Dancer Archive
Thread: Profession-specific Buffing: A Method
Piloting is SP free, but it also takes fair to excellent reflexes. I know many people who play swg are disabled, and many of them gravitate to the Social professions. Just a piece of perspective so you realize that the "better way" you may be suggesting isn't viablefor everyone. Besides, your argument actually proves the point. Pilot is "free" and its one of the easiest routes to cash in the game, yet a fully skillpointed profession can't make it on it's own? Something wrong there, and it's not with space or piloting.
Steve_12_08 wrote:
Inever really liked the argument about tipping and "poor" musicians... especially since piloting is a free SP profession, and can be very lucrative (in fact, I'm 4333 privateer and was able to earn nearly 100k in short amount of time), but it would be nice to be tipped for the performances we create, since it is time that could be spent doing something else more lucrative. Covercharge is a way to make your time worth something, although it's not the best solution, it's a workable one.
Message Edited by Steve_12_08 on 06-24-2005 08:20 PM
Steve_12_08 wrote:
The whole point of what I was saying was that musicians also need a way to compensate the time that they could be doing something else, like (as an instance) piloting. Or crafting. Or hunting. Or getting cool quest rewards from the Kashyyyk missions. Piloting is just my personal method of getting money, and no, it's not the only way. I wasn't ever arguing AGAINST musicians making money, I'm arguing against the argument that "I'm a musician, therefore I am poor, therefore tip me."
There are plenty of ways that money can be made, so simply saying "I'm a musician, I'm poor, tip me" is not an argument that will ever fly with me. Unless you're considering the recently labotomized as being "disabled"....
Covercharge is a satisficing of the problem of compensating musicians and dancers for their time. Until the best possible alternative is found (better missions, quests for musicians/dancers/ents, etc., etc.), we'll have to make do with covercharge. However with the system as it is currently, it makes more sense to get the basics of this profession back in line with its current skillpoint cost (i.e. by way of Warryr's or others' suggestions on how to make the buff interface useful).
Message Edited by Steve_12_08 on 06-24-2005 08:20 PM
I agree 100% that all the entertainer professions should be able to participate fully in the game economy. But I just want to clarify something here. Perhaps I am misunderstanding your point and if so I apologize. Piloting is a great way to make extra cash because the NPCs readily buy those parts for an amazing amount of money. But Piloting requires at least 3 things. 1. JTL. Plenty of people have 0 interest in space and thus didn't purchase JTL. 2. The ability to fly a ship with a mouse or joystick. As someone who has suffered a serious crush injury to my dominant hand I can tell you that is often not as easy as you might think. 3. The desire to engage in combat in order to make money. I know plenty of players who specifically chose a non-combat profession because they didn't want to have to engage in combat. Nothing warns you when you start down that path that if you decide to go non-combat you are automatically saying "no thanks I don't need to participate in the galactic economy".
Everything I have seen on my server indicates that /covercharge is a huge joke. We have so many afkzombies and bots still that any live entertainer who wanted to try to make money using covercharge would become the laughing stock.
Again, if I misunderstood I apologize. But it sounded as though you were saying each and every player had the option of getting money either by looting things in space or completing loot/reward quests on the ground. And I have to take issue with that. For any player who doesn't meet the above 3 requirements, tipping is the only game in town. (well except for those swell entertainer and delivery missions but those aren't going to get you into the real economy)
All I meant was that my experience is piloting. But I've made money in so many different ways and I've always primarily played as a musician/entertainer or mixture thereof. Whether it be by crafting (which is non-combat as well), by combat, by piloting, or even by playing special performances, I've never had a problem not having money on hand. None of themis as fun as the latter, and the way I would prefer to make money... but never once have I begged for a tip using "I'm a musician" as an excuse, and I think it's tactless and poor logic to do so, given that there are so many other ways and opportunities to build credits in the game. I'm not so interested in discussing my thoughts on tips/incomein this thread, but I'm more than happy tohave adiscussion elsewhere on how to enhance the entertainer professions' abilities to make cash. 
And now that this is waaaay off topic, let's reign this back in a little bit. I'd much rather hear people weigh in on the thought of an entertainer/musician/dancer crafted device that acts much as a song book or choreography book, where you can program what songs to play, effects, flourishes, holoemotes, lyrics, and inspirations, using DE chips to save them to the datapad and load them as needed. You could even build an entire song or dance around the effect the buff gives, if you are the type of performer to do so. It gives you free reign as to what songs/dances to perform, and perhaps with skillful design could deter or prevent AFKing in some fashion.
Its a great basis for an interface. Is it perfect? Who knows. I hope that it does get serious consideration from the devs.
I'm the board pessimist currently, but I won't post my thoughts as to what will come of all this other than to say: "I'll believe it when I see it"
Fragpuppie Uber
Master Musician/Master Entertainer
Steve_12_08 wrote:
Inever really liked the argument about tipping and "poor" musicians... especially since piloting is a free SP profession, and can be very lucrative (in fact, I'm 4333 privateer and was able to earn nearly 100k in short amount of time), but it would be nice to be tipped for the performances we create, since it is time that could be spent doing something else more lucrative. Covercharge is a way to make your time worth something, although it's not the best solution, it's a workable one.
I’m sorry, but I have to 100% disagree here.
This is a game we pay to play in order to have fun and relax, therefore we all should be able to play what we have fun playing and not be forced to “do” something we hate in order to make credits.
Over the past almost two years I did try many servers and many characters, I’ve been a crafter, combatant, healer …. But I found them all insanely boring. And yes I did try the space also, lasted 2 days before I just couldn’t stand it anymore.
Different people like different things and that’s why we have so many professions to choose from, the main problem I see is that not every combination of offered professions results in productive and useful character. But to blame players for it is wrong, it’s the Devs fault in not paying attention to details where it comes to game balance.
You seem to enjoy little combat thrown in to your template (unless I’m misunderstanding) and that’s awesome, I’m very glad, but please understand, it is not what everyone likes. Atm my character is MD, MM, ME, MID or as one of my combat friends said, she’s a dancing Avon Lady. There is absolutely no predictable way to make credits for her, unless she performs inside a cantina which has entertainers mission terminal on the outside (and many of my favorite cantinas don’t). But if I would follow your opinion I would have to spend large part of my play time doing something I dislike. I only get to play an hour or two each evening, I log on to basically unwind after the day filled with too many things I do because I “must” because it’s my job, I sure as hell don’t want to spend large part of my play-time doing things I don’t enjoy.
This is not meant as an attack at you or your play-style, just an explanation of how I see it from my perspective.
Ok, since some folks didn't like the flourishes impacting performances, I pulled the wad of paper out of the trash bin and smoothed it out as much as possible, and thought about this:
Let's ditch the flourish idea.
How about 8 new icons we can click on that do NOTHING but establish the buff you're providing - mid-performance, pre-performance, whenever, whatever, you can target the patron and click these new icons, and they will achieve the ability to set your buff application just like how the flourish keys would have worked in my original idea? Clicking these would do nothing to your routine. Does that do anything for anyone? Totally unintrusive. Imagine the buff-setting capabilities in my proposed system moved into 8 new icons you could place on your toolbar. This allows you complete freedom in your performance, in the length of performance, and there's no interruption mid-performance when new patrons show up or ask. I don't know what they'd be called (Method 1...Method 2...Method 3?).
I'm assuming the idea is that each icon would apply a different buff so that it couldn't be easily botted? Perhaps some buffs might require two icons... I definitely like that idea.
.1. Warryyr's branch (if you will) which emphasizes unpredictable system messages to prevent it being AFK macroed. If the system tells you to do a certain flourish, change to a certain dance, or press some "OK" button at a random time that say has a refresh rate (so you can't macro /okay;/pause1;/macro okay;...) or there are 8 or something to choose from, whether they affect the dance or not, it will not be possible to AFK them. You have to be WATCHING the system message, which will be unpredictable, and respond to the system message in a unique enough manner that no AFK bot can do it.
2. Panthu's method, which is to use elements of dances to build specific buffs. This is the "swamping" method, where you could AFK macro a single one or perhaps several on a loop ("Buffing artisan crafting now! In two minutes I will buff combat experience! In four minutes I will buff crafting again!"), but you can't possibly cover everything on an efficient or fast enough loop that you'd satisy people. If a live person is there to give the requested buff immediately, vs. a buffbot who won't get to the specific 80/20 buff you are looking for until 15 minutes from now, people will use the live performer.
I think more important than the implementation of either thing is (a) the funadmental basic message that we want to make it so that AFK macroing may be possible but is so much less efficient than being live that nobody will want to do it, and (b) the way to do this is with unpredictability, or too many things for them to cycle through.
We need to get the devs to recognize these BASIC messages and agree to (a) and one of the (b)s as a fundamental concept, BEFORE they decide on an implementation. Once they have agreed "OK, let's use the unpredictability method and bring an end to buffbots," then it's time to work on just exactly HOW to make it unpredictable. That is where the devs really come in, because they know what their system is capable of at the programming level and we don't.
The problem is that so far, what happens is they go for the specific suggestions without looking at or understanding the fundamental logic and reasoning behind them -- this goes for ALL the changes they seem to make, not just dancers -- and then everyone gets all caught up in the specifics without there being a real plan that is based on fundamental principles.
The fundamental principles need to come first, and as of yet I do not see this happening from the dev team. We need to try to push them on that.
C
Chessack wrote:
I think more important than proposing a specific method, we need to make sure the devs have got the idea of what we are after.
C
Chess has a very good point here. At this point, I don't have any information regarding what implementation plans they have, if any, nor what their limitations are for such (both technological and gameplay limitations). Whle we are all pretty well-versed about our criteria, it would really help in presentation of an idea if we list those criteria and talk to those points when defining the implementation.
What is implemented is often a combination of their ideas & our's. We would definitely be serving ourselves better by pointing to our rationales, all in one place,and in a format they can relate to.
Warryyr wrote:
Ok, since some folks didn't like the flourishes impacting performances, I pulled the wad of paper out of the trash bin and smoothed it out as much as possible, and thought about this:
Let's ditch the flourish idea.
How about 8 new icons we can click on that do NOTHING but establish the buff you're providing - mid-performance, pre-performance, whenever, whatever, you can target the patron and click these new icons, and they will achieve the ability to set your buff application just like how the flourish keys would have worked in my original idea? Clicking these would do nothing to your routine. Does that do anything for anyone? Totally unintrusive. Imagine the buff-setting capabilities in my proposed system moved into 8 new icons you could place on your toolbar. This allows you complete freedom in your performance, in the length of performance, and there's no interruption mid-performance when new patrons show up or ask. I don't know what they'd be called (Method 1...Method 2...Method 3?).
The only problem that I woulod have with this is that it could easly lead to botting, with the origional method, it would be almost impossibel to set up a macro because the "Methods" changed randomly.
I know that if there are many it might take a buff bot a while to get through them all, but I would not put it beyond the 1337 d00ds to set up buffing houses with multipul Bots. Buffbot A will performBuffA and B, BuffbotB will perform Buff C and D ect ect.. Also given the Devs tendancy to make things Easer for combatnts.. i see these buffs taking less then120 secnodsto apply, with as little as 30 seconds for a Double Master Bot.
Now.. this system along with a randomization would be great.. You use what ever command is chose (say its /givebuff)
Then you recieve a system message (Not a pop up, I mean a message that appears in yout system tab (We all have one of those right? It sends system messages like You gain Xps, and you perform a flourish to this tab making less spam)
The system message should be Simple
- Method 1 for Buff A
- Method2 for Buff B
- Method3 for Buff C
- Method4 for Buff D
I don't mean to nitpick.. My main goal is to preven botting, above all else
Warryyr wrote:How about 8 new icons we can click on that do NOTHING but establish the buff you're providing
Same as what I said earlier, except icon buttons to go with the command line. Yes, I think this is how it should be done... totally separate commands from performance.
BUT...I disagree with part of what you just said. If we let the buffs run, started pre- or mid-performance without a customer targetted, I think we're still going to have bots that start it and spam "watch me for uber melee defense buff!" for hours on end. Although, having to target the customer or put in customer name precludes us from buffing multiple people at once, but maybe thats the lesser of the evils? Based on inspiration buffs today, which dont take too long, one customer at a time shouldn't be too cumbersome.
- Ish