Dancer Archive
Thread: New Top Issues List
And baby when we get it figured out..it's You vs Me in front of Theed starport and you better have some solid moves cause you know I'm going to make you hurt!
fattymcgee wrote:
Panthu wrote:
Esharra wrote:
Dancers would like breakdance flourishes for the breakdance dance.
Not only do I want the other positions, flos, and transitions that were made... I want real battles! The leak clip showed taunts too, it would rock so much if there was a game mechanic for real challenges! *drools*
oh yeah, i have many time gotten into ent pvp(breakdance challenge) and some offical way to chart who wins and score it would be better than,
"I beat ya"
"na uh"
"yes i did"
Esharra wrote:
And baby when we get it figured out..it's You vs Me in front of Theed starport and you better have some solid moves cause you know I'm going to make you hurt!
fattymcgee wrote:
Panthu wrote:
Esharra wrote:
Dancers would like breakdance flourishes for the breakdance dance.
Not only do I want the other positions, flos, and transitions that were made... I want real battles! The leak clip showed taunts too, it would rock so much if there was a game mechanic for real challenges! *drools*
oh yeah, i have many time gotten into ent pvp(breakdance challenge) and some offical way to chart who wins and score it would be better than,
"I beat ya"
"na uh"
"yes i did"
your on esharra
(stands back and waits to be served by esh)
KeelieWi-O wrote:
Dancers and Musicians have it worse grinding now than back when I was achieving master. At least back then, people came into cantinas....
If you mean we have a worse "grind" in that we have a harder time leveling now, no we don't. We can level with out waiting for others now and our XP gain has been increased, both of these changes mean that we now have a much easier path to master.
If you mean we have it worse now as social players, eh maybe. Yes, we definitely need interaction with many other players to be happy socializers and we aren't getting that in an empty cantina. We weren't really getting it in a cantina full of avs though either before the CU at the height of the mind craze days.
Giving them a list of 20 things lets them off the hook. They can fix the 9 easy things that do not matter and say "See you got something."
The devs do not get it. They NEED to get it. They have gutted our profession, removing 99% of the in-game interactivity component from the social class. This was fundamentally a bad thing. It needs to be fixed forthwith. It must not wait. We must not give them any excuses to wait. They need to understand that these things have GOT to be fixed, and fixed pronto. I don't want them messing around with theaters. I want them giving us the stuff that should have replaced BF before patch 20 went live. I want them working on a real solution to the AFK issue.
Giving them 20 things to choose from gives us a 90% chance (at least) that what they pick will NOT be what most of us would list as top priorities.
We need ot get our priorities straight. A "throw it up the flag pole and see if anyone salutes" approach to an issue list will just make us seem like we want "everything." It's unrealistic to expect them to do all, or even most, of these things, at least not quickly. We need to focus. There are two major, major issues that are so much more important than the other things that the other things are literally not worth mentioning in the same post with them. Those issues need to be addressed speicifically and without anything to confuse the issue.
We need to focus here, people. Our class has been stripped of nearly all in-game functionality. We need it back. Now.
C
Jeez, I don't know. That's mighty freaking ballsy. 
I saw plenty of corrs turn in a shorter list than was asked for to make a point... and the majority of the time it meant they got nothing.
I pulled it with Tyrant once myself. He came in and asked for three top bugs for each prof and I made a smart ass comment about having a crippling problem of AFKers completely undermining our prof and making it worthless, so any bugs we had were a non-issue as long as this was ignored.
So, uh, we didn't get anything fixed that pass, heh.
You bet your butt I had 3 bugs ready next time he asked, and they all got fixed. *shrug* I don't know, this tactic has worked for other prof corrs rarely, but it was always BHs or Jedi or likeeven rarerSwords or Riflemen. I think maybe ASs and WSs have gotten away with it too.
Usually it's just a wasted opportunity though. I don't know, I'm all for it if it will help, but I just having a feeling it's not going to and we will be missing a chance to get other things that we really would like.
Ok, also, I don't think these general items ever get addressed anyway. Just saying "we hate AFKers, get rid of them" won't work. Just saying "give us interdependency and a function" won't work.
If we are going to make these our items, I think they need to be very specific suggested solutions. I also think they have to be for our prof only. Corr profession issue lists are not meant to over step prof boundaries.
I think we need to pick some solutions like the Buff UI Shi'ann described and explain it very clearly if that's what we want. That makes it a prof item and something that can be addressed when we are up for some development time.
Yup..I've seen it too..but heh..if that's what dancers decide they want.../shrug What can I say?
Panthu wrote:
Jeez, I don't know. That's mighty freaking ballsy.
Panthu wrote:
Ok, also, I don't think these general items ever get addressed anyway. Just saying "we hate AFKers, get rid of them" won't work. Just saying "give us interdependency and a function" won't work.
If we are going to make these our items, I think they need to be very specific suggested solutions. I also think they have to be for our prof only. Corr profession issue lists are not meant to over step prof boundaries.
I think we need to pick some solutions like the Buff UI Shi'ann described and explain it very clearly if that's what we want. That makes it a prof item and something that can be addressed when we are up for some development time.
My usual MO is to present a statement in bold followed by a couple of paragraphs supporting the statement and suggesting potential solutions. I include links to specific threads when the arguments in them are well composed, don'tdeteriorate toa lot of "let's flame the devs" posts and are the sort of succinct discussions that present an argument best (threads that work for this are often hard to come by). If I quote a player directly, I accredit the player and include a link to the post. What I won't include are demands and time constraint expectations. These get us no where. Remember in the couple of days after CU release when the devs asked for 3 questions? A few corrs expressed frustration that their questions weren't addressed directly but instead received answers based on the time constraints brought up by their wording. Some even expressed their dismay directly to me, pointing out that all of my questions were answered. My questions started with Will, while their's started with When.
This methodology is working well for us. Granted, we don't have everything we want. Many of us are unhappy with what we are getting. We will get what the devs believe is best for the overall game, not necessarily what we believe is best for us. And we will get it within their timeframe, not our's. But I have too often seen them quote us directly to believe that what we say and how we presentour ideasdoesn't have impact.
Message Edited by Esharra on 07-30-2005 08:37 AM
Instead of going to them and demanding they take away AFK, recursive macros or anything like that.... See if they can't just pull all text and emotes from macros in order to give us back the spatial chat of most of the social centers.
Taking away the ability to repeat text from a macro would also give a benefit to droid engineers and merchants as the only way a player could then advertise their shop would be with a barker droid rather than sticking their character online with a repeating text macro.
As to the other issue, just let them know that players aren't coming to the cantina anymore and make sure this was intended. If it wasn't intended see if they might consider returning the battle fatigue system at least until such time as they think of a better system to replace it with.
Panthu wrote:Ok, also, I don't think these general items ever get addressed anyway. Just saying "we hate AFKers, get rid of them" won't work. Just saying "give us interdependency and a function" won't work.
If we are going to make these our items, I think they need to be very specific suggested solutions. I also think they have to be for our prof only. Corr profession issue lists are not meant to over step prof boundaries.
"We hate AFKers" is not what I said. It's not what I've ever said. In fact on numerous threads I have told people I am not capable of hating AFKers, per se, because you have to know someone personally, to hate him or her, and I don't know AFKers, so I can't hate them.
What I dislike is the practice of AFK levelling and I think from a basic game design standpoint, allowing it for ANY prof is a bad idea. There are clear, obvious reasons why this is true, and certainly we should state those reasons up front and honestly. It's bad from a game design perspective and the devs need to see this. My bet is, they won't ever agree with it, for financial reasons. Take away AFK bots, and they lose half the double accounts in the game, which are only there for AFK botting purposes. Heck one of my own guild-mates has 3 accounts, logs all 3 in, and bots 2 of them on auto-follow and auto-attack somehow, so he can level all 3 toons at the same time. This person would probably cancel those extra accounts if he had to actually PLAY them all. We have made the AFK argument before, and the devs do not listen, and they probably never will.
However, I still think we need to make it. I think the reasons why it's bad need to be made clear, and just "we don't like it" is not what we should say.
1. We need to explain how AFKing allows players to grief each other without consequences because they are not present at the keyboard to receive any anger or other response players might have. So an AFK tip-spammer can grief hundreds of players by tip-spamming in a public cantina, and there's not thing one you can do about it other than /ignore. Spamming is against the EULA, but these people are able to violate the EULA without so much as even having to face the (considerable) disapproval of the community. These spammers make everyone want to not go into the cantina, which hurts the entire entertainment profession group. "Oh just /ignore" is really not an acceptable answer, because although people in the cantina realize the person is AFK and needs to be ignored, people outside do not. Feel free to use my example, of the girl on the AFK macro doing /shouts about strippers in the cantina... players outside, thinking she meant it, came in looking for strippers, and those of us inside, even though we had her on /ignore ourselves had to deal with the abuse of those who entered the cantina looking for strippers. She wasn't to see their lewd comments and deal with their juvenile behvior -- behavior her /shouts AFK had encouraged -- but *I* was. I ended up having to leave my own home cantina -- a public venue, not a private one -- as a result. There was no way to ask her to stop because she was not there.
2. We need to explain that AFKing allows people to get reward without effort, and that it is bad from a fundamental game design to allow people to gain game rewards without efforts. When they let people AFK kill and loot, it means that super-rare loot drops get into way too many people's hands. This damages the ecomony, because something almost no one should have, eventually everyone with enough money will have. It damages the whole idea of achieving something when they have people on AFK macros just killing of hordes of green cons for AFK experience with no risk, and master professions in 3 days without a single instant of actual game play. It damages the whole idea of actually earning the master badge, when someone can turn on a single-flourish looping dance macro in his house (just one flourish over and over again), go away for a few days, and come back to being a master dancer (yes, I know you have to train in it, but, you get the idea). Being required to put forth some effort to get the "goodies" is fundamental to any game design. In Monopoly if you just steal thousands of dollars from the bank while the banker isn't looking, and the other players see it and allow it, your wealth without effort will totally unbalance and ruin the game. In Chess, if you just take the other guy's queen off the board without having to capture her legally, again, your reward without effort will ruin the entire game. Putting forth effort, and being rewarded with something that matches the effort you put forth, is a basic premise of almost every game that has ever been created. To allow effort and reward to be disentangled, screws up so many things it's hard to describe them all.
With regard to interdependency, again many arguments have been made about this. All professions in an RPG need to be "hooked into" the system. Imagine in D&D if the designers of that game had taken away all spells and all combat skills and abilities of the cleric class, and said, "We'll give you some cool holy items to hold, and you can still turn undead." So that's it, a cleric could ONLY turn undead. That's not enough reason to play a cleric now. It's a cool class and it might be fun to RP, but anyone playing D&D would play something else, because you don't fight undead (that need turning) much of the time, and at all other times, the cleric would not be useful to the party -- would not be able to make a contribution. This is the state dancers are left in. The devs clearly want people to have to be interdependent in combat. They even have a pretty graphical representation of it showing who the tankers, crowd controllers, etc, are. That same kind of interdependency is necessary for the other professions.
We need to be hooked back into the system. Players need a reason to come visit us or they mostly won't. We pay just as many skill points as every other profession in the game... we should be just as important in the gaming sense. "Well you don't need a hook into the system to socialize" is not an acceptable answer, because we're paying skill points here. You can socialize without spending any points. The idea of a dancer isn't to give us a class that allows us to socialize -- we can do that with ANY class. The idea of a dancer (or musician, etc) is to give us a class with which socialization is recognized as a valid and useful form of game-play, where we can do what is fun for us (socializing) and still be "hooked into" the game, just like a "killer" bartle-type can with PVP. That's why the GCW is so PVP-oriented -- it is the "hook" for the killers, giving them an in-game reason to PVP, rather than "just allowing it."
SWG was the first game, originally, in which Socializers were given an actual playstyle. Remember, that's what the entertainer classes were all about. In the past, in all other online games from MUDs to EQ, socializing was something you'd have to do IN SPITE of the game system, and you did it to your character's everlasting detriment (by, for instance, wasting money buying a tavern to run rather than on buying armor/weapons). That is what SWG has become -- being an entertainer hoses your skill points for no real benefit (you can get the same use out of 15 novice points as master). But originally entertainers were designed so that they were just as wise and useful an investment of skill points as any other profession. We need that back, or else SWG is just like every other MMO -- socialization is what you do to the detriment of your character, and socializers may as well not play the game anymore.
Shug_Ninx (sp?) once said he wanted the cantina to be the "social hub of the galaxy." Once upon a time, it was. But it isn't anymore, because hardly anyone ever visits it. If the devs ever want cantinas to be a social hub again, they need to address these two issues. They need to make it so people have no incentive to AFK in the cantina (which turns them into zombie-yards when people do AFK), by eliminating all XP gain whatsoever when the (AFK) tag is up, and by getting rid of the option to stop the tag from going up. People (AFK) for reward because the game allows it, and this ruins the atmosphere of the cantina. The game needs to stop allowing it. They also need to give people a real, solid reason, for visiting the cantina, and we all know a novice-level inspiration buff is not enough. We need the rest of our buffs, and it needs to have been done yesterday. We need to be "hooked back in" to the system, so that we again have a class with which socialization provides real in-game benefits, so that the socializer play-style is once more a valid one in the game, rather than being a side playstyle that we have to do only to the detriment of our own characters.
I'm not asking for anything beyond the pale, here. The devs have said in the past they would hook us back into the game after pub 20. I'm saying, they need to do it .
If you're that concerned that too short a list will get nothing from them, well that kind of says something doesn't it, especially with regard to the interdependency issue, because it would mean we were sold a false bill of goods when BF was removed -- that they have no real intention of giving us anything else. Let's hope that isn't the case. They claimed we were getting more buffs. We're asking them to move the timetable on that up to URGENT with big flashing neon lights. As for AFK, it has hurt the entire game for 2 years. It's time someone made it an issue again, so it may as well be us... especially since we are the most hurt by it.
However, if you really do think that the devs would just ignore a 2-issue list since they probably don't want to do anything about our two REAL issues, then by all means go ahead and add more. But make clear that there are two issues that REALLY matter, and the others are way, way behind on our list of priorities... and that most of us would give ALL of them up FOREVER to have issues 1 and 2 fixed once and for all.
C