Dancer Archive

---

Else-Whira wrote:
There are AFK doc bots on almost every server. They stick them in houses/buildings with an enterance fee.

---

So much for that idea....

the only thing I can say is it would keep them out of the cantinas, but that would still not fix the whole buff bot issue.

Message Edited by Ka_ren on 02-08-2005 01:48 PM

So the question is "What do I want?"


Honestly, I think I need to go back to why I started these professions in the first place.

It was different and new. SWG has a great crafting system. Combat is combat is combat. But this, this was new and exciting and had great promise. I figured here they are pushing this as a new and exciting playstyle,and that means lots of Dev time spent on it. I mean I think through the games I've played over the years and the fun and interesting non-combat parts of them are wide and varied. So many options of different things that could be done. But another very important part of it for me was the fact that I clearly had a support role for one of the other playstyles. And I expected/hoped to at some point be very important support role for all the other playstyles.

My first thought was Entertainer/Smuggler. What better way to smuggle then by entertainer. Someone that travels across the galaxy and has reason to be in contact with not only all the more shady cantinas. But also High ranking officals and grand theaters. But then I decideded I wanted to do my part for the Empire. Spy for them. Pass information along when I could. And help rid the galaxy of those darn rebels that blew up an entire planet.

I had hopes for soooo much. And it all slowly disappeared into the void of cold hard truth. Yet still they kept offering things coming up Soon(tm) that made me think maybe this... maybe this will be the start. And none of it has yet to come to pass.

So what do I want ?

I want a NEEDED/desired support role to the other playstyles of this game.

I want my Skillpoints. My professions to be of more use to me.

I want to be included in ALL content. I want all the different playstyles to have their own content but also to have the majority of it open to all of us.

I want the designers and the game to give me more reasons to be part of the GCW and to pick a side. Not LESS reason.

I want from Novice Entertainer up to Master Dancer to be fun and entertaining. With enough content to keep players ATK.

I want Post-Master Content that honestly is a fun and exciting reason to keep going.(not just a 400k xp grind)

I want the Ent Quests expanded into a ranking system like the FRS. With fun and unique rewards for those in the top ranking of it.

I guess the short answer is I want to be treated like they honestly believe this is an exciting and new playstyle. I want the effort put into us that a Grand Experiment deserves.

Ok, I've said a lot of these things before in various places and various times, but let me see if I can bring several ideas together and summarize them somewhat here.

First of all, of your three directions of revamp, Deila, I would say that only the first is a viable option. The other two are, simply put, unacceptable, and if the devs have any inclinations of making either of them a primary direction of our revamp, then they have truly learned nothing in all this time, and obviously have no clue what it takes to make a satisfying game experience. If that's the case then I think it would be time for all of us to say "Thanks for the good times. Last one out, please turn off the light."

So what do I like about our profession? For one thing, I like my dance skills in and of themselves. I actually do enjoy watching my character flourish in skilled and graceful dance moves even if it is just "animated pixels". I like trying to use my flourishes to fit together in a smooth way so that the dance moves flow together. I like timing effects at just the right moment to accentuate a dance move. I like the ability to get together with friends and use our skills together in a group in coordinated dance and music routine. I like bandflos and synchronized dance movements. I like the ability to time my flourishes to the music that my moves synch to it and even make dramatic movements like a kick or jump during a musical crescendo. I like being able to help other players such as through heals or buffs or even by being able to provide information on how the games works or events that might be going on. I like meeting other players and learning about them or aspects of the game that I didn't know. I like the ability to take my skills "on the road" so to speak and be useful outside the cantina environment as well. Overall I enjoy a profession that I can be more relaxed with, not have to worry about having the biggest or best equipment, not have to get frustrated with because I made a mistake and died, and even use as a creative outlet.

What do I want? I want a useful and viable role in the game. I want to get paid by the cantinas for the time I spend in them and the customers I bring in. I want a persistent way to be able to control who I help and those who don't. I want new options over time (flourishes, dances, even effects). As much as I do enjoy the existing ones, I also crave the ability to do more and have more variety. I want increased ways to create my performance whether through props, effects, dancer emotes, or even mini-flourishes like a single kick or spin or jump. How about animated emotes while dancing such as blowing a kiss while dancing the basic exotic? I don't want to have to wait 15 seconds between stopping a dance and starting again.

I want my dancer to have as much chance at getting a Jedi as the TKM player and be able to receive FS skills that are as useful should I so choose. I also don't want the devs to assume that because I'm playing a dancer, I must not be interested in playing a Jedi character. However I don't want to have to give up my dancer to get a Jedi character either.

I want my dancing to mean something in the game as a whole. Combat players have a PvP rating system, Jedis have their force ranking system, why can't we have some sort of entertainer fame system? It should mean something - possibly effect factions or the type of opportunities we may have.

I want to be able to do missions that use my skills and probably the skills of my friends as well. For starters we need some type of quest mechanics that are fun to do - maybe multiple styles. Things like just going somewhere and performing for a set amount of time, or a certain dance, or a certain number of flourishes, or trying to guess the right dance or flourishes to please the crowd based on their reaction, or being judged by how well we string flourishes together, or maybe even some type of DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) style where we are prompted some how, and have to respond with the proper movement at the proper time. Maybe there are some more possibilities that I can't think of right now, but whatever it is it should be some kind of fun mechanic perhaps with some challenge to it, but that is still fun even if you've done it several times. For me, shooting TIE fighters out of the sky is more or less the same thing every time, yet somehow it doesn't get old that fast. There should be solo missions and group missions. I've also always thought there should be themepark style missions perhaps as alternatives to existing ones, that continue a theme and grant access to new areas or new content. The spy missions that we often talk about are a good idea and could fit into this too somehow. There's also the possiblity of GCW based missions. If the devs are feeling especially creative, they might design missions that require multiple different skills to complete such as dance, combat, crafting, and ID (i.e. use the ID to disguise yourself to get to the mob, to kill it and loot the the schematic, to craft the item, to use as a prop, to do the ceremonial dance, to impress the tribal chief, to get the reward - see, it could be done! ).

I want content that caters to my playstyle once in a while. Why does all new content have to center around fighting mobs? Why can't some of it involve creativity or solving puzzles - i.e. using my real brain instead of my virtual brawn? I want to be able to earn special rewards and loot by using and being good with my dancing skills. Why couldn't I get some kind of rare dance mission that gives me a +15 rifle accuracy attachment as a reward that I can sell to a combat player for 50 million credits?

That's enough of an "I want" list for now I guess. Other people have mentioned some things to which I would like to add my 2 credits. For one thing, I think that the issue of bots and AFK grinders and spammers is largely irrelevant to this discussion. Basically because the devs have already pledged to remove AFK macros which makes it a separate issue altogether and *should* make all these problems moot. However, we will have to wait and see what form the fix ultimately takes, and whether, perhaps, we are still left with macros that can carry on for overly long periods of time even without looping. Along with this, though, is still a valid issue of trying to come up with mechanics that are both fun and that encourage or require active user interaction for best effect.

On the issue of buffs, I like to try to look beyond the current system which I think is seriously flawed. The current pre-combat prep model of buffs puts the players in a rush to get our services, and makes us look bad in their eyes as yet another time sink and an impediment to their fun. I would rather see entertainer buffs removed than to continue anything like the current system even if buffbots were completely removed from the game. The alternative is to change the nature of buffs. One simple way would be to shorten the duration of the mind buff to something like a half hour maybe. Why do this? It shifts a mind buff from being combat prep to combat support. You couldn't just grab a buff and forget about it for a couple of hours, it will need to be refreshed periodically throughout a combat encounter. If a mind buff is important enough to have, then the player seeking one will have to make more of an effort to get to know an entertainer and be nice enough to us so that we will be willing to go out and stay nearby to reapply the buffs when they run out. It gives players an incentive to need us out in the field, and gives us a reason to get out of the cantina if we want to. It could also make for more strategic gameplay if you need to maintain a support base during a PvP battle, and defend your valuable supporting players from enemy advances. Another more extensive option would be to change the effect of entertainer buffs altogether. Make them enhance player skills or speed or something like that. This could make them useful without being critical. Again, though, combat bonuses should be short lasting (attributable to the fact that combat should wear on your mind rather quickly), though perhaps such buffs could be applied to other skills as well, crafting for example, and perhaps these types of buffs could be longer lasting.

There's also the idea about some sort of stored buffs whether through some sort of crafting or preparation process. I tend to be wary of this idea in general. On the one hand there's the possibility of creating more access to buffs via a live process or a buff vendor (which replaces the buffbot) which requires an active ent one way or another, and facilitates that 24/7 access that the combat players demand. On the other, they are still required to sit through a prerecorded performance for some minimum amount of time which is little different than watching/listening to a bot, and, in my mind at least, detracts from the value of a live performance as well as from an element of realism. How can your dance charge a crystal, or just how inspiring can a recording be? (Then again, how realistic is it to pull a car or a half-ton pet out of a datapad?) This idea does have its merits, but it's just not one I particularly like.

I still like the idea of mind wound healing as a useful game mechanic, though I do not like the idea of so much of our advancing being tied to it. I think that the Ent. Healing boxes need to be replaced with something else: something more generic that we can gain. The XP that we earn now as Ent Healing could simply be changed to this new type of XP, but there should be other ways of gaining this XP. My idea is some kind of performance XP that we are granted by various means, of which healing is but one. It's still a good way, I think, to tie us to the combat portion of the game as combat support. Perhaps some more effort could go into balancing the rate at which wounds are gained. Increase the rate, and we become more useful in the field to heal the wounds right away, but at the same time risk being viewed as a necessity and being hassled by the combat players if we can't meet their perceived need. Decrease the rate, and the combat players expectations from us could be light, but then they may have little need to come use our services.

Battle fatigue is also a potentially useful mechanic, but I think it should be changed. I think it should effect things like a character's speed and skill. If you're fatigued, you're going to be slower about doing things, and you're going to be less efficient at them. You might be slower at fighting or less likely to get a good hit. I think the effect should be tiered somehow, such that low levels cause little to no effect, moderate levels have a minor but perhaps noticeable effect, and high levels should cause a more severe effect. I think that it should be earned rather slowly over all though the rate should be tested. This is the mechanic that can still make people return to the cities occasionally for some down time, but it should be more of an encouragement than a requirement. Let's say that maybe after a few hours of a PvP battle or live event or adventure area quest you rack up a hundred or so BF points. Maybe it doesn't have any real effect on your character so you can either choose to take a little downtime to just get rid of it, or keep going - your choice. Maybe after a couple of days of playing without taking care of it you get a few hundred points of BF, and it's having some effect on you so maybe you'll hit a cantina if its convenient, but if you're busy or there's no one around, it's not too big a deal. Then maybe if you've gone several days without taking care of it, and you're up to several hundred points of BF, now it's having a strong effect on your abilities so you really do need to take some downtime and take care of it, and perhaps only by now does it become a requirement. You could even still allow for limited "in the field" BF healing, but restrict it so that players should still visit a cantina or other location to get complete healing.

Another option I like is to generalize the concept of battle fatigue to a more general fatigue that would be earned by all players for exercising their skills. Just as the commando needs to take a break to rest his mind from battle for a while, the weaponsmith should need a break after a long run of crafting weapons and experimenting to get the stats just right. Even the dancer needs to take a break (it takes a lot of effort to perform and do a good job of it) and sit down for a while, or maybe just freeform dance for a while to relax

There has also been discussion on whether we are healers or performers. On this point I would have to wonder why we should be forced to choose one or the other for our profession? It seems to be that there is plenty of room to be both. If we were to declare ourselves as pure healers, then what would our gameplay be limited to? Buffing and healing mind wounds? Possibly some other exotic construct that we could heal? What tools/mechanics would we need to do that? One or a few dances? Special effects designed to have specific results? We certainly wouldn't need to have much variety in what we do if our only purpose was to heal - just enough to get the job done. And what then would be the point in playing this class? There would be little need to enhance our dances, music, effects flourishes etc. because we would need only enough to be healers to the combat players. I think we would lose much of our ability to be creative, and many of us would become dissatisfied with the limitations of the profession. Docs are pure healers, but they can heal, buff, craft stims, rez, put out fires, actively keep people alive during combat, etc.

What if we choose to become pure performers? What if we sever our ties to the combat weights that hold us down? We free ourselves from the confines of buffs and mind wound heals and become free-spirited performers. Maybe we get new dances and new songs, new props, and new clothing, new performance commands, even our very own kinds of missions. Maybe we have the tools to create the kind of performances we've been longing for, and we use them to create shows, and routines to dazzle an audience. We might have great fun amongst ourselves, and surely some players will seeks us out for special events and some will come see us when we put on a performance, but many won't. Without a tie to us, many players will be perfectly happy to craft away in their shop and never bother with us. Many combat players will be perfectly happy in their dungeons or PvP battles or whatever, and never make an effort to come see us. I think without a tie to the game as a whole we could become insulated from the other players and they from us. I also think that the devs will view us as being a game that is separate from the rest of the game world, and perhaps decide it's not worthwhile to keep two separate games in the same world. In the end, we lose out again.

I don't think that either option represents a workable solution to the problem. I think that the only solution lies somewhere between in the middleground, and I think it's a balance that doesn't have to be difficult to achieve. Give us expanded options that allow us to be more creative with our performances. Continue to include ties to the rest of the game world through heals and possibly buffs. Continue to allow a limited number of entertainers to service a large number of players. Make sure our skills are useful to other players, but not critical (or at least not so much that they can't find ways of getting along without us for a while), so that we can be seen as enhancers of play and not time sinks that players are forced to endure. They could also come up with more creative quest/mission ideas that really make use of all the skill sets available in the game. Use a few dancers to help sneak a strike team into a heavily guarded enemy base to plant a bomb for example. There are many possibilites they could consider if they're open to it, and I'm sure that the collective creativity here could provide them with plenty of ideas and options from which to base a proper and satisfying revamp for our professions.

Message Edited by gera on 02-08-2005 10:52 PM

---

Esharra wrote:

Oh..something I'd like to add to mine..

If the intention of the falling is to somehow challenge us, is there any way we can convince them that falling does not present us with challenging game play and replacing it with something that does would be a good thing?

---

I agree, and I'd go further. Falling needs to just plain go away. How is it a "challenge," if the only way to defeat the challenge and circumvent the falls is a semi-exploit (holding a weapon while dancing)? It's not a challenge at all. If anything, it's a "flavor" or an immersion tidbit. But even there it's not fun for anyone - not for the people watching, not for the person dancing. It's also meaningless except on a purely cosmetic level - experience gain and healing continue even when a fall occurs.

Get rid of falling. The end.

I wouldn't mind falling VERY occasionally. The "challenge" is handling it with aplomb. But we fall way, WAY too much.


Umi

Message Edited by Aynianu on 02-09-2005 12:06 AM

---

Groovymarlin wrote:

---

Esharra wrote:

Oh..something I'd like to add to mine..

If the intention of the falling is to somehow challenge us, is there any way we can convince them that falling does not present us with challenging game play and replacing it with something that does would be a good thing?

---

I agree, and I'd go further. Falling needs to just plain go away. How is it a "challenge," if the only way to defeat the challenge and circumvent the falls is a semi-exploit (holding a weapon while dancing)? It's not a challenge at all. If anything, it's a "flavor" or an immersion tidbit. But even there it's not fun for anyone - not for the people watching, not for the person dancing. It's also meaningless except on a purely cosmetic level - experience gain and healing continue even when a fall occurs.

Get rid of falling. The end.

---

On THIS I have to agree totally. Long time ago my husband and I danced a season competively at local Discos. Im not a professional dancer but during the entire season I didnt fall once.

I know several Professional dancers here in town who dance with the local Ballet Company. A FALL is not a trivial event. For a Professional Dancer it can be a career ending event and at the least a huge Professional embarassment. A fall, particularly during a peformance is a MAJOR event for a Dancer.

Thats why the absolutely absurd and ridiculous fall frequency suffered even by a Master Dancer is beyond insane. Its a total embarassment and shows a complete lack of understanding the Dance Profession.