Dancer Archive
Thread: Player cities...AFK solution or not?
one thing i have noticed, if i go into a player cantina and there is any AFKer in there, it's always only one.
dunno if that chaps yalls asses or not, but imo it's better than nobody at all.
C
Well I've been running what I'd like to consider a successfulAFK free cantina. I've got a regular group of entertainers, and a regular customer base, as well as out of towners visiting regularly. There has been two people who tried to macro in there (And one who pretended to be AFK) and they were dealt with.
Here's my take on it though.. I'm constantly worried about losing entertainers because there just isn't that much healingxp in player cantinas. Maybe a 1000-2000 a day of healing xp. Sooner or later people will be capped on dancer/musician xp and have almost nothing else. One of the musicians is 4-3-4-0 right now, and struggling to get any amount of xp. Sooner or later it will be off to coronet or anchorhead, or finding a combat medic willing to help. However, given that it is a RP city, none of the CMs are willing to poison innocent people.
So the protection it provides from the AFK crowd is thinly veiled at best, and possibly just makes the problem worse for the people that choose my cantina over an NPC cantina. They could spend time in a moderately visited NPC cantina and get a decent amount of healing xp, and at least be close to master by the time they max out knowledge and technique, or they could come to my cantina, get knowledge and technique before even finishing one branch of healing, then feel they have to find the place for the best healing xp to grind out the rest. So instead of the whole time only having to deal with a few people AFK, they have to deal with the worst spots for about as long as they'd have had to deal with them if they wanted to spend all their time there.
Even when more people arrive in the city, there won't be a huge amount of battle fatigue and mind wounds to heal. The change that makes player cantinas not selectable as the closest cloning facility just makes it worse - nobody will arrive as often with a nice juicy 100 mind wounds and 100 battle fatigue for around 260 healing xp. They only way they will be able to get there is to have stored their cloning data which doesn't produce said wounds.
So it's not a solution, and it's hardly helpful for people who aren't master already.
Something has happened to cause healing xp to drop very dramatically, to less than a quarter of what it used to be in the summer. We can debate what factors have led to this (e.g., insurance, AFK dancers, whatever) but whatever the cause, I don't think it's that you are in a player cantina that causes the heal XP to drop.
One thing I know for absolute certain: if Entertainers are going to require a combat medic and a willing victim to sit there being poisoned for hours on end just to get their healing XP in less than a year, something is wrong. Because you are right, I am getting like 1-2K a day, and I need probably 300K left in the final 3 dance heal boxes (half of fatigue 4, all of wound 3-4). At 1K a day that means it will be something like next September before I am a Master Dancer. Now, I don't mind that it has taken me a while but, for someone who dances a lot, that is kind of ridiculous. And it's not even like, "Start dancing in December and master 10 months later." I can live with that. But "Start 90% of the way to master in December and get it 10 months later" is nuts.
Something needs to be done about the healing rate, not the player cantinas or even AFK. A simple solution might be: make BF much easier to get. I would say right now that I generaly have less than half the total # of wounds I receive in BF. Well... what if they make it 1:1? For every wound, you get 1 BF. That would help a lot, since BF is worth more xp than mind wounds anyway (why that is so I have no idea). It wouldn't solve the problem but it would help dramatically.
C
Chessack wrote:
A simple solution might be: make BF much easier to get. I would say right now that I generaly have less than half the total # of wounds I receive in BF. Well... what if they make it 1:1? For every wound, you get 1 BF. That would help a lot, since BF is worth more xp than mind wounds anyway (why that is so I have no idea). It wouldn't solve the problem but it would help dramatically.
C
Perhaps making battle fatigue easier to get but also less incapacitating (BF of200 would be equivalent to what a BF of 100 is now)would be a good strategy. We don't want the combat folks to be constantly suffering from vastly diminished attributes. This would allow them to stay in the field longer, but would also mean they'd be in the cantinas longer when it came time for healing. We'd still get the same amount of experience for healing battle fatigue, but we'd get it for twice as long as we currently do.
I'm not sure if that's workable or not, but the lack of healing experience is certainly a credible issue. Whatever the solution, it's best if we impact combat players as littleas possible. I just want my profession to be more playable, I don't want theirs to be any less.
Cheers.
I agree with Pickles. Our guild had discussions about AFK entertaining in general and most are against it. But right now everytime I go in the cantina there's either nobody, thank god, or there's a AFK tainer from either the Raven, Twilight or Birdcage guild.
Now, I know I have admin rights to the building and even though I'm assistant musician manager, our chief manager dropped some music skills this weekend because her focus is on ID/Tailor, I won't boot them from the cantina instead I think Iwill slowly be taking my distance from the Birdcage, our player city and the Tempest server in general, possibly the game too since it just is not going to change and the first entertainer i found on Chilastra with my new alt was a Master musician blasting away Jazz on his Chidinkalu horn 