Entertainer Archive

I guess I'll start with my general stentiment that I'd prefer to not see devs waste time fighting AFK's. I don't particularly enjoy AFK's. I boot them every time I'm group leader. But I know that anything the devs do to try to "solve" the problemwould be defeated by macroers really quickly, so I'd rather see them use their time on more constructive efforts.

These are also coming from my own biases (heck, if the FC can be biased, so can I ). I don't dance for tips and I don't need to do missions. I make my money selling resources and droids. I dance purely for fun and for the social aspect of the game; not for profit.

• Dancers fall far too frequently.


• Some dances have fewer than8 flourishes. Let's flesh them allout.


• We need a timer for entertainer buffing.


• We need to be able to deny service to entire factions andentire guilds.


• We need to be able to register with cantinas on adventure worlds.


• We need more interesting and varied clothing and jewelry (cross-buff to tailors). In particular, I want clothing and jewelry that works well for belly dancing, European style tribal dancing, Middle-Eastern style tribal dancing, and African style tribal dancing.


• While we're on that last one, how about some African tribal style dances?


• Musicians need more interesting songs. There are too manyhorn/wind sounds and far too few string and percussion sounds.


• An intelligent entertainermission system. The system should evaluate the populations of advenure worlds and send the missioneer to a town that is relatively high on population and low on entertainers (registered) in cantinas.That mission should paysufficiently to cover round-trip travel in case that large population of adventurers chooses to be tightwads.

Ideas for Anti-AFK that would probably not be defeated easily, so I'd support them:

• Eliminate the "passive" entertainer buff. Instead, let us /setperform at up to19 different people concurrently, if they're grouped with us. Leave it at 1 if they're not grouped. They key here: make it an active choice to start the buff.


• Changing TOS to make AFK *anything* against the "rules". And strictly enforcing it with highlyresponsive CSR's. (Good luck.)

One more...

• Let lower level musicians play in the same group with the same song as higher level musicians. When doing this, the lesser skilled musicians should earn as much exp as they could with their best song. It is very hard to find a band playing anything from the Musician tree because of all the novice musicians who want to play along. Call it playing "highlights" or "background" or something, but help us hear the better songs!

I posted it in all other profession boards I have character of, so here goes the entertainer copy

One point that goes for any class and any topic in this game: communication. It would be nice if you could bring this point to the DEVs attention. Most if not all of us are computer game players. All games have bugs. All games have design problems. However, it is much (!) easier to live with them, if they are acknowledged by the DEVs. Why do we have to list bugs ? It's the DEVs responsibility to present a list of known issues.

Example: tipping. Tipping was broken lately. They fixed it two days later. Instead of warning us that tipping is broken, they kept silent. I think most players could have lived with 3 days time or even four, if they had the chance to avoid that bug. They had not. Losing money that will not be refunded to a bug that was known to the DEVs and hit me due to their failure to communicate their knowledge is... I don't know... so much of an offense that I don't even know how to descibe it.

I'm not threatening to quit. I think that's not working, and I'm hooked anyway. I won't quit, whatever happens. I still have my UO acount though I haven't UO installed for at least a year. So much for quitting anything. BUT: Friends ask me daily about this new game, about the cool things they've heard about it, about the cool graphics they see. And they ask me if I can recommend it. If they should buy it.

And I have to say: No, don't buy this, you will not like it. I wish I could say otherwise. I wish they could play and group with me and have fun. But I will not lie to them about the state of the game. And the state of the game lives and dies with communication. Not Bugs, not features. Communication. And as it is there is no communication. There is a huge amount of rumours and information too little too late.

I think good communication will outweight any profession list by far.

Thunderheart is a good step in the right direction. But it's only one step. More of a symbol than a real help. Please include this point in your report.

From my personal point of view, communication is what lost them ~20 potential customers. And it's only my own idiocity that is keepingthe one that's left.

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nvoigt wrote:
Oh, and I agree with every point Sigrunpresented, especially AFK. I must be drunk.

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You must be.

I may come across as liking AFK. That's not the case. I just don't want to see devs waste time trying to prevent it when they could do all the other cool stuff I and others have suggested instead.

In the next few days, all of the correspondents are going to be posting State of the Profession threads in their forums. Thunderheart will be using those threads as jumping off points for focus threads about various aspects of the professions.

I've made a very general draft based on the stickied threads and the general threads on the forum. If anyone has concerns, wishes, compliments, complaintsthat are NOT related to missions or AFK macroing, go ahead and post them in this thread. That'll give me a reality check to make sure I haven't missed something.