Dancer Archive

My 2 cents...

Personaly, I think the life span of an overt pure entertainer would be about long enough for the 1st opposing player to actually find them. Any combat mastercan one shot an un-buffed & un-armored target, without trying too hard.If you go overt, perform your buff and then apply for covert status, the combat party you just buffed would need to guard you for a full hour before you were safe.

An entertainer with both combat and entertainment classes would be a bit better off, but would need to buff while wearing their armor, and a master dancer/musician who could give a full buff, would have all of 47 skill points to make a combat template from. A single mastery would leave you with 110, but lacking the ability to complete the buff, making the bots more atractive, again. Additionally, this would draw the focus of the entertainer away from the social life of the cities and cantinas, and turn them in combat support characters.

Personally, I think that the best use ofATK entertainers would be in the form of information gleened from well entertained NPCs, and passed to the entertainer via an onscreen message from the NPC. Depending on the NPC, their satisfaction with the performance, and a bit of luck, information could range from stats on a new spawn,location of an overt player sighting, impending city assault (npc assault), to the current vulnerability window of a particular faction base. What the player chooses to do with that information would make all the difference in the value of it.

Learn of a brand new Tat Wooly Hide with great stats? I'll bet that ranger over there would love to know about that before the masses do... Upcomming Imp crackdown on Coranet? Hmmm... Better get that to Reb command, and fast. Comms go down on [player base] at 22:00 eh? I'll bet [pick a guild] would pay well to know that.

Using the satisfaction requirements, a buff-bot or macrotainer isn't going to see many successes, and by handing off the info on-screen, anyone AFk is gonna miss it all together; putting this ball solely in the court of the ATK hands on entertainer. By making the reward information, it keeps the focus of the entertainer a social one, and not a field or comabt oriented thing.

Second, motion carried, get posting

Elwyn LyteFoot - Corbantis server

OK, it's there. If you like it, get in there and help fight for it.

Personally, my feelings are this:

I am by nature skeptical at the possibility of tweaking the potency of our mechanics, especially our buff mechanic. I always look at the difference between Master A and Master B, and the things that determine who gets the audience. When the professionals were more or less equal in the mechanics sense, the one who was better able to create a show was the one who got the audience. But when we start making the difference between Master A and Master B be about the mechanics, then no amount of amusement will ever win the audience. Just look how SEAs have affected things, and notice who has them: boring buffbots.

I think there are far more interesting, fun, and worthwhile ways to bring us into the Galactic Civil War. One of those things is in terms of faction terminals. Entertainer missions from faction terminals can help us gain FP, and may even have some sort of objective, such as "tagging" suspected members of the opposite faction to be put on BH terminals. Another thing may be to actually grab faction missions out of the "cantina atmosphere" to place on terminals, or send directly to datapads via E-Mail. Still another thing can be to have rival faction NPCs come in to see you while performing on a faction mission, so that other players from your faction will be able to dispose of them.

I'll try to think of more...but its late.

Madame Sirii Ajaan
August 2003-September 15, 2005
"There is a difference between being /watched and being WATCHED."

Ah-ha! See Esh? Sirii had a similar idea, so it must be good! (But not alone, of course.)

Sirii, I'm actually extremely excited about seeing something like this added to the game, if accompanied bya few more tools that would enhance social interaction and not simply be available for economic inclusion.

Let's keep up this discussion - a lot of interesting ideas are being tossed about in Roho's thread! I love it when different communities get together in constructive discussion - especially when it has to do with giving the entertainer classes some perks!

Elwyn LyteFoot - Corbantis server

Not only am I a Master Dancer I am also a Master Rifle Twi' so I havevery recently been overt for a base defense on Shadowfire. It was quite exciting but I would not willing go into any city cantina overt as not only would it mean a pretty fast death but some players can be amazingly rude and crude in how they treat your corpse. Reading over the posts I have to say I really like the idea of the "entertainer as spy". having NPC's give out information in the cantinas would indeed be an easy way for dancers and musicians to "one up" the robot vending machines currently taking up space. Rewards could be in credits, loot (including skill enhancing tapes), new songs/dances, etc.... Not being a game developer I have no idea if this is easy to implement or not but it certainly seems like all the pieces are already in place... It would be nice if we could be given a healing/buffing bonus but I too think that messing about with any of that code is just asking for trouble so would be willing to forgo that for now.

Ikewe, Master Dancer Shadowfire

New songs & dances, while being something we'd all love, has a good amount of development involved that once reaped, is done and gone. It's not something that you can repeat.

Cash would be great (yeah, I'm a broke male dancer), loot too, but I think information would fit the idea most of us have for where we want the entertainers to be; totaly seprate from the rest of the game (if we want to be), but able to influence it in dramatic ways.