Dancer Archive
Thread: Our old top 5 and answers to two of the questions.
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Ravanne_Esi
Fri Feb 13, 2004 2:06 pm
#14
I would say from the lack of response we've gotten after all this time that the DEVs don't care about us or our profession and that Thunderheart's word is worthless.
Great customer service SOE you set a fine example to the rest of the industry, a fine BAD example.
ChryssSR
Fri Feb 13, 2004 6:38 pm
#15
It would also be nice if the timer on entertainer buffs reset on death like other buffs. As it stands right now, if you die 1 hour into a 2-hour mind buff you have to wait another hour before you can rebuff again.
Lesia
Wed Feb 25, 2004 1:26 pm
#16
It's truly nice to know that we share this frustrations.
1. Falling down.
Feels silly being a master dancer who falls to her knees. If we must fall, may we at least hold a flower instead of a weapon to keep our balance?
2. Mind-buffing self.
You take the timeto mind buff your group and then join them in a battle. You're the first to die... no mind.
3. Fix Entertainer Missions.
Just yesterday I stopped a NPC and was given a mission to dance in the Deeja Hotel for 158 credits. A master dancer, I danced and healed myselffor over 30 minutes before I gave up. There was no audience in Deeja, so no tips. Very sad.
4. Make changes to mind buffing system to make things easier.
I need explain to my customers that dance buffing is not an exact science, so that even when using a kitchen timer to time their buffs, they may not get a full 2 hours. Then I apologize.
5. Fix the lyrical/formal base dance.
Would be nice to have this fixed too, though I work mostly where space is limited, so I preferdancing exotics.
Thank you VERY much for listing these concerns shared by those of us who chose the profession of dancing because we enjoy it.
Lesia
IvyMC
Tue Mar 16, 2004 10:41 am
#17
I just have to complain. I am frustrated with the entertainer professions of Dancer and Musician. And I'm doing it for the love of it! It is so difficult to reach Master in both. The amount of XP given per flourish is really not good. When you consider the length of time involved in achieving Master in either skill, the slowness of XP gain is disheartening. I would love to see a better ratio of XP to skill level in these skills. Especially if you do not want to perform in Theed or Coronet which is where the grinding of these skills is mostly done.
Trying to level up in the Tyrena Cantina is very time consuming because it is empty. Same withmost other cities in the galaxy(unless I am missing any)except for Theed and Coronet. Then they are so packed there, that you can't move for all the lag!! This concentrates all the players in these two cities and no where else and economy also suffers for other cities, including player cities, because there is no draw for injured players. Performing in out of the way places means you perform alone mostly and with very little interaction with others and very little XP of any kind.
Developers, help us entertainers out! Give us some hope and a light at the end of the tunnel! Make the missions for entertainers mean something (XP bonus for doing them in hostile areas like Endor, and actually giving us money for doing them!!). You need to get a developer out there to be a Novice Entertainer and work up the skill tree the hard way.And itIShard, takes hours and hours of work (afk or not!) and has no pay except for tips (depending on how social you are), little reward and bad working conditions, unless you want to stay only in Theed or Coronet. Not only that, as I've read, Formal/Lyrical dance looks interesting, let me tell you! I flourish now with only 4 of the flourishes for Lyrical and one of them, #3 makes me fall down each and every time! All the other flourishes give me popular2 dance moves!!! Lovely!
By the way, I know of absolutely NO ONE who takes entertainer missions except Noobs and they find outquickly that they are unrewarding because no one is there and they don't get their payment! Maybe in those places, NPC presence can enable higher XP and payment!
Thanks for listening. I don't expect an answer from any developers. Just really needed to vent it!
Dewi Flyingwaver
Apprentice Dancer, Master Scout, among other things
Valcyn
Starlance
Fri Mar 19, 2004 1:07 am
#18
Hmm, well . . . *sighs*. I really want to believe that they care and are really going to do something about our concerns. It's great that our dev thinks our concerns are reasonable. Yeah. It's just getting really, really hard to find reasons to believe that. I guess the burning question becomes, if we have this developer who's supposed to be specifically employed for working on Dancing aspects of the game, then what is he/she doing?
Falling: How long would it take to simply REMOVE falling? I was a Dancer in Beta, I was a Dancer as soon as the game released and I'm even -still- a Master Dancer now. Now I seem to remember a time in Beta when there was no falling. Ask yourself this: How will harm the game if there were no falling? Is it going to cause imbalance? It's not going to do ANYTHING but make us happy. Just do it and get it over with! It's not rocket science, I'm pretty sure it's been that way before. They're way too busy taking 6-months debating whether or not to make a 5-minute fix that would only serve to make their customers happy.
Mind-buffing self: This is going to take more effort than falling, I should expect. Still, it should be easily do-able compared to something like the recent changes to completely re-vamp the food system, take the randomness out of Doc buffs, etc. All it's going to take is the commitment of the time and effort to make it happen.
Fix entertainer missions: This could take a varying amount of time, depending on how you propose to fix it. It could be simple number crunching to make them pay out a bit more. It could be a whole revamp of the system to change the nature of what the missions are like and how the pay-scale works. Those at opposite ends of the spectrum and could take vastly different amounts of time. Much needs to be done to figure out just what 'fixing' these missions will entail and so far it seems no real investigation has been done. (That we've been informed of, anyway.)
Changes to the buffing system to make things easier: Well, the system HAS to track how long the buffing process has been going for and calculate what that translates into in terms of buff quality/duration at some point. So all the numbers are there. What we need is a visual display in human-readable format. That about sums it up. Biggest problem I see here is the calculation is likely not made until the /stopwatch command, thus the system is just tracking Action spent or number of flourishes or whatever until that point. Instituting feedback would mean making that calculation at regular intervals during the buffing process and thus adding to the server load. This is likely the only reason we haven't seen this happen yet, IMO.
Fix the Lyrical/Formal base dance: I sure wish they'd do this! My two favorite dances, though only as I see them myself from the dancer's perspective. I don't really understand what the problem is, so not much to comment on this one. Presumably it has to do with latency, but it would seem that if the system sent a packet saying Dancer A is dancing Lyrical2 and did Flourish 3, the client program should be able to then play the appropriate animation properly on any system. Don't really understand where the problem comes into this one, unless way too much is being done server-side instead of sending the triggers to the clients and letting them do the appropriate animations.
People might say these are minor problems compared to some. But in a sense, that's why it's so frustrating that they've all been allowed to go so long. If it's not that hard to fix, and we're supposed to have different people working on this stuff than are working on fixing, say, Droid Engineers, then what's the hold up???
You can only wait so long for something to get fixed before it's time to start looking at the possibility of just up and replacing the whole thing. (IE, leave and go elsewhere.) SWG has great potential and I've been hoping to see it fixed. But really, time is running out. Sorry for the rant, but I've been here forever now and it's just wearing on me.
-- 'Seph Iridan, Master Dancer, Chilastra
Falling: How long would it take to simply REMOVE falling? I was a Dancer in Beta, I was a Dancer as soon as the game released and I'm even -still- a Master Dancer now. Now I seem to remember a time in Beta when there was no falling. Ask yourself this: How will harm the game if there were no falling? Is it going to cause imbalance? It's not going to do ANYTHING but make us happy. Just do it and get it over with! It's not rocket science, I'm pretty sure it's been that way before. They're way too busy taking 6-months debating whether or not to make a 5-minute fix that would only serve to make their customers happy.
Mind-buffing self: This is going to take more effort than falling, I should expect. Still, it should be easily do-able compared to something like the recent changes to completely re-vamp the food system, take the randomness out of Doc buffs, etc. All it's going to take is the commitment of the time and effort to make it happen.
Fix entertainer missions: This could take a varying amount of time, depending on how you propose to fix it. It could be simple number crunching to make them pay out a bit more. It could be a whole revamp of the system to change the nature of what the missions are like and how the pay-scale works. Those at opposite ends of the spectrum and could take vastly different amounts of time. Much needs to be done to figure out just what 'fixing' these missions will entail and so far it seems no real investigation has been done. (That we've been informed of, anyway.)
Changes to the buffing system to make things easier: Well, the system HAS to track how long the buffing process has been going for and calculate what that translates into in terms of buff quality/duration at some point. So all the numbers are there. What we need is a visual display in human-readable format. That about sums it up. Biggest problem I see here is the calculation is likely not made until the /stopwatch command, thus the system is just tracking Action spent or number of flourishes or whatever until that point. Instituting feedback would mean making that calculation at regular intervals during the buffing process and thus adding to the server load. This is likely the only reason we haven't seen this happen yet, IMO.
Fix the Lyrical/Formal base dance: I sure wish they'd do this! My two favorite dances, though only as I see them myself from the dancer's perspective. I don't really understand what the problem is, so not much to comment on this one. Presumably it has to do with latency, but it would seem that if the system sent a packet saying Dancer A is dancing Lyrical2 and did Flourish 3, the client program should be able to then play the appropriate animation properly on any system. Don't really understand where the problem comes into this one, unless way too much is being done server-side instead of sending the triggers to the clients and letting them do the appropriate animations.
People might say these are minor problems compared to some. But in a sense, that's why it's so frustrating that they've all been allowed to go so long. If it's not that hard to fix, and we're supposed to have different people working on this stuff than are working on fixing, say, Droid Engineers, then what's the hold up???
You can only wait so long for something to get fixed before it's time to start looking at the possibility of just up and replacing the whole thing. (IE, leave and go elsewhere.) SWG has great potential and I've been hoping to see it fixed. But really, time is running out. Sorry for the rant, but I've been here forever now and it's just wearing on me.
-- 'Seph Iridan, Master Dancer, Chilastra
aimee
Sat Mar 20, 2004 12:23 pm
#19
I agree with all of the above. I made master dancer with one of my alts.. tysita... and first off I do not understand why a Master Dancer must fall 5-6 times in an hour?? I don't go to a Ballet and see the performers falling all over the place...
I do not understand also why we cannot buff ourselves.. a master doc can buff himself, a chef can eat his own food for a buff, but dancers cannot have their own mind buff?... makes no sense whatsoever.
I agree formal/lyrical needs a fix. I also think a better buffing system needs to be in place.
- tysita - master pikeman / master dancer
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