Dancer Archive
Thread: Definition of AFK?
Was buffing a female customer last night and she asked me to take my pants off...so off they went and on came a pair of black hotpants......hahaha I did it but was still embarrassed in real life but I was smiling too
Schardour wrote:You know, I just don't know how to respond to that
There is no way to respond to that actually. In fact, if you do some people end up thinking that you personally hate them for it and then just one-star the heck out of you
I'm an avid ATKer, and I see nothing wrong with this. She said herself that once it became busy she DID take a break from stocking her vendor to interact with people. She WAS at the PC ready and willing to answer people and chat with them. So now being ATK means not even taking your eyes from the screen?!?
Sorry, that goes a little too far.
<----- here comes the one-star... wait for it.... wait for it!!
It all depends on time to me i guess, if your not paying attention to your screen for 5-10 minutes here and there i can't realy say no your an afker. Personaly i tend to be of the extreme of atk dancing, whenever i needed to step away i would have my character stop dancing and sit out, i know many others that do this as well. I don't like the prescence of unatended dancing even if its for 5 minutes myself, however I realy won't hold a grudge against someone cause they step away 5 minutes or aren't paying full atention for that time.
Once you move into anything thats completely unatended for more than 10 minutes then i have an issue with it and thats where i would put the line of tolerance at for myself. That doesn't mean that i hate you and want to claw your eyes out cause you frequently go afk for 20 mins to atend your children, it just means that i disagree with that playstyle and i wish that something were implemented to prevent it, such as a 10 minute auto macro dump.
I think the main problem is that we as players are expected to decide what is aceptable, and i think i even saw it mentioned somewhere that peer pressure is inteded to discourage unatended play. It's just another case of dropping the responsibility on the comunity rather than taking a stand as the developer and putting a rule in place that defines what is acceptable and what is not. It certainly hasn't been condusive to creating an atmosphere of felowship among the players. A game needs rules to function properly and its time sony came in with one instead of leaving it to anarchy.
Of course this doesn't solve the main issue discussed in this thread: how much presence is enough? LT50? LT80? LT100?
Like Dreamland said, SOE should come up with guidelines on what is acceptable from their point of view, and what not. Furthermore they should also communicate those guidelines to their CS staff, and control that CSRs are following those guidelines. There are discussions all over the boards where one CSR considered something an exploit while another one judged a similar situation perfectly acceptable (if one trusts screenshot 'evidence'). Relying on peer pressure only leads to griefing. While it even might work if there was a strong in-game community, large areas of this game are now essentially a single-player game where one not enters the godmode code but buys godmode from other players' vendors.
/stoprant
You try to end ranting but you're too angry.
I am usually able to play one MMO (SWG in this case), one other game (turn-based or have pause button), watch tv/chat/etc, and do homework at the same time, with minimal loss of attention to the game. I wouldn't consider myself afk then... if I need to take my attention completely off my computer, I'll usually stop dancing.I don't see any problem wtih it... I guess it depends on a person's pov
Reachwind wrote:
This may come as a shock to you but there really are people that play this game that actually PLAY as dancers and musicians. In so far as they execute commands, care about the direction their character moves, faces and animates.
I know they're out there. More often than not, I'm ONE of them. I've attempted to form routines for buffing while still meeting the customer expectations for speed by using macros and toggling flourish sequences. When a cantina is inhabited and I'm not distracted by my beautiful girlfriend, I generally greet most of the patrons. If there's activity in my server's Entertainer channel, I'm quite often involved with that. What I do in my "downtime" is read these forums, become acquainted with our issues, and respond to various topics that I find important or interesting. (YES, sometimes more important than the 1337 kid standing in front of me with his AFK tag up.)
Aynianu wrote:
Anyway the result of that little argument left me feeling quite mad, and a little upset.
Am i no better than an afk entertainer? I would really like some other opinions.
EDIT: also perhaps more to the point, am i a hypocrite by keeping such high anti-afk principles while i play 2accnts at once splitting my attention between them?
I think the fundamental question is, did you pass the "Live Test" to a fairly good percentage ofincoming patrons? If the answer is yes, then great, you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing. If the answer is no, then that's a problem.
Personally, I'd say from your description you would probably fail the "Live Test." Since you weren't interacting in(or even monitoring spatial), the primary medium for any incoming patron to tell if you are "Live" or not, they'd have to probably assume you were "AFK" even if you were not. And that perception is, in my mind, crucial. If indeed you would fail the "Live Test" then yes, you are no better than an AFK entertainer.
Does that make you a hypocrit? I don't think so, I just think it means you haven't really formed the questions properly in the debate. The issue shouldn't be AFK vs. ATK. It should be Zombie vs. Live. If you look like a zombie and act like a zombie to a patron, it makes zero difference if indeed you are ATK or AFK.
Just something to think about
Electro wrote:
If you look like a zombie and act like a zombie to a patron, it makes zero difference if indeed you are ATK or AFK.
Padtai wrote:
Now just how much attention you gave your entertainer over the tailor is the question that none of us can tell, let alone people who were AFK with you. They can guess though, that like they were, you were relying on macrosto attend your character for you. The only difference is that IF someone walked in who needed you to think, then its more likely you could havedumped the macro and started to attempt to entertain, whereas those on perma AFK could not have done that.
I restocked my tailor vendor when there was no one around to talk to simple as that really 
The other entertainer who wasnt afk, was not exactly a conversationalist, so when no others in the cantina to talk to i restocked my vendor
My entertainer was played as well as if i was playing the entertainer alone, I often use my master dancer character instead of the musician, and am giving mind buffs, or band flourishing with my entertainer friends i was paying no less attention this time than any other really. I simply restock when things get a bit boring, and im sure you cant tell me youve never had moments where no one is there to talk to or simply not talking back.... Those are the times where i make a few bits of clothing with the tailor
Basicly If you who beleive i wasntpaying attention was dancing in there with me, you wouldnt know i was doing two things at once unless i actually told you (which i guess i wont bother doing again )
just to clarify
Padtai wrote:
Now I don't know what Mauve did.So I can't say if she was afk or not. But I do agree Saltee has a great point that if ALL you do as a musician or dancer is talk, then you aren't playing one. You're still playing, I would say, but I wouldn't say you were playing the profession you picked up.And if you aren't playing a dancer, then why are you getting experience for DANCING?