Entertainer Archive
Thread: What did you think about the question/answer excercise?
At least we know what the devs think and where they consider our profession to be in the grand scheme of things. These answers were more communication than we've had... probably ever... and showed us a lot about how the devs view the profession (explicitly and implicitly). Overall, I get the impression that, other than the hologrinding, the devs don't consider the entertainment professions as inherently problematic. At least we know that this is the attitude we are facing when we attempt to push changes through, and we can tailor our requests to that mindset. In that way I think it was a good exercise in that it forced the devs to show their cards, whether or not we liked the cards.
But overall, I came away with a feeling of helplessness because it seems that we are spinning in circles with the focused discussions on this forum - discussions that repeatedly deal with the intrinsic problems with entertainers that the devs have not yet recognized. I feel like there is a large disconnect, and that they are months away from discovering what we discovered months ago about this profession. It makes it seem pointless to even have discussions on these boards, day after day, about how to improve things.
The impression I got was it was a complete waste of time on our part and was done by them just to keep us quiet for a while. They answered none of our concerns and gave every impression that they hadn't even looked at the questions before they sat down to type up their answers.
I don't know Tiaga, it kinda sucked. I thought Holo had stepped down from the heavens to watch for a while and say "we must at least make them feel like we are listening"... I'm ok with it being just a PR stunt or a real sincere desire to listen to the players. Either way, big Corp humoring customers or artists listening to their patrons, either way makes me feel like I'm not throwing away money for a sub and they would care on some levels if they lost me (and others).
So whatever the motivation was, I thought talking to posters was a good idea... but they didn't really seem to do it all the way. They were soooo slow about getting answers to us... I'm not even really sure how much the answers were TH's and how much was really dev input. Now no one will come back and respond, even though the response was so negative. Even if they had not planned on responding for a week, I would think some damage control was in order... it's not like they haven't been posting in other threads.
I realize the posters don't represent the whole gaming community; I think on some issues the popular poster's opinions are directly at adds with the majority of the non posting game base... but this isn't even an example of listening to the in game population over the posting population... this was more like "ask the posting population for feedback, then prove to them how little they mean". Ouch!
Overall, it's been poorly executed, confusing, insulting, and a little depressing. I'm going to have to go with negative.
I thought the idea was great, but the questions weren't as simple/straight forward as I'd like and thus the answers we got seemed to be a blanket statement that didn't provide much insight at all...
So, I think it was a great idea with a negative out come (it seems like they were dodging questions even though they probably weren't). I just think that it should have been much more formal and taken a bit more than a day to properly write up and revise 10 questions that the community of a profession feels needed to be answered.
Tiaga wrote:
I'm not looking for what you thought of the questions or the answers themselves.. But overall, do you think the whole thing was something positive, something negative, or neither? Maybe a little bit of an explanation on why you feel that way about it.
I'm still massively disheartened by all this. I swore I'd never give up Music again...but after finding out what the powers-that-be consider to be my sole purpose for playing....
It's just depressing to hear that the entertainer classes are actually functioning as intended. That all we are supposed to be is a glorified chat room for the girls to hang out in while the men go off and kill. Wow.
To be quite frank, entertainer isn't even working as a social class as the devs intended. It's difficult to socialize when most everyone in the group is AFK and spatial chat is filled with people yelling "Please heal me!" "Please tip me!" "Can I get an invite? I have auto-join on!" Fine, fine... AFKing isn't against the rules, so do SOMETHING else. At the very least disable the ability to speak anything while AFK. If you're not there then your character shouldn't be able to say anything.
When I first started the game I became a musician because I'm a musician in real life. I was excited. I had heard that I might even someday have the ability to make my own tunes and share them with others. Wow! But I quickly discovered that there is no actiual creative ellement to being a musician or dancer in SWG. All you do is hit F1-F8 or program your macro. Woo-hoo, feel the creative juices flowing!
Instead of being smart and initially spending the time to give us an interface to generate our own content, our own music and dances, they took the simple easy path and hard coded in the few things we can do. And now apparently it's such a pain to add any new content that it's being delayed. Thunderheart's answer about content basicly boils down to "Yeah, we've got new content for you, uh, it's just that it's kinda hard to add, and uh, we're a bit busy making the 10,000th change to the combat system, so we'll get to you when we get to you."
Sorry, I'm ranting. I know. Sorry. It's just that I spent the first few months as a musician, gave it up out of boredom, came back and tried dancing recently because I missed being an entertainer, and discovered that it's still the same old boring stuff to do.
Maybe I'll give it up again and dedicate myself to PVP so I can make others miserable... oh wait... my character is a wookiee. No armor. Nevermind.
I'm sorry, you wanted feedback about the process of communicating with the devs and I'll I've done is rant. *sigh*
I think what really needs to happen next is the devs need to spend a little more time on these forums reading. I think the answers they gave indicate a bit of surprise and naivete on their part to what entertainers are actually experiencing. That's fixable with a bit of effort.
Let's see where things go from here before passing judgement. If they do actually post some 'in-design' threads focusing on entertainers, then I expect they'll be as active on those threads, listening and answering, as they have been recently on others. Of course, the real problem is we'll be fighting the rest of the player base, hopelessly outnumbered, a player base that wishes us to disappear in favor of NPCs. But we have to try. It'll be out best platform to try to enact change.
picklesSW wrote:
Communication of any kind is positive.
Not true. This communication amounts to a pat on the head a slap on the rump and being told to get our butts back in the kitchen and make dinner. It's insulting and shows that they really don't care about us at all.
If they never respond, I agree. If they read the thread with an open mind and this is just the beginning of the conversation, then it's not.
Either way, I prefer to know where they stand, good or bad, as that helps every entertainer make their personal choices in a more informed way. As far as I'm concerned, anything is better than the silence we endured for months.
This community is ready to crucify them for not responding to the thread there, but they only posted their answers 3 days ago. I'm a bit more patient than that, so I won't be joining the crusade to burn the devs in effigy just yet.