Dancer Archive

Ok, I know I've sworn off the whole AFK topic, but I'm thinking this is a valid idea worth discussing, so I thought I'd bring it up.

NPC entertainers. Put one in every NPC cantina and allow player-run cantinas to place one at their discretion. These entertainers would heal no better (and maybe a bit slower) than a completely novice player entertainer.

In return, kill ALL forms of AFK entertaining. Let it be known that AFK entertaining is against the rules and implement it such that after 10 minutes or so, they automatically stop dancing/playing completely.

Is this ideal? Nope, but I think it's better than the nightmare we currently have. For one, it allows Sony to kill the macrotainer phenomenon while still giving the combat classes the ability to get their healing wherever they need it. Real entertainers would still heal faster than the NPC entertainers, so we're still in demand. The holotainers will hate the idea, but if they're not patient enough to actually play the professions they have to master, do they really deserve to play a jedi? The entertainers who AFK to earn cash while they sleep will hate it also, but since most of them take the line that they're providing a "public service", and they're not in it for the money, the NPC entertainer is an even better idea since it's always there, right?

Does this idea bite? A few months back I would have argued against this, but at this point I'd trade quite a lot to eliminate the existing problem.

- J

I do not think adding npc entertainers is the awnser, a player should not be able to jus walk into town in the middle of nowhere and expect a full heal, he should if he chooses to play in a area with a lack of people have to make that trip to a more heavily populated area to get his battle fatigue healed, I am geting tired of this game trying to hand feed everything to every one

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Guler wrote:
I do not think adding npc entertainers is the awnser, a player should not be able to jus walk into town in the middle of nowhere and expect a full heal, he should if he chooses to play in a area with a lack of people have to make that trip to a more heavily populated area to get his battle fatigue healed, I am geting tired of this game trying to hand feed everything to every one

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I dunno about you, but on my server, just about every cantina I see, be it in an NPC city, player city or remote planet, usually has an AFKer in it. I think that expectation you mention IS the reality, and rather than travel to a more populated place, that problem has invented the need for the AFK entertainer in those remote spots. In other words, I think it backfired on us. They already are hand fed, they're used to being hand fed, they'll cry to high heaven if you take away their hand feeding, and that more than anything else is probably why the devs refuse to remove AFK entertaining.

- J

Let's kill afk entertaining first,,,then wait for a month,,and then decide whether a npc bot is needed,,I suspect that they would only be needed in out of the way cantinas and if we did need a bot,,make it like a vending machine,,,1000 per minute,,

I don't quite understand why entertainment healing is the ONE thing in the game that everyone expects to have at their beck-and-call. You can't get regular healing quickly or efficiently anywhere you want it, can you? Oh people say, "the med center heals you" but it's so slow it's a joke. It works out to something like an average of 1 wound/minute. If you have 100 wounds from forgetting to clone, you'd be in for a much longer and more inconvenient period of time (100 minutes, give or take) than if you just hopped a dang-blasted shuttle for 10 minutes to find a real medic. Or they say that lots of people take Novice Medic but not Novice Entertainer. Well, that's their choice. Choices have consequences. Deal with it.

And what about crafting? When is the last time a fighter said there should be AFK tailors on every world to custom-make clothing to his specifications? Or AFK creature handlers to hand out pre-trained pets when he wants a new one? Why is it considered perfectly reasonable to spend thousands and thousands of credits hopping across 7 different worlds to find that ONE super-great Two-handed Curved Sword in the one weapon shop that has it, but entertainment healing has to be at people's beck and call?

Unless they're going to make EVERY profession have NPC bots on every world so nobody has to travel anywhere, I don't think having NPC dancers is a solution.

C

Interesting idea but a bad one. If you are going to have NPC entertainers, why not NPC medics to heal your wounds... and then NPC vendors to sell weapons and armor...

The whole purpose of not having NPC vendors or really NPC anything is to force some sort of inter-dependency of professions. People want to fight, they need to find people who make armor for them, not just stroll up to the vendor and buy it, or kill 3 meatlumps and get it. That is what other games are about. Personally I like other games a lot better, but if you truly want a player-run economy you need to have no NPCs so that a player can choose his playstyle and have to at some point interact with other people in the community. That is what the developers wanted and to a large extent it is working pretty well.

AFKers help. They don't hurt. You call people selfish that AFK entertain? You are the one being selfish. You feel that only by sitting there staring at the screen and hitting flourish buttons manually you should alone be a master? Please. How selfish is that perspective?

If not for AFKers you would have many, many empty cantinas. As it is there are many, many empty cantinas but it would be far worse without afk-macros. The afk-entertainer does in fact provide a service to other players specifically casual gamers. Maybe to you its no big deal to take a shuttle trip back and forth and waste 20 minutes going to Coronet to find an entertainer to heal your wounds. Many casual gamers play 1 hour clips at a time. To spend half that time waiting at the starport will simply make that person cancel their account due to boredom.

Many people take novice medic instead of entertainer? True. However people take novice medic so they can use stims to heal damage and have the added benefit of being able to heal their own wounds between their hunts or destroy missions or what have you. The entertainer benefits are purely between battle benefits, not during combat benefits like medics are, so you are comparing apples to oranges in a futile attempt to justify your selfishness. Let it go.

There are 2 types of AFKers - those who want to max the profession to move on (95%) and those who want to truly be some sort of entertainer but do not want to stare at the screen until they are a master and can play cool songs and do cool dance moves (5%). Either way this does not hurt you. Those that move on are in it for a very brief time and leave. Those that want to play the profession are afk only until they make mastery, and then they enjoy the profession just like you do, and can group with you to do a really cool song and not worry about xp (where everyone plays top instrument for xp once u max out u can use all the instruments to make the song actually sound better).

To say that those people don't 'deserve' mastery... why not? Because they have jobs and family obligations and cannot sit there and hit the flourish button manually every 10 seconds for the rest of their lives? They should be denied the enjoyment of the game?

If not for afk-macroing many people would not venture into the profession. The less people in the profession, the WORSE it is because you will get less attention from developers if a problem or issue arises, because quite frankly there is so much wrong with the game even still that they cannot waste man-hours to please 1% of the community. They will devote time to please 10% of the community however.

Think I have posted in enough places that the afk-haters will read this. I really am not going to check on your selfish flame-responses.

It was the same with Bounty Hunter by the way. Investigation xp was broken. They wanted to increase it and the jobless loser powergaming community begged them not to because they felt it hurt them if other people could attain mastery quickly (quickly means 100 hours instead of 300 hours go check the BH boards if you dont know how bad it truly was for just that 1 line of the profession) and in fact when they changed it some of the master BH actually quit lol. It was a short-sighted view. Those people felt that since they had 300 hours to devote to the grind that only they were worthy of the title of master. Sorry folks thats not how it works in SWG. There are a lot more casual gamers than power-players, and if the casual gamer can never, ever attain a goal they want (even jedi) a lot of them will quit. How does that help SOE or the state of the game? When I made master BH (took me a LONG time) which I did just after the investigation fix, I fail to see how it hurt the guy who did devote the time and effort into mastering it himself. He could still shoot and kill things, I was not stopping him. He could still get Jedi bounty missions. In fact he could now team up with me and other master BH to hunt jedi down and have some fun instead of running solo investigation missions which are beyond boring.

I do agree that there is too much spoon-feeding, and I think there should be some benefit to an entertainer at the keyboard as opposed to afk all night. Like Image Designer which I just mastered (putrid profession should really just be a skill line in entertainer and thats it), you can ID yourself and get 25% normal xp, or find someone to help you or someone that wants to try new hairstyles and get normal xp. It cannot be afk-macroed since someone, even you, have to click on 'accept', but by getting people to help you out with Muon Gold and Musician buffs it can be mastered in under 2 hours EASILY if done properly. If someone wants to take the time to find people to help them or borrow their friend's time, they will master it faster. If someone does not want to interact with the community at all they can sit at home and ID themselves it will take a very, very long time to master.

So yea it would be nice if there was some way via pop-up boxes similar to ID that you could get more xp by being AT the keyboard... but then for those of you who really want to play this profession, isn't it more about socializing and having fun than clicking pop-up windows?

- Broog

I just thought of something.

I am on board with NPC entertainers, on one condition. I want wounded NPCs I can heal who then tip me a fair price (say, as ent missions).

If THEY get NPCs of US, then WE get NPCs of THEM. Anything else is monumentally unfair.

C

"Interesting idea but a bad one. If you are going to have NPC entertainers, why not NPC medics to heal your wounds... and then NPC vendors to sell weapons and armor..."

From a customer standpoint, can you please explain to me the difference between an NPC dancer and a dancer being run from a macro while AFK?

- J

I sure can Pickles.

An NPC entertainer will be there 24/7. When the server goes down and comes back up, it will still be there. An NPC entertainer will never, ever get disconnected, and can be relied upon 100% of the time, 365 days a year (366 now since we are in a leap year).

An AFK entertainer sometimes goes LD, and since they are AFK sleeping or working, they are not there to log back in. They sometimes move to other cantinas so they might be there one day, and not the next. They are not there when the servers first come back online. They sometimes run out of action and cannot flourish and may not heal as effectively (not sure about that since I am new to the profession but my understanding is that skill level and flourishes help heal faster?).

But the biggest difference? Well that is simple. Most AFK entertainers are trying to get massive xp to attain mastery, then move on and do something else. In a few days, the AFK entertainer is done with dancer or musician or what have you, and is not there anymore. This would not be the case with NPC entertainers which are always there healing BF and mind wounds, and for the most part truly and completely trivializing the profession as we know it.

As it stands now, there really is no assurance that every cantina will have an AFKer macroing in it. NPC entertainers would be far, far worse than afkers.

- Broog

Personally i think NPC patrons would be better. Ever been to Mos Eisly? Hard to find a chair in there cause all the movie NPCs are sitting down.

Wouldn't it be cool if all the cantinas had a few NPC patrons just hanging out (other than the bartender) who could radomly drop you a tip (maybe even a holocron since entertainers rarely go on combat runs to earn them)? It would make dancing in the cantina with no watchers alittle more pleasant on the wallet if an NPC dropped 20 creds in you purse or a shiny braclet in your backpack.

Then again that may just fuel AFKing /cring

i still dont get what people have against AFK entertaining.. the people still get healed.. who cares??

Let me clarify the question. You walk into a cantina and see an AFK entertainer there. Forget what they gain as experience or their reasons for doing it, forget whether they are there 24x7. What difference, from a customer standpoint, is there between that AFK entertainer and an NPC entertainer?

As an additional query, if AFK entertaining is so beneficial, does that mean you'd support changes to the game that make AFK wound healing for doctors a possibility, thus allowing docs to go AFK in a hospital and heal as AFK entertainers do?

- J

I think they should get rid of the servers entirely. Put out a patch that turns it into a solo game we can all play by ourselves on our computers. That seems to be what everyone wants anyway.

C