Dancer Archive
Thread: Is this only my humble vision or dancers really went somewhat useless after CU ?
Oh noes! I'll never be able to run for Emperor now.
Gothywench wrote:
...but I can be paid hush credits. /evil
2788 wrote:
Are dancers really that much useless now ?
We are useless only in the minds of those who based their opinion of our value in how we could provide mechanics which enabled the combat playstyle. At first I was totally against losing our mechanics..I really wanted to find a way to make us fit the mold which had been created for us. But I've come to regret that we ever accepted this idea of basing our opinion of our game on what others thought of us..judging our game by the standards of those who don't even play our game.
While we all have our own reasons for playing a dancer, we have in common that there was something about dancing that attracted us more than doctor, crafting and combat did. The entertainer game really is totally different from the combat and crafting games. And while there are other "social" games around, there are no other games which have deliberately incorporated content for the social players as a distinct playstyle along side combat and crafting. I think this is why we have tended to compare our importance and success by the measures with which we are accustomed to comparing the value of crafters and combatters, not only in SWG but other games as well. We simply have no other ruler with which to measure the value of the entertainer experience.
I think that, rather than look to others' playstyles or the in game economy for the measure of our game experience's value, we should be examining it with the question of "What experiences does this game need to provide in order to fulfill my needs in a leisure time activity". Games are based on the challenge/accomplishment/reward cycle and I think this can be applied to us. We've had several discussions of more varied and interesting quests. And I think we would all love to be able to have a cut of the loot table or higher potential credit income in such a system.
Right now (with the exception of the new Inspirations that are being coded..I believe they are too far along for any major changes at this point) I think the devs are open to considering content for us. They are very into the idea of us providing entertainment and player created content and they realize that these things don't come without expenses.
The trick I think for us will be to help them justify spending a lot of dev hours on a profession played by so few players. Loosening up our skill point requirement would go a long way to that end. Devs apply their time to areas where players are investing time..not skill points. And I know there are a lot of players out there who would love to go dancer if it didn't compromise their existing crafting or combat templates. Of course this brings up the concern that many have voiced that "if others could play our professions, we would no longer be special". I'm not one of those who see that as a concern. Maybe someone can provide some arguments toward that end. I was special before I ever got here. 
Message Edited by Esharra on 08-21-2005 10:49 AM
Esharra wrote:We are useless only in the minds of those who based their opinion of our value in how we could provide mechanics which enabled the combat playstyle. At first I was totally against losing our mechanics..I really wanted to find a way to make us fit the mold which had been created for us. But I've come to regret that we ever accepted this idea of basing our opinion of our game on what others thought of us..judging our game by the standards of those who don't even play our game.
"Our game," "their game." I can't say I agree with this way of looking at things at all. We're all playing the same game. I wouldn't want Dejah living in a world that had no smugglers, pilots, or pistoleers any more than they should live in a world without dancers. We're supposed to be creating the Star Wars Universe here in an electronic medium. We need the whole picture.
Otherwise, SOE should rip the ent profs out of the game, provide a new game with a small number of servers that is just for entertainers. But that would not be what most of us want, because most of us want STAR WARS Galaxies, not "The Solid Gold Dancers Online." I don't want an "our game" and "their game" -- I want my character to live in a fully realized Star Wars universe. I want her to be a PART of that universe, not an afterthought or a sideshow.
Esharra wrote:While we all have our own reasons for playing a dancer, we have in common that there was something about dancing that attracted us more than doctor, crafting and combat did. The entertainer game really is totally different from the combat and crafting games.
I am a social player -- no question about it. I prefer gaming with others (which is why now that I am playing GW a lot, I worked hard to convince a few of my friends to try it out, so I could game with them instead of solo or with pickup groups). However, I also wanted to play a healer. That's my favorite role in a lot of other games -- the healer role. What was great about SWG was that it allowed me to combine my two fave game activities -- socializing and healing -- into one thing. The devs have taken that away from me and there is no way to get it back. Even medics aren't social anymore... they're out in the field doing combat healing as their only means of gaining XP. So there is no longer a way to be a "social healer" in this game. Nothing they come up with in terms of buffs will ever fix this.
Again I think you are exemplifying exactly what is wrong with the game in its current form, at the design level. You are thinking of it as being lots of different games -- a "crafting" game and a "combat" game. It's this attitude that is exactly the problem. It should be all one game, with everything inter-linked and inter-dependent. That's how it started; that's what I fell in love with in SWG; and that is what made it feel realistic, what made it feel like I was living in the Star Wars universe. With the "multiple games within a game" philosophy what has happened, and this cannot be denied, is the interconnectivity has been severely de-emphasized. Oh, the combat professions are all interconnected still -- you need a pikeman and a swordsman and a pistoleer and... whatever... to have a good "combat group". But that's all just combat... it's the "combat game." And let's provide looted equipment so people playing the "combat game" do not have to interact with people playing the "crafting game." And let's have a "space game" that's also separate. And let's take the entertainers' role out of the rest of the game so there is just an "entertainer game".
And so what do we have left? A group of entertainers in the cantina entertaining themselves. A group of combatants ignoring everyone else and doing combat/looting. A bunch of crafters doing the "crafting minigame" and putting stuff on vendors but rarely ever interacting with anyone. And that has ended the connectivity, the inter-dependency, the combined reality of the universe they had created, and turned it into a shell of its former self.
Taking BF out of the game was not the problem; rather, it is the symptom of a much larger problem, which is that the devs (and too many other people) seem to think it will be good to segregate the community's different game types. "Well they'll never get along so we need to separate them." I think this is exactly the wrong direction to go. They needed to promote more interdependency, not less. Instead, what we really have now is the "explorer game", the "achiever game", the "killer game", and the "socializer game", and "let's do everything we can to keep them all apart from each other."
Well I'm sorry, but I didn't want to play a "social" game I wanted to play a complete one. That's what made SWG seem so real the first year-plus I played it. But in the last year or so, and especially since the CU, all that reality, the completeness, has been replaced by fracturing the community into its component parts and making sure every possible reason for those parts to interact is minimized. And that is a sad, sad thing.
A friend of mine, when I discussed this with him (former SWG player but doesn't play it anymore) said, "Well, SWG was a great experiment, and that experiment seems to have failed." I think he's wrong though... the experiment didn't fail -- it was never really given a chance. Ever since Holocron left, the new crop of devs and lead designers has been all about separating us into little sub-communities because they think we can't "play nice" together, and the great experiment was left to wither and die.
Esharra wrote:The trick I think for us will be to help them justify spending a lot of dev hours on a profession played by so few players.
This is a catch-22. They won't spend time on content because nobody plays the classes, and nobody will play the classes until the devs spend time on content. Ultimately, though, if they're going to keep having the attitude that there is an "entertainer game" that is somehow separate from the "rest of the game", whatever they do is going to fail. I didn't become an entertainer to just entertain other entertainers... I became one to heal and entertain everyone. I thought it would be the best way to be connected to the entire player base. And it was, for a while, until some fool decided we needed to be separated from the rest of the community, and now it's all runied.
C
Chessack wrote:
I am a social player -- no question about it. I prefer gaming with others (which is why now that I am playing GW a lot, I worked hard to convince a few of my friends to try it out, so I could game with them instead of solo or with pickup groups). However, I also wanted to play a healer. That's my favorite role in a lot of other games -- the healer role. What was great about SWG was that it allowed me to combine my two fave game activities -- socializing and healing -- into one thing. The devs have taken that away from me and there is no way to get it back. Even medics aren't social anymore... they're out in the field doing combat healing as their only means of gaining XP. So there is no longer a way to be a "social healer" in this game. Nothing they come up with in terms of buffs will ever fix this.
Well I'm sorry, but I didn't want to play a "social" game I wanted to play a complete one. That's what made SWG seem soreal the first year-plus I played it. But in the last year or so, and especially since the CU, all that reality, the completeness, has been replaced by fracturing the community into its component parts and making sure every possible reason for those partsto interact is minimized. And that is a sad, sad thing.
One of the strongest points here. I don't need an "animated chatroom", but a solid and alive universe too.
There was a lot of originality to the launch version of SWG. It didn't work, not because it was all a bad idea, but because, being original, the kinks needed to be worked out. And what is sad is that, after launching it before it was ready, which left even more kinks in place, SOE refused to get behind the original design. When they saw there were a lot of kinks to work out, their solution was to beat a hasty retreat to familiar territory, and convert SWG to "EQ in space." That's pretty sad... since it removed all that was original about the game in favor of "what they know will work."
We'll never know if it would've worked, because SOE didn't give it a chance. They put the game into live format withathousand bugs, and then instead of fixing the bugs and maintaining the original vision, they said, "Combat upgrade!" and changed the underlying game design. Instead of clamping down on macro-bots and stopping it before it got bad, they allowed and even, one might say (with hologrinding) encouraged it. It is entirely inaccurate to say, "It didn't work" as if they gave it the old college try. They didn't even try to make it work, so of course it didn't. Had they tried would it have worked? We'll never know because they didn't really try.
And that's another and the main thing about it. SWG is becoming one of those "traditional RPG's ",no matter ifwe admit it or not. Thus all "untraditional" thingsare treated accordingly.
Now I see I'm not the only person around who sees something more the BF and mind buffingamiss after CU,and this was much the point of my starting all this discussion. I just want to say a phrase my guild master told me some time after CU: - "I am ready to give up my Jedi Knight to play the game I bought in 2003."
Sorry for some indistinctness in my previous post, just haven't got used to this forums yet.
The sentence "You just expressed what I was think about, and I thinking, andI wouldn't be able to express it anybetter myself."
wassupposed to mean "You just expressed what I was thinking about, andI wouldn't be able to express it anybetter myself."
Strange thing newbs are prohibited to edit messages.
C
Panthu wrote:
Ok, but you are saying that like there is some other game that has Social (as in combat downtime in this case) Healers, and that's just not the case.
No, I'm saying that no other game allowed me to be a socializer/healer like SWG did, and I think it is a shame that SWG no longer does. Maybe I'm an odd duck, but I don't think a game designer should aspire to do what everyone else is already doing and has done for 25 years. I think a designer should aspire to be original. There was a lot of originality to the launch version of SWG. It didn't work, not because it was all a bad idea, but because, being original, the kinks needed to be worked out. And what is sad is that, after launching it before it was ready, which left even more kinks in place, SOE refused to get behind the original design. When they saw there were a lot of kinks to work out, their solution was to beat a hasty retreat to familiar territory, and convert SWG to "EQ in space." That's pretty sad... since it removed all that was original about the game in favor of "what they know will work."
No, I can't get "social healer" in any other game, but I used to be able to get it in SWG, and I'm saddened that I no longer can. I would have preferred if they had stuck with the original vision and made it work, rather than punting a few months in.
Panthu wrote:
The first draft of the Doctor write up for the CU out and out said downtime healing and buffing were taken out because players didn't find them fun. We can't deny that most downtime doctoring was played out as automated as possible - we had starports full of at least mostly AFK Doc buffers and no one in the hospitals RPing a Doc.
That's because they allow AFKers. It's the beginning, middle, and end of the problem. AFK botting let people who had no interest in being actual doctors or entertainers play those professions better than the people who liked them, so the people who would've been attracted to those professions left the profs or the game. Would there have been enough of us to attend all the cantinas and med centers? We'll never know because SOE did not give it a chance. They allowed AFKing and refused to stop it, and when AFK botting took over the game, they said, "It's a valid playstyle." So we will never know if the original vision would've worked, because it never got a chance to get a toehold. The real, social players, have mostly long-since quit this game. Everyone I know who is still left is either primarily combat oriented, or has switched to combat oriented behavior in the last 6 months.
Panthu wrote:
It didn't work, I wish it had, but it didn't.
We'll never know if it would've worked, because SOE didn't give it a chance. They put the game into live format with a thousand bugs, and then instead of fixing the bugs and maintaining the original vision, they said, "Combat upgrade!" and changed the underlying game design. Instead of clamping down on macro-bots and stopping it before it got bad, they allowed and even, one might say (with hologrinding) encouraged it. It is entirely inaccurate to say, "It didn't work" as if they gave it the old college try. They didn't even try to make it work, so of course it didn't. Had they tried would it have worked? We'll never know because they didn't really try.
Panthu wrote:
Full on Social play is an option though and there are many examples out there of how to make a game that is nothing but Social content be fun. Surely that type of gameplay can be worked into our role and there is no reason at all that it has to be exclusive.
I still think breaking SWG into sub-games where the different player types never have to interact is a terrible mistake, and is turning it from a game where we can live in the SW universe, to a game where we do things that are merely inspired by the SW universe. If you can't see the difference, well... I guess there's no point in discussing it further.
C
Chessack wrote:
Panthu wrote:
Full on Social play is an option though and there are many examples out there of how to make a game that is nothing but Social content be fun. Surely that type of gameplay can be worked into our role and there is no reason at all that it has to be exclusive.
I still think breaking SWG into sub-games where the different player types never have to interact is a terrible mistake, and is turning it from a game where we can live in the SW universe, to a game where we do things that are merely inspired by the SW universe. If you can't see the difference, well... I guess there's no point in discussing it further.
I'm not touching the whole "continuity" thing, but I can't see how that has a darned thing to do with gameplay, role, and content design. Design is design, whether it's in Sanrio flavored world, Tolkien flavored world, Warcraft flavored world... and yes, even the holy Lucas SW flavored game world. I don't see how the commitment or lack of commitment to the consistency of the base material in a brand has anything at all to do with what you are talking about here and I see how it has any relevancy on Dancer even less!
Oola - they could have stopped at the NPC in JP if staying true to the canon was the only need here. *shrug*
Anyway, I can't respond to a full on rant about the whole game now sucking when it used to have so much potential. I was in there in the trenches fighting the good fight for this stuff, it's not my fault that the answer back was always "Entertainers aren't really Healers."
The CU didn't change that for us, it just finally made it public knowledge. We never got any of our Healing improved and we saw very little improvement in our buffing. It's not like we weren't asking for it, the answer was just always "no."
This battle was lost before it even started so I just can't see the usefulness in clinging on to something that was certainly there from impression but absolutely never got any Dev backing at all. *shrug* We're the players, not the designers and no matter how much you post you can't change that.
I see plenty of fun potential in Entertainer working within the constructs that have been set up for us. I see plenty of ways it can still work even with out healing, which yes, I liked too.
The fact is, Doctor did not get handled the same way by players that Dancer did. These are my top two profs in the game, so it's not like I haven't been there through all the changes. 
We had plenty of Dancers who gave up on the healing and buffing for Dancer long ago, but they still used their Dancer skill boxes to enhance social experiences for themselves and others.
Doctors did not. Doctor was role played and used as a social toolonly as often as any other prof in the game: the same as Tailor, Smuggler, Bounty Hunter, Ranger, so on. Ents however, that was picked up. That resonated with the playerbase even without participating in the Healer/Buffer activities.
It's not that I don't share many of your preferences for the way things were (or at least seemed to be in some cases), it's just that we Dancers always needed more content and this is the one way that fits with everyone's plan for Dancer no matter what.
I don't think complaining about how much the game now sucks totally has any chance of being used as feedback and inspiring Dev action. I do think asking for direct Social content is something that works for us regardless ofpast, present, and future Dev direction. I think we can get this, we always needed it, and I see no reason at all to refuse totry something that can work in this whole feedback set up.
I do not think this has much to do with the "entertainers are healers" rhetoric. We never were healers, as much as we put on "healing shows."
What this has to do with is giving us an intergal role in the daily operation of the server. And I do not think that we can succeeed if we have to somehow compete with the DWB, the GCW, the Jedi trials, and all of the other action packed, "Star Wars," and danger filled things to do outside of the cantina.
Panthu wrote:
I'm not touching the whole "continuity" thing, but I can't see how that has a darned thing to do with gameplay, role, and content design. Design is design, whether it's in Sanrio flavored world, Tolkien flavored world, Warcraft flavored world... and yes, even the holy Lucas SW flavored game world. I don't see how the commitment or lack of commitment to the consistency of the base material in a brand has anything at all to do with what you are talking about here and I see how it has any relevancy on Dancer even less!
You need to go back and re-read what I said. I never said anything about canon itself. I was talking about immersiveness -- which makes the difference between playing a Star-Wars-inspired game, and feeling like you are living (in a roleplay sense at least) in the Star Wars universe. What gave the game that sense of immersion and reality wasn't whether there are Jedi or not, or any other "canon" issues, but the connectedness of each class with all the others. We may have lost the "healing" argument a long time ago, but I still think it is worth pursuing the idea that all the professions need to be connected to each other. As PoetD just said... we need to be a PART of the server's daily life. The problem is entertainers are being cordoned off into the "socializer community" and not really expected to interact with the rest of the server, nor they with us. We need that back, or as I say, it's just going to turn into "Solid Gold Dancers Online" for those of us playing entertainers.
This has nothing to do with "consistency of the base material in a brand" and everything to do with immersion, and how it is enhanced by interconnecting the professions, and seriously damaged when the profs are all off playing "their game" and "our game."
C