Musician Archive

Are you all kidding me? If I could not do this profession afk I believe I would slit my wrists!!! Thank you SOE for allowing us to afk this profession. (Some of have to work for a living and would never finish this profession.)

I am both a master entertainer and a master musician.I earned both titles at my keys and without having to AFK grind.AFK is just that,you arent playing the game.This needs to be stopped entirley and ignore the whining from those who dont want to put the work into it.AFKers have ruined any economics for entertainers,in the beginning entertainers conversed andjokedand made tips. The atmosphere was fun in the cantinas and it was a genuine entertaining place to go.Now major cantinas are glutted with the AFK dancers and musicians.Don't tell me that they serve some noble purpose of being on call 24hrs a day-thats just making excuses and the people whodo it and they know it.This game dosent have a cheat manual available at Best Buy so you can tap 4 keys and be a Jedi for a reason, its made to give you back what you put in.Enough of the crying and whining about how tough it is,go ask a BH how much of his proffesion he got to grind in his sleep. If you are not at your keys too bad,there are others who are. AFKers just cheapen the proffesion by treating it like a right not a privlidge.Any player who needs BF or mind healing is PRIVLEDGED to find another who can fill this need.It isnt a right that you take for granted,we provide a service and thanks to those that can do the job while ignoring thier patrons(who dont care beacause its free)most of the galaxy sees it like a garage,always there and in service-not like a doctor that is there when he can be.

Right now I'm grinding all the elite entertainment professions (yes for slot) but I have another character who is an entertainer whom I play part time. Well my two cents....

Personally I like to play the entertainer (the one I'm not grinding for the slot) non-afk because I like to interact with the character. I also like it as a visitor to a cantina when the musicians are present and greet you. BUT I also understand the need for AFK entertainers. If you take away (or hinder) the macroing many cantina's will be empty at thelate and earlyhours in the day when some of us play. It's already difficult to find a doc in the middle of the night. Finding entertainers is already difficult in some citys as it is now, you take away the ability for them to do it afk and there will be no entertainers healing mind at places like the Imperial Outpost on Dantooine.

What I would favor is finding a way to make it more rewarding for the entertainer not to go afk. Either by increasing xp gain for those who avoid the afk tag or perhaps even the cantina itself would pay entertainers (at a certain skill level like master) for a good performance (not going afk) during a certain time span. WHy not pay the entertainers, they could be out running missions making cash (Not entertainer missions, they kinda suck, at least I think they do) but instead they're doing public service.

I don't think getting rid of afkers is the solution, it will cause more problems than it solves. I think Rewarding the HARD working entertainers is the solution.

here's my thought since i highly doubt that they will remove afk macrotainers....

make the theaters not be able to heal but give double the xp or more

this way the grinders will go to the theaters to play which are under used as it is and all the atk true entertainers can heal/ train in the cantinas.... after all dont you go to band class/ lessons before taking on a venue anyway?

AFK Free Zones Options

I have been reading the boards with much interest, I have been working on Master Musician for a little while now. I finally broke down and went to Coronet and tried to get in a group. There I found a sea of entertainers half of them AFK, in fact it was flowing over into the hallways too. I tried to join a group but was told it was full and to play somewhere else.

I would like to throw out a suggestion.

Make the Cantina's an AFK Free Zone. Those who wish to go afk must do so in other places.

"Jaeo"

I am a hologrinder, and here are my views.

I started playing this game the first week of July. My first profession was dancer. I loved being a dancer. I met so many people, many of whom I still chat with.

The last couple of weeks that I was earning my master dancer title, an AFKer started coming into our cantina. Most people who I performed with were at the keyboard 85% of the time. This girl was NEVER there. Maybe once and hour she would flirt with peopel and leave. She had on teh skimpiest outfits and parked herself right in front of everyone. She was the first person to be seen and everyone would watch her. It was annoying to us who were there working hard for our money.

After a couple months, more and more of these AFK robots showed up. The more they took over, the more I started getting out of the cantina scene and on to other things. Back in September, I dropped all my dance skills without any regrets because I became so frustrated with the state of the profession.

So, you can imagine my dissapointment when I opened my first holo and saw "Master Musician". Back to the cantinas. Now all I want to do is get it over with. Sometimes it isn't so bad when i can get into a good group/ But that is hard to do.

But my whole view on the AFKing has changed. Back when Iw as a dancer I despised it. I didn't understand why someone would want to be an entertainer and never actually play as one. It boggled my mind, it still does.

But so many of us want to try out the Jedi thing. Hey, why not right? And to become a jedi, some of us HAVE to master musician/dancer. Now I don't mind grouping with the AFKers because I get more XP from them. If we are all in one group we all get the EH XP. I hate it when Coronet has two or three groups because the healing XP gets spread up too much. I have 190K healing XP to go before I master. Which will take forever sinec healing is not easy to get. (back when I danced I finished that first. Do people not even go to cantinas anymore and walk around with tons of BF?).

Since 95% of the entertainers out there seem to be holo grinding, it's just useless to fight it. Let them AFK there way in and out of the profession. The thing that bothers me is when they park themselves at the entrances and beg for tips, etc. I think holo grinders, if they just want to AFK, should go off to the side or in the back. Let the real entertainers perform in the front.

I am at the keyboard most of the time, but I will run a macro all night sometimesin hopes that I will get some EH xp over night.

I don't even know why a serious entertainer would go to a cantina like coronets'. When I perform there, I can't even tell who is performing and who is there to get healed. There are just way too many people there. I have been performing in Bestine which has much better EH xp. and much easier to actually perform in.

Well, that's just my opinions.

Should come to Theed, Sunrunner sometime. It's not the afk'ers in the entrances there, it's live people, trying the only lame way they can, to grief people who don't even want to be there in the first place, by trying to take prospective XP away from the larger group. It's funny too, because for all that we're supposedly afk, they stand there making rude comments out loud for us to hear, which the group laughs about in group-chat because they're such stupid comments.

C'mon folks, work with us here! If you stand there making it take LONGER for us to level up, then we'll be there even LONGER "ruining" your wonderful, albeit the *least* active, profession...Criminy, I had more stuff to keep me occupied as a novice artisan for cryin' out loud!

This wouldn't help AFKness much, but it might help spread entertainers out more, which would make going into a Cantina less spammy and annoying, which might encourage more folks to stay at their keyboards: make it possible for only ONE group per venue to exist/get performance or entertainment healing experience. That way both the Cantinas and Hotels and Theaters might get used in the starter planet capital cities.If entertainers had to spread out, people might actually have a hope of finding entertainment healing in cities other than Theed and Coronet, which might encourage general players to spread out more. Might help with server stability, for that matter.

Just a thought.

Good idea Echinacea! Although I don't know how easy that would be to implement. but then I'm not a programmer, let them figure it out.

My suggestion is to give us faster buffs and heals in player cantinas exclusively. In that way, the owner of the cantina can decide which musicians he allows in, thus limiting the AFK in cantinas where the owner doesn't want them. Also, the faster buff and heal will draw the audience out from the static cities to player cantinas. All the while, AFK guys could still play as they do now, i.e. where ever they want (with the exception of private cantinas that booted them).

This doesn't solve AFK, but it gives a tool if all the private cantina owners wanted to utilize it. Also it gives even more of a reason to go to player cantinas beyond their potentially convenient locations.

I think the reason more clients aren't in the player cantinas right now is because they (the clients) expect the cantinas to be empty. Maybe they don't check that registration thing, I don't know. My suggestion might add the little bit to the scale that made them stop by just in case. In achicken/egg situation, that added audience load would entice more (real and AFK/ hologrind) entertainers to the player cantinas.

Another idea I have is to allow masters to register and appear on the registry as masters in the cantina. Alot of clients don't want to be buffed by lower level musicians (for what reason, I can't say, maybe it's psychological). Much the way merchants can get premium auctions and colored signs etc.

Again, this doesn't solve AFK. Instead it encourages player cantina attendance; and the player cantinas are where the musicans have much more power over with whom and to whom they play.

Inviting suggestions and comments.

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KoraJubali wrote:

Maybe they don't check that registration thing

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Incidentally, the 'registration thing' it totally useless at the moment. Every morning when the servers come up, all Cantinas are defaulted to 'registered.' So are Med Centers. Unless someone goes into them and registers, then leaves again to show them as being unocupied by a registered performer/medic, they stay in the 'on' state all the time.

This, in effect, makes the entire purpose of registering pointless. No one will be able to tell if there's really a qualified healer in there until this is fixed.

And I don't expect it to be fixed in the foreseeable future. Medics and Doctors are some of the most functional classes in the game...and we've certainly seen how much priority performers are given.

I think Kora and Echinacea are both right: /register doesn't work correctly, and players don't check for registration. I've mentioned the /register problem to the devs before but haven't had any response. /register is a particular pet peeve of mine; I can't register at my city's cantina because the owner is of the opposite faction. Didn't Free French and Vichy bands both play at Rick's Cafe in Casablanca?

My city's cantina usually has a couple people hanging around -- maybe me and our Dancer and an Image Designer or some such. But dang it, I heal so fast that customers don't have incentive to stick around for long. Even buffing doesn't take all that long. It's always bothered me that as we increase our entertainment skill, people need us for less and less time. I'm not saying that we should become *less* effective at healing as we level up. I'd rather see the devs give us all more fun stuff to do in the cantina -- casinos, more interesting gig missions, rewards for throwing a party, "reputation" increases for a big audience, entertainment badges, anything.

Honestly, I did not have time to read all 8 pages. But as someone who just had his 3rd holocron say master musician, let me say this: AFK'ing is caused by one problem and one problem alone, that being the profession is not very fun. If you want to spend a lot of time chatting with other players its fine, but I can just as easily chat on instant messanger without paying 15 bucks a month. To stop afk'ing, the profession MUST BE MADE FUN. I believe that the point of this post was to figure out how to make the profession more fun/interesting, not how to nerf afk xp so that every holo grinder in the game despises those who suggested it be nerfed.

There are many things that can make the entertainer professions fun. The first of which are npc competitions. These function like battlefields, but are judged by npc's unless a master musician/dancer steps in. Then those players judge based on choice of song/instrument, timing of flourishes and light affects, and only socials you can use to spice up the performance. These competitions can completely replace gig missons, and may pay very well if enough players enter. These competitions will also grant A TON OF XP, so that the time spent doing it was more productive than just sitting around.

I think the competition idea alone will make things much more fun, but there are also more fantasy-style abilities that can be used. Entertainers could charm creatures into being temporary tamed animals. The skill of the person controls the level of thew creature and the time that it will follow you. You will also be awarded large amounts of xp for larger tames.

Lastly, and this is total eq, is having entertainers grant "burst run grace periods." This will allow a player to remain burst running for up to 1 hour for masters. It is a great help when you need to cover ground and cant use a vehicle since you're not a scout and cant camp.

There are other abilities that can be added, like a direct music or dancing "battle" between two players. I'm thinking along the lines of "Guitar Kings" or "Dance Revolution". The two players will compete directly, rather than with judges, to see who can outperform. Once agaon, large xp rewards for longer and more exciting fights. And these will not simply be "hit button to flourish" things. I'm talking an actual system that involves timing and tempo to record scores, the sort of thing that made dance revolution such a hit.

So you see, you dont need to nerf AFk xp. You simply need to zero in on the root of the problem. I hope that my time as a musician will be fun during the holo grind, and hopefully it will b fun enough that I choose to keep it as I advance.

Zeta Atreides, Master Squad Leader

Lol, well, by "battle", its more like a solo competition. I thought it sounded fun anyways, if a unique and challenging game system were integrated to control this. I'd like to know if any "hardcore" musicians agree with any of this.

And why on earth would somebody 1-star my post with suggestions to make musician more fun? Was it offensive somehow?

Zeta Atreides, Master Squad Leader and aspiring Master Musician