Dancer Archive
Thread: Bots do more good than harm
hawbatleader scribbled:
Entertainers seem to feel they have a right to the same abilities.
Fine. jump on the buff vending entertainer bandwagon - craft holos of your performance, and allow us to watch holos of a performance for a buff. Spend the same time harvesting, and spending lots of money to secure uber resources... craft a great recording, and you will make money...and you will be well rewarded...and NEEDED for your skills.
Right now, you are a social club that the rest of us need to belong to, in order to facilitate our game play.
I don't have to be polite, or hunt all over the galaxy for the mysterious roving weaponsmiths vendor. Its a constant....and it doesnt act like a primadonna. And its logged on 23 hours a day...
Actually it is not entertainers who "feel" they have a "right" so much as it is you and people like Naish who champion afk buffbots who seem to think you want entertainers to have the abilities to provide their services when the player (irregardless of the account) is offline.
Entertainers are not merchants. Entertainers are not a "social club," no more than live doctors sitting at starports are. However, they are designed to provide a real-time service between players, part of which in theory, is supposed to involve an opportunity for social interaction. They enjoy that even though you do not.
You may not have to be polite to vendors, but you said yourself, you know enough to be polite to the weaponsmith for custom work. Entertainer buffs were meant to be only custom work, performed by the player each time someone wanted the service.
If there is such demand for their services that a custom work model cannot keep up, then I (and others) have suggested alternatives that do not involve abusing the afk macro system or their class to do it. This was the drive behind my merchant services proposal and other crafting based suggestions. But the custom work still needs to have value in whatever system we create, since it is the custom work that provides the opportunity for social interaction that entertainers find most fun.
So Naish and Hawbatleader:the right decision is not to keep the macrosin order to keep the bots (it may be to keep macros), but instead to change how the system works so people feel less incentive to try to make bots out of entertainers bymanipulating the afk system.
Whether that is because the run around is harder, the buffs are less of a bonus or the in-game alternatives are better, I don't care.The solution should reduce the rampant AFKing for profit (experience or credits) in the game. I have a feeling the developers have the same attitude as I do except that they do care because they want the solution to be easy to code and fast to implement.
Fact is, no matter how "interesting" you make game play, people are offline more than they are on. So if they can advance when they are not on, they will. Even if that means they never really play one of the character's accounts for which they pay to have or even, if it is their only account for a time. That kind of game is flawed so the developers are realizing they need to fix it.
Naish wrote:
Most players in the game like buff bots. It's a good service, if it wasn't my toon wouldn't constantly be busy and people wouldn't tip us 10 to 20K per buff. We will be missed, and when you guys get bored with dancing and playing music. When that happens the combat professions will miss us even more.
In the overall scheme of things we do way more good than harm. I wish more bot owners and bot customers were aware of the topics on this board and would speak up.
I'm in here talking about this with you guys in the interest of my customers and the customers of my fellow bot owners. I don't want them to go away and neither do my customers.
I hope that, at the least very least, my voice will been heard by the Devs. And if I'm lucky, I'll help them make the right decision. The right decision is to keep the macros and keep the bots.
Sorry but you are very misguided. Real entertainers will NOT tire of entertaining. Heck only last night 3 Master Dancers decided to have a dance (lasting several hours ) on TC - and this came 2 days after 2 other master dancers did the same. This is on Testcenter (i.e. small community) and any of the dancers would happily have buffed if asked. On Bria and Starsider I frequently dance with high level ATK dancers - again people if politely asked will buff.
CodeBreaker007 wrote:
Tell me if you dance all day, what else do you do in swg, if your telling me that you sit at your pc all day just dancing then your just paying monthly for an expensive chat channel....Don't get me wrong but I don't beleive that someone just dances all day and does nothing else in swg..And as for botts, why are people interacting with them? BECAUSE THEY ARE THEIR PROVIDING A SERVICE
Thats because you are still under the impression that dancing is doing nothing. Socialisers like to "socialise", that means talking in various chat channels, tells etc interacting with customers and other live dancers with them in the cantina. It hasn't occured to you yet that this game is like a very elaborate chat client to the socialisers and thats why they like it have you?
Interacting with people in spatial is the Meat of the profession, talking to customers and the other entertainers. if you take that away all we have left to do is chat in tells and other channels, and we need not dance in a public cantina to do that. the thing is we WANT to be able to perform in the public cantina, to be able to chat in spatial without anoying spam(and this affects everyone, in other places than the cantina) We want to be able to sell buffs to those that want them without being ignored for a npc.
It bothers a great deal of the customers as well, Many comment on how refreshing it is to see a live entertainer when they see me.
Has it occured that it will in fact be alot easier to find a buff when you walk into a cantina and you see a master performing, and you know for sure that they are there at the keyboard. All you have to do is walk up to them and ask or send a tell, there will no longer be a need to wade through the 30 people there looking for one that is not afk, because they will ALL be atk.
Just on a side note to those that say "but there will be noone there at all"in theed cantina last night about 11 pm something happened that spat everyone out of the game in the cantina, made them crash, as i logged back in i looked around to realise that about 15 or so entertainers had logged back in and the rest were all ld. There were at least 15 entertainers including several masters myself and a musician friend included who were buffing that were all live and on at 11 pm. almost double that amount were afk and unable to log back in.
codebreaker007
Tell me if you dance all day, what else do you do in swg, if your telling me that you sit at your pc all day just dancing then your just paying monthly for an expensive chat channel....Don't get me wrong but I don't beleive that someone just dances all day and does nothing else in swg..And as for botts, why are people interacting with them? BECAUSE THEY ARE THEIR PROVIDING A SERVICE where are you? sulking afk or not advertising that you are buffing, as I keep saying if you got off your arse you could make money, but you won't. You just want a part of the game removed so it takes away your compition..
Advise to you people would be to train your characters in something that you can provide a service, if your that fedup...not just one profession that is the most useless when it comes to making money..
Do you walk into a restuarant or any service industry store and don't say anything to the people working there? Ask them why they are doing the job that they are doing and 90% of them will say they enjoy meeting new people. I wonder if you treat the people doing these types of jobs like you do entertainers in the real world, but I don't think you do since there would be repercussions to your actions.
I think you should ask someone who is really in the killing profession, military,why they do what they do and I can guarantee that it won't be because they get to kill. They'll say something like they're defending their country, following family tradition, etc...
Now for my usual, well mr. combat type I expect you to be out there killing critters and give everything that you harvest to my doctor 23/7, so she can enjoy her game.
Funny, I don't dance publicly anymore and I have a lot of regulars built up that I'm always getting requests for buffs by them and they even travel to me if I'm out doing missions. In addition, they pay me 20k to get buffed. The moral of the story is to make friends with your local entertainer and they will be there for you when you need them.
CodeBreaker007 wrote:
Tell me if you dance all day, what else do you do in swg, if your telling me that you sit at your pc all day just dancing then your just paying monthly for an expensive chat channel....Don't get me wrong but I don't beleive that someone just dances all day and does nothing else in swg..And as for botts, why are people interacting with them? BECAUSE THEY ARE THEIR PROVIDING A SERVICE where are you? sulking afk or not advertising that you are buffing, as I keep saying if you got off your arse you could make money, but you won't. You just want a part of the game removed so it takes away your compition..
Advise to you people would be to train your characters in something that you can provide a service, if your that fedup...not just one profession that is the most useless when it comes to making money..
I don't dance all day, I dance daily. There is a difference. The bigger part of my playtime, however, is spent dancing in a cantina, roleplaying, and socialising. Check out the stories in my sig if you want to know what kind of adventures one can have as a roleplayer and dancer.