Entertainer Archive

(Cross posted to "Role Playing")

As SWG becomes more packed to capacity with power gamers with each passing day, a real opportunity for actual fun is truly being missed out on – ironically by those best in a position to create & enjoy it.

I am referring, of course, to the Entertainers and the Elite class specialists derived thereof. Of all the classes with most potential for role-playing and player-to-player interaction, no other class has more opportunities or better reasons to really get into making their characters colorful.

Yet sadly, “colorful” for Entertainers these days usually begins at the wardrobe and sadly ends there, too. In one solid game month, across three different severs, I have only encountered two Entertainers who were not AFK & stuck in macro land for the duration of entire said month. Two out of at least a hundred who actually got into the role and interacted with the players around them.

What a loss! Think about the potential of real, old fashioned MMORPG fun is being missed out on for a few minutes, here, for both the person playing the Entertainer and their audience as well. A cantina should be a place where players actually hang out in for real entertainment, not just a pit stop one dashes through just long enough to drop one’s battle fatigue or get a quick mind buff.

First suggestion: Cantina NPC bartenders are just props. They do nothing. They don’t even talk. LAME! But what’s a cantina without a bartender? Well, if the props won’t do it, why not have your amateur Chef dress up and be the bartender for a while? Make mass quantities of beverages, hang out behind the bar and sell cheap shots to the patron crowd. You won’t be pushing uber buff products, but you’ll be selling a lot of simple ones … and you’ll actually be having fun at your job. After all, bartenders know all the hot chicks, neh?

One fun thing I did on one server was make a Trandoshan Brawler ( I know, a total stereotype) and added a little fun to the idea by giving him grey skin, yellow teeth, and red eyes. Then I gave him some ugly black gloves & took Novice Entertainer. Thus prepared, I had him hang out in the cantina and start singing “Kompressor” songs while shaking his fists in the air. And no, Kompressor Does Not Dance!

Here’s another fun idea: Get a buddy of yours & pick a server that neither one of you currently use. Go make characters on there, both human, one short & fat, the other tall & skinny. Then cruise into the cantina together and start doing “Blues Brothers” tunes.

Yes, for all the macros I see Entertainers using by far the easiest & most entertaining one is to just macro some of your favorite songs to crank out during your musical performance. Since they recently added breakdancing & the like to the dancer’s repertoire, why not go out and do some of your favorite fun rapper rhymes while you dance? Or how about your guy at that funky keyboard start doing “Depeche Mode?” Or have that slow exotic dancing Twi’lek sing some “Dead Can Dance” (in Ryl, no less)? Best yet – make your own songs!

And for Bog’s sake, stop dancing with yer swords & guns in hand fer cryin’ out loud. That got old five minutes after it started. Maybe we can persuade the devs to make burlesque fans or dancing snakes or something. It was a good idea, at first, to dance with props but the game’s inventory selection in that department is far too limited right now to truly make it as cool as it could (and should) be.

Although groups sometimes pop up, I only saw one cantina on only one server that actually had an honest to goodness band working together. So let’s go back to that idea with your buddy & you going to an unused server – why not get four of your friends to throw together some characters on a server you’ve all never tried before and make a real band? Use the “player alliance” system to name your band, even! Trust me, when you get bored of the repetition of shooting down hundreds of cheap starfighters or blasting the same womp rat spawn point for hours on end, taking a break from your main character to go play around with your Entertainer side character on a back-up server will do wonders to refresh your interest & satisfaction with SWG. It will also to wonders to refresh everyone else’s interest & satisfaction with SWG, too.

Best of all, you’ll actually be playing those characters instead of standing around AFK all night while running the same boring macro as everyone else.

And I guarantee you this: Active, at the helm Entertainers always make better tips. In fact, they not only get more money, but even presents, too! You’d also be surprised by the number of guilds & player towns that are desperate to recruit a good resident Entertainer to do regular shows for them, and will pay out oodles of cash & fancy presents as an incentive.

Once you get your band/troupe together, have a friend (or a side-skilled member of your group) grab some Merchant points off the Artisan tree so you can have you very own vendor/spam-bots advertise your upcoming shows. Do a “Tour of Corellia” with shows that are announced to everyone before hand. See how many entertainment droids you can put in one room before everyone’s video cards explode.

Heck, make your act big enough and you could do shows at Player Town cantinas and charge admission, just like a real band. The local chef/bartender could also clean up on that, act, too. Make them your manager if you really want to get into it – after all, who better to give you that vendor/spam-bot, eh?

Do poetry. Spoken word. Stand up comedy! That’s right – put your favorite macho hero in a dress & do an Eddie Izzard routine. The crowd will love it. Rodian Dangerfield – I can see it now. Recite Shakespeare. Heck, get a group together and do a play. There’s more sides to entertainment than racking up experience points.

So you see, the opportunities for true Roleplaying laid out before the Entertainer class are probably the best in the game. It would be a real shame to continue to see the vast majority of players sadly wasting that opportunity by sitting around AFK for weeks on end and macroing themselves into mindless buff bots.

Remember, if all you want is powergaming, repetitive combat, and experience grinding, you don’t need a MMORPG to do that - any stand alone, sit-at-home RPG on the market can let you do that. People play online to interact with other Players … what else does online gaming offer that sit-at-home games don’t?

Make the most of it, and rekindle the meaning of FUN in the game!

Sadly, one of the biggest problems is all the AFK entertainers in the public cantinas. As much as it makes the cantinas unfun for people who come to visit, it makes it 100 times more unfun for the people who spend their professional lives as entertainers, as they're likely to spend much much more time in the same place with them. As a result, most live entertainers stay away from 'busy' static cantinas when they hit master, or even before they hit master. They hang out in other havens where they can still have fun.

Anyways, that point aside, I just wanted to make you aware, in case you didn't know, that until the publish of a few days ago, holding a weapon while dancing was the only way to prevent your dancer from falling while dancing (as of the recent publish, falls don't happen anymore at all). So it's not so much dancers trying to be cute (though some do it for this reason) as much as it is preventing the falling.

I really do hope that cantinas will one day become exciting awesome fun places! And your ideas sound fun, given the right environment . There are in fact a lot of people doing nifty things like this; hang around the ent/dancer/musician boards and you'll hear about some of them; others happen all the time without being publicized here.

Yay! Ham it up!

Message Edited by BioEngine on 03-30-2005 10:28 PM

By all means utilize my ideas! That's why I post them, neh? Glad to see that people are taking heart again.

Thanks!

Actually, you can talk to the NPC bartenders. The spiel is a bit limited; seems to be a pointer to some quest or other. And they will sell you drinks, too. I was a bit annoyed to discover that they have no benefits whatsoever, but they still have filling!