Musician Archive
Thread: Musician top five issues, and dev responses
A couple of points ...
Buffing with the Ommni/Narl:
First, the disclaimer - I haven't done this to buff people, but I use this method to target people when greeting them as they enter the cantina so it *should* work for buffing too.
You can switch your target away from the Ommni/Narl and keep playing it so long as you retarget it before the game decides what your next measure is. As you know, youhave till roughly halfway through the current measure to indicate a flourish for the next measure. If you miss this window, the game will decide that your next measure will be unflourished. It's at that same point where the game decides you don't have the instrument targetted anymore and decides that you're gonna stop playing. So long as you retarget it before this point, you'll keep playing.
So, what I do is: type the command, wait till just asa measure starts and then target the person, hit Enter to execute the command, and retarget the instrument. Occasionally I miss cause I'm not paying close enough attention to timing, but it's very doable.
Second point:
I really don't like afkers in my cantinas. But, I also don't want to click any stupid popup window every 5~10 minutes. The survey windows are incredibly easy to get around (search the artisan board for "survey macro") and would be just as easy to bypass for entertainers. It really won't stop afking or even deter it.
In any case, these days, the big problem isn't really the afkers in the cantinas...it's the holo-grinders in the cantinas. If somehow they were all forced to be at the keyboard, they'd still befilling the cantinas grinding away ( I don't blame them for this, they're just following the only path SOE gave them for jedi ). Only then we'd have to listen to many of them complain about how much they hate having to grind through our profession ( this I blame them for ). As famousFATWOOKIE stated in another thread, SOE needs to just remove all entertainer professions from the jedi paths. As much as I hate to dump our problem on other professions, as far as I know, no other profession requires an audience to advance ( well, Politician does...and oh do I feel sorry for anyone who manages to get that from a holo ).
Since removing entertainer profs from "the path" isn't likely to happen, I can only hope that we'll get some mission upgrades to help us earn xp (music, dance, ID & ent heal) and creds AWAY from the massively overpopulated cantinas in the cities. I love player city cantinas, but they seem to be empty most of the time which makes it just a wee bit difficult to earn ent healing xp ( plus it just isn't fun playing for no audience ).
One of the suggestions for missions was to go somewhere and play for a specific NPC - perhaps even needing to buff them as part of the mission. Payout would be based on skill level, distance, etc. I still wouldn't want popup windows, but what I'd like would actually be even harder to get around. Every so often the NPC would "say" that they'd like to hear a different song, ora different instrument. You'd have a set amount of time ( oh... 30 seconds? ) tocomply or they get huffy, tell you you're not satisfactory and don't pay you. This could still work for missions to cantinas if the person you're playing for is in the back room or a side alcove.
Okay, enough ramblin from me. Happy New Year everyone! Be safe and go light on that Corellian whiskey.
Ow-thi
Tyrena, Corellia, Scylla
Kelvin,
Sorry to see you go. FWIW, I routinely get the buff to last two hours -- in fact, it's almost always two hours on the dot. The duration of the buff depends on Musician skill, choice of instrument, and choice of song. More details are in my FAQ, stickie'd in this forum.
Anyway, good luck to you.
It is truly a sad sad day when a musician decides to drop there skill and their dream.
I am a bit confused about musician buffs myself(after i read the FAQ) as to if a buff can last longer than 2 hours. I heard that you had to play for 5 hours to give a good buff, geuss i got the wrong impresion.
An idea for the "Epic quest" for master musicians.Maybe it could start off where you talk to an NPC Musician(one of the mos eisly cantina band) and he would send you around to talk to and perform for different NPCs. the final quest could be where you have to find a musician somewhere on a remote world(the starting npc probebly), he tells you you have finished the quest and are now "worthy". Then gives you a new instrument like an electric gitaur that only a Master Musician can play(why should you have to go through all that dancing and ID just to get that Mandoviol, along with some more dances, and another crappy song). Along the way, aside from the mission payment, you could get another Loud Speaker for your home or Cantina. The only mission I know of that gives out loud speakers is the reb hideout mission from 3PO. I have seen player cantinas with more than one or two speakers in em, I was told tha the other missions that give loud speakers still give em away put you can't place them in a house. What is up with that?! I have one loud speaker in my cantina and i would REALLY REALLY like to have MORE of them. 
JediTed: Several NPCs give the speaker quest. I got mine from a thief hanging around behind a cantina in Bestine. Not the cantina in the center of town, but the one on the outskirts.
I like your idea for an epic quest. Electric guitar, heh. Right now we do have an electric guitar on one tune -- Star Wars I.
When the buff was on Test Center, I was able to buff people for almost three hours. But on Live, my buff never seems to last much more than two hours, even if I do /setperform for 20 minutes or so. Anyone getting it to last longer than two hours?
one more thing, I posted on the "your top issues for musicians"a few of the things i think should be looked at.I made the suggestion that the epic quest give you a master musician instrument like a conga drum. also, mak it so u could walk or dance with it.
Perhaps you could swing that by the devs.
One final thing.
Do you know anything about if the devs are working on any of those other suggestions like that musical NPC pet. I think that would be a very cool interactive thing for musicians, especial ones who don't like to play inbig groups. Is this to difficult to code? i mean there are already NPC faction pets.
P.S.while your at it, you should see if they'll make these fourms so you canedit your own posts. 
Jedi: I haven't had any further response from the devs on epic quests or NPC "band pets" or other new content. I know some things are brewing -- new songs, better gig missions -- but the devs are reluctant to give me a timetable. In general, I've found it easier to get a dev reply to my bug reports, since those can be hunted down and fixed relatively quickly, than to requests for new content, which takes more time. And as things progress, our top issues tend to be more about content than bugs.
If you look at our top five list now, it's mostly about content: new songs, better gig missions, more things to do to give us incentive to play at the keyboard, post-Master content; only the complaints about targeting the nalargon/ommni arebugs. (Well, the devs might not agree it's a bug; it works as designed. It's just a cumbersome design.)
In fact, to generalize beyond Musicians, my own opinion is that the problems with SWG are more and more about content and less and less about bugs. Slowly, gradually, incrementally, we see bugs being fixed: stat bugs, chat stability, vehicle bugs, Player City bugs. At the same time, people burn through more and more content and start to ask "now what?" I'm still enjoying the game, but I'm increasingly restless about getting more content.
Anyway, a note about quests. I'm not sure how the Ris armor quest works, but there's currently a small quest one can do for Nym and 2 of his associates and the final reward is a non-craftable carbine. The code/format of this quest could be very adaptable to musicians.
The quest works like this - you talk to Nym and his friends and they give you missions to go fetch items from some caves far away, (there's a lot of story here too, it's a fun read) you bring the items back and when you've fetched all three you're given this nice carbine.
The carbine you get from the mission is usable by pretty much anyone and is generally better than the other carbines available to novice marksmen. Novice carbineers however have better guns. So it's a middle of the road carbine - desirable to novice marksmen because it's the best gun they can use, and desirable to carbineers because it's different, it has a unique look and sound compared to their other guns.
This format could be used for musicians as well. Perhaps you'd get the missions from a famous musician (Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes? Max Rebo? Sy Snootles?) And the missions could be stuff like fetching an instrument that's being repaired, delivering concert holovideos, or even going and doing a gig mission because Figrin is too busy to do it himself. Maybe you have to do missions like this for several people. At the end the reward could be a unique non-craftable instrument. Perhaps some sort of stringed instrument like a harp or a violin kind of thing. It could use the same sounds as the mandoviol. That way musicians would have access to an instrument with that sound, even if they can't use an actual mandoviol (which would still be saved as a reward for achieving master entertainer). Anyone with novice entertainer could be certified to use it, it would give better XP than a slitherhorn, but not as good as novice musician level instruments, but it'd still be highly desirable to all musicians because of it's unique look/sound.
Anyway, this just struck me as the sort of thing that'd be relatively easy to implement since they'd just have to adapt existing code, and would take care of more than one problem at once (high level content, new instruments, musicians getting mandoviol sound).
Ok,
While I share the other Musicians frustrations with the lack of development in our profession... I am also a member of other professions, and friends of people in still more that are just as nerfed, jacked, messed up, and whatever else you want to call it.
I think it's great that the dev's are working on our stuff... and perhaps I am one who can understand why so little has been fixed yet, because I looked at the big picture for a moment...
The Vehicle Patch, Player City Patch, Mount Patch, and major MAJOR game issues in the beginning have likely consumed a majority of the dev's time in 2003...
Now that they have released these major patches and updates... they can focus on exploring and fixing the less MAJOR yet still important issues...
I personally can't imagine how someone imagines coding a description of what someone wants (New Songs... etc.) into a video game, but that's what the dev's are paid for. I'm sure that we musicians, as well as my fellow Pistoleer's... and others, will be seeing our major issues, and some we didn't even think/know about start to become fixed over the next 7 months. Then, I'm sure we can expect the **edit** to hit the fan again when the Space Expansion is released...
So, in short... I appreciate that the dev's are now looking into our professions...
But I would still like to see MORE response from those whose job it is to be the go-betweens (AKA Thunderheart, etc.)... maybe you guys need more interns... I don't know... but just some more input would be great...
And if you're about to tell me it's a hard job... think about the Starwars.com community boards... some of them are paid, and some of them do it for free... but they manage to participate in all posts, at one point or another... (and remember, interns are free sometimes!)
Looking foreward to the upcoming changes/fixes,
Jericho Farstrider (Ahazi)