Entertainer Archive
Thread: AFK Dance/Music and How It Helps Me Personally (non-Entertainer)
Greetings.
I play very odd hours at times andonce in awhileI need to have a great deal of Battle Fatigue and/or Mind Wounds healed. I go into the Cantina in Kadaara (my hometown) and what do I find more often than not? Nothing. The place is deserted, maybe 2 or 3 people sitting, hoping, for an entertainer to arrive. The med center here is the same way, but I can heal my own wounds with a medbot whenever I want so that's another thread for another person.
After 3 days of playing without ever getting the opportunity to watch an entertainer, I had upwards of 700 battle fatigue, 307 mind wounds, 142 Focus wounds, and 473 willpower wounds. I wandered into the cantina in Kadaara once again, and what did I find this time? An entertainer! A low level dancer, doing a great job with the flourishes! But what did I see above her head? An AFK tag!
She got a 15,000c tip for being in the right place at the right time. And not only that she was AFK, probably sound asleep in bed. I spoke to her the next day when she was on and in hunting mode, I told her to enjoy the tip and I then asked her what she was doing in Kadaara rather than a bigger city with more people and more tips. She said that Kadaara needed entertainers badly, and those on wierd shifts need entertainers too.
I then thought about the furor over "AFK Macroing, NERF IT NERF IT NERF IT" going on here on the Dancer/Music/Entertainer boards.
Long story short, if you dont want us non-entertainers supporting the AFK Macroers, then put a real effort into making sure there is one entertainer at a minimum in every cantina instead of packing into Mos Eisley and Coronet like virtual sardines.
I for one am considering creating a DancerBot to follow me around on a second account, that's how hard it is to find an entertainer in any of the smaller cities or at odd hours.
Thank you.
Speaking as a dancer who did NOT afk her way to master, i find your view point very refreshing and something that we as a communityneed to think of.
No, i do not like AFK dancing, i feel it in a large part has contributed to the contempt with which many of the combat folk view us.
Personally i did not level in places like Theed and Bestine, i didn't like the large crowd. I went to a small town on Naboo and danced there until my husband decided to move to Tatooine and asked me to follow him. So at the level of dance 3 i moved myself to Mos Entha. Sure i leveled slower than my fellow dancers that went to bigger towns. I was the only ent there, i also had to buy all my training. but the locals knew me, they knew my hours and they knew i would be there for them. I never had to run a mission again (well, at least not until i decided to do it for fun).
I knowLAMEr bots are a pain to us ents, but if we are to get rid of them, like i feel they should be got rid of, then we need to make a commitment to do our best to be there for the combat folk that do not play during prime time.
That's a fine story, so I don't want to come off as callous and unsympathetic when I say that it seems like the situation was exactly as it should have been.
One thing about desolate, out-of-the-way places is that these spots are inconvenient. Some don't have shuttles. Some don't have trainers. Some don't have a junk dealer. Life's hard that way.
Now, I don't know anything about Kadaara, so I'll use an example dear to my heart: Wayfar.
In Wayfar, there are rarely entertainers. When I show up, I announce there is an entertainer. It's kind of like a circus coming to town (or to use The Music Man as an example, the Wells Fargo shipment). It's a big deal when an entertainer shows up because life sucks in this small town. I suspect Kadaara is the same way.
With all due respect, I'll point out that the 15k credits could have been spent in a better fashion. For that amount of money, you could have flown to another town. Does Kadaara have a shuttle port? The most expensive round-trip ticket should be about 12k. So, you easily could have flown to another cantina.
And it goes both ways: If entertainers are paid their worth in small towns, they would have more reason to go out of their way. You're not the problem here, LiemKincaid; your generous offer shows that you support Entertainers. I thank you as an Entertainer. If other people tip Entertainers a fraction of that, you'd see more performers in those areas.
And if you see an empty cantina, then does it not reflect the true desolate nature of these small towns? Where is the fun if you get everything you want? There should be no guarantees. There is no guarantee that there is an Entertainer available. There is no guarantee that you won't get a critical failure on the last of your prime material. There is no guarantee that the Rebel base you were sent to destroy isn't protected by 10 Rebel PCs.
My character is a dancer/marksman living in Keren, which has absolutely horrid destroy-mission distances (2000+ m most of the time). Moenia and Kaadara, two other cities on Naboo, have very short mission distances (600-1000 m most of the time). So when I want to run missions, do I sit in Keren and moan about mission distances? No... I hop a shuttle for 240 cr or so round trip, go to the place with shorter mission distances, and do them there. The point is, if your "home city" doesn't have everything you need, there's no reason you can't just spend a couple hundred credits and go elsewhere.
And to save yourself pointless running around, here is a really useful tip a BH friend of mine gave me. Hit ctrl-v, world map. Go to the right, and open up the "cantina" list. Any cantina whose name has a "*" next to it, is "manned" by a dancer or musician. She said she uses this whenever she is on another world besides Naboo (she's from there, so she knows where the active cantinas are), to find out where to get healed.
And for the musicians and dancers -- to get the "*" to show up, you have to use the "RegisterWithLocation" (or whatever it's called) command. Don't forget!
The solution to this problem really is not the AFK Macro-bot... it's using the world map and resources at your disposal to find an active player who can help you.
C
But if you look closer, look at cause and effect. Unfortunately we're in a downward spiral. People are creating entertainer bots, cantinas are getting filled with them, so people who actually play the class are getting less interested in it and move on to something else, so some places that used to be crowded are now deserted, so more people are creating entertainer bots. And the cycle starts over.
I watched it happen in Theed on my server. The cantina used to always be crowded. There was maybe one or two AFK people but overall not many. Then more AFK people showed up. Not too bad... But as things progressed, AFK became more and more common. Soon it was rare you saw someone not AFK there. Thats about when I left. I started going back recently. I was in Theed and stopped by and was blown away by what I saw - almost no AFK people, and an almost deserted cantina. All the old entertainers I knew left, all the AFK people got master and left.. And there was a new batch of young entertainers working their way up the skills. And they were nice and friendly.
So AFK entertainers may seem like a solution.. And for the short term it may be.. But it is probably turning a lot of people away from being entertainers.
See the catch-22? AFKers are a plague that's killing off the real entertainers. They're the disease, not the cure.
Not sure if you tried this or not, but next time you find an empty cantina (or only AFK entertainers), do a quick search in the area for entertainers and ask them if they wouldn't mind entertaining you. Speaking personally, if I'm near town, I'll happily go help someone out.
- J
OOC:
I was dancing in Moenia on Kettemoor last night and there was a wookie musician macroing AFK in the cantina. Not only was he AFK, but he was also spamming some shouted message about supporting local entertainers! I was so annoyed after seeing that message over and over again for a couple of hours straight that I was driven out of the cantina.
The simple fact is this - if you don't like playing an entertainer at the keyboard as a novice, you're not going to like it any better as a master, so don't do it.
~Player of Nare Ese
Kettemoor
Nare wrote:The simple fact is this - if you don't like playing an entertainer at the keyboard as a novice, you're not going to like it any better as a master, so don't do it.
~Player of Nare Ese
Kettemoor
Wow...
This says it all in one sentence.
C
"The reason there are no entertainers in smaller cities is because there are not enough entertainers. One of the reasons there are not enough entertainers is because so many quit. One of the reasons so many quit is in disgust over the AFK entertainer problem."
But but but...you heard them. They're not hurting anyone!
I love sarcasm, but putting it away for a moment I'm very near cancelling my account as well with AFK macroers right at the top of the list of reasons. "Don't let the door hit you...etc etc so on and so forth," they'll say. YAWN. If this is how the game is going to be, you can have it!
LiemKincaid, I've come to realize the plea from people like you and why you may believe that AFK macroers help you. But please please please realize that support of AFK macoers is not the solution, but rather more of the problem. The real solution is asking SOE to make entertainres a more interesting class so that there are more of them, not less interesting as the AFK macroers make it.
Aiyiyi...no wonder AFKMing is flourishing (no pun intended)...it's self-perpetuating for crying out loud.
By the way, there's one famous saying that applies here:
The ends don't justify the means.
I started out as a dancer, but then switched to architect/tailor as dancing really got too boring for me.. sitting in one place all day.. I started out in Restuss, Rori where i would be the only one in there someitmes for hours at a time, then moved the the skill animating lag of theed....
I am starting a second account (more lots! woo! plus i want a differnet kind of character but dont want to switch servers)...
And one of the skills I will be picking up again is Musician... Why? Because my other real life friends in the game are all fighters.. Ive made enough cash to buy us at least once spaceship hopefully, and can easily make more cash with all the heavies i can make and architect things I can build... But why an entertainer to play more in game with my friends? Because on the planets they hunt on, there are NONE.. they have to clone themselves else they will lose their mind.. lol literally.. So a combat/musician i will be to be able to buff them and heal wounds when we die, without having to clone or leave planet.
Will I AFK macro? Yes probably.. But not in some major cantina. I will be afk macroing where Im needed.. on those out of the way planets where there are no entertainers for people to get healed/buffed by. Where the fighters dont only go from the Starport gathering area to brag about their ATSTs then back to the cantina to gawk at women in revealing clothing. Where people do real fighting and have no entertainment at all, even an AFKer would be welcomed.
When I was in Restuss dancing, i made nearly 5k every 2 hours.. when i went to Theed.. it was more like 50cr if i was lucky. No this is no fortune at all to speak of, but hey, it was a lot to me back then when i first started. The money is much better on the smaller planets because they want you to stay and you provide a needed service for them.. The overcrowded sardine cans as quoted from above, have enough entertainers.. Entertainers are needed elsewheres in the galaxy.. even if they are AFK, its better than nothing...
Pendarin-
I can understand where you are coming from. Asking Sony to make Entertainers a more interesting class, so it becomes more popular, WOULD be a better solution, in an ideal universe. However, a few points that make this unlikely.
1) We're talking about SOE here, and a lot of the same people,some classes in EQ were boring and near-useless for 2 years.
2) Anything added to Entertainers to keep them "interested" most definitely wont involve sitting in a cantina. Thus the Cantina will be even MORE empty when the Entertainers are finally given bard-powers to make them worth something in the field with us warriors.
3) Because of #2, AFK bots will still be around grinding their way to mastery, this time with a bigger goal: Super Bard Powers. And because all the Entertainers will be out in Biz Natch groups on Dathomir, there will be no one in the Cantina EXCEPT AFK macroers!