Musician Archive

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Bionic wrote:
.... Increased communication is great only if you can believe the message being sent.

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NJ62 wrote:
I don't see that AFK is a necessity because inspiration buffs are not a necessity. People do not need inspiration buffs. They can play at off-hours and do perfectly fine without one. Now, granted, it is better to have an inspiration buff, but for that, I think it's fair to require some effort to find a live entertainer.

If an ID is not online, you don't get a haircut. If a smuggler is not online, you don't get your weapon sliced. Same deal here.

It's a travesty that people have gotten used to afk bots to such an extent that they feel a sense of entitlement to entertainer services. That doesn't mean, however, that we have to stall the game for those resistant to change, in a way that is detrimental to a specific identifiable population.

Look around you. Aspects of the game that people relied on are going poof. 3k ham buffs? Gone! Your composite armor? Hah! Being able to keep the same combat skills for the same skill points? Nope, you can't do that either.

How is this any different? It isn't. Why should we sugar coat this change by offering "incentives" for being ATK, rather than simply eliminating afk, when none of the other changes that have been implemented in the CU are being treated this way?

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Perfectly stated, N.

Let's look at the facts we have been told about our place in the CU:

-Inspiration Buffs and Battle Fatigue Healing are the extent of our abilities when the CU goes live.
-AFK Novice Entertainers are able to Inspiration Buff and heal Battle Fatigue as effectively as people with 250 skill points in Entertainment skills who are at the keyboard, it will just take six minutes instead of one minute.
-We have no idea of the timeline for any abilities beyond these two abilities.
-AFK Entertainers are not being punished or eradicated because they are "useful."

Why the hell am I supposed to be okay with this? Give me one reason. One reason and I will move along.

Why do I even play a game where the developers care more about the use of AFK players than the happiness of the people who play their game? Is there a reason?

It's interesting that Phydeaux-K9 has stated that the Inspiration will be a foundation, a basic ability for entertainers and more will come over time. With the inspiration only giving a small 10% increase we can only imagine what is to come. While this system doesn't remove AFK - in fact it does make it worse - I'm hoping that future abilities will require ATK play. As Phydeaux-K9 said they will be interactive that can't be macroed and will require a live player.

It's been said many times that the player should not have to ability to toggle the auto AFK flag and i agree, AFK should kick in after 15mins and stop ANY ingame action from taking place until the player is no longer AFK. Detecting that a player running a macro and is AFK i would imagine is slightly harder to do but surely the client code could be altered to detect a physical keypress? No keypress in 15mins and your AFK.

Removing macro's isn't really a working idea. I play live, i love to entertain, but i also use flourish macros - if you got a routine that you like to perform or your actually talking to players then having a flourish macro helps free up your fingers and your mind so that your not thinking about hitting the flourishes on time and missing one!

I am looking forward to seeing what other abilities they hae planned for us, and it'd be great if we got the Hutt Casino too

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Atlantiss wrote:
It's interesting that Phydeaux-K9 has stated that the Inspiration will be a foundation, a basic ability for entertainers and more will come over time. With the inspiration only giving a small 10% increase we can only imagine what is to come. While this system doesn't remove AFK - in fact it does make it worse - I'm hoping that future abilities will require ATK play. As Phydeaux-K9 said they will be interactive that can't be macroed and will require a live player.

It's been said many times that the player should not have to ability to toggle the auto AFK flag and i agree, AFK should kick in after 15mins and stop ANY ingame action from taking place until the player is no longer AFK. Detecting that a player running a macro and is AFK i would imagine is slightly harder to do but surely the client code could be altered to detect a physical keypress? No keypress in 15mins and your AFK.

Removing macro's isn't really a working idea. I play live, i love to entertain, but i also use flourish macros - if you got a routine that you like to perform or your actually talking to players then having a flourish macro helps free up your fingers and your mind so that your not thinking about hitting the flourishes on time and missing one!

I am looking forward to seeing what other abilities they hae planned for us, and it'd be great if we got the Hutt Casino too

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I agree with just about everything said above. I'm really hoping that the new systems installed will promote at the keyboard enough that people will come to us.

I do have to comment, to those that don't like the inspiration buff system. With BF being harder to come by and mind wounds gone, and neither of these changes appear set to be changed, this will be our primary method of getting healing XP. Unless they drastically up either the XP reward or the benefit for the inspiration buffs, I like that it's passive now I think about it. If the listener has to go through extra steps to get such a tiny buff, they likely will pass on it (people in general are lazy, and the buff doesn't give that much of a bonus). The more people looking for these buffs, the more chances of getting the XP. It's going to be hard enough with the smaller group sizes.

I've only been playing SWG for a short time and as an entertainer even shorter and from everything that i've seen it appears that the Devs support AFK play as many of the others have said. Needing entertainers around at all hours is a nice idea, just so long as they are ATK. If the combat AFK was removed then what is the problem with removing the entertainer AFK? There NEEDS to be some sort of penalty if you are AFK. There NEEDS to be some sort of bonus to be ATK. Right now the only reason i play ATK is because i don't believe in AFK play. If that was how the game was supposed to be played then i understand that. It is not. The term "AFK Play" is an oxymoron in and of itself. If you are "Away From the Keyboard" then how can somebody "Play"? I know that games have macro's setup so that you don't have to type something over and over, but to have it setup so that ALL you have to do to "Play" the game is start a lone macro is wrong. Games that i have been involved with that have had players with this kind of attitude (AFK Play) have suspended/banned players accounts that have used it excessively. This doesn't happen here because it's a "built in feature". If its a feature then it can be removed/fixed as all bugs are, and considering how much the community is in agreement about this it warrants ALOT of concern.

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Seahawker wrote:
I've only been playing SWG for a short time and as an entertainer even shorter and from everything that i've seen it appears that the Devs support AFK play as many of the others have said. Needing entertainers around at all hours is a nice idea, just so long as they are ATK. If the combat AFK was removed then what is the problem with removing the entertainer AFK? There NEEDS to be some sort of penalty if you are AFK. There NEEDS to be some sort of bonus to be ATK. Right now the only reason i play ATK is because i don't believe in AFK play. If that was how the game was supposed to be played then i understand that. It is not. The term "AFK Play" is an oxymoron in and of itself. If you are "Away From the Keyboard" then how can somebody "Play"? I know that games have macro's setup so that you don't have to type something over and over, but to have it setup so that ALL you have to do to "Play" the game is start a lone macro is wrong. Games that i have been involved with that have had players with this kind of attitude (AFK Play) have suspended/banned players accounts that have used it excessively. This doesn't happen here because it's a "built in feature". If its a feature then it can be removed/fixed as all bugs are, and considering how much the community is in agreement about this it warrants ALOT of concern.

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Warryyr wrote:

Having someone say something to us was nice.

We still have several issues that go unaddressed.

Can we please get some kind of attention to these.

Battle Fatigue and Battle Fatigue healing are still a problem. Is this ever getting fixed? What the hell is wrong with it? Does anyone care?

Group size nerf is bad, bad, BAD for Entertainers. What will be done about it before the CU goes Live?

Will we ever hear of these fabled Master-level abilities beyond the Uninspiring Inspiration buffs? (Have to admit, an inspired Entertainer would probably be putting on one HELL of a show, but oh, not in SWG - no xp gain for Entertainers from these buffs).

Will we ever hear more about what K9 talked about?

We're moving very quickly to the end of Beta. Time continues to run out. The new player experience with Battle Fatigue factored in continues to go untested because nobody gets Battle Fatigue.

And I've grow more than weary of asking the same questions.

Can we get some kind of update? I didn't think Phydeaux's post would be our CU communication in it's entirety.

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Warryyr wrote:

Having someone say something to us was nice.

We still have several issues that go unaddressed.

Can we please get some kind of attention to these.

Battle Fatigue and Battle Fatigue healing are still a problem. Is this ever getting fixed? What the hell is wrong with it? Does anyone care?

Group size nerf is bad, bad, BAD for Entertainers. What will be done about it before the CU goes Live?

Will we ever hear of these fabled Master-level abilities beyond the Uninspiring Inspiration buffs? (Have to admit, an inspired Entertainer would probably be putting on one HELL of a show, but oh, not in SWG - no xp gain for Entertainers from these buffs).

Will we ever hear more about what K9 talked about?

We're moving very quickly to the end of Beta. Time continues to run out. The new player experience with Battle Fatigue factored in continues to go untested because nobody gets Battle Fatigue.

And I've grow more than weary of asking the same questions.

Can we get some kind of update? I didn't think Phydeaux's post would be our CU communication in it's entirety.

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I fully expect answers to these, I'm not backing off on it.

I want answers and I think they're long overdue for most of our issues.

Somebody needs to talk to us more than once every 6 months.

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Warryyr wrote:

I fully expect answers to these, I'm not backing off on it.

I want answers and I think they're long overdue for most of our issues.

Somebody needs to talk to us more than once every 6 months.

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What really gets me incensed on this is the extreme lack of feedback we get and Helios is a posting madman in the Commando forum. Granted, it's known what's going on with the CU in regards to Commando (and it's allowed to be known to the player base), but still, they basically have a dev they can ask questions of quite often, and we don't get a sniff of a dev in here.

Well, I guess I shouldn't say "we" anymore. I've decided I'm going full combat (I'm too lazy to grind to padawan to open a second char slot, and I won't ever give SOE 2x the money and I don't wanna start over on another server.) Cantinaswill never have the atmosphere we had at launch ever again, and that's reason enough for me to go full combat (although the 3000 health thing will be nice too.)

I'll still support you guys fully (no going to an AFK bot for me!), and I'll still whine and complain hereuntil this profession gets the goodness it deserves.

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DarkY0da wrote:
"We'd rather reward the ATK performer with better abilities that can only be achieved through active participation (resulting in an interesting performance, of course) rather than punishing or eradicating the AFK performer (who, in the end will provide inferior but useful services)."

Let's take a look at the new AFK doc bots... likely won't use enhancers so will provide inferior but useful service and still buff.

Let's take a look at their attempt to reward ATK sampling, you get a pop-up asking you to move to a new spot and you get a brief and slight bonus to sampling... but you can ignore it and keep right on AFK sampling right where you were...

In the end the AFK bots will provide an inferior but useful service by doing the same buffs... we will just get some way of enhancing those buffs because we are atk.

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And nobody will care about better buffs, because they don't want the "hassle."

AFK'ing Entertainers is unacceptable. It makes expectations of our professions to be totally unreasonable.

The attitude is, "don't like it, provide the service they do."

No human can.

Nobody can play a game 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The bot lovers will just "deal with getting inferior buffs" since they "can't ever find a liveEntertainer." Of course they can't, they run right to their little macro lovebot and get all the goodies they need.

Finding out the Devs now think that AFKis okay, but they want to encourage ATK play instead, ended up really pissing me off the more I thought about it. Our situation will never improve so long as extended AFK continues.

I'm taking a break from entertaining, and have been for awhile now. I've had enough. The situation only gets worse, and the absolute lack of pretty much ANYONE even SHOWING UP at a cantina on TC tells me we're boned. And the Devs don't give a hoot. And I'll only pay for a character that I don't play for so long. Sorry, but I want to have fun again. I'm really tired of not having fun as an Entertainer.