Dancer Archive

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Esharra wrote:

My bright side has slowly deteriorated over the past 1.75 years.

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Eshy -

My bright side has been Kirah, Lei, Ubi, You, Javy, and many more in the community too numerous to list. I'm just glad that you all stay reasonably shiny without too much waxing.

I would happily be just an entertainer with no healing or buffing powers at all. But I agree with the above poster -- give me those skill points back so I can make a living as something else (Master Chef/Master Merchant comes to mind, for instance).

C

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Chessack wrote:
I would happily be just an entertainer with no healing or buffing powers at all. But I agree with the above poster -- give me those skill points back so I can make a living as something else (Master Chef/Master Merchant comes to mind, for instance).

C

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I'm totally in agreement with both of you. I need some or all of the skill points back. I'll keep dancer until I stop playing... I'll just stop playing alot sooner if my character is unable to particpate in any content

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Goldshadow wrote:

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Esharra wrote:

My bright side has slowly deteriorated over the past 1.75 years.

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Eshy -

My bright side has been Kirah, Lei, Ubi, You, Javy, and many more in the community too numerous to list. I'm just glad that you all stay reasonably shiny without too much waxing.

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Isn't he just to glorious for words? /sigh (Not that I mind the waxing . . . . )

But Roho is right. He did a lot to quell my concerns this evening just by being his typical calming, reassuring self. I can hold on and see what happens because of all of you.

We can raise all sorts of alarms and ruckus and second guess ourselves and the devs until the kaadu come home, but truth be told we won't really know what changes will affect us until the CU is released. It has become our nature (understandably) to strike out in anger and defiance when we even just perceive a problem with our profession. We expect the worst (also understandable) from the get-go. I'm not suggesting we sit quietly back and wait for whatever befalls our profession to happen, however let's try not to fly off the handle -too much. If it becomes something many of us can't play with, so be it. Let's not allow angry supposition and conjectureto ruin what fun we have now and taint our view of what might be in our future with SWG.

Well Kirah, the reason for the angry supposition (as you know) is that, as far as any of us can tell, despite whatever efforts they may think they have made in this regard, it is infinitely clear and indisputably true that the devs have no effing idea what people who play entrtainers want, like, or need. Their guesses to this point have been almost all wrong. It is going on 2 years to get it through their skulls that falling is inappropriate for a master dancer. Two years, for a simple one-sentence concept. They also don't "get" that many of us are not acheivery types but social types, and so grinding dance is not what we are about, but rather, performing. They also most definitely do not get that we want our dances to look good. This should be obvious if you check out our top issues, which have been (over the years) things like (1) get rid of falling, (2) fix the formal/lyrical base dance, and (3) /startbanddance, /stopbanddance that works like band starts and stops for musicians. Those 3 things, voiced over and over again whenever we were asked what we wanted, share a common theme -- they will make us look better. So the devs, seemingly, fix 2 of these (falling and formal/lyrical base dance) but, as we see now, at the apparent cost of de-synching eveyrone's clients from the server (or from each other or something) so now it becomes much more difficult to coordinate a band and, you guessed it make it look good. So now the GROUP looks worse on all dances but formal or lyrical (as it has been described to me, at least), but the SOLO performer looks better. And the devs think we will be happy about this... Why? Because they don't understand why we asked for what we asked for. It wasn't FALLING that we didn't like but that falling destroyed the look of the dance, especially ruining group dances.

Musicians are all about sound... they want to sound good. Imagine if they "fixed" some problem in musician by making it sound, solo, way better, but in a group, certain bandflos now sounded like a set of fingernails being raked screechily across a chalk board. Dancers are all about the LOOK of the dancers and the dance. It was always hard to co-ordinate groups of dancers (much harder than co-ordinating musicians, which I say without the slightest reservation as someone who does far more of the latter than the former, but plenty of both). So now it will be even more difficult. And clearly again we have the unavoidable fact that the devs do not understand what we want, need, like, hate... in short, they do not get us. They never have, and they never will.

One of the members of my band, Hyperdrive, is going to Fan Fest this year. She said she's going to give them one hell of an ear full (if she can get anyone to listen to her). She is also a master pikemen. The rest of us on the band just said to her, "Bring your Pike... Maybe you can beat some sense into them." Since no amount of explication or reasoning seems to work.

C

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kirah_ashlin wrote:

We can raise all sorts of alarms and ruckus and second guess ourselves and the devs until the kaadu come home, but truth be told we won't really know what changes will affect us until the CU is released. It has become our nature (understandably) to strike out in anger and defiance when we even just perceive a problem with our profession. We expect the worst (also understandable) from the get-go. I'm not suggesting we sit quietly back and wait for whatever befalls our profession to happen, however let's try not to fly off the handle -too much. If it becomes something many of us can't play with, so be it. Let's not allow angry supposition and conjectureto ruin what fun we have now and taint our view of what might be in our future with SWG.

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I think what worries many of us isthe quote from TH:

"Entertainer changes are outside the scope of the Combat Upgrade."

Given this statement, and their previous track record, it's not unreasonable to assume that any of our skills and interdependencies they decide to change or remove during the CU won't even begin to be addressed until the Non-Combat Profession Revamps, which will naturally be after they have the CU and the new expansion in some semblance of working order - and we all know how long *that* always takes...

hmmm...
Given the options I'd prefer the second one. Our major problem has always been that people don't actually find us entertaining. The buffbot problem existed only because people don't actually want to listen to a musician or watch a dancer.
I believe instead of blackmailing people to come to us with heals and buffs that do not actually have something to do with entertaining we need better ways to entertain people. More effects, more dances is therefor a good start. Given the fact that half of our skillboxes have no or little use after the CU, I'd prefer the branches of the dancer tree not to be split by into different isolated abilities, but into several dance styles, each with its own effect, items to be used, special clothes certifications, options to synchronize events with musicians and other dancers and so on...
We all know the problems with entertainer skills in the game. Singing a song is crap, since, know matter how good your songwriter skills are, no-one likes to listen to a song you can't hear. No-one likes to watch a more or less random sequence of the same three flourishes over an extend period of time.
But I believe if we had our skill tree split into, let's say, Corellian Style (things like Basic, Poplock, Popular), Nabooian Style (Formal, Lyrical, Theatrical), Tatooian Style (Breakdance, Footloose, Tumble) and maybe a lost Alderan Style with tango-like dances. Then give the opportunity to make synchronization points and define a choreography script a set of dancers and musicians can use for orientation, while NOT doing bandflourishes, define virtual points on the floor and give dancers the opportunity move around a little to compensate the drift that will always happen due to the lag.
Each style must be mastered on its own in a show, that is a "standard" to this style each dancer/musician/image designer must know, with costumes, several dancers and musicians entertaining in a place suitable for the style, with image designers caring for the decoration to become master. Make become these profession quest based like this, while entertainer stays grinding, getting basic knowleadge of the business and working the way up.
That was the right way to go. Not blackmailing people to watch when they don't want to but make them want to.

Of course this would be a little too much to ask for. But just going into this direction, even if slowly and giving us the opportnity to create something that is more worth watching than that what we got would be helpful.

Oh I agree that the guys need more masculine looking dances and I have no problem with it.

I'd just like exotic to have a full range of flourishes also. And I don't consider a few new dances to be a fair exchange for our profession becoming even less generally useful and more marginalized than it has been up to now.

C