Entertainer Archive

Ok, so last night I was in the Coronet cantina, jamming away on my brand-new Ommni box with a huge, great group. Well, the leader had to logout, and somehow or another I ended up in charge.

Whew, I'm never going to be leader for a group of more than 5 people ever again! Don't get me wrong, the playing wasa blast (getting 110+ xp, with 150 not uncommon), but as the evening wore on, we ran into the point where thegroup hit the 20 person cap, and more kept coming in. Plus, the bug where changing target from the Ommni and anything/one else occasionally had me stop playing; which wasn't critical, but did get annoying the 10th time it happened.

I proposed an idea where we would split the group into one of just dancers and one of just musicians, under the assumption that the audience could /watch one of the dancers (getting the heal from them and bumping the dancers' xp), and /listen to the band, stacking the same benefits. Well, even with the entertainers waiting for an open slot, the groups would've been about 14 musicians and maybe 10-12 dancers, so most people didn't want to lose the group xp boost. Plus no one was sure whether someone in the audience could watch/listen two groups. We ended up having the master dancers (who didn't careabout the xp) leave and form a separate group, which worked out pretty well anyways.

So my questions are these:

1) Can you /watch one group of all dancers and /listen a group of all musicians, giving an audience xp gain to both groups?And if you can, would you get healing from both?

2) Is there a cap on the group xp bonus? Is there some point where more people in the group isn't giving you more xp?

3) What etiquette do you think would be appropriate for forming up a secondary group when the main one is full? Separate sides of the cantina? The cantina layout really isn't that performer friendly, so we're all just sprawled out on the main floor anyway, should we start setting up in a side room like that NPC band in the Eisley cantina? Should we start advertising the hotels more? Do combat players even check those, or are they relying exclusively on the cantinas? And do we not play there because no one comes to watch, or does no one come to watch because we don't play there?

4) For people who regularly handle full groups:what do you do aboutafk/LD members? There were a few who I removed from the group, unless they had specifically said they were coming back. Unfortunately, one LD'erjustlost her connection on her end for about 20 minutes, and when she came back the group was full. I felt really bad, and made sure that she was the first invite when a slot opened up. And there was another member who'd be afk off and on for a while because he was double-boxing. The temptation to remove him was almost too great, since he was the lowest level musician, and I have yet to hear ceremonial, ballad, waltz or jazz with more than 2 people.

And on a related note, I'd like to make a request to my fellow performers: If you're in a full group and yougo to log out, please /leave the group first. There were a few times where there'd be performers waiting to join, and someone off in the corner hadn't been doing anything for a while (I assumed they were resting up or in the middle of at /tell conversation), and then they finally go LD. Sure it's only like 5 minutes, but you weren't using them, and someone else could've.

This probably got a little incoherent, but I thought I'd throw these out to the entertainer population to see what we can do to make our services more fun for us and the audience.