Dancer Archive

From reading the dancer/musician/entertainer boards recently it sounds like a lot of people are against AFK buff bots. I was thinking about a possible solution for both sides which may be sort of "meeting in the middle".

Here is my proposal:

In the current system, a dancer or musician has the ability to give mind enhancements of 100% at master. If a player gathers skill tapes they can get that up to 125%, although this is a fairly rare occurance. If a penalty was added to being AFK* which caused a skill modifier of[Dancing/Musical] Mind Enhancment -20, this would allow people to still run AFK buff bots but without +20 worth of skill tapes or more, they would give sub-par mind buffs.This would also make it so they could collect skill tapes and give a 105% maximum buff while AFK.

* Currently "AFK" mode can be turned off at will, my guess is that the timer which gets reset each time a keystroke or mouse movement is made still runs, but doesn't make you "AFK" if the option is off. Slight modifications, if any would be needed for this system to work.

This would create a valuable reason to stay at the keyboard while doing mind buffs, and still allow AFK buffers to give mind buffs during the off hours when so many complain they can't find live buffers. Some other posibilities may be to limit this system to inside NPC city cantinas, or having a non-penalty list on player cantinas so guilds can run buff bots if needed inside their own cantinas.

The proposed system could also be modified to cause an experience penalty when AFK as well, but that would need more thought and discussion.

The only way to get around this system that I can think of is to use a third party program to emulate keystrokes or mouse movements which would be against SOE TOS, and a bannable offense.

Please let me know what you think, forgive me in advance if this solution has been proposed before, as I have only gone through a few pages in the respective forums.

Thanks for the heads up!

In my experience, those coming to the cantina generally don't "shop around" to find who buffs a % point higher or lower than someone else. They generally pop in where they know a master is buffing, SEA bonus or not.

No doubt, I'd like to be more functional. But its not so much in terms of the quality of my buffs, as opposed to the quantity of the buffs I can give. Because ultimately, that's the real disadvantage of playing live. Buffbots and live players both can buff up to 20 players at one time. But buffbots can potentially distribute the buffs all day, while a live dancer may only be able to buff for three or four hours. That's the real advantage of buffbots over live players, not the quality of the buffs as much as the quantity of the buffs and the ability to "set up shop" in a cantina and not retire due to lulls in the patrons throughout the day.

There have been arguments to improve the functionality of live players at the expense of buffbots. I don't know how this really pleases any party to the issue. Buffbot owners generally feel as though the game should not discriminate mechanically between live and unattended providers. They argue that since they and live players both pay the same subscription fees, dancers should have the same abilities regardless of the circumstances surrounding the attended status of the character. AFK play is simply playing another way for them that is no less legitimate than live play.

Plus, I don't see any evidence that the size of the buff determines the tip. Nor do I see evidence that the size of the buff leads to moreclients beyond the master tag. In fact, I would argue that tips and use are made on the basis of much different criteria than functionality.

Again, I would like it if I were more functional as a live player. But I don't think that it makes live buffers any more of an option, nor does it make buffbotting less of an option. People generally do not shop around for the best entertainer buff. They generally go to the dancer they know can give a 100% buff, and anything over that is inconsequential.

Madame Sirii Ajaan
August 2003-September 15, 2005
"There is a difference between being /watched and being WATCHED."