Dancer Archive
Thread: The New Cantina: Performance Tact for the New System.
PoetDancer wrote:
And if what one wants is the correct "goodie" we give, why would anyone think a fool, a drama queen, or a comedian is capable of the task?
Because the Inspiration game is overwhelmingly simple. 
There's no timing involved, and no recharge timer. There's no danger of death, item loss/decay, or time wasting. There's no possibility of loot stealing or kill stealing or triple incapping. The end result is the same each and every time. Set rules dictate the outcome. There's no guesswork.
But even in combat, where all of these factors come into play on a regular basis, nobody wants a "serious" player to accompany them. I, and most others, tend to enjoy the company of the fools, drama queens, and comedians. Even when the game is much more difficult, and you have to place alot of trust in your partners, everybody loves to have fun! Something as simple as Inspiration doesn't call for seriousness. The 'serious' aspects of the game don't even call for seriousness.
PoetDancer wrote:
Cantinas are boring. That is the one thing I discovered in my time on Bria this afternoon.
If you were to poll the dancers on this forum in an objective way, you would probably find that the vast, VAST majority, if they had their druthers, if they could design how we work themselves, would not have done buffs at all. Rather, we'd have made BF stay in the game, but made it be the old way (where you got about 1 BF per wound done, and lots of wounds in combat, ending up with a couple of hundred BF on a standard hunt outing of a couple hours' duration). We would have remained BF healers with the only mechanism being someone watches or listens. BUT, we would have made it so that AFK macroing and AFK game play were not possible.
The devs didn't want it that way. They decided healing was "not our role" and that AFKing was "perfectly acceptable" as a form of game play. They took BF out of the game over our most strenuous possible objections. They left AFKing in the game over 2 years of extremely vociferous and impassioned complaints about it. Then they said, "What we will do, is give you new buffs."
At that point, we retreated to the fall-back position we are now in, saying, "OK well if all we can do is give out buffs, can you at LEAST make it so they are not (easily) AFKable?" And this, finally, the devs seem to have listened to. They seem to be too chicken to just bite the bullet and take AFKing overtly out of the game, so they have "stealth nerfed" it (and funnily enough this has worked -- other than a few whiney crafters and a few inveterate AFKers, most people don't seem to have realized that pub. 23 was a major AFK macroing nerf).
And so most of us have taken a position something like this (which again remember is a fall-back position, not our preferred one): Well at least the new buffs require active clicking and participation -- they cannot be AFKed.
I will readily agree, I'd have rather the devs just did the upstanding and reasonable thing and took AFKing out of the game entirely like they basically did with City of Heroes way back a year ago. They could have left entertainers totally passive then, which is how we all would have preferred it. But since they didn't do that, we have to work with what we've got left, or quit. And since I'm not ready to quit, because I still like entertaining for all its flaws, I'm willing to work with what we HAVE got (which admittedly ain't much) to try to make it workable and still not AFK-able.
The problem with PoetD's wish for a purely passive system again is, it doesn't stop the AFK macrotaining. I know, she'd probably say, "Well they should just do away with that too," but we know they won't (they're too cowardly and they know they'd loose too many accounts), and so I am trying to be a realist. Fundamentally I agree with many of PoetD's points... I just don't think she is being realistic about what this current crop of devs is willing to do for us.
C
PoetDancer wrote:
From the attitudes on the boards surrounding targeted enhancements, patrons seem to want a "price," a saleable good...
Alissok wrote:
PoetDancer speaks for me as well as her from what I have read so far, if you don't like what she has to say then you don't like what I have to say too. I just wanted her to know it.
All throughout my current "twilight days" here in SWG, I have been receiving many, MANY personal messages, positive posts, and "thank you," messages.
Thank you for your support, dear. But there is no sense fighting. This is how entertaining is now. Its not coming back to the way it was before.
Its no longer my problem. Nor should it be your problem, either. It seems to me they gave us the decision to live with it, change professions, or quit. Frankly, I chose the latter.
PoetDancer wrote:All throughout my current "twilight days" here in SWG, I have been receiving many, MANY personal messages, positive posts, and "thank you," messages.
Thank you for your support, dear. But there is no sense fighting. This is how entertaining is now. Its not coming back to the way it was before.
Its no longer my problem. Nor should it be your problem, either. It seems to me they gave us the decision to live with it, change professions, or quit. Frankly, I chose the latter.
Yeah I understand. I stopped dancing with publish 20 and haven't looked back aside from the occaisional look in here and from talking to my old entertainer friends on Tarquinas' ENT chatroom. I still think it's wrong that you take all the heat from saying what a lot of us are thinking.
Alissok wrote:
PoetDancer wrote:
All throughout my current "twilight days" here in SWG, I have been receiving many, MANY personal messages, positive posts, and "thank you," messages.
Thank you for your support, dear. But there is no sense fighting. This is how entertaining is now. Its not coming back to the way it was before.
Its no longer my problem. Nor should it be your problem, either. It seems to me they gave us the decision to live with it, change professions, or quit. Frankly, I chose the latter.
Yeah I understand. I stopped dancing with publish 20 and haven't looked back aside from the occaisional look in here and from talking to my old entertainer friends on Tarquinas' ENT chatroom. I still think it's wrong that you take all the heat from saying what a lot of us are thinking.
<opinion>
Nobody's attacked PoetDancer that I've seen. If you're suggesting, Allisok, that people who disagree with her views should post elsewhere, I'd just suggest that you can't have a discussion if people with varying viewpoints are all in seperate rooms talking to the walls.
As for your contention about the devs changing things based on player feedback, I'm sorry to say it just ain't so. We're too small a constituency for us to have any weight. In fact, if every entertainer in the game cancelled their accounts overnight, I suspect it would barely be a blip on the radar.
Every game has it's own degree of interaction between devs and players. In City of Heroes, the devs run the show but they also communicate with the players almost daily. If there's an uproar about something, Statesman will acknowledge it, consider it, and probably still do things his own way. However, he'll come out in public and say WHY he's doing things that way. Players don't always appreciate his rulings but they almost universally admire the dev team as a whole for their willingness to communicate to and work with the player community.
In SWG, the devs run the show but they engage in almost no congress with the players. In part, that's because they have the correspondents to run interference for them. Mostly, though, it's because they take the view that while each profession is a seperate small constituency with its own agenda, that they see the "big picture" and have a "big agenda" that we players can't comprehend and shouldn't even be worrying about.
A "movement" here on the forums (where we represent 1-2% of all entertainers, who in turn represent some small percentage of the total playerbase) means nothing at all to them. We're a small cog in a big machine. They know their plan and they know that they have a better idea of what we need than we have.
Listen, I was a correspondent back in fall/winter 2003. The year that Galaxies launched. Do you know what the top entertainer concern was back then? AFK macro-bots. Do you know what the top concern is today? AFK macro-bots. With these new buffs, that might actually drop in importance, but this is now TWO YEARS later, and the devs are STILL supporting AFK entertainers via the passive general buff. If giving "honest feedback" was the key to getting action then we wouldn't have waited this long to still be taking back-seat to the macro-bots.
By all means, state your opinions. Just don't get angry at others for stating theirs or assume that we're somehow "stifling honest feedback" if someone disagrees with someone else. Discussion requires opposing viewpoints, and the devs don't put that great a value on our feedback anyway.
</opinion>
Goldy_Lhim wrote:
The problem isn't that the way I play differs from Sirii. I think the problem is we haven't been told HOW we're supposed to play.
what could the patrons possibly want that would promote performance?
Honest question not a flame. It seems that most don't actually watch me they only /watch me. This is from day 1 not since patch 23. The mechanics of our dances do not change. They've seen each flourish 100 times. In different orders or different series of flourishes but there's nothing new about flourish 1.
I don't think that can come from them. In fact, as I argued before Publish 23, the answer to the problems of this class is not to invent new and contrived ways to pull credits out of the bank accounts of patrons.
As long as our game is totally and utterly dependent on others to make the game fun and rewarding for us, we'll always have this sort of problem.
The answer, I suspect, is to give us more system driven reasons to perform--regardless of how many "/" commands we sell.
In the Entertainer forum, I have a simple, entertainer game, that makes us feel like performers. It is just as viable if there are 1,000 Boi Engineers that need to run schematics, or no players. It doesn't require much in terms of developer time, and can give entertainers a reason to perform outside of being used, so that when players need them, they'll be logged on.