Dancer Archive

Message Edited by Jeassa on 03-27-2004 07:57 AM

I have started Master Dancer with my wookiie I can honestly say I wouldn't have touched it with a barge pole (might have dabbled with entertainer) had the holo not told me it was my first profession.

Yes, I will be AFK for large portions of the XPing - it is utterly mind numbing for a games player. Roleplayers will find it fascinating - the opportunities to interact with people are diverse and plentiful, however the wise amongst you will note that it is the location, not the profession that provides these opportunities. (the location is popular because of the profession, granted)

This is what it comes down to. If you are a gamer first and RPer second or not at all then you will hate this class because its boring. Not just a little bit boring either but totally and utterly dull, devoid of any enetertainment value at all after the novelty value of the first few hours of working out how it works, etc. Compare sitting at the keyboard watching your macro run, tuning it to remove flourishes you don't like the look of and to add new dance routines and flourishes you have earned to running through the Naboo Weapons Development centre with your flamethrower blazing, taking down between 2 and 6 Stormies at a time and only just escaping with your life. This is the comparison you have to draw, we pay for this game - to be entertained. Of the 2 scenarios I have described, purely in game mechanics, the second is by far the more entertaining - it has adrenaline, skill required and great rewards (Cash and loot) the first (Dancing) has 0 entertainment value [unless you are on drugs and find the pretty colours and sound entertaining], no cash reward having been ATK for 5 hours I got no tips at all(this was common for all entertainers in our group [Coro Cantina] - I checked) and no adrenaline at all (unless you are naturally hyperactive and easily over-excited).

If you are an RPer first and gamer second then you may well love the class. Great opportunities for cantina conversation and making friends. However the number of AFKers and people only interested in watching their BF and mind wounds heal in the Cantina will impinge upon this enjoyment.

Basically all the entertainment from being a Dancer comes from you roleplaying with other people, etc - all of which you COULD get without doing the actual dancing. Ergo Dancing adds nothing to the game gameplay wise and needs a rethink. Logically speaking I dont think we can argue with this statement - the sheer numbers of AFK people grinding their way through the profession is testament to just how dull it is.

So here is my recommendation:

Keep a combat profession going so you can actually play the game and have fun in the peak times. (Perversely also the best time for getting that entertainment healing XP)

When you go to bed or work - leave your chap dancing in the cantinas while you are AFK - without the AFK dancers it would be impossible to get mind healing in some places at off peak hours so this is a valuable service.

OR

Smoke large quantities of cannabis and stay ATK while you learn Master Dancer - you might JUST about find it interesting if you smoke hard and long enough. Try drinking wine at the same time, this may also help a bit. You can also use the time to read all the skill and ability Mods for all professions - that fills up some time.

Enjoy the RP (dancer not essential for this but is a good ice-breaker obviously)

-=-=-=-

The polarity between RPers and Gamers is why you always get threads like this with "XXX is rubbish","No it isn't - you're rubbish and spoiling the game", "No - youwere rubbish first and also you are a moron"type intelligensia arguments going on in every Online RPG (from MUDs to DAOC to SWG).

Skip it - I've heard it all before about a million different subjects on dozens of games - it all boils down to RP vs Gameplay. And no, there's no reason why you can't have/do both but they are 2 distinct mindsets and people rarely have both. Never the twain shall meet and all.

cheers,

Jowetharr - hairy dancing freak currently on show in the Coronet Cantina - Infinity server

Yes, I did.

I have mastered dance several times now on different characters. My beta characters and my first dancer I made after the game went live I did the skill completely at the keys. Hell I didn't know you COULD make a macro to do the flourishs.. I just pressed the buttons on the tool bar. By the time I had learned more about the macro system I was well into playing the game.. Looking back on it the only thing that was fun per se about doing the skill this way was the hours of flirting and gossiping with my fellow entertainers. This was gone from the game about three weeks into the game being live. AFK was already the norm by then as people had finally figured out how to write repeating macros.

During beta we had rooms full of AFK entertainers but the at the keyboard players were able to use band flourishes to make them less of a nuisance. Just before the game went live they decided that the way to stop AFK was to take away experience from bandflourishes... LOL good call there BTW. Instead of giving the at the keyboard players the ability to use these people to make entertainment they left in a place a system where AFK would have to basically compete with the at the keyboard players for attention.

Anyway back to th live server... So it was about three weeks into the game being live. The people who were eager to play 12 hours a day to get skills were begining to burn out on entetraining. They no longer had a reason to be in the cantina save for the occaisional tip or maybe to flirt with a fellow entertainer. At this point people were mastering the artisan skills so people were looking for houses, clothes. armour and weapons. Instead of looking to entertain the people that played so much now found that they needed to have money which the combat players WERE NOT paying. On lowca I saw more master dancers hunting baz nitch than I ever did in the cantina during this phase. The only entertainers you'd find were AFK tucked away in a remoteoutpost healing battle fatigue for a group of combat players.

By the begining of July Coronet and Theed would be empty during parts of the day. I would get tells from people asking me to dance for them everywhere I went... A few even offered to tip. The problem though was that it was more profitable for a dancer that had the same needs as a combat player (getting a house, getting clothes and equipment) to learn a combat skill or artisan skill and make money that way than to make themselves available to entertain.

This is when we started to see the first macrobots. People needed their battle fatigue healed but there weren'tenough entertainers available working at the rates that the early days of the server had established (less than a thousand credits for a healing) so the combat players would place a macrotainer in a cantina on the planet they were hunting from. They needed the battle fatigue gone so they acted.

By late August the people who had been the at the keyboard players the first month of the game began to drop entertainer skills like crazy. Those that kept the skills rarely if ever did more than dance with friends. If you saw a dancer or a musicianin a cantina they were there AFKing. It was like pulling teeth trying to get fellow entertainers into a cantina by that point.

Fast forward now to the player city introduction.... Now people that had a city needed a cantina. To get people into that cantina they needed to have a 24/7 entertainer. Obviously it is not possible to get enough entertainers to sit in an empty cantina one that will rarely have a player drift through so the answer is AFK. Now we have a player city on every server that has an AFK entertainer in it... The bigger guilds have masters who you can group to get buffs from (TAG on lowca is great example).

Finally we get to holotainers... Those people that basically never wanted to, cared to or asked to ever train an entertainer skill. It is required for them to get the skill because of the badly implemented jedi character system. Well what can you say about them... At least there are players raising entertainer skills in large groups so that the very few who want to actually play as entertainers can get the skills in a relatively short time. Before the holo craze it could take as long as two full weeks even AFK to master music or dance. At least there are entertainers available at all hours in two cities on each server (not including the masters who sit in a lonely player cantina).

Anyway... I guess to wrap all of this up.. I can safely answer your question.. Yes I did master dance without being AFK but there is no way in hell I would ever wish that again on another player. The experience and play system for dancer has been broken since creation and some of us are willing to admit it.

I mastered dancer in the first couple weeks after the game went live. Yes it was very much a chat room with experience. But I loved every moment of it. We always had 15+ entertainers in there, and being really the only male dancer, and one of the few male entertainers at all, I always had several people chatting with me.

The game today for entertainersis nothing like what I experienced.