Image Designer Archive

Yeah Master IDs are sitting pretty now huh?

It took me nearly a full day to earn a level one skill! I don't mind the devs making it longer to grind this profession by lowering the exp you get for each id but waiting for the timer and the inability to make a grinding macro make grinding it a pain and a half! I gave up on getting image designer.

I also hate that i can't use my macros anymore to change my appearence to a preset thanks to the command line nerf.

Futhermore Master ids are going to go from being hard to find to being impossible to find. I sure hope the devs bother to examine their stats on the popularity of this profession after this expansion, cause i am sure it is going to fall.

I also hate the stat migration nerf - but thats an argument for another time...

Ya I imagine none of you actually tried to even image design yet as a novice or even worst... an Entertainer!!!

You people don't understand the mentallity of how Image Designers work.

I still have my Image Designer on Bria, I even grinded that profession before the Holo-grind since I always wanted to change people's looks. And I've realized back then, that why people come to image designers are for this:

- They want that really cool hairstyle they saw another person have (And those hair styles can only be done by Novice ID)

- They want a new face tattoo (You can't do Tattoos on Zabraks until you have Markings IV!!!)

- They want largest boobs, different height, to be thinner, etc.. etc... all Novice ID skills, some even need to be III or IV to be done

- Their girlfriends say they have an ugly face and need it redone (YOu can't do a nice job unless you have a high skilled bodyform skill)

Anyways, what I'm pointing out is this:

By adding the timer, you're basically stopping a lot of new Image Designers from being born. To get from Image Design I to Image Design IV in the Entertainer profession can take easily 10 hours. Logically the timer was added to force people to PROVE they are real image designers. So in those 10 hours to get Novice, you can either grind yourself non-stop until you're ready to cry, get fat cause you've been sitting down 10 hours straight waiting to click an Accept Button over and over again. Or you can spend 10 hours worth of time at the Image Designer tent waiting for a newbie whojust bought thegame so you can ID grind on them OR someone actually wanted a hairchange in the low-level ID skill slot.

Cause the moment a customer enters that tent and wants a high level ID hairstyle, forget it, you just lost yourself a potential customer. I mean, as a low-level ID, you can't even offer people that want a nice hairstyle a certain style. Everyone wants the nice high-level styles, barely anyone wants low-level ones and the time it will take you to hunt that low-percentage type of people, it will take even more time than if you were just grinding ID on yourself.

I'm not saying remove the timer cause SOE loves that timer so much it will never disapear. I'm just saying reduce it!!! 5 minute wait just to change your eye color is unreal.

Each ID should take no more than 1 minute. And give ID's more XP when they ID on someone. I mean not everyone can find someone, to sit down with them, for countless hours just to grind ID (Especially now that the timer has been added). Cause by doing this, it will stop AFK-ID-Grinders from grinding ID on themselves since they know they must find people to grind ID faster, it will force'em to seek out people, make friends and thus helping them since they are forced to ID on people and not just themselves.

It makes it more "fun" to ID on someone and not someone else.

That's why anyone here that agrees with the ID Timer is not someone who is trying to grind or just want to like to become an ID. None of you are... because I'm doing ID right now and it's not fun...

So many things can be changed to make ID a fun profession again, and nothing is being said, discussed or being done. SOE is just focussed on keeping the timer and everyone hates it... oh except you people that never touched ID or are already Master. You people shouldn't even have a say in this because you don't know how anoying the timer is until you actually try it

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PerilousWish wrote:

Um, you know, that brings up a good point.

Weren't players 'encouraged' to use macros to progress through professions?

Otherwise, why would they have put in the command lines for them in the first place?

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Ok, is it just me, or does it seem to be only Master Image Designers that like this new timer. That is all I seem to see in this post, and in most others. Believe me if you had to advance up it from scratch with this timer you would feel differently. And I do talk with my customers, the xp advancement just takes far too long now to make this enjoyable. I enjoyed advancing up ID before...I actually got new skills and customizations to use. Now if I chose to advance it would be grinding (waiting).

I can't believe this has me this worked up, as this isn't even my main character. I guess that is why. I created this character to truly enjoy these professions (not grind and drop) and this has taken the ID aspect out of that area as the advancement is not even noticeable anymore for a casual player

Getting from Novice ID to Master ID means to talk about politics and stuff with 667 Customers who all want a Stat Migration giving you 600 XP. That means that you will talk 112 hours with your customers until getting Master ID. This time is just the time that this timer runs it does not include the time to find your 667 customers. If we assume that you have at least to search 5 Minutes for a new customer and getting your talk to a politely end you need 167 hours of time. Playing 4 hours a day doing nothing else you will play 7 days a week for 42 days.

By all means I ask you Master IDs to stand up and honestly say: This is just the way that I skilled my ID. I spent these 42 days talking hundreds of hours with all those roleplayers out there. I don't want to be rude, but this is bullxxxx. It is simply not true.

I am an ID who just skills by playing the game. I asked every customer if he had the time to help me making some XP and so I got from august last year until now to have two full trees of the ID. Now my advance is standing still. Nobody will wait 6 hours to help me getting some XP and I am not patient enough to stare at that timer myself.

The whole sense of this post is to ask you Master IDs to help us get this timer deleted or some other way to make it possible to advance ID without just starring at a stupid clock on your monitor.To make it even worse asMaster IDs have their timer deleted we won't get any customer as Non-Master IDs and wil end up spendind the double ammount of time which is simply one thing: impossible.

So please don't post in threads like this saying this timer is great.

Thanks,

Sue Rouge

I can't stand the ID timer. I am not a hologrinder, never intended to be a hologrinder. I just, stupidly, decided I wanted to be a master entertainer after the patch went through. If only my brain had worked so that I had decided to do so a couple weeks earlier. It's not that I hate ID'ing. I mean, practicing on other people is kind of fun. But, it's entirely too difficult to find anyone who will let you ID them at the lower levels. At this point I feel indebted to those friends who have let me do so for an hour at a time, taking up their valuable time. Otherwise, here I sit in the ID tent, changing my own lekku around hour after hour after hour. I feel incredibly sorry for an ID'er who happens to be a wookie or a species that can't do anything to themselves until they reach the higher levels.

See, this is what doesn't make sense to me. So, some people didn't want others to be able to master ID in such a short period of time (even tho, they did it themselves!), and I realize that appears to be a minority of people. Most masters I've talked to don't even like the idea of the timer. But, this is the thing. The jedi revamp is coming up fairly soon. When it does, nobody is going to be hologrinding anymore. In fact, if people are "grinding" ID, what will it matter? They will want to be an ID. There are so few going up the ranks right now anyway, you're only discouraging any growth in this profession. It's going to be extremely difficult to find anyone to do any ID work on you, much less a stat migration, which many ID's don't even want to do in the first place. I can understand a little, why some people might want to make mastering ID a little longer. But, the way it is now, is simply ridiculous and not only punishes the hologrinders, but anybody else who wants to join this profession, or just go up 4 boxes to getmaster entertainer. It's just too harsh.

If the main focus of this was to keep people from hologrinding too quickly for jedi? The solution is going to come at the jedi revamp. Why did they have to do this too?

I'm a Master Image Designer and I hate the timer. It's a terrible solution to the problem. Instead of multiplying the required XP for each box by, say, 10 or even 100, they instead instigate a system that penalises everybody and makes the game sloooooow riiiiight dooooown.

Sure, IDing isn't a fast-paced profession like a combat one, but it's still absolutely ludicrous to have such massive time restrictions. Look at crafting professions - each item takes time to produce, but we're really looking at 30 seconds to 1 minute (depending upon complexity of item). Yet IDers get stuck with a 2 - 10 minute session in which they can't do anything else? Bad, bad, bad.

A much simpler and fairer solution would have been to increase the XP requirements for each rank. It makes sense, it's a system people are familiar with and - most importantly - it keeps the IDer's customers happy. They don't care about timers and restrictions. They want to be in and out as quickly as possible. And now we have to tell them that not only will this change take up to 5 minutes to take effect, but we're also going to charge them for it? It's bad enough getting payment from the L337 D00Dz under the old system, but now...?

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GypsyRiver wrote:

Thank you! I'm glad someone finally made this post. I was too scared to! 90% of the posts after the patch have been complaining about the timer. I think people should stop whining, and most of the whiners are people who aren't Image Designers, did Image Design specifically for this patch, or waited 'til after the patch to pick it up. 5 stars to you!

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Uh, lets analyze what that yellow statement means, shall we?

The first part: "Most of the whiners are people who aren't Image Designers"

On what empirical data are you making this statement? From what I have seen in these forums, it's manily up and coming Image Designers who are complaining or "whining" if you will.

The second part: "did Image Design specifically for this patch, or waited 'til after the patch to pick it up"

So what you are saying here is that you CANNOT be an Image Designer unless you started out during the old system? Is it wrong that people wanted to wait for the ID revamp because they thought it would actually be fun to level it up? Are all the future Image Designers less worth than old ones, or what are you on about?

As I have stated in some other thread, before you support the timer, do this for me:

Start a new character at a server where you will be making a clean start, IE you have no friends on it. Start out as an entertainer, play that entertainer one or two hours a day with the goal of mastering Image Design. Return here when you are a master, and give us a full debriefing on how long it took, how many customers you had during the leveling and most importantly, how fun you had.