Entertainer Archive
Thread: Entertainer Missions What should they be like?
Don't count them as our primary income.People don't like beggers, and the people playing don't like to beg. Most don't anyway.
My proposal. Make Cantina's and Hotels Pay you for playing every 10 minutes. The more people that come in to the cantina or hotel and /listen, the more money you make. Masters of course, make the most money.
This is the only way entertainers can compete in making money. People who play this class, don't like hunting. They also don't like afk people taking their tips.
If not, what's to stop every shmoe in the galaxy from picking up Novice Entertainer and flooding the cantinas playing SW1 on slitherhorns to make some extra change while they're asleep?
I agree on the afk thing, but pay in entertianerwould be low...
Musicians, Dancers, Image Designers, and Master Entertainers would make the most money.
Another Idea
This would be limited to groups of 3 or more. They would make a pre-defined amount of money based on the skill of the group. The people in the group who make the money are Image Designers, Dancers, and Musicians. They all get an even split.
People who go afk, get booted by the leader, as they don't want them making a cut of their money.
One more idea...
Take the Ability of healing wounds away from Cantinas in far away places, forcing people to bring musicians along with them on their large hunts. (This would only be a good idea if the ideas above were in place)
Keto_Jax wrote:
My proposal. Make Cantina's and Hotels Pay you for playing every 10 minutes. The more people that come in to the cantina or hotel and /listen, the more money you make. Masters of course, make the most money.
I would expect that such an idea would be unlikely to ever be impelmented. This goes back to the "cheese factor" again. If there's a way for people to mechanically make even small amounts of money doing repetitive actions they will do so, especially if the actions in question can be macro'ed. I've used this example just recently - In Everquest, when Shadows of Luclin was released, some entreprenurial chefs discovered that there was a new vendor who sold all the ingredients for making cheese. This same vendor would buy cheese at a profit of about 2 gold pieces per cheese made. Without moving, you could earn several plat in a couple of minutes and if you were steadfast enough to spend a few hours you could potentially earn thousands. Within a few days, the word got out and CSR's had to start going around killing the cheese vendor whenever he spawned because otherwise there were 20 people all camped around him making cheese 24/7. They finally had to remove cheese entirely from the game until they could get the database adjusted down to where cheese-making was unprofitable when selling to an NPC.
What this means for SWG is that a situation like the one you propose would cause massive numbers of people to buy novice entertainer and then make sure that they always camped out in the cantina with a macro running. When they came back the next day they'd have free money with no downside.
This is one of the big obstacles to overcome when designing entertainer missions - Making them something entertaining to perform, yet difficult or maybe "inconvenient" enough that a macrobot or a novice can't do them and make tons of money at it.
So, what are your ideas? Assume we have a clean slate to design an entire new mission system. What sorts of missions would you want to see as an entertainer? What activities would you want to engage in as part of an entertainer mission? What game mechanics would you use to determine the difficulty of the mission and thus scale it with ability? How would you feel about entertainer missions that involved physical danger?
I could be in the minority here, but I was never interested in Entertainer missions to begin with. I do love this profession, but for me it's all about taking my chances on a flight to somewhere, finding out what's shakin' at the local cantina, and maybe being a part of it for a while. Except for possibly Scouts, Entertainers could be the most rootless of all the professions, and that's the way I like it.
When I first got a gig mission from an NPC (prior to the terminals coming on), I was thrilled. "This is gonna be exciting," I thought, "what song should I play? What instrument should I use? What are the NPCs going to say to me?" The gig was at the Lake Retreat, on Naboo. I arrived, starry-eyed, to find an island completely devoid of people. I entered the hotel, looked around, but none of the NPCs had anything pertinent to say. Finally I just took the stage, started playing, and sat around... all the while feeling more and more like a loser. The bell rang, and I was done - having made some sort of pittance. Naturally, I felt let down... I became an Entertainer to meet people, brighten other peoples' days, and have fun. This mission took me away from all that. The thing we (I'm assuming) became Entertainers for, the human element, was missing.
My suggestion is to forget Entertainer missions completely - we're having more fun without them! When Player Missions come into the game, that's when I'll be interested... when I can be called to a private cantina, meet the proprietor and patrons, socialize, and make new friends. That's entertaining to me.
And with no one wasting their time working on gig missions, maybe they could be putting a stop to all the AFK macroing that is laying waste to our entire profession! 
DaraShaku wrote:
My suggestion is to forget Entertainer missions completely - we're having more fun without them!
Heh. I wish that was true but the tide of opinion is against you on that one. The biggest entertainer issue on all three forums is and always has been "Why can't we make more money?". Missions went mainstream because of player demand for an in-game way to make money from their profession instead of relying on the goodwill of other players. Unfortunately, that same patch also nerfed the payouts down to nearly nothing so we had a lot of unhappy entertainers instead of happy ones.
Yeah, I suppose you're right. As a professional Entertainer in the real world, the notion of depending on 'tips' in SWG as a primary source of income always offended me. As a consequence, I've made all my money with my pistol.
I'll try and think of some missions that would make me want to do them, and come back! 