Entertainer Archive

Sorry if the title was a bit leading.

This is coming from a non-Entertainer Politician. The intent of this post is not to "Troll" for flames, or insite a riot. Rather, to gather a clear understanding of the Entertainers point-of-view (POV).

As a Civic Leader, I am grappling with ideas on how to get entertainers into my citie's cantina. The PC Cantinas across all galazies are pretty much empty. The exceptions being the cities that are located around intense POIs. Mine is a city of merchants, primarily, with a healthy dose of shooters mixed in. We have plenty of entertainers who call the city home, but they seem to migrate to the various planetary hubs (cornet, theed, anchorhead and bestine)to get their experience and to hawk their skills.

I have toyed with the idea of an entertainer "payroll" where by the city would pay resident entertainers to spend time in the cantina. We also have a couple entertainer "Alts" that do a fair amount of AFK entertaining in the cantina.

But what I see as the root of the problem is a system that pretty much dictates that you, as entertainers, all bunch up in the big city cantinas. What if there were an incentive to spread out? Here are a couple of ideas, both reward and penalty based, for you to digest:

Building Codes: Have you ever noticed in some RL bars, hotel conference rooms, and school gymnasiums there is a plaque that diplays the room/structures maximum capacity? What if the cantinas around the planet had a similar "Cap?" Perhaps one for entertainers, and one for spectators. If the building was full, you would have to move one to another location. the CONS of this plan would be that during dead times in the game, the popular locations would still be the only place to go for mind heals and experience.

Salaries: Rather than have the mayor of a city manually pay out to entertainers, perhaps an automated system could be employed. A mayor could specify how much he/the city will pay per hour of entertainment, or perhaps per amount of damage healed. The mayor could also speciy how much he/the city is willing to commit to this each week. A dancer/musisian/entertainer could check the "employment terminal" in the cantina and see how much money is to be made. To ensure that there is still some activity in the NPC cities, the system could also include "mission/employment" type terminals in the NPC cantinas.

Experience/Heal Rate Caps: Perhaps a structure would divide the amount of available experience to be had from the spectators between the folks doing the entertaining. This would have the effect of the dancers competing for the attention of the patrons. The system already works similar to this. It would just get an adjustment to make entertainers decide to stay or go. There would also be a mechanism that would limit the amount of healing a patron got if too many folks were oggling the same scantilly clad dancer. The flip side of this is an increase in the Experience/Heal rates for PC Cantinas.

Once again, I implore you, please don't take this as a desire to NERF your professions in any way. I would only be in favor of a system that was mutually benificial to all, and had the effect of making our PC cantinas more inviting to you. I have also seen where much of this has been discussed in the past. Re-stating your position is welcome.

Well, it's like this... If you have get the traffic, you'll get your entertainers (at least on my server). We have our entertainers in the capitals, the folks leveling. But I also see people in cantinas wherever there are a lot of people moving through. Mining post on Dantooine, I'll usually see 5 or 6 entertainers in there. Most of them are AFK, granted, but they show up to level. We have a player city on my server where the GCW seemed to concentrate, one faction built some bases outside the city of an opposing faction. Many guilds began coming here to fight. The cantina had entertainers, because the entertainers wanted that experience.

Now you can create rules to artificially force entertainers to leave the places where they know they'll find their healing experience, somehow force them to come to your city. But what kind of healing experience will they get?

I suppose it's a catch-22. No one goes to your city for to heal their minds because there are no entertainers to do it, who will not go there because there is no one going there.

But those are the novices. The city I was talking about? They also had a policy where they would pay entertainers a rate per hour to play in their town during prime-time, but the paid help had to stay at the keyboard, was the only rule. That's what I would recommend. Put out the word that you'll pay for entertainers. How much can a master combat profession make off missions per hour?

You could also offer to supply the services of a combat medic, to attract entertainers. If they know they can get constant healing experience, as well as getting paid for it, you should get your entertainers.

But even then... will that attract customers? Usually entertainers will willingly go wherever there's lots of traffic. But I'm not sure the traffic goes where there are the entertainers.

I think the biggest way to encourage entertainers isn't to really mess with the entertainers, but the way missions in general are assigned. If crafting/delivery/entertainer missions keep sending me back and forth between Mos Eisley and Anchorhead, guess which cities I'm probably going to be in? I think simply having missions that sent people to player owned cities, and have NPCs walking around player cities giving out missions would greatly increase the amount of traffic, which would increase the number of entertainers. I think factionally aligned cities should be free from non-factional missions. Only Reb missions send you to Reb cities, only Imp missions send you to Imp cities. If your city is surrounded by a minefield, I don't think you have any right to complain that not enough people are visiting.

Now to discuss your ideas:
Room capacity: My main problem is that prime spots like Coronet will get full fast, and rather than encouraging folks to go to player cities, it simply discourages them from entertaining period. Why bother hunting around for a cantina with an open slot when they're all filled with afk folks? And capping the number of players that can be listening or watching in a cantina at any given time would encourage people to get in and out ASAP to make room for others. I've yet to hear any complaints about too many people in cantinas sitting around enjoying the entertainment.

salaries: Good idea. The only caveat is from the city's point of view, I think they should have the option to /banentertainment for entertainers if they want, in order to discourage afk players. (I recommend this as a less drastic option to banning them from the city.) Simply ban them from playing in the cantina so the city isn't bled dry by afk'ers trying to make a quick buck. Some cities may not care either way, but they should have that option. And it should be clear entering the cantina whether or not afk is allowed.

Experience/Heal Rate Caps: I'm personally against this. As it is, entertaining tends to be a fairly slow grind, and the party XP Bonus helps speeds things along. (I'll admit that I did the macro thing one day while went to work. I was sick and tired of hearing Starwars 2.) Plus, things are bad enough with people yelling "PLZZZZ TIP!!!!" every 30 seconds in their macro, I really don't want "PLZ WATCH ME DANCE!!!!" in between.