Dancer Archive

I took dancer for a few reasons....

1) During the beta I stopped into a cantina after a battle and the girls dancing in there turned the charm on and emptied my bank via the /tip exploit (they just made me feel so good I had to reward them with massive tips).

2) Unlike medic, dancer let me heal an important aspect of a player without crafting. I get bored easily with crafting.

3) SWG didn't have a beggar profession but dancer/musician were close enough that I could use those same kinds of player interaction skills to earn a better than combat income and place in the community.

It looks like to me that the developers have decided to just take the entertainer professions and turn them into a strictly RP/player event fluff piece with the bonus to XP added in there to keep a few alt accounts open.

Entertainer has been treated like it was the girlfriend profession from day one. Any of you who played in the beta with me will remember entertainer as something quite different than the direction it took at launch after a few terrible choices were made by the developers. In beta entertainer was a much more group oriented, performance based enviroment that ONLY appealed to the kind of player like Sirii and myself who enjoyed chatting it up and playing a role for other players to enjoy.

Ka'th my advice to you is try another role in the game. Dancer and entertainer are going to be headed the way of ID and politician... Slowly but surely being reduced in ability until they are nothing more than RP titles and fancy emotes to perform.

You are not a game designer. That's the point. If they needed the opinion of a game designer on what they were going to do in terms of massively changing a given profession, they have themselves to ask. My point is, the role of a correspondent is to communicate what the players are thinking and feeling to the devs. As such, you would expect, if the devs had any sense at all, if they cared whether the players are going to be having any fun at all in their new system, that they would've at least brought it up to you, if not to the rest of us. Wouldn't it have been more logical, rather than putting who-knows-how many thousands of dollars and man hours into developing a whole entire new system for us without the slightest idea whether we'd like it or not, if they had asked someone who was in a position to know?

You have to ask yourself, why do they keep this stuff super-secret until the week it goes on TC? I mean, what could it have harmed if, say, 3 months ago or whenever it was they decided to do this, they had gotten on here and discussed it with us, before spending any resources on dealing with it? The devs don't just do this with entertainers either -- they do it with EVERY profession. Nobody consulted CHs about changing their role in the game either... nor did they ask what would happen if all the pets we currently had became useless deletables... nor did they ask what would happen if all creatures became generic bags of hit points based on level rather than the unique pets they were pre-CU. They just DID IT, and then pretended to be shocked that the CHs weren't happy.

Why do they do this? I can think of only one good, logical reason, one explanation for why they do what they do -- keeping changes secret until they are already coded and it is "too late" and then putting out a design doc a few days before something hits test center: they know, or at least suspect, that the players of whatever prof is being changed are going to hate it. So they wait until it's too late and then they can say, "It's a done deal." I know a LOT of combat players who think BF should actually mean something, not be taken out of the game, and don't like that it's going away. They feel the GCW will be harmed because it should've been the case that BF would build up during PVP and eventually people who died a lot or got wounded a lot would get taken out of the battle. They think there should be a "cost" to dying, especially if you didn't clone right, and again, this comes in the form of BF. This is not just dancers it affects. Yet the devs didn't ask ANYONE what they thought of removing BF as a "what if?" weeks or months before doing it -- they just did it. And the only explanation I can come up with for why they act like this is, they know they're doing stuff we are going to hate.

So no, you're not a designer. None of the rest of us are either. And that is my point: their treatment of you and the other correspondents shows just how little they care about the opinions of anyone OTHER than designers (i.e. themselves).

Now you could say "well it's their game; they have to design it how they want." OK, I'd buy that. But then get rid of the charade of having correspondents -- since they don't care -- and heck just get rid of the forums, since after all, they don't care what we say or pay attention to our concerns that get posted here anyway. If they really feel this way -- that it is THEIR game and our opinions should not count -- then stop the charades and just admit it.

I'm a big fan of honesty, Esh. The devs have been extremely dishonest, and I would say have acted downright sneaky, for months and months, and I don't go for that kind of crap. I prefer the devs to be honest about the fact that our opinions are irrelevent, than to keep being dishonest and pretending they matter when they really don't.

C

Panthu, I would love to enjoy the "new stuff" I would love to enjoy it all to heck.

Whats the new stuff?
A couple dances I cant check out on TC cause I am not a master there yet.
I can create my own toys, hmm, well, I could if I wanted to sleep dance my way
until I get to that level, so that will wait too...

I took dancer because, well, I love dancing, I figure skate, I find the whole thing
just relaxing after a day. I love talking to people... thing is, people will not be coming
in to see me anymore. Sure, I have my friends that come by, I have the hordes of people
whose friends list I am on that will pop in, but aside from the pleasure of my company...
I am doing nothing for them.

New people? hmmm....I doubt that. I'll see a few... most will wander in after some quest or
something if you are in a cantina with a Mort or a Jevan Monsul , and may talk you up some,
but really, I dont think they read through what the npc is saying, why would they talk to me?

As it is now, I can be at the front, of a room full of afk'ers, smiling and chatting away, and
people wander in, I smile, wave, say hi whatever, and they watch the afk people, its like there is
a magnet on these non attenders.

The ONE thing, I have consistently always noticed that we have asked for is something be done about
AFK, I honestly, have never seen anything about removing BF although I am sure its there, but AFK
is a big one. All I am saying is, its like going in to the doctor with a broken leg, screaming in pain,
then having the doctor remove a wart and figure you'll be happy with that.

I dont have anymore warts thank you, I want my leg fixed.

Ka'th Sandrunner
Master Dancer
Scylla

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Panthu wrote:
Sure, market research is done. Customer feedback is collected. It doesn't run any company though and I don't think it ever will a game company either. It's just not very practical from a fiscal perspective.

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Anybody remember the New Coke? Do you know how many millions of dollars they lost on that, because they changed it without properly test-marketing it first? That is exactly what almost every one of the recent changes is like.

Also, remember this is NOT a standard product. A standard product is a one-shot... you could say such things about a one-shot game like, oh, Age of Empires. If it sucks they might not ever sell another one, but it's a one-shot deal. An MMO is different -- they want a subscription from us, one that goes on, and on, and on. Making changes to the game that people hate will cause a loss of subscriptions... this is not the same thing as a one-shot that you only find out you don't like AFTER you buy it. I didn't like KOTOR-2 at all -- I thought it was crappily done and at least on my system it was bugged to hell and back. I'd probably never buy another Obsidian product again, but it's too late to UN-buy KOTOR-2. They made their millions on it... And most people probably will try other Obsidian stuff again, if they put out another KOTOR, say... because even if it also sucks, it's still a one-shot cost.

But with a subscription service, they have not one-shot customers but an actual community. Indeed, because of their nature, an MMO is all about a community. People will often comment on it, e.g., "The devs of UO might suck but it's a great community!" (just an example using UO -- not meant to be a real quote). Lineage 2, when it first came out, obtained a horrible reputation because of its community. No one-shot product has this issue -- Nobody talks about the "KOTOR community" or the "Age of Empires community" because, short of a tiny handful of people who are into game modding or whatnot, there isn't one. Just like there is no "Coke community" or "Dell community". Nobody buys a coke because of what the "population of Coke drinkers" is like. The Coca-cola corporation does not have to maintain a good "community atmosphere" to sell their product -- they just have to make a darn good-tasting soda.

But in any MMO, the community is very important. Player interaction is often absolutely necessary to play the game (if people complain about it the answer is, "This is an MMO! That's what it's all about!"). Therefore, regardless of what "other industries" do, a community-based industry needs to have a healthy community, and that requires (note the same word root) communication. The devs need to involve us in ways that, for example, Obsidian did not need to involve people when designing KOTOR-2, because the nature of the product is different. People dis-satisfied with KOTOR-2 turn it off. At an extreme, they might (though most won't) boycott future Obsidian products, but KOTOR-2 is already made and done and has made its profit, so that part doesn't affect KOTOR-2's profitability itself. But people dis-satisfied with SWG aren't going to just turn it off -- they're going to cancel.

It's a totally different model, and perhaps part of the problem is, the people "upstairs" and perhaps the devs themselvs do not realize this (Holocron did, by the way, which is why he took such an active role in the community). They can NOT approach this the way Bioware approached their latest X-box game (Jade Empire) from a design perspective because they need a community of subscribers here, and Bioware does not need any such thing in X-box... just people to buy it one time. Failure to grasp this fundamental difference has been a problem in many MMO design teams (as you say) but is much more prevalent here than it ought to be, given how they had a model at the start (Holocron) to work with.

C