Dancer Archive
Thread: Tell me about the Hologrind
Page 1 of 1
Thefig
Sun Apr 17, 2005 6:28 am
#1
I heard that Entertainment professions had a bad time during the Hologrind, and I'm really curious what happened. So can anyone tell me?
Sighryn
Sun Apr 17, 2005 6:43 am
#2
At that time getting to Jedi meant mastering professions, different ones for different people. A Holocron would tell you which profession was next... except for the last one.
So people went through all professions quickly to get to their Force slot.
Good idea- have people learn what is involved in mastering different professions. Bad idea- nobody cared, nobody remembered. There were AFK entertainers everywhere. Many -many- people began to see entertainer as a profession that was a waste of time unless you could do it while you were asleep or at work.
Panthu
Sun Apr 17, 2005 6:49 am
#3
It was fun to see all the new people in the Cantinas at first. I met a lot of really nice combat players in the hologrind days while they were entertaining for their hologrind. Because of that, I ended up knowing most of the first Jedi on Starsider, hehe. 
There were good things about it... it was better than the bot take over which came next. I have my fingers crossed that we might be moving into our next phase of the "battle for the rights to the cantina space" and I'm hoping this next phase is easier on us than the last one has been.
--Qilue-UCW--
Sun Apr 17, 2005 9:02 am
#4
Panthu wrote:
There were good things about it... it was better than the bot take over which came next.
I would guess that.. at least after they are doneAFK grinding for jedi they go away for the most part.. and they are on a character who they inted to play so there is a chance to make a real frind.. you can't make friends with a bot, and they never go away
We still have a kind of "holo grinder" tho.. Because If I recall Dancer/Musician still have a farly low converon ration of 10 to 1 (instead of 30 to one for combat professions) for Heightened Senses
Utess
Sun Apr 17, 2005 9:22 am
#5
The real problems with the hologrind were what they did to the class, not so much the grind itself.
- It changed a lot of people's attitudes towards entertainers. Before, entertaining was just something neat that some people liked to do. After the hologrind started and players took the attituade of them being "forced" to play an entertainer, player impressions became permenantly altered. This is when the player perception of "entertainers being forced on everyone else" first appeared.
- It created the afk macros that the buff bots use to this day. Before the hologrind, people who played entertainer wanted to play it all the time. So, no one ever once put really serious effort into devising a way to play the profession totally afk. A handful might have, or at least looked into it. But, afking and macroing weren't the serious "study" that they are today. It was during the hologrind that enterprising power gamers developed the afk macro techniques that are used by bots today.
- It desensitized people to afk entertainers. There were hundreds, thousands of afk entertainers during the hologrind. While those who did it eventually went away once they mastered, for awhile there was a never ending stream of afk players. At its height, you could easily walk into coronet cantina and see 100 to 500 afk dancers and musicians. After a couple of months of this, seeing entertainers afk became the "norm" to a lot of people. This let the buff bots sneak in under the radar and easily establish themselves before it was too late.
- It started the first mass exodus of social players. The hologrind is what established SWG as a power gamer game and forced about half the social player population out of the game. This is when the shift of direction took place in the game, when combat became the number one priority no matter what.
While the hologrind in and of itself was just annoying and a short term thing, it is what opened the doors to all the problems entertainers and the game itself have. It is something the game has truly never fully recovered from, and I doubt it ever will.
- It changed a lot of people's attitudes towards entertainers. Before, entertaining was just something neat that some people liked to do. After the hologrind started and players took the attituade of them being "forced" to play an entertainer, player impressions became permenantly altered. This is when the player perception of "entertainers being forced on everyone else" first appeared.
- It created the afk macros that the buff bots use to this day. Before the hologrind, people who played entertainer wanted to play it all the time. So, no one ever once put really serious effort into devising a way to play the profession totally afk. A handful might have, or at least looked into it. But, afking and macroing weren't the serious "study" that they are today. It was during the hologrind that enterprising power gamers developed the afk macro techniques that are used by bots today.
- It desensitized people to afk entertainers. There were hundreds, thousands of afk entertainers during the hologrind. While those who did it eventually went away once they mastered, for awhile there was a never ending stream of afk players. At its height, you could easily walk into coronet cantina and see 100 to 500 afk dancers and musicians. After a couple of months of this, seeing entertainers afk became the "norm" to a lot of people. This let the buff bots sneak in under the radar and easily establish themselves before it was too late.
- It started the first mass exodus of social players. The hologrind is what established SWG as a power gamer game and forced about half the social player population out of the game. This is when the shift of direction took place in the game, when combat became the number one priority no matter what.
While the hologrind in and of itself was just annoying and a short term thing, it is what opened the doors to all the problems entertainers and the game itself have. It is something the game has truly never fully recovered from, and I doubt it ever will.
Esharra
Sun Apr 17, 2005 10:03 am
#6
At first it was fun. Suddenly some of the people who had been coming to the cantinas and watching me for heals were there asking me how to play the prof. I'd dress them up and show them how to use bandflourishes. We joked around and made a great party of it. My favorite weaponsmith made a really great post on our server forum about how much fun he was having with dancer and people were coming in just to see the big wookiee dance.
Very quickly the cantinas in Coronet and Theed became packed with avatars who were just there to gain xp while their players were afk. Several people I knew opened second accounts so they could still play their preferred game while grinding out holocron profs on their original account.
Then our buff potency and duration was increased (I've regretted that at times). Our better buffs and the need to plow through combat professions as quickly as possible brought on the buffbot invasion.
In a matter of just a few weeks, the cantinas went from being a fun place with a few afk'ers that we made jokes about to a room full of wall to wall zombies and their incessant spam. After starting at launch as an entertainer, in earlyDecember 03, Idropped master dancer, master entertainer and 4244 musician as quickly as I could mouse click and didn't come backuntil mid-March.
Message Edited by Esharra on 04-17-2005 12:21 PM
SpinningCloud
Sun Apr 17, 2005 10:09 am
#7
The problem was tons of players fast-grinding professions they never had any intention of playing.
The cantinas were jammed with AFK macroers grinding to Master so they could drop it like a hot-potato.
It was probably the MOST immersion-breaking aspect of SWG since launch.
SpinningCloud
Sun Apr 17, 2005 10:29 am
#9
Yeah, the holo-grind was IMO the biggest blunder SOE ever made. Unfortunately I don't see them recovering the pre-hologrind feel of SWG and that saddens me.
Tralmek
Sun Apr 17, 2005 11:46 am
#10
Utess wrote:
The real problems with the hologrind were what they did to the class, not so much the grind itself.
- It changed a lot of people's attitudes towards entertainers. Before, entertaining was just something neat that some people liked to do. After the hologrind started and players took the attituade of them being "forced" to play an entertainer, player impressions became permenantly altered. This is when the player perception of "entertainers being forced on everyone else" first appeared.
- It created the afk macros that the buff bots use to this day. Before the hologrind, people who played entertainer wanted to play it all the time. So, no one ever once put really serious effort into devising a way to play the profession totally afk. A handful might have, or at least looked into it. But, afking and macroing weren't the serious "study" that they are today. It was during the hologrind that enterprising power gamers developed the afk macro techniques that are used by bots today.
- It desensitized people to afk entertainers. There were hundreds, thousands of afk entertainers during the hologrind. While those who did it eventually went away once they mastered, for awhile there was a never ending stream of afk players. At its height, you could easily walk into coronet cantina and see 100 to 500 afk dancers and musicians. After a couple of months of this, seeing entertainers afk became the "norm" to a lot of people. This let the buff bots sneak in under the radar and easily establish themselves before it was too late.
- It started the first mass exodus of social players. The hologrind is what established SWG as a power gamer game and forced about half the social player population out of the game. This is when the shift of direction took place in the game, when combat became the number one priority no matter what.
While the hologrind in and of itself was just annoying and a short term thing, it is what opened the doors to all the problems entertainers and the game itself have. It is something the game has truly never fully recovered from, and I doubt it ever will.
QFE. That's exactly it.
We had always had AFK macrotainers, and they were bad, but the cantinas were still livable. Before the hologrind, Long-term AFK macroing was considered a bad thing, something to be hidden, put aside, done with shame. When thousands of combateers suddenly found themselves "forced" to master Entertainment professions by the hologrind, the AFK macroing problem expanded and it became generally acceptable, even the normto "play" Galaxies while AFK if you were doing anything non-combat--crafting, and especiallyentertaining. The hologrind is really where all respect was lost for the social professions.
ChiiTWINS
Mon Apr 18, 2005 1:22 am
#11
The hologrind was the reason people become convinced they couldn't live without mindbuffs. People poured all their available cash into finishing it as fast as they could -- docs figured out how to make the buffs more like what we have now -- armoursmiths made better armour -- and the folks going through the combat lines would just buy it all up in order to grind faster.
Entertainer became the holo everyone wanted. Because it was easy. The entertainer professions were often the first ones churned out.
Many entertainers who -were- alive stopped talking to each other and the guests in the cantinas, because you were never sure who was really there or not. People became convinced that in order to not get kicked for inactivity, they had to have something in spatial chat every few minutes. That spatial chat turned into the horrible tip/heal spam you see now.
The holos are why so many stay AFK even if they're not bots. They became convinced they were providing the community with a service -- always being there for their heals, no matter what. It became all about what you want, what you need, what you absolutely positively have to have and right now, because how -else- am I supposed to solo NS elders without a mindbuff, duh!
Used to be people were happy to see us. We were appreciated. Talked to. Now we're an annoyance to them, a nuisance getting in their way before they can go pwn the people that used to be their best buddies, but last week they switched factions and so now they hate them. 
DanceRulez
Mon Apr 18, 2005 6:57 pm
#12
Well I'd have to generally agree with most people's comments here. I'm not sure how much more I can add, but I can give you one more perspective on it. The term 'hologrind' came around when the devs began releasing holocrons into the game as hints on how to become a Jedi. Some people think that the reason they did this was because there were too few people figuring out what the then 'secret' path to Jedi was so they figured people needed a little more help. Whatever the reason, the actual path to becoming a Jedi at that time involved nothing more than mastering a predetermined set of professions which was different for every person (or at least different enough that you'd have to be lucky to find someone else with the same set as you), and this was how they delivered on everyone having their own path to Jedi that they promised somewhere in the documentation. Many people thought that the path to Jedi might involve keeping one or more Masteries for a while, some number of experience points, running themepark or other missions, visiting all planets or all cities, finding secret or random NPC's, and so on - any number of ideas which I personally thought would have been far more interesting, fun, and fair than what it actually turned out to be.
Once they were introduced, what a holocron would tell you was one of the professions from your personal set that you had to master, but only one at a time until you finished it, and there were some from your set that they would not reveal - that was when your holocron would 'go silent'. There was a lot of speculation on how many professions you had to master. Some say it started as 5, then was increased to 8, then was later increased to 30 or so because the devs thought that people were mastering professions too fast and too easily. The devs say that they didn't increase it, or that they didn't increase it past 8 - something like that, anyway, the game by in large took a radical, and in my opinion detrimental, shift, and the 'holocraze' began.
As people realized that the path to Jedi involved mastering professions, a large part of the playerbase that wanted to open their second slot or get a Jedi stopped playing the game, and suddenly starting grinding out professions - the 'hologrind'. I think people liked to try to get the holos so that they could find out some of the professions they 'had' to do, but others probably just started grinding out whatever they could, or maybe their holos had already gone silent so they had no other choice but to start knocking the professions out one by one. Now while I'll admit that there were some who took this as an opportunity to try professions they might not have otherwise (and even found out they liked them) as well as some who found grinding professions to be a game in itself, I would say that for most, each profession was an 'obstacle' between them and their goal of becoming an elusive Jedi. Now because mastering a profession usually took a fair amount of time to do, the power gamers started looking for any shortcut they could find to get them through each mastery faster - and found it in the game's built-in macro system.
At this time, people already knew about macros, and some people, probably from beta, already knew about, or were starting to figure out how to use the macro system to create recursive macros that allowed their character to execute commands continuously once started. Add to that a little spatial message or some other gimmick to trick the AFK auto-logoff timer, and voila, all the reward with little or no effort. Thus any profession that could be largely, or totally, macroed was an easy target for a hologrinder whether they actually got it from a holo, or were just trying to guess one of their secret professions.
So how did this affect Entertainers? At least a couple of ways really. From launch I guess I could say that Ents were a bit of a different breed of players. I didn't even know this myself, though I quickly figure it out. Functionally we were healers, and I think many people appreciated the service we provided as such, and also I think the kind of realized that we did try to bring a little more 'life' to the game by being there in the cantinas with our dance or music effects and socializing. But that view was certainly not universal, and I would say there was a not-so-small minority of players even then that didn't like or appreciate our role in the game and felt that the whole concepts of battle fatigue and mind wounds were nothing more than artificial downtime imposed by the devs to force people to see us and create another time sink.
At first cantinas were filled with mostly or all live entertainers getting together, practicing their skills, and socializing with each other and with cantina patrons creating a fun environment. As time went on, and more people were trying out various professions in the game, some people tried Entertainer, and perhaps liked some aspect of it, but overall considered it to be boring or too long of a grind, or were just generally looking for a faster way to get to Master. Then you'd start to notice a few people who would stop responding to you when you tried to talk to them, or the Master Dancer in the corner who would just be doing some form of Exotic, but never talked and was always in the same place for long periods of time. Gradually I started hearing people talk about writing macros that could call themselves so they could leave them running and not even have to be there to keep getting XP. Then there would be a few AFK performers off in some corner or alcove of the cantina, and as the weekes passed, the number of AFK'ers grew to rival, and even exceed the number of live entertainers. Often people would attend their character for a while, then then excuse themselves for the night and just leave it running AFK after that. It was around this time that the hologrind hit.
As it was now becoming known, Dancer and Musician both happened to be one of those professions that you could Master completely AFK - and people did - in droves. The first and most immediate effect that the hologrind had on us was to fill our play areas, the cantinas, with a sea writhing, player created NPC's often poorly or skimpily dressed or even not dressed at all, most of which clogged spatial chat begging for tips and heals or pleas to "Watch ME!!!". True entertainers by in large abandoned the largest, busiest cantinas such as Coronet and maybe Theed which were so choked with AFK entertainers that being in them felt like some scene out of "Night of the Living Dead". Though some continued to put up with it, I think many retreated to lesser used cantinas or their own player city cantinas.
The second major effect was a little more subtle, yet probably more significant and more damaging. There were already people who didn't like entertainers or the role we played in the game, but I think that forcing some people to go through our profession who didn't want to, fostered even more resentment. Worse than that, it created the perception that Entertainer was nothing more than an "AFK profession" not only by those who went through it totally AFK, but also by all the other players who waded through the sea of AFK entertainers in the cantinas when they did need mind or BF healing. When mind buffing was added shortly thereafter, the resentment increased even more as this class that many already didn't respect, became the sole provider of a service that suddenly people "needed" (no doubt in part due to people trying to rush through combat or other profs while hologrinding). With a small population of entertainers that was already beginning to dwindle due to decreasing interest, the hologrind, and the invasion of our play area by AFK'ers, it probably became difficult, or "too much trouble" to find actual live entertainers to service their needs. Since some people were already becoming quite knowledgeable with creating AFK macros, it didn't take long for them to figure out that by adding the simple command /join to their macro, they could turn their AFK XP grinding toon into the buffbot that we all know and loathe today. As people started creating alts for the sole purpose of being buffbots, the last shread of dignity we had crumbled away as people could throw it in our faces that our entire profession and game mechanic could be achieved and given away for free by a macro. And as if that wasn't enough, the less mature of players could now get away with rude comments, emotes, or even actions with these buffbots that real people would never have tolerated, because after all, it's only a bot.
The hologrind may be over now, but the damage it's done still remains. The buffbots are still there. The resentment towards entertainers is still alive and well. There are still AFK zombies in the cantinas, though certainly not as many. Many are either future buffbots of their own, or "new hologrinders" coasting through easy macro XP gains that they can convert to FS XP without having to work at it. Many entertainers have dropped the profession or the game as a result, and the lack of real dev response to heal the wounds the hologrind caused have left many others bitter and considering quitting as well. So that's what I would say the hologrind did to Entertainers.
Once they were introduced, what a holocron would tell you was one of the professions from your personal set that you had to master, but only one at a time until you finished it, and there were some from your set that they would not reveal - that was when your holocron would 'go silent'. There was a lot of speculation on how many professions you had to master. Some say it started as 5, then was increased to 8, then was later increased to 30 or so because the devs thought that people were mastering professions too fast and too easily. The devs say that they didn't increase it, or that they didn't increase it past 8 - something like that, anyway, the game by in large took a radical, and in my opinion detrimental, shift, and the 'holocraze' began.
As people realized that the path to Jedi involved mastering professions, a large part of the playerbase that wanted to open their second slot or get a Jedi stopped playing the game, and suddenly starting grinding out professions - the 'hologrind'. I think people liked to try to get the holos so that they could find out some of the professions they 'had' to do, but others probably just started grinding out whatever they could, or maybe their holos had already gone silent so they had no other choice but to start knocking the professions out one by one. Now while I'll admit that there were some who took this as an opportunity to try professions they might not have otherwise (and even found out they liked them) as well as some who found grinding professions to be a game in itself, I would say that for most, each profession was an 'obstacle' between them and their goal of becoming an elusive Jedi. Now because mastering a profession usually took a fair amount of time to do, the power gamers started looking for any shortcut they could find to get them through each mastery faster - and found it in the game's built-in macro system.
At this time, people already knew about macros, and some people, probably from beta, already knew about, or were starting to figure out how to use the macro system to create recursive macros that allowed their character to execute commands continuously once started. Add to that a little spatial message or some other gimmick to trick the AFK auto-logoff timer, and voila, all the reward with little or no effort. Thus any profession that could be largely, or totally, macroed was an easy target for a hologrinder whether they actually got it from a holo, or were just trying to guess one of their secret professions.
So how did this affect Entertainers? At least a couple of ways really. From launch I guess I could say that Ents were a bit of a different breed of players. I didn't even know this myself, though I quickly figure it out. Functionally we were healers, and I think many people appreciated the service we provided as such, and also I think the kind of realized that we did try to bring a little more 'life' to the game by being there in the cantinas with our dance or music effects and socializing. But that view was certainly not universal, and I would say there was a not-so-small minority of players even then that didn't like or appreciate our role in the game and felt that the whole concepts of battle fatigue and mind wounds were nothing more than artificial downtime imposed by the devs to force people to see us and create another time sink.
At first cantinas were filled with mostly or all live entertainers getting together, practicing their skills, and socializing with each other and with cantina patrons creating a fun environment. As time went on, and more people were trying out various professions in the game, some people tried Entertainer, and perhaps liked some aspect of it, but overall considered it to be boring or too long of a grind, or were just generally looking for a faster way to get to Master. Then you'd start to notice a few people who would stop responding to you when you tried to talk to them, or the Master Dancer in the corner who would just be doing some form of Exotic, but never talked and was always in the same place for long periods of time. Gradually I started hearing people talk about writing macros that could call themselves so they could leave them running and not even have to be there to keep getting XP. Then there would be a few AFK performers off in some corner or alcove of the cantina, and as the weekes passed, the number of AFK'ers grew to rival, and even exceed the number of live entertainers. Often people would attend their character for a while, then then excuse themselves for the night and just leave it running AFK after that. It was around this time that the hologrind hit.
As it was now becoming known, Dancer and Musician both happened to be one of those professions that you could Master completely AFK - and people did - in droves. The first and most immediate effect that the hologrind had on us was to fill our play areas, the cantinas, with a sea writhing, player created NPC's often poorly or skimpily dressed or even not dressed at all, most of which clogged spatial chat begging for tips and heals or pleas to "Watch ME!!!". True entertainers by in large abandoned the largest, busiest cantinas such as Coronet and maybe Theed which were so choked with AFK entertainers that being in them felt like some scene out of "Night of the Living Dead". Though some continued to put up with it, I think many retreated to lesser used cantinas or their own player city cantinas.
The second major effect was a little more subtle, yet probably more significant and more damaging. There were already people who didn't like entertainers or the role we played in the game, but I think that forcing some people to go through our profession who didn't want to, fostered even more resentment. Worse than that, it created the perception that Entertainer was nothing more than an "AFK profession" not only by those who went through it totally AFK, but also by all the other players who waded through the sea of AFK entertainers in the cantinas when they did need mind or BF healing. When mind buffing was added shortly thereafter, the resentment increased even more as this class that many already didn't respect, became the sole provider of a service that suddenly people "needed" (no doubt in part due to people trying to rush through combat or other profs while hologrinding). With a small population of entertainers that was already beginning to dwindle due to decreasing interest, the hologrind, and the invasion of our play area by AFK'ers, it probably became difficult, or "too much trouble" to find actual live entertainers to service their needs. Since some people were already becoming quite knowledgeable with creating AFK macros, it didn't take long for them to figure out that by adding the simple command /join to their macro, they could turn their AFK XP grinding toon into the buffbot that we all know and loathe today. As people started creating alts for the sole purpose of being buffbots, the last shread of dignity we had crumbled away as people could throw it in our faces that our entire profession and game mechanic could be achieved and given away for free by a macro. And as if that wasn't enough, the less mature of players could now get away with rude comments, emotes, or even actions with these buffbots that real people would never have tolerated, because after all, it's only a bot.
The hologrind may be over now, but the damage it's done still remains. The buffbots are still there. The resentment towards entertainers is still alive and well. There are still AFK zombies in the cantinas, though certainly not as many. Many are either future buffbots of their own, or "new hologrinders" coasting through easy macro XP gains that they can convert to FS XP without having to work at it. Many entertainers have dropped the profession or the game as a result, and the lack of real dev response to heal the wounds the hologrind caused have left many others bitter and considering quitting as well. So that's what I would say the hologrind did to Entertainers.
Tralmek
Mon Apr 18, 2005 8:44 pm
#13
At launch, Icreated on Starsider and played an Artisan/Medic. I had a few rifle skills for protection from the evil meatlumps who would attack me when I left the safety of Coronet. Since Starsider was the unofficial RP server, we were somewhat protected from the original AFK'ers. We also had people like Bluesbacca who were amazing Entertainers and would go on Galactic Tours...they even had groupies who would follow them from city to city and planet to planet. My cantina experience consisted of sitting around crafting little gifts for the Entertainers and healing them as needed. By August, I tired of my "adventureless" lifestyle and started Lilo as an all-combat player on Bria.
Since Starsider was the unofficial RP server, we were somewhat protected from the original AFK'ers. We also had people like Bluesbacca who were amazing Entertainers and would go on Galactic Tours...they even had groupies who would follow them from city to city and planet to planet. My cantina experience consisted of sitting around crafting little gifts for the Entertainers and healing them as needed. By August, I tired of my "adventureless" lifestyle and started Lilo as an all-combat player on Bria. Once I fell into the world of Entertaining (my first hour or so after starting Lilo) I played ONLY in Mos Entha's Fallen Star Cantina. We never had LAMers there that I can remember. I was totally shocked when I first ventured to Bria's Coronet Cantina and found that no one there was talking to me. I figured at first that it was just because they didn't know me...eventually I learned they could AFK macro the entire profession. I was disappointed, but didn't mind a whole lot at first, because they kept to the alcoves or hid in the back. Things just really got worse from there till...well, *points down* take a look at the sig. 
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