Dancer Archive
Thread: Make dancers like Politicians...
KaceyBronson wrote:NoBottom line..I would quitnever come backI am an entertainer. It is what I do in gameI hear to often that our proffession is useless to the gameMaking something I take pride in an "extra" would make it seem even more trivial to those who already put us downI am proud to be able to pop up my master Dancer/ Master Musician/Master Image Designer or even my Master Entertainer TagI know I worked for it. I put my time into itAnd those rare times when I can get one of my PvP friends from one server to make a dancer with me on one of my 4 other servers to hear them say they were wrong about us having the lame proffession makes my skill point use worth itI am so happy with the new buff system. How the ATK entertainers are looked for first. this would destroy what we do in my mind and I hope they don't consider something like this
This unfortunatly is the problem, its almost a martyr type person who takes all ent and accepts aspects such as the new buffs as great because its attention. I dont mean this personally but ive seen alot of those who go the self appointed "grand master" entertainer template have the same view but the problem is that those happy to spend ALL their time in a cantina or putting on shows are a minority to those who enjoy doing this as PART of the game which like it or not is focused around combat.
Full reduction of sp to 0 doesnt need to happen but they need to make it so either you can realistically have a template to take part in the larger game AND dance (sp reduction) or leave it as it is and provide combat levels to the net professions (no armour certs etc just combat levels). Hybrids since the CU have been penalised and there needs to be some give to make that route viable again, hybrids never should be as good as full on combat templates but they should be able to join in on the same level as they did pre CU.
TKM Master Dancer Pre CU could effectively take part in combat whether PVE or PVP.
TKM Master Dancer Post CU lacks combat levels meaning lower health, more agro from mobs, and inability to find groups willing to take them.
Full template ents dont want SP reduction because they are happy being an Ent only.
Full template combat characters having 0 SP ent skills would mean everyone could be a buffbot for their guild negating the limited bonus the new buffs provided.
Reducing SP or giving combat levels means Full temp ents benefit, hybrids benefit and Full combat has the option of becoming a hybrid and experiencing the entertainment and social side of the game without destroying their efefctiveness completely.
Oblox wrote:
This unfortunatly is the problem, its almost a martyr type person who takes all ent and accepts aspects such as the new buffs as great because its attention. I dont mean this personally but ive seen alot of those who go the self appointed "grand master" entertainer template have the same view but the problem is that those happy to spend ALL their time in a cantina or putting on shows are a minority to those who enjoy doing this as PART of the game which like it or not is focused around combat.
I too have a jedi knight/politician, crafter etc i probably use my jedi and smuggler/dancer toon equally but i hate being forced to switch to my jedi to help with high end content just because the dancer part limits me due to CL. Ive recently dropped from mdancer to 0040 so i can get some pistoleer and up my combat level but still enjoy dancing, now a level 70 character i can help alot more. The new buffs have not generated more customer flow for the profession, i still dance quite alot and the cantinas are as dead as ever they were and all the ents have noticed this. The new buffs have technically reduced us to a support support profession in the grand scheme of things, we help the combat support crafters make better products before we at least had direct usefullness to the general populace in healing BF and wounds and mind buffing now we provide grinders with a buff that we have 0 control over.
If you have hundreds of alts an all ent character is viable, if you dont they are not. Like i said before i dont necessarily want sp removal or reduction but balance it so people can be an entertainer and if they choose combat dont penalise them for the decision, there has to be some give and take in the argument between the fulltime ents and the hybrids/dabblers because all are part of the whole and have equal say.
As I write this, I have Kodan's SWG Profession Calculator running. It's a nifty template planner that tells you everything you'd ever want to know about the skills in the game. I recommend it highly.
According to the calculator, I can achieve CL80 in a ranged combat mix (say pistoleer and rifleman) with 67 points left over. That 67 points is enough to learn Dancer 0040 which will allow you to dance every dance that isn't a master-only dance. You won't be able to do any fancy light shows, and you won't give the longest lasting buffs. On the flip side, a combat character who just wants to dance as a sideline shouldn't care about giving a light show or giving a three-hour buff as opposed to a two-hour buff. With a dancer-buff from a musician, our hypothetical dancing gunslinger would still be able to use a good selection of advanced props.
Would our gunslinger be able to heal herself? No. Would she be a fast runner? No. Would she be a surveyor? No. She'd be a dancing gunslinger and that's it.
The point is, this sort of decision-making is what the game's about. There are trade-offs in template building and you have to decide what's important to you. Do you want to be CL80? Then accept that you're not going to be a "full-time" dancer/musician. Do you want to reach your CL80 using a melee/ranged mix or by including medic or scout skills for their various benefits? Then accept that your dancing skills won't be more than a couple of entry-level boxes worth of Entertainer dances and that you can't afford any Entertainer at all if you build your combat toon to be "optimal".
Do you want to be a "grandmaster" entertainer and master three or even all four entertainer profs? Then accept that you're NOT a combat toon and live with your choices.
Maybe I'm unreasonable. I don't think that you should be able to do everything in the game. Someone with double masteries in entertainer professions shouldn't expect to be a top-end combatant, and someone with a triple-mastery shouldn't expect to be a combatant at all. The inconvenience of aggroing CL70 creatures on adventure planets is the price you pay for being a civilian in a combat zone. If you want to hunt with your friends, then you should probably be a hybrid combat character who's a semi-competent dancer instead of a dancer who's a semi-competent combatant.
The CU is here to stay. Arguing that "I should be able to do X because I could do something like it pre-CU" is going to be about as effective as arguing that nobody should be able to give buffs AFK. There's no logical reason why the current game system should give combat levels to non-combat professions. By the same token there's no logical reason why combat characters should be given professional artisan or entertainer abilities just because they want them. Reducing the skill points of entertainer profs or eliminating them entirely is just another step towards making us into something that's not a profession at all, but just a bit of fun fluff for anyone willing to grind the XP to acquire it.
If you want to be a hybrid, then accept that you won't be optimal. If you want to be specialized, then accept that there are limits to what you can do and live with your choices. If combat's important, then consider whether you need to push the hybridization to the other side of the fence.
SlickRiptide wrote:
As I write this, I have Kodan's SWG Profession Calculator running. It's a nifty template planner that tells you everything you'd ever want to know about the skills in the game. I recommend it highly.
According to the calculator, I can achieve CL80 in a ranged combat mix (say pistoleer and rifleman) with 67 points left over. That 67 points is enough to learn Dancer 0040 which will allow you to dance every dance that isn't a master-only dance. You won't be able to do any fancy light shows, and you won't give the longest lasting buffs. On the flip side, a combat character who just wants to dance as a sideline shouldn't care about giving a light show or giving a three-hour buff as opposed to a two-hour buff. With a dancer-buff from a musician, our hypothetical dancing gunslinger would still be able to use a good selection of advanced props.
Would our gunslinger be able to heal herself? No. Would she be a fast runner? No. Would she be a surveyor? No. She'd be a dancing gunslinger and that's it.
The point is, this sort of decision-making is what the game's about. There are trade-offs in template building and you have to decide what's important to you. Do you want to be CL80? Then accept that you're not going to be a "full-time" dancer/musician. Do you want to reach your CL80 using a melee/ranged mix or by including medic or scout skills for their various benefits? Then accept that your dancing skills won't be more than a couple of entry-level boxes worth of Entertainer dances and that you can't afford any Entertainer at all if you build your combat toon to be "optimal".
Do you want to be a "grandmaster" entertainer and master three or even all four entertainer profs? Then accept that you're NOT a combat toon and live with your choices.
Maybe I'm unreasonable. I don't think that you should be able to do everything in the game. Someone with double masteries in entertainer professions shouldn't expect to be a top-end combatant, and someone with a triple-mastery shouldn't expect to be a combatant at all. The inconvenience of aggroing CL70 creatures on adventure planets is the price you pay for being a civilian in a combat zone. If you want to hunt with your friends, then you should probably be a hybrid combat character who's a semi-competent dancer instead of a dancer who's a semi-competent combatant.
The CU is here to stay. Arguing that "I should be able to do X because I could do something like it pre-CU" is going to be about as effective as arguing that nobody should be able to give buffs AFK. There's no logical reason why the current game system should give combat levels to non-combat professions. By the same token there's no logical reason why combat characters should be given professional artisan or entertainer abilities just because they want them. Reducing the skill points of entertainer profs or eliminating them entirely is just another step towards making us into something that's not a profession at all, but just a bit of fun fluff for anyone willing to grind the XP to acquire it.
If you want to be a hybrid, then accept that you won't be optimal. If you want to be specialized, then accept that there are limits to what you can do and live with your choices. If combat's important, then consider whether you need to push the hybridization to the other side of the fence.
If what you say is true then this game is truly dead. The thing that made it great was versatility of characters.
Personally im not willing to declare time of death yet...
SlickRiptide wrote:The point is, this sort of decision-making is what the game's about. There are trade-offs in template building and you have to decide what's important to you. Do you want to be CL80? Then accept that you're not going to be a "full-time" dancer/musician. Do you want to reach your CL80 using a melee/ranged mix or by including medic or scout skills for their various benefits? Then accept that your dancing skills won't be more than a couple of entry-level boxes worth of Entertainer dances and that you can't afford any Entertainer at all if you build your combat toon to be "optimal".
Do you want to be a "grandmaster" entertainer and master three or even all four entertainer profs? Then accept that you're NOT a combat toon and live with your choices.
My problem with this kind of argument, is that it would be valid if all forms of play were roughly equivalent. The problem is, they're not. Not even close. If there was a strong Entertainer game complete with challenges, quests, rewards, repeatable gameplay, and evolving content, then choosing between combat and entertainer would simply be a matter of trade-offs. In reality the post-CU world makes it a choice between participating in a game play that receives a lot of development support and attention, has several play options from quests to missions to PvP to plain old hunting, has continuous content additions and has various rewards from cash to loot to badges, or a game play with little content, limited usefulness, few in game rewards, little development attention and few play options other than to perform somewhere where we can buff or perform somewhere where we can't.
Now granted, that's not all there is to it of course. There is more to consider than that, and having experienced the combat side of the game now I can make a better comparison. For all its options and content, the combat game is pretty much the same - concentrating on your highest damage specials and taking down an enemy as fast as you can. There's also a lot of grinding involved whether it's trying to earn XP, farming loot items or FP or sometimes just trying to slog your way through some adventure area. Entertaining, on the other hand, allows you to express yourself creatively or artistically or socially whether it's working on your skills to acheive a particular pattern or effect or emotion, trying to find the right combination of outfit for a song or dance, or trying to create a friendly atmosphere in a cantina.
So each side has its costs and rewards, but both sides are not equal. The combat side of the game just gets more effort and investment in it than the entertainer side. It's kind of like going to a restaurant with a friend, and while you order the soup and salad, your friend orders the steak and lobster, and then expects you to split the bill 50/50 at the end.
DanceRulez wrote:
... soup and salad... steak and lobster
now I'm hungry
DanceRulez wrote:
My problem with this kind of argument, is that it would be valid if all forms of play were roughly equivalent. The problem is, they're not. Not even close. If there was a strong Entertainer game complete with challenges, quests, rewards, repeatable gameplay, and evolving content, then choosing between combat and entertainer would simply be a matter of trade-offs.
*snip*
It's kind of like going to a restaurant with a friend, and while you order the soup and salad, your friend orders the steak and lobster, and then expects you to split the bill 50/50 at the end.
Exactly... and I don't think it's fair for Social Players to shame other Social Players if they noticethis differenceand wouldprefer to see it resolved.
DanceRulez wrote:
My problem with this kind of argument, is that it would be valid if all forms of play were roughly equivalent. The problem is, they're not. Not even close. If there was a strong Entertainer game complete with challenges, quests, rewards, repeatable gameplay, and evolving content, then choosing between combat and entertainer would simply be a matter of trade-offs. In reality the post-CU world makes it a choice between participating in a game play that receives a lot of development support and attention, has several play options from quests to missions to PvP to plain old hunting, has continuous content additions and has various rewards from cash to loot to badges, or a game play with little content, limited usefulness, few in game rewards, little development attention and few play options other than to perform somewhere where we can buff or perform somewhere where we can't.
Now granted, that's not all there is to it of course. There is more to consider than that, and having experienced the combat side of the game now I can make a better comparison. For all its options and content, the combat game is pretty much the same - concentrating on your highest damage specials and taking down an enemy as fast as you can. There's also a lot of grinding involved whether it's trying to earn XP, farming loot items or FP or sometimes just trying to slog your way through some adventure area. Entertaining, on the other hand, allows you to express yourself creatively or artistically or socially whether it's working on your skills to acheive a particular pattern or effect or emotion, trying to find the right combination of outfit for a song or dance, or trying to create a friendly atmosphere in a cantina.
So each side has its costs and rewards, but both sides are not equal. The combat side of the game just gets more effort and investment in it than the entertainer side. It's kind of like going to a restaurant with a friend, and while you order the soup and salad, your friend orders the steak and lobster, and then expects you to split the bill 50/50 at the end.
Very much how I see it, Shi'ann.
To really over-simplify it..one could say that the combat game is system driven (evenpvp to a great degree..success depending a lot on the quality of your equipment and howyou manage your foods and buffs and which template you choose being often moredecisive in the contest than what skill you may have gained in button smashing..especially with the cooldown timers)and the entertainer game is player driven..the social game and how attractive we can make our dances.
Is theplayer drivengame satisfying enough game play for me to where I am content with it? Heh..if it was I wouldn't be paying for 3 accounts (heh..at least I'm down from six..I should probably start a 12 step program). But I do find that our opportunities for creativity are something I can't get elsewhere in any game and I'm ratherin lovewith them. I'm not done yet with exploring the social game and ideas I and others have had for pve and pvp content for us within the social playstyle.
Do I think we can look forward to having satisfying game play opportunities provided for us through the system? To me it is a problem of trying to enumerate aesthetics. I think a mata hari game might be fun for us for a while..at least it would give us something new to do..until it got old. But considering our greatest satisfaction is derived from how we interact with others and pushing the envelope of manipulating our dances, I fear the spy game would just be a temporary pacifier. Code just can't measure our success at aesthetics as well as we can.
Would more expansive creative and social tools (such asthe dancers' toolbox, fame system and content creation tools)allowing us to create our own content and game content for others(which could include a spy game)be more satisfying for us in the long run than a fairly static system based game? My tendency is to say yes but I enjoy creating content as much as I do participating in it. I do realize others don't.
One way or another, I still contend that devs invest their hours where players are investing theirs'. I think we're going to have to have a significant increase in our numbers before the devs would be able to justify creating a new game for us. So we have this Catch 22; there are only a few players who are satisified with the bit of game that we have andeven fewer who are willing to give up their existing game to participate in our world, yetwe need more players playing in our sandboxin orderforthe devs to be able tobuild castles there (whether those castles be the spy game, fame, creative dance tools or player created content tools).
On every server I visit, I get tells from combatters who would love to dance but don't want to give up their ability to participate in the combat game content to do so. I probably get 4-5 PMs about it every week. I was getting these tells long before I ever became correspondent. In my 14 months as mayor of a major city on my home server, I never got a singletell from anyone who was just dying to be a politician.
I don't feel the same way you do about SP at all, but I do think this is a good idea.
SlickRiptide wrote:
Why do artisans want combat levels? Not so they can wield a pistol. They're primarily interested in accessing their harvesters without being eaten or blaster-burned in the process.
Why do entertainers want combat levels? Some of them want to wield a pistol, but mostly you hear about how they want to go along with the hunting group for fun and buff them without aggroing every Pharple between the starport and the target destination.
Ideas that address these needs within the confines of the game system are the ideas that will get dev consideration above ideas that require a revamp to major portions of the game.
Example - Both of the problems listed above could conceivably be solved by allowing Rangers to craft a special kind of camo kit that convinces animals that the user is higher CL than she really is. To make it simple, a player with no elite professions would be unaffected. A player with one or more elite professions would appear CL18. A player with one elite mastery would appear CL 54. A player with two elite masteries would appear CL80.
You should post about it here. We suggested the same thing for an inspiration buff, but it makes just as much if not more sense for a camp.
Some long comments on two well-written and articulate posts.
DanceRulez wrote:
My problem with this kind of argument, is that it would be valid if all forms of play were roughly equivalent. The problem is, they're not. Not even close. If there was a strong Entertainer game complete with challenges, quests, rewards, repeatable gameplay, and evolving content, then choosing between combat and entertainer would simply be a matter of trade-offs.
Very succinctly put, and very true. It's a chicken and egg scenario - SOE doesn't want to invest the effort (and our professions requires huge amounts of effort for small returns compared to other professions) unless there is a lot of demand. The demand doesn't materialize because the content isn't there.
Part of the problemis that after nearly 2.5 years of existence, nobody has yet managed to really define what this "strong entertainer game" should be. The closest anyone has come (beyond new tunes and dances) is the Theater Manager quest. It has its roots in ideas that date back as far the "old days" when Ravenmist, NewJedi and I were doing the correspondent work. It sounds like it's just what we always requested for an entertainer oriented quest. I'm working through it now. It's not bad. I have no complaints about it. But it's also not compelling, either. It doesn't enhance my entertainer experience, nor does it make me "feel like an entertainer". Truthfully, I feel like a "puzzle solver", same as I'd feel about a similar quest that replaced the performance with combat. Like the mind buffing (which was in great part a response by the devs to the complaint that entertainers had nothing that the other professions wanted to buy) it looks like something that seemed like a good idea at the time but which fell short in the actual implementation.
If the quest didn't have an otherwise unobtainable song at the end, I can't say that I'd really bother finishing it. As it is, I failed my first pass at the "figure out what the audience wants and entertain them" segment and I haven't been back to the theater since. One of these days when I'm near town and I'm bored I'll give it another try but it's not something where I feel like I really need to do this "right now".
The only real compelling "entertainer content" for me is when I interact with a live person. I'm personally starting to doubt that it's possible for the game system to provide compelling entertainer content. Entertainers are a social profession. Quests and what-not that try to provide content are missing the point. What we need, IMO, is content that acts as an enabling mechanism that brings entertainers and non-entertainers together to achieve a common goal. The form it takes is less relevant than it's success at filling up the cantina or otherwise causing non-ents to WANT to come into my sphere of influence.
Reducing or elminiating our skill points wont address the inequity, in my opinion. Instead, it will marginalize us out of existence as a real profession. It reminds me of the bit in _The Incredibles_ where Elastigirl is doing the "mom thing" on Dash and tells him "Everybody's special, Dash." and he mutters "That's just a way of saying that nobody is." If everyone can do what we do, then there's no point in supporting it any more. It's just a fancier version of the /emote command.
Esharra wrote:
On every server I visit, I get tells from combatters who would love to dance but don't want to give up their ability to participate in the combat game content to do so. I probably get 4-5 PMs about it every week. I was getting these tells long before I ever became correspondent. In my 14 months as mayor of a major city on my home server, I never got a singletell from anyone who was just dying to be a politician.
I wonder whether the real focus of "entertainer content" should be content that makes entertainers into social enablers rather than content that "entertains" entertainers. Take this request that Esharra mentions; one that's a driving force behind much of the "let's make entertainers 0-SP" camp.
There's no reason that we can't use cross-pollinization as opposed to complete marginalization. We see this already whenever someone buys a mount or a pet from a creature handler. The pet improves the ability of the player to participate in various activities from travel to combat, but it doesn't turn its owner into a "mini-creature handler". Stims can be purchased but they don't turn their users into medics except in the most minimal sense.
In our case, we could LET the combatants learn to dance and play music, on a small scale. That's all they want, is to have some fun. Game mechanics exist for sheet music and dance steps. All that's required is that these things be provided by entertainers and that some interaction with an entertainer group is required in order to learn the dance or music. There'd be no more harm in letting non-ents learn two entertainer skill than there is in letting them use CL10 pets or stims. To keep the CL10 paradigm from creature handler, the non-ent tunes/dances would have only four flourishes each. With two tunes and two dances, but only two "entertainment slots" in the datapad the non-ent would even have to make choices about whether to be a "dancer", a "musican" or a mixture.
The important thing is that non-ents would get the taste of the ent-world that they want and they would have to acquire and then learn the skills from an ATK entertainer. Whether it worked like a buff, simply by grouping, as a mini-game, whatever... it doesn't matter. What matters is that it would bring the two worlds together and then encourage them to continue to interact afterwards and maybe even convince some of those non-ents to come over to our side of the fence.
THAT, IMO, is the kind of content that will provide "entertainer" content. Something that bridges the gap between the two games and pulls them over to our side instead of pulling us over to theirs.
Message Edited by SlickRiptide on 09-15-200511:34 AM
Message Edited by SlickRiptide on 09-15-2005 11:35 AM