Dancer Archive
Thread: How about this solution for AFKers?
The main purpose of the AFKers is to get XP for dancing / musicianing (is that a word? lol).
How about... when they go AFK for a certain amount of time, no XP is granted?
Now for most of the time I have played as a dancer, I was levelling at a time when AFK entertainers were not that prevalent. Indeed, my cantina time was a blast, and I was taken care of for my good work (and I do work hard to amuse the patrons). By the time I reached master, I was already established and making a fine living inside the cantina.
Now why did they do this? They did this because they'd rather see me or someone like me in the cantina then out doing missions. Entertainers were rare, priveledged, and sacred to the other players, because they have made the choice to do something that few players would normally choose: a static, support role with little guarantee of an income through normal means. If people like me were neither tipped,nor taken care of, we'd simply leave. It gave us a measure of barganing power and leverage that nearly every other support class possesses. If I work hard, and if a city was not good to me in the tip department, I'd simply go to one that was.
However, I am starting up a new dancer on a new server. Now most of the characters are so habituated to leaving a city to get service elsewhere, the cantinas that do have customers are always jam packed. Besides the problems of spam, lag, mismatched songs, and no ability to see my avatar, there is a much deeper, fundamental problem associated with theprevalence of unattended entertainment. Forget about tips given for my cantina service, its rare these days that I'm being paid for buffs.
What has changed? The ability for an entertainer to walk away. The constraints of playability that gave the entertainer the incentive to walk away from the cantina and do something else if they are bored. The normal market forces that are in play resting on the assumption that only players play are no longer in effect. Unattended play is really not play at all. If you are not at the tools you need to play, then you are not playing. Yet non-players are able toinfluence the game environment in such a way as to perform acts that no player operating under the constraints of playability can hope to attempt. For can any live player perform service 24/7, in the same cantina, with no need or desire for interaction or achievement of reward? I think not. It turns the benchmark of service from something that was personal, living, and chereshed into something impersonal, mechanic, and dispensable.
But the effects of this system have an even more profound effect on how entertainers are treated when AT the keyboard as well. Players see entertainment as mechanized, impersonal, andavailable on demand, turning me into something just as easliy replaced by a machine. No longer do patrons today even interact. They go AFK as well and check the boards while I'm trying to do my job. No longer do they have the incentive to treat me any better or worse than the next dancer, because they can get everything I have to give them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for free. They'd rather listen to a spastic song or dance for 30seconds than a real good song, wittty humor and my personality. They wont have me join a PA unless I agree to set on autopilot with an autobuff command. If the standard for good play is that of an AFK bot, then my humanity and enjoyment must be put aside for sheer availability, which is impossible. I tried to be live and mimic a buffbot, and was swallowed whole by my last server.
Because I felt as if I had to answer every buff request to show these players that liveentertainers care. I felt as if I had to answer every request to play at a cantina. What's more, other live entertainer players got nasty with me because they could never come to understand why I felt it so important to play for an audience than hang out with them. They never really understood, nor cared about, the silent war we live entertainers are fighting for a place within this game. Its a war we are losing, and we are losing because when the standard set for us is superhuman, no human may mimic it, however super they may be.
And I fully feel that this new paradigm of mechanized service is a root cause of all the nastiness on the servers. Griefers are allowed to be griefers soley because they can get everything they need and still be jerks. That attitude wouldn't fly in the past. Individuals of all types were so neccissary back then that individuals had to comply with certain basic tentants of decency in order to get cooperation. Now, griefers just sit in their cities, in their PAs, having everything bestowed upon them like Croessus in Lydia. Entertainers apparently were more than the relief from the day's play. I am realizing more and more that they are also the glue that held us together.
Message Edited by PoetDancer on 04-05-2004 09:49 AM
Message Edited by PoetDancer on 04-05-2004 09:58 AM
Message Edited by PoetDancer on 04-05-2004 06:12 PM
WunuShi wrote:
AFK macroing will continue to exist until the process (whatever it may be) ceases to be mind-numbingly boring and repeatitive.
The idea that HALF the Dancer/Musician's required XP is mandated as Healing XP is ludicrous.
The idea of Entertainment professionsrelying SOLELY upon other people for this XP is moronic. (Even Doctor's can buff their own pets for Medical XP)
The fact that this Healing XPcomes excruciatingly slow is just infuriating.
Having Mastered Entertainer, Image Designer and Musician, I simply cannot WAIT till I attain the title of Master Dancer ...My entire Entertainer tree will be dropped inside of 30 seconds and I will delight in thatfact that I'll NEVER be bothered by such a colossal waste of time again.
Safest Journies
It doesn't matter how right you are if people can't stand to hear you speak..
I think the xp works fine so far..
I don't like the idea of not getting xp unless someone is actively watching me.. My character is male and have noticed that, if there is a scantly clad female dancer nearby, the male toons tend to watch them and just ignore my guy in the purple hot pants.. (not really LOL)... Go figure..
Thanks to Vasarian Brandy I am now the town drunk and ONLY go to the AA meetings to brag about the killing spree done during my drunken rage.
your idea would be great if people followed it, but it doesn't solve some of the main concerns with afk macroing:* lack of player interaction
* people who don't want to spend money will still watch the afk people instead
* afk spam
* etc...
people will do what's easiest for them (especially true for macrotainers and hologrinders), and your solution requires "work". i hope that the jedi changes they mentioned will result in less hologrinders, and therefore less macrotainers. a lot of people simply isn't interested in being an entertainer, and would not go into these professions if their holocron didn't tell them to. i guess we'll see in a while
i really miss how the entertainer professions were before holocrons, and sometimes i'm afraid to step into my own city's cantina
even when we've asked the afk people to stay in the back and side of the cantina, they still occupy a large amount of space. as a atk entertainer, it almost feel like an insult to share a stage with them... hence i've been performing anywhere from outside the cantina, in front/inside the city hall, and in the theatre. noone can say no to a dancing mayor 
Squygxicus wrote:If there was an option to grind dancer, like musician, that takes resources instead of action maybe it wouldnt be so bad.
I don't really see that there is a difference with musicians. People want the easiest xp, not the quickest.
However, I will tell you how you can make dance xp go a lot quicker... Don't watch it. Don't even think about gaining new skills as your goal. Think of dancing as your goal. You can do that at novice entertainer as well as at master dancer. All master dancer gives you is a few more dances. The two dances I use most often come from novice entertainer and novice dancer. The dances you get at master are, in the grand scheme of things, rather simple and dull.
Pappi wrote:
i really miss how the entertainer professions were before holocrons, and sometimes i'm afraid to step into my own city's cantina
While I never felt insulted sharing a stage with my own AFK dancing mayor 
and the other guild ARKers, I certainly didn't care for it. The main cantina in our city has become the place to AFK everything from dance to tumbling. The emphasis seemed to be put on providing the AFK novices with attention instead of us live masters. They even have poison parties and other mini-events for them . . .
What was our solution? We created our own cantina! Live entertainment only. No AFKing allowed. None. Nada. We have our grand opening this coming weekend. We may never gain the number of patrons that the one in the center of town gets, but you never know!
kirah_ashlin wrote:
Pappi wrote:
i really miss how the entertainer professions were before holocrons, and sometimes i'm afraid to step into my own city's cantinaWhile I never felt insulted sharing a stage with my own AFK dancing mayor
What was our solution? We created our own cantina! Live entertainment only. No AFKing allowed. None. Nada. We have our grand opening this coming weekend. We may never gain the number of patrons that the one in the center of town gets, but you never know!
i've had people suggest placing an extra cantina, however our city's pre-planned (not by me) and i don't mess with the cantina rules (the owner stated that afk is ok as long as they're not centerstage) i've been trying to encourage atk peeps to head to the theatre and PA hall, as i've been doing myself. sometimes i just start dancing in the middle of the city hall square
Tiaga wrote:
I don't really see that there is a difference with musicians. People want the easiest xp, not the quickest.
Does this also read "I don't see a lot of musicians grinding the crafting way, so it isn't really improving the situation for musicians any and most likely wouldn't for dancers if we had the same options"... was that your meaning? Because surely you didn't mean there was no one interested in this option, right?
I find crafting music xp a lot less rewarding personally, but I'm just not a very good crafter. I do understand that there are many people who really enjoy resource hunting and the leveling side of crafting (the grind) because there is some activity with it... the kind they like... I don't get it, but I know they do. 
I think Squygxicus was saying he gets artisan leveling. He can see his xp go up dependent on what his actions are and how fast and what he's crafting. He doesn't get the concept of time and action spent giving XP the same way. It just isn't fun for him like crafting is.
I understand how we can say "well, if you don't like our kind of activity and can't get used to it during leveling, you won't ever like it so this isn't for you" but the musician option is a little confusing. I mean, it's obviously there as an alternate means of xp or it wouldn't be giving any... right?
Leveling play and Master play are not necessarily the same thing, even though in almost all cases you are doing the same activities, just better at Master. With so much talk about alternate leveling options and with Musician already having this option, I'd really hate it if it was not considered at all for dancers on this weak premise. ><
Personally if I were just grinding, that's the route I would take. But I just don't see a large percentage of people doing that. Believe me, I'd love it if they did, the cantinas wouldn't sound so bad.
As for the play being different.. The class is focussed on being social so therefore so was I in that statement. If you look at healing abilities, masters can do it a lot faster, and can mind buff. But that doesn't really do much socially. For that, it's all about the dances, music and instruments. A master dancer can't do basic any better than a 0030 dancer. The master just has more selection.
Right! Oki, I thought that's what you were saying... and I do see the EH sort of negating this option once you hit Novice.
Most people I've ever heard about doing this did it only to get to Novice Musician... it is a nice option to have though, just wanted to make sure we weren't ruling it out. (It might be a really nice way to tie in those props we've all been dieing for too )