Entertainer Archive

This post may come off as rather raw. This is not aimed at any particular entertainer, but only in the collective sense. I am just as much to blame here as anyone else who plays this thing live. I only want to give us a different perspective on the great issues before us at this time.

There have been many attempts to analyze our profession, but they never consider the notion that entertainers simply cannot heal or buff. It is the patron that must heal or buff themselves by /watching or /listening to us. Who really does the work here? Certainly not us. Because we could dance, /setperform, and/invite until we are exhausted into oblivion, but it won't do anything for a player unless they /watch.

I don't believe this was an oversight or a bad game decision. I believe this is how it has to be in order to encourage the things this profession was designed to promote. And what does it promote? It promotes activity from all the players in the cantina in the realms they can control, from the novice entertainer with her red shoes, to the master dancer/musician with her +25% taped up hot panty. It puts the emphasis on what live players do best, observation and reaction to the current situation in the environment. And I think it is healthy for the profession to operate in this regard.

Because I could say one thing about these classes at the start of the game last year. Wewere some of the only classes in the game who did not suffer from the "master uber alles" syndrome, where one needs to be a master to be economically viable in the game. Moreover, we were some of the only classes where the challenge did not stop once the master's title was attained. And its because the challenge of this class and the economic viability of these classes at launch had nothing to do with the skill boxes, since the skills that produced game mechanics were never under our authorization. It had everything to do with the player's actions behind the dancer.

I liked it this way when I was leveling on Intrepid a year ago, and I like it today for what still remains of it on Bria. Let me tell you a story about my days on Intrepid. Back in Tyrena where I was leveling a year ago, there was a master dancer by the name of Kalira SunSong who would simply /exotic 4 away with her shorts and bare booby jacket. She'd do this each day and every day while the person that owned her did other things using "allow multiple instances." I guess we would call her a buffbot today, but at the time there was no real conception that this character would be a buffbot in any sense of the term. Because Kalira SunSong could never "give" anything that was a limited, rare, and gated commodity. People would simply /watch me, or people who were doing things in the cantina instead, like myself, or Cloie Flyingwalker, or any number of other players. And even if they watched Kalira SunSong, they never thought of her as "providing a service" the way they talk of buffbots today. Indeed, the term was never even entered into our SWG language in the context of what Kalira was doing at the time around the summer of 2003.Instead, we who were making the cantina interesting were "providing the service." Because they knew that Kalira SunSong would always be there to /watch, but we who made the place interesting needed to be encouraged to do the things we did, or we'd go elsewhere.

We were never tipped for our mechanical abilities in the beginning. And I could thrive in such an environment, even as a novice. Because I knew that if I just worked harder to be more amusing than the Master Dancer next to me, I could still get tipped for being amusing. Players would simply /watch the master dancer who wasn't paying attention, while I could reap the rewards of being interactive and amusing. Conversely, when I was a Master Dancer, I still had a reason to be amusing. Because I knew that if I wasn't, the patrons would simplytip the dancers who were working hard at being amusing, yet /watch me.

Now I understand why some masters wanted to ensure that patrons who were getting game mechanics off of them would want some sort of safeguarded system in order to ensure their "investment" paid off. But my question to them is why should your investment in skill points pay anydividend at all if you can't outperform a raw novice who is working hard at being amusing?

The only answer I can come up with is that there were some masters of the elite professions amongst us that felt the title and abilities gave them a right to be tipped. That they shouldn't have to work as hard to get tipped. That their income was falling because players just didn’t like what they were doing, or that they were being upstaged by some young upstarts who still believed that their performance--not the mechanics--were the things that were tipped. And they asked the development staff what they could implement to give a master some kind of thing they could do to force a tip for a performance the patrons never thought worthy enough to tip.

Indeed, Ralph "Holocron" Koster started a thread in August of last year; one of the few threads any developer had offered to us as a group of professions. He asked for input as to what sort of things could be done to increase the economic viability of entertainers. But to me, this was a non sequitur. The economic viability came from working hard to be amusing. And this thread, in my opinion, was never for entertainers like me who bought into the effort/reward structure as it existed. It was brought about by players who never really bought in to the notion that the things you do to entertain at the keys made a difference. Because my income never suffered as a dancer leveling at the keys on Intrepid. And when I did have a bad day at the cantina, it just motivated me to work harder to discover better ways to be amusing. And many things were being debated in Holocron's thread, but they all seemed to want an "extra authorized level" of performance above and beyond the current system of /watch. So that a patron could get a normal /watch, or a special "/watch plus" that would be administered, of course, by masters of the elite professions. But the most telling post of the thread came from a player named Mosh_Lokin:

"Since you can macro to master entertainer, and we have all seen the plethora of entertainers doing this, forcing a payment will be the very end of the profession, I promise you.

If you make a price on watch/listen, many people will set about and make entertainers on every server just to provide healing for FREE in response to this nonsense.

I am not anti entertainer. I love the entertainers on my server (the ones who actually speak, and entertain, taking time out to get to know all of us in the cantina). I always tip, even when I'm dead broke. And I think they should have ways to make money.

But the minute you try to force players to pay a certain price, I will gladly join in the rebellion and offer free entertainment healing services around the clock.

We saw this in games like AC and AC2. They were called buffbots. And they came about in response to developers trying to force something on players (in ac2 the issue was slow traveling from place to place, so buffbots provided portals to various locations, as well as buffs to stats and weapons).

If you want to see a thousand "buffbot" free entertainers pop up, add a forced payment option."

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=392005

Mosh_Lokin

This, as far as I can tell, was the very first mention of the term "Buffbot" with regard to entertainment in SWG. Before this time, the term Buffbot only was used in the pejorative sense to talk about bad games, like Asheron’s Call, or Asheron’s Call 2. But the most telling aspect of Mosh_Lokin’s post is that he, unlike we at the time, fully understood the danger inherent in turning a skill based support function into a paid commodity. He foresaw the results a full year before we realized them in practice. The more you create safeguards and protocols to receive support mechanics, the more you create entities to bypass the protocols for the sake of a smooth game experience. The more you base the profession’s worth on tangible game mechanics, the less you reward the intangible aspects that accompany such mechanics. He, unlike we at the time, understood that putting more control of who receives the mechanics would only create entities that serve no greater purpose than to disregard the control. He knew how fragile the social play style was, and knew quite clearly that the surest way to discourage it is to turn the classes into sellers of“/” commands.

Because right around the end of fall, we got what many of the Masters of the elite professions wanted: /setperform and the group buff. And quite frankly, they are things you do not have to be amusing to administer. Which changes the way the profession is played entirely. So I have to give a big fat thank you to all the masters out there that couldn’t get tipped last summer.You got what you wanted, a reason for players to think you are a good dancer or musician so you could get tipped. You also gave every other unattended mule that makes a macro a reason for players to think they are good dancers and musicians so they could get tipped. And what about the poor Entertainers? You really pulled one over on them, now didn’t you? Now nobody gets what you have to offer unless you allow it, however boring you may be. No need to be exiting now, just type enough /setperforms or /invites, and you don’t even have to be amusing.

But have you ever stopped to consider the possibility that if you do not need to be amusing to authorize the buff, then alts that make no attempt to be amusing can do it just as well—if not better—than you?

How could we have known at the time that these things would single handedly change the subtle dynamics in the cantina to such a degree that it would make Kalira SunSong and others like her the driving force of entertainment on our servers? How could we have known that by giving us more tools to encourage tipping for mechanics that it would result in the creation of an entire system of automation? How could we have known that by giving high-level characters a mechanic that would give them an advantage in the cantina that they have destroyed the viability of the only real things they could do better than an automated character? We should have known. Mosh_Lokin did…

Now I read treatises on these boards all the time about more institutions and safeguards to be put in place in order to control who can and cannot receive game mechanics. Haven’t we learned as a class that these safeguards not only discourage social and creative activity in the cantina, but they merely encourage boring cantinas?And who does this help? Does it help the novice entertainer who brings his or her enthusiasm and optimism to the cantina for the sake of the customers? Or does it help the three account powergamer to justify even more why their boring +25%/+25% master dancer/master musician alt should get tipped for spamming, “if u need a buff, bank tip LeetDood 10k and I will switch my toon?”

...Something to think about, isn't it?