Dancer Archive
Thread: New information on Dancer Mind buffing. (on TC)
First off I'd like to say I'm sorry for taking so long to get around to posting this for you all. This change happened on Saturday and I can't access these boards from home, only work (internet explorer is borked) so I had to wait til I got to work to post whats going on. As someone else noted from the T.C. boards the targetable buffs I've been pushing for have been put into test, the way their done was the wayI pushed for, for now at least. Some of the other ideas to make these more afk proof are going to take longer to do and this is the best we could come up with in the short term and thebest me and the boss could agree on.
The new flourishes are targetable.. Yay! The command to target someone is /setperform while you have someone targeted. You can still buff more then one person at a time tho. Yay! In order to buff a group they have to be in your group. If their in your group they can all /watch you and get the buff in about 5-10 minutes of watching. So.. from now on, when I refer to our Active buff I'm talking about your targeted buff, when I say Passive I mean our group buff.
First on the active buff. The active buff can be targeted at any time, even before you start dancing or while you are dancing. That target will remain the target until you choose another target so you can stop dancing, start dancing, whatever and it will not affect the buff, (however any time spent not dancing won't be increasing the buffs power) but once you start dancing again you'll just pick up where you left off.
The buffs power will hit max long before its duration does. What do I mean by this? Simple.. a Master can buff someone for 100% of their current mind. This increase is gradual.. after say, 1 minute you might only be at 50% and if someone stops watching thats all they will get. You seem to hit the 100% mark very fast tho, about 2 minutes.
The duration however I'm having a hard time with. The way our dev intended it to be is that it would take 5 minutes of active buffing to give someone your full power buff, duration wise. During this 5 minutes the dancer performing has to flourish non stop to meet that 5 minutes. Why do you have to flourish non stop? Because the power of our buffs is tied to our flourishes.. the more we flourish the faster we'll do our best buff possible. (this wasn't my idea but I don't mind it too much) What about our passive buffs you say? To be honest I don't know exactly how long those take yet, I spent most the weekend testing our targeted buffs and didn't have much time for the passive ones however, from the best I can tell it takes about 5-10 to do our max buff with the passive system.
Now for the current problems.... oh yes.. always those aren't there? Remember the 5 minutes I told you about? The 5 minutes our dev said it was suppose to take. Umm.. well, the answer is no, 5 minutes isn't cutting it right now and I'm beating our dev over the head as we speak about that. (knocks him again while writing this) I tried several times to buff someone for 5 or 6 minutes while active buffing doing non stop flourishes and was only able to get the buff to last about an hour and a half which hey, isn't that bad darnit, but its still not the way its suppose to work so hopefully that will be fixed. (currently I'm guessing it probably takes about 8 minutes to get it to last its max.
Well... can't think of much else to add. This is definately a huge improvement and I hope you all are happy that our dev is listening and working with us. These are some pretty big improvements to our profession pretty fast so give our dev a big hug will ya? This guy has a ton of stuff to do besides just us so I am really happy to see us get this much so fast. 
If any of you have any more questions for me you'd like answered then feel free to shoot. Same goes with any ideas or comments etc. and if theres anything else you want me to test out let me know and I'll do that too! Doing the best I can for you folks but its your ideas and comments that help me do a good job.
I could see potential for extra tipping here.
Patron: Will you buff my group of eight?
Dancer: Sure. But it'll take 45 minutes to get to each one.
Patron: Can't you do all at once?
Dancer: I could if I join your group.
Patron: I'll invite you. Oh, you're already in a group.
Dancer: Yes, well, I need to stay in this group for my dancing. It helps me learn my moves.
Patron: Can't you leave the group?
Dancer: I could, but that would cut into my training.
Patron: We'll pay you 5000 credits.
Dancer (to other performers): Be back in 10, folks.
From the sounds of the buff, that's how I plan to operate. If I'm in a cantina with other performers, then I will group with the performers (I technically do not need any more xp, but I like to help out others) and do only targeted mind buffs. If I'm not currently targeting someone, I may buff someone for free...a sort of "first one's free" type of thing.
If I'm alone in a cantina (ala Wayfar or Yavin), then I will probably just invite people into my group if they want the passive buffs. And if the tip is nice, I may actually notice someone asking for an invite for the buff. I don't know; I'm so scatterbrained that I might accidentally miss a request for something. I do that a lot, especially when someone /tells me a request to cyber.
Hunting groups will benefit from the passive buff. I plan to use that. Oh yeah.
Hmm, yes, spambots asking for people to invite them into their group for the buff. That is annoying. Perhaps we can combat that by constantly inviting them to our group. Then no one else can invite them. Heh. Also, I will /report spammers. That is harassment, after all. And when I place a few /tells into the spatial chat for the /report, it should tell the whole message.
Ravenmist, any progress at all is welcome progress.
To tack onto Kuildeous' comments, this still isn't ideal, of course. As i understand what you wrote, we can either target and buff ONE individual at a time, or we can join a group to buff an entire group, correct? Are those buffs equivalent in power and duration?
So in other words, a player can't enter a cantina, spot a master dancer and ask for a mind buff without (a) Being the only one she's targeted, (b)inviting her into his group, which usually requires she leave her entertainment groupor (c) joining her group which requires he leave his own?
I suppose we could still manage to get it to work, but I'm curious why it's not possible just to target multiple players, one at a time, do /setperform, and give them their buff? If I'm a rebel dancer in Anchorhead during a PvP battle, do I want to join and leave groups all day to give my buffs, especially with the ongoing chat bugs associated with that? Do i want to make 20 rebel players wait their turns or force a full group to drop one player so I can join them just to buff?
Please don't think I'm whining here. If I could give this Dev a big hug, I'd do so -- and you deserve one as well But I figure this is the time to bring up potential issues so he can think them out while he's building the code.
One last thing: If I target and buff a player while covert, does it give me TEF? Will it force me to go Overt? What are the factional issues he's pondering with this?
Oops - forgot one important point! (1million creds for an edit button!)
As implemented, the new buffs STILL do not deter AFK macroing!
Most AFK Macroers have a /join command in their macros just in case someone invites them into a dancer group. Now, that /join command will also allow players to add that dancer to their group and gain the benefits of her buff EVEN THOUGH SHE'S STILL AFK!
If the Devs are truly sincere about stemming AFK macroing, they'll ditch this idea of a group buff and work on letting us only buff those players we actively target, but as many targets as we want at one time without having to leave our groups or join theirs.
Okay Sinda, to answer your questions. I'm sorry if I didn't make this clear before, hope this will explain things better.
There are two types of buffs, Passive and Active.
The active buff can target anyone. In group or out of group. Just target the person you want to buff and do a /setperform and after about 5-8 minutes if your flourishing a lot they'll have the max buff. (this only works on one person at a time)
The Passive buff only works if someone is in your group. Then they can just listen to you without you targeting them. This buff takes slightly longer to apply at its max level.. 8-10 minutes I think (not entirely sure yet) The passive group buff was added so that the dancers could buff an entire group at one time. This helps either speed up buffing a group of people paying you or, if the dancer is out in the field he/she can buff their group up faster during downtime. Just having a targeted buff would make both of those cases really tough. It would mean we wouldn't be able to buff a group effectively.
Yes... this is far from AFK proof still due to that **edit** /join. I'm very aware of this and will definately be working on coming up with a good solution to that problem. The ideas we've had and seen are things thats going to take longer to get put into the game so this may end up the best we can do for now.
I understand there are reasonable limits to what can be coded. Maybe you can lean on them to "nerf" some of the macro functions, then. If macroers can't include a "/join" in the macro code, the point would be moot. So would disabling the /ui toolbar command.
To me, /ui is the biggest culprit. I can write a hellacious long macro that might keep me going for 20 or 30 minutes without the /ui command, but giving me the ability to loop the macro is ONLY an invitation to abuse. I honeslty can't think of any good use anyone - including crafters - could put the /ui command to except to macro their skills while they sleep.
Hmm... I don't know. A lot of playersare forgetful. I've grouped with uncountable legions of characters for the purpose of training them in X or Y, and maybe (and that's generous) 10% of them remember to /disband once I've trained them. All it will take is one lazy sot every now and then, and anyone else trying to /invite the AFK'er is going to wind up getting a "X is already in a group" message.
Kae
I wish to applaud the devs for listening and being active on our behalf, and Raven for bringing our cause to their ears.
As an aside, with the AFKer issue. If AFKers are spamming "Invite me for a buff!" in their macros and using /join to get around this issue, then I propose inviting them into YOUR group so that anyone who tries to invite them gets a "this person is already in a group" message.
Of course you have to deal with them in your group, but hey, it's no worse than having a droid or a pet in your group with you. Although pets are cute and droids are useful and AFK macrotainers are neither...
Oooo, was that harsh?
- J
I like your Idea
I could really make fun to invite 19 afklers and then making on of them to the new leader (best in an other town).