Entertainer Archive
Thread: One thing going into my second report...
Personally I am anti-afk anything as to me playing a game requires you at the keyboard actually partaking in the activity.
However... my concern is about the methods that SEO would employto eliminate afkers. In my mmorpg experience it is fair to say that those who want to always find a work around and it is the people at the keyboard who suffer in their play experience. Bandfls being but one recent example in SWG itself.
I make use of alias files for little moves and comments (e.g. :throws her mandoviol into the air and blows a quick kiss to %NT before catching it again) and also for songs that I sing. I find it hard to believe that SEO would manage to find a way of eliminating afkers without impacting this very useful tool for those of us entertainers who want to put more into the game than we are given in terms of mechanics.
My feeling is that afkers shoulddo so responsibly in side rooms or their homes to leave the way open for those entertainers at their keyboards. I disagree with the playstyle and will never understand the powergamer (rper myself). But it comes down to different play styles - why can't we try and accomodate the majority here as we are all paying to be here?
Well, it sounds like the AFK issue is being covered by something else, so I won't go into that.
However, a recent thread has prompted me to make a request. It prompted me to type:
In addition to coloring the entire tip sentence purple, I make the Experience more subdued. I set "Dancing Experience" and "Entertainment Healing Experience" to dark gray. I can read them if I have to, but for the most part, they blend into the background. Thus, all the emotes, conversations, heals, and tips show up without being camouflaged by the Experience spam.
Many entertainers agree that the experience spam kills us in our attempts to remain attentive in the cantina. I would like to see Entertainment Experience and Healing Experience grouped up so it tells you how much you made in much longer intervals. Possibly one of the following:
- Sum up all the experience gained and display the experience gained after every fifth "pulse" instead of every pulse.
- Sum up all the experience gained and display the experience when the performer stops playing or dancing.
- Allow the option to define how often you want to display the experience (if at all) so that some sort of combination of the above two will happens.
There are pros and cons.
By seeing the experience we get every pulse, an entertainer knows that he's still getting dancing experience. This is more vital at lower levels. My beginning musician gets 2 exp per flourish. I need to know when a pulse ticks so I can do another flourish. My dancer, however, gets 22 exp per flourish. I can usually let it count down to 15-18 before doing another flourish. So, having it go through every fifth pulse can be a problem for lower levels.
Summing up experience at the end can seem very convenient, but it's even harder for an entertainer to notice that it's time for a new flourish.
For those reasons, I like the third option. A player can choose to display every pulse, display every tenth pulse, or not display until the end. I think it'd be great, but it may be extra work for the developers.
Or, if those options are not feasible at this time, I can see two other solutions that would satisfy me (not please me, but it's a start):
- Group all Entertainment Healing per pulse into one message. We don't need three different amounts listed out.
- Allow the spatial chat to be resized so we can see more than six lines of text.
Those are my observations, and I think I'm right. But if there is some setting I can modify to make this better, feel free to correct me.
As a Master Entertainer working toward Master Musician, I totally agree with Kyorlana. I am always at the keyboard (Minus grabbing a drink or when nature calls), but I've used the macro system to write some kick a$$ songs. You spend 4 hours to get the timing down just right and string together the flourishes so the cheesey unflourished basic riff doesn't come through so you have a song of nothing but flourishes that go really well together. I've done this with a number of songs and always get compliments when I play them ("I can't believe that was songname. That sounded so cool.") Granted it eats up 3/4 of my action bar each time I play one of these songs, but the reaction of the crowd is worth it. I could not care less about afk players, they do not concern me. They are easy enough to boot from a group if it gets to be too much. My concern is if SOE eliminates afk macroing, are they going to do it in such a way that prevents good songwriting through macros by the rest of us? I do not want to have to memorize the order and precise timing of 30-50 flourishes to play the same songs I've already written using macros just because a few of you entertainer/musician/dancer elitist snobs have a problem with afk players. Simple solution is to refuse to group with them or kick them from your group if they go afk for what you consider to be an unacceptable length of time. Please also read your Entertainer Correspondent's admission to afk macroing which can be found at:
http://vnboards.ign.com/message.asp?topic=54637108&page=1
It's the post right after clo1_2000 by Archangel. Check the signature block and compare it to the first post in that thread. How much friggin hypocracy can we stomach? Has this stirred you up? Has it got a reaction? GOOD! That's what an entertainer does...gets a reaction from the crowd.
As you can see, this is my first post, so please be gentle! I'm a non-dancer (I skim all of the professional forums), but I have an idea about both the issue of AFK entertainers, and the idea of being able to deny fatigue healing to rude players. Perhaps Entertainers should be able to "target" their audience. Unlike the "Deny Services" idea, this would be an inclusive rather than an exclusive command. The number of people that could be targeted could be linked to skill level (so a novice entertainer could only perform for a couple of people, while a master could perform for large groups), and a group of entertainers would have the number of people that could watch them pooled together, perhaps with only the group leader being able to select who can "watch". This would give greater incentive to having large groups, and would give group leaders a more active role beyond just letting performers into the group.
This would allow a performer to be able to demand payment before allowing someone to watch (collecting a cover charge), and would allow the entertainer to prevent an annoying customer from gaining benefit from their performance.
The other benefit of this would be that a person would not be able to go AFK for too long, because eventually, the people that you selected to be allowed to watch you perform are going to leave. but at the same time, this doesn't prevent going AFK for a short time, and more importantly, it doesn't add in some sort of artificial constraint on the system. You would naturally just lose your audience over time, if you weren't around to select new people.
Anyway, this is just an idea. There are a couple of problems with it, I know. For example, the current interface only allows you to target one person, so there would have to be a way to target multiple people. I'm sure that there are plenty of others. But I'd like to help find a way to keep all of you entertaining types from fleeing the Cantina's. There is nothing sadder to me than seeing a Cantina with just some dumb brawler like me dancing around trying to heal his friends because the Entertainers are too fed up with thing to do it anymore.
I have spent a lot of time and effort to come up with small macros that I call routines. These macros run through several diferent dance styles and a series of flourish's in each. None last longer than my action bar... in fact, I found out early on that with intricate macros, one fall and from then on you look really foolish... so shorter ones were better.
Not only does this keep me looking professional... i can time the flourish's and transition smoothly... but I can also engage in chat with the patrons as well as group chat and guild chat.
The problem generating all the negativity is not the people using the macros as intended but the ones making long un-atttended macros... the entertainer bots thatplop thenselves in the middle of the cantina for hours and hour with the afk flag up and spamming their macro'd messages. To do away with macros entirely is a huge loss to the rest of us.... in fact you may as well forget ever trying to coriogragh something (once the bugs are worked out)
the solution to the un-attended survey macro was to have an interactive event occur that required an action on the part of the player. I'd be up for something similar here, but to do away with macros entirely would be a mistake imo.
Kuildeous wrote:
Many entertainers agree that the experience spam kills us in our attempts to remain attentive in the cantina. I would like to see Entertainment Experience and Healing Experience grouped up so it tells you how much you made in much longer intervals. Possibly one of the following:
I'm going to have to give a PLEASE NO to that.
If you want to split things out make a new chat tab. Right click on the tabs and select new tab. Then go to that tab and select edit tab. You can then move just chat and not xp messages to that tab.
Unfortunately, you also lose tip messages, so unless you keep it coming onscreen you won't see them.
Hijo wrote:
I encourage you all to read this to see where our correspondent is coming from:
http://vnboards.ign.com/message.asp?topic=54637108&page=1
He afk macro'd himself to master musician, and now decided that it is a bad thing for the profession... apparently it was ok when he thought he was one of the few exploiting macros in this way.
/sigh
Wow, seems Hypocritical to me.
The solution, as someone else has already pointed out, is simple; Targeted active entertainer healing. Instead of the injuredperson needing a heal having to select an entertainer to heal from an entertainer should have to select an audience to heal.
This would solve two major problems with the entertainer profession in onegiant move. AFK people would be FORCED to play attened at least long enough to get the entertainer healing lines and the issue of relying on the honor system would be finally resolved.
Sorry, don't really care for the click on someone to make them watch or listen to you for 2 reasons.
1. Have you seen how crowded it can get in cantinas some times? You cant move or you stop singing and dancing and having to scroll the camera around a room full of people to find one is gonna make the whole thing a pain.
2. Do you really want to force your audience to watch or listen to you? We get plenty of folks who do come to watch and listen that don't need healing, they just want the atmosphere, but then there are plenty of people who come to the cantina just to log out. And forget tipping, earning a living will become even more difficult for those who don't want to play another profession.
The logic that I don't understand is people saying that V macroed to MM, and now V personally wants to stop AFK macroing.
Um...if he did it himself, I don't think it's a personal agenda....
I'm not here to "earn" anything. I'm here to have fun. I couldn't care less about your judment of whether or not I "earned" my fun. If I have fun by staying right at my keyboard chatting with people and socializing for many hours, that is what I will do, whether you like it or not. And if I have fun sometimes by taking a break from that, going off by myself in a corner somewhere and running a macro while I do something else then that is what I should be able to do whether you like it or not, becuase it has nothing to do with you. It doesn't hurt you, it's none of your business and I'm sick of this self-righteous attitude that seems so prevalent on the boards these days. If you've got an afk dancer in your group that is bringing you down - boot them and move on. But if I want to privately run a macro o my own, I will.