Entertainer Archive
Thread: Opinions of an AFKer
then the Players wont be FORCED to come to you, and would rather come to you when they feel like a change.. and a friendly ear.
Force isn't part of the game unless you are a jedi. Until they come to your door and hold a gun to your head, everything is voluntary.
If you see visiting entertainers as being forced into something, then you are also forced to find a doctor, forced to find things you can kill, forced to find players to train you, or alternately forced to get money to visit skill trainers. Not to mention forced to find people to train so you can get master. If by "forced" you mean it is something you must do to play the game.. Then if you get rid of that, what is left?
Players want more convience and quickness in the heals. = Players goto the more popular cantinas with the biggest groups = all entertainers move to the same spot = Entertainers seeing nothing but a single cantina/city day in and day out = more players coming and expecting more and more entertainers = more "demand" on the entertainer to be there = more entertainers bored of the system and going afk
Ah, but which came first, the chicken or the egg? The situation you speak of is a new invention brought about by hologrinders. Before things went something like this...
- People find a cantina they like and start entertaining there.
- As word spreads through the entertainer population, more entertainers show up
- Eventually those who need healing hear about it, either through their friends, their favorite dancer, or a hunting group
- The cantina starts to become rather popular with both entertainers and patrons
- Eventually AFK entertainers start showing up, for whatever reason
- At some point, the AFK entertainers start to become too much for the real entertainers, and they go somewhere else, and the cycle starts over at the new location
- Eventually the AFK entertainers reach their goal, or they move on, leaving a once again empty cantina
There were exceptions, but in general that is how things went. I've seen it in Theed, Coronet, Tyrena, Bestine, Mos Eisly, Moenia, Keren, and that's just off the top of my head. Yes, you can take by implication that I have seen Theed and Coronet *EMPTY* during peak hours.
This stopped when the hologrinders showed up. Suddenly there was an unending supply of new AFK entertainers to fill the places of the old ones, so the old cantina never emptied, ending the cycle. Now it changed from a veriety of places to the same 1 or 2 places.
Now, you may think this is bad, that things are constantly changing like that.. But everyone knew where the new cantina was by the time the old one was empty. It wasn't such a bad thing. Sure, some people claim they can never find an entertainer.. But people even claim that now. (Hello?? Coronet.. Duh!)
Again. The AFKers are not the enemy here... it is the devs for designing a system that instead of offering a world to experience... you have a treadmill of level and loot making everything else secondary.
It was the players that turned it into a treadmill, not the devs. The devs designed the game to make the journey the fun part, not the destination. Unfortunately, the players don't want a journey, they just want a destination. That's why you see all the cries for end game content. End game content is the destination. This puts the devs in a bad place. They can either remain true to the game and find ways to make the journey more interesting, or they can bow to player demands and give them a destination.
By the way.. Amusing sig there.
Tiaga, thanks for the comment on my sig. I saw just SO many people with Holo 1 = this, and Holo 2 = that and holo 3 = the other. Thought it kinda silly personally.
Onto the subject. Ill concede that maybe it was indeed the players that pushed it over the edge to the End game meaning more then the journey. but from my understanding (i have paid attention to SWG since the begining and also Beta tested on a friends account), the players never said "Give us loot!" But rather.. "give us content!" These are two differant things.
It was the Devs who decided to take the easy way out and instead of giving the players a living world to adventure in... gave them a static based system where yet again like every other game out there (a few exceptions like SB but that was a coding NIGHTMARE), they privide a hook. Somethings that force people to play to feel like they get anywhere... rather then giving them a reason to continue to come in.
Yes Entertainers are forced onto the playerbase. Without an Entertainer you simply cannot do the things you find fun. If you genuenly find hunting FUN in the game... then at some points the game forces you to hit up Entertainers. But your example of forcing Doctors is false. As far as i know BF never goes down on its own. Wounds and Damage do. therefor the game isnt forcing you to catch a Doctor... it just encourages it.
The game does force you to hit up Entertainers. Making Entertainers a nessecity rather then a convience. That is why i say it is the Devs fault for forcing people to seek out a place/person where they will be bored. I am not saying remove BF, only using that as an example and a question. If they made it so other players were not forced to come to Entertainers... you would have an extremely few amount of them. Because so far that is the only reason (most) people play/seek out Entertainers right now.
Give Entertainers more real content... not buffs, and you keep the people that actually enjoy the class. Removing the AFK ability or hurting AFK play will not solve the problems. And thats my point. If the Entertainers are ever going to actually get Devs to listen the single focus from the community needs to be towards the Devs and getting real content.. NOT on ways to stop AFK usage.
make the class/profession fun to play for a wider audience... and you will in turn have alot less AFK usage.
What content do they need?
Therein lies the rub. If you just ask for content, they will say "Yeah, we'll consider it." If you present an idea on the other hand, you'll get the seed of an idea planted. The scouts did this for camps - they came up with what they thought camps should be, did a detailed write up of it. That got heard. I want to do something similar for entertainers.
If you can help the community come up with an idea of what content we want for entertainers, I will stand behind it and pitch it to the devs.
Some things to keep in mind for this though..
There are 34 classes. Getting an ear isn't always easy.
If you read the stickied thread with answers, Haden of Lucas Arts gave a good commentary on what the intent of entertainers should be. Their intent is to encourage people to socialize and turn the cantinas into the social hub of the game. We actually had this for a few months before the hologrinders showed up. Anything that goes against this goals is not likely to get heard.
Game development takes a long time. Even if I can get an ear, it would be a long time before we saw any change.
Game design is a complex process. If it weren't, we'd have the perfect MMORPG by now. As you pointed out, they aren't perfect. So don't expect the community to perform miracles.
As a corralary to the above, not all good ideas really are. There have been a lot of good seeming ideas that have been impractical for several reasons.
Each class needs something distinct. The devs will not implement something that makes entertainer, musician and dancer just 3 of the same thing. It's already borderline being the same thing now.
With that in mind, if you've got some ideas what content entertainers need, speak up. Start some threads on it. Until I can go to the devs and say "We need content and this is what we think it should be" I will not be pushing hard on the more content.
Heh, granted i dont have any grand ideas. however, i am still new.
I would venture to say without even looking the Entertainers have made a multitude of threads about what kinds of content they would like to see for their profession. So have all of these ideas already been shot down or have the Devs just failed to pay any attention??
Id gather it was not the former. Am i right?
So again, just beause it is easier to place blame on all "AFKers" doesnt mean its your only option. As i understand it the Entertainers have received no posts from any Devs or Dev voices since what was it said.. Nov? Sept? Something like that... so if ideas for content have been brought up what responces has the community gotten?
I am sure content options have been placed up, and i hope they have been presented to the Devs. But either the community cannot come up with anything that is not "Blue Sky" as TH calls it... or the Devs simply do not care. I am still of the mind that the anger i see (not by Tiaga directly mind you but in general over various threads) towards the AFKers should be redirected or at least acknowledged as needing to be, towards the Devs.
The community hasn't come to a consensus on what content is needed. Thad and people keep talking about the AFK issue. You've noticed how much it's talked about. It's been like that since June. That tells me it is something that needs to be dealt with in some manner. Dealing with it anyway would allow people to then focus on more constructive things.
Again I say.. I can't really explain to you how much of a problem it is without a common frame of reference. You are new, so you've never seen what it is like without the hordes of AFK people. However, there are plenty of accounts of it. Most of them - entertainer and non entertainer alike - talk about how much nicer the cantinas were then. People would come in to get healed and stay much longer than needed, and not just park and go AFK to heal. They'd come to see their favorite dancer, or listen to their favorite musician. And they knew if they were around they were there to talk to and have a good time.
That's all gone. Anything you see now is a mere shadow of what being an entertainer is.
JasonK wrote:
Ah that's a classic. AFKers suck but you'll still group them for the XP.
Ophistes wrote:
JasonK wrote:
Ah that's a classic. AFKers suck but you'll still group them for the XP.
I don't care that much about AFKers as long as they keep their mouth shut and don't spam the same BS over and over again. It gets old fast if you are in the Cantina for hours on end
You can heal BF slowly by sitting in hospitals (at least it works in the hospital in our city) but not in cantinas. Yay.
/addignore stops the spam.
Then you really have no idea what were talking about do you.
Ostracized wrote:
I am relitively new. Only a few weeks into the game.
I make that leap because I've seen it happen on my server. Ever wonder what happened to the first Jedi? Monika? You know, the one they made all the fuss about on the front page? I'll tell you what happened. Monika got permabanned for duping Kryat pearls. Which was funny, because Monika was also one of the WORST griefers of at the keyboard entertainers. The arguments were all the same, "Those entertainers! Why don't they get a REAL job!" And she would always come in to the cantina and not support the people living there. In fact, she was able to exploit every good intention to her own advantage, that YES, she did pop the first Jedi on the servers...but in the end, what good did that do?
I can tell you another story about a realgrief case on my server. He made a living farming holos out of the Naboo cave, and when he wasn't farming, he made a living buying holocrons for 3M and selling them outside the Coronet Starport for 5M. This guy would get his kicks going in to cantinas and calling all the dancers whores when they tried to greet him at the door. So he would go watch some AFK dancer who didn't put ant effort at all into what she was doing, tip her, and say to the live dancers, "I just tipped her 5000 credits!" But when the guy tried to convince everybody else who we were trying to entertain that we were stupid for staying in the cantina for doing what we do, he got a talking back to. The arguments from the community were, "People like Sirii work hard to make the game fun, why you giving them a hard time?" This only made him more frustrated, so he started sending me nasty /tells when I logged on, like "People like you are whores and everyone is disgusted with you," and I was not the only one who got them. I didn't respond, but simply /reported and filled out a CSR ticket under harassment. When I /reported and /addignored him, he got REALLY frustrated. So he made up this crazy story about me being a scammer by taking peoples credits and not buffing them. Only problem with the story was this, I was never logged on when he said it occurred, and I neverserviced the people he said I took credits from. He got permabanned from the forums for this, and soon after that, left the game, his jedi, and put his account on E-Bay. His name was Krastyn.
So why did I say what I said? Because from my experience, its true. The same kind of mentality that does not reward effort to make this game enjoyable is the same kind of mentality that gives griefers and exploiters sufficient justification in their minds to grief and exploit. Now I posted this for the benefit of a new entertainer so that she will not be put off by people who give her a hard time, simply because they can. Because I tell you, we get a LOT of that in this business.
Because while I may understand the mentality behind using unattended entertainers because thereare no live players that are making an effort to be entertaining, I find little sympathy toward people who go OUT OF THEIR WAY to make a live entertainer's experience miserable simply for playing the game in the way they should. If they aren't entertaining? Don't tip them. But if they are, and not doing something in poor taste or disruptive, then they should be ENCOURAGED through a tip, or at least a kind word. Because there is a learning curve to this thing. They'll get better, but they have to understand what they are doing is important, because it is. If you don't believe me, read all the postsfrom the Carbineers, Bounty Hunters, and Master Brawlers on the galaxy boards who HATE going to the grind capital cantinas.
2 whole people. Quite a small sample size to base a broad generalization on.
Hey, they were both jedi. Maybe next you'll claim all jedi are cheaters and griefers because 2 of them were.
No, not all jedi are exploiters. But exploiters don't care about making the game work. They actually care more for making the game NOT WORK because that's the only way they can gain an advantage.