outweigh my concerns? If so, how? Will UF make us more respected, give us greater tips, and give dancers more of an incentive to play live? Or simply add another non-respectable, non-tippable function that we are responsible for getting rid of?

Thinking about the concerns Sirii brought up actually made me realize why universal fatigue will probably never be implemented, and I think we'd be better off to seek more effects from battle fatigue instead.

Based on current game mechanics, if we had universal fatigue that entertainers could heal, then we as entertainers should be able to heal our own UF. We currently heal our own mind wounds and battle fatigue; doctors and medics can heal their own damage and wounds; image designers can modify their own avatars and migrate their own stats (soon to be the only players who can do so without another person). Based on the way the mechanics have been implemented to date, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to heal our own "universal fatigue."

Except for one thing. In all the previous examples, the act of healing the damage, wound, or fatigue doesn't result in the same damage, wound, or fatigue being incurred. If we incur "universal fatigue" by dancing, how can we simultaneously heal our own by dancing? In effect, if universal fatigue were implemented in the same way that battle fatigue is, then our healing would cancel the incurring out, making entertainers pretty much immune to universal fatigue (unless incurred through other, non-entertainment activities). Maybe that's okay, maybe that's how it should be. I don't know.

I think the complex questions like these are the reason something like universal fatigue won't be implemented. Don't read this as my opposition to UF, I am not opposed. I'm just trying to figure out how it would work, as the more we consider it the more complicated it becomes. Which makes me think, as stated at the beginning of this post, that making battle fatigue have more effects than it currently does might be the way to go.

That is not to say that there isn't any way for us to gain crafters and other non-combatants as customers. Maybe we could give those special buffs that were discussed earlier, similar to what some of the chef foods provide. Likea short-term bonus to experimentation success rates, etc. I was reading the tailor forum last night, and I bet if getting a mind buff increased the tailor's chances to produce four sockets on a item by some percentage, we'd have a lot of tailors looking for mind buffs! Just an example.

Shi'ann has some very good ideas here. I like the concept of how to treat mind, and mind wounds, quite a bit. I fear that these very good ideas don't work very well with the current game system, and may well require a bit too much in terms of game redesign to ever see the light of day.

The biggestconsideration is that if such a concept of the mind pool and subsequent use of mind causing wounds were in place, then all skill uses would have to be reevaluated. Some skills require heavy mind expenditure, whereas others require very little - and these current costswould not be equitable or reasonable withinthe proposed new model. Rifleman's specials cost heavily from the mind pool... does it make sense that a rifleman should have their mind torn apart (and gain wounds)so much faster than a pistoleer, whose primary specials cost is in action? There would need to be a complete restructuring of how all HAM costs for skills are balanced across all professions in the game, and I question whether or not the devs would be terribly thrilled at that notion right after working outone newcombat balance plan. If they did rethink HAM costs across the board using the proposed model, it might be a very nice system... barring any other unforeseen issues. Hmm... tangled mess... I'm just not really ready to try to anticipate all possible problems if I'm not on the clock drawing a salary here. Whole system redesigns are very involved.

The one thing that I didn't see working too well was the part about healing partially in camps - and it's not due to simple lobbying to keep all healing in cantinas. If any percentage of healing can occur in camp, what prevents rapid-fire resetting of new camps to continue the healing?

It seems that for the game to track wound amounts, it could really only look easilyat the current wound levels - not what wound levels were accrued since the last full healing (at least without yet another very heavy redesign in how the code currentlyworks, is my guess - I could be completely wrong here). In the latter case, it would have to remember what thehighest levels of accrued wounds were since some arbitrary last fully-healed state, and still remember in the case of partial healings intermittently, and update for additional wounds accrued following some partial healing... you see this gets messy to track.

Now, if percentages of*current* wounds could be healed in camps, a camp could be set, the dancer performs for the 20 seconds or so required toheal the percentage of current wounds allowable, break camp, set a new camp, heal the next allowablepercentage chunk... rinse and repeat until the mind wounds were back down to managable levels. And we'd be back to a case whereit would not be necessary at all to come back in to the cantinas.

I love the concepts behind the mind pool and wounds, and subsequent healing thereof... but I think we'll never see them happen without another dramatic change in the overall game system. Makes me wish that this model would have been the original concept involved.

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Xyrdre wrote:

Panthu? Can we get a clarification?

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Well, mostly we're just brainstorming... period. Largely for me so I can answer Dev questions on a wide range of topics and proposed future additions when they do happen. As you pointed out yourself in an earlier post, Blue Deaths and Blue Migrations will most likely not be so common. I'm not sure what effect that will have on our buff's market.

I would like to ask for some re-examination of our healing aspects because it is a large part of what we talk about here in the forum (buffing, healing, tips from healing/buffing, so on), but it does seem we are a little unclear on how much we are to be taking these aspects seriously.

I know we all take our visual aspects very seriously, unfortunately for us these are considered not tobe "functional"... so, I think a marriage of anything that will be functional and visual will be our best game plan.

Of course, no, I don't think SOE is looking for new designers. I do however think there is great room for possibilities with so many upcoming revamps and additions. As long as we don't get our hearts set on these really really super huge changes, I think they are fine to talk about. We don't really know what is possible at this point. Anything that will have an effect largely on other classes or the playerbase as a whole would have to get support from many different communities, but we do currently have a few things like that. They do happen, someone has to pitch them in the first place.

Big ideas and small ideas, brainstorming on all and any are good at this point. After the next few 19 answers come out, I think this will all start moving in a more channeled direction.

JEST3R the GCW Corre was kind enough to start a feedback thread in the Corre Forumfor what Social players would like to see in our new GCW additions all professions have been promised. I think that's a good sign that our input will be considered instead of something just being made for us. I can't bring any Dev feedback this week, the Corres will be flying solo till the Devs get back from E3... so, just throw out anything you are interested in until then. This thread has already helped me tremendously and other people have been reading it... so far they have all noticed our great passion about these things as well, lol.

Arrr! Feisty Dancers!

Message Edited by Panthu on 05-10-2004 06:10 AM