Musician Archive
Thread: Musical Mind Enhancement
Mariki wrote:
Musical Mind Enhancement is as important to musicians as it is to dancers yet we don't have a common item like the Exotic dancers Leotard. We have talked about how musical instrument experimentation should mean something and perhaps we have some common ground here. Perhaps this should be a modifier along with possibly FT healing. After all, a fine instrument has a sweeter sound then a poorly crafted one and does effect the listener. I think some dancing props with the same abilities should be added for dancers too, to be fair.
It would be nice to get some help in these areas as those skill tapes are rare andextremely expensive. The current system makes it very hard on live entertainers as their sources of income islimited with passive healing and AFK player NPCs to contend with. Its a sad state of affairs when the buffbots are the few who can afford to have +20 added mind enhancement. Having a enhancement on the instrument also allows real entertainers to change outfits, something NPC's could care less about.
Message Edited by Landlubber on 03-09-2005 12:21 PM
Landlubber wrote:
Mariki wrote:
Musical Mind Enhancement is as important to musicians as it is to dancers yet we don't have a common item like the Exotic dancers Leotard. We have talked about how musical instrument experimentation should mean something and perhaps we have some common ground here. Perhaps this should be a modifier along with possibly FT healing. After all, a fine instrument has a sweeter sound then a poorly crafted one and does effect the listener. I think some dancing props with the same abilities should be added for dancers too, to be fair.
It would be nice to get some help in these areas as those skill tapes are rare andextremely expensive. The current system makes it very hard on live entertainers as their sources of income islimited with passive healing and AFK player NPCs to contend with. Its a sad state of affairs when the buffbots are the few who can afford to have +20 added mind enhancement. Having a enhancement on the instrument also allows real entertainers to change outfits, something NPC's could care less about.
Hehe, yeah... a week or two ago I bought a +5 music mind enhance bandolier for 2.1mil in an auction for no other reason than that I didn't want it to go to a buffbot. And since that was about half of my total funds, I don't see myself doing this again anytime soon
But I think the basic flaw with your proposal is that the buffing skill would still be item-based, and that's what caused the current spiral in favor of buffbots in the first place. This does nothing to give us an advantage over buffbots, at best it puts us on an even footing. And sorry, but this is just not enough - I will not settle for being only as good as a robot, I want to be clearly better.
If those enhancement instruments/clothes/whatever are easily available, then everyone will have them, which more or less negates their point in the first place. Make them (semi-)rare on the other hand, and you'll have the same situation as now - the rich (buffbots) will soak them up again.
And for this reason I'd be all for tieing buffing skill in some way to ATK/AFK status. Not necessarily by making it better for ATK folks (heck, as if this game needed even better buffs...), but by making it worse or even impossible for AFKers. As for how this could be done, there are many suggestions floating around here - but that's certainly a challenge to implement, and frankly not one I'm sure the Devs are willing and/or capable of taking on...
Message Edited by Landlubber on 03-09-2005 12:21 PM
Even footing? Buffbots have to go entirely. Their presence is a blight on all entertainers and everyone knows this except perhaps some combat people who couldn't care less and only think of themselves. I really believe that this is needed for our very survival. I'm on a server now that the problem isn't as bad as it could be. I left a server where the situation was much worst. Buffbots replace live entertainers.
I'm proposing enhancements for the live entertainers that are affordable and make instrument experimentation worth anything. I never ever thought of it as equal footing with buffbots asthey need to be shut down. I won't settle for their buffs to be toned down, they need to be shut down, period.
And whats so wrong with more people having access to the enhancements? We are all entertainers. I don't consider myself in competition with anyone and support the work of all entertainers. I run a PA that its expressed purpose is for the benefit of the arts. I don't want to see these enhancements rare and expensive, I want entertainers to have access to them. Be it crafted instruments, quests, etc. Rare expensive loot drops for items that are for a class that are traditionally the lowest paidin the gameis just wrong. Look at the missions payouts for entertainers. Look how many tips one can expect to get healing in the cantina. Thankfully there are a lot of entertainers who are not in this for credits.
Mariki wrote:
Musical Mind Enhancement is as important to musicians as it is to dancers yet we don't have a common item like the Exotic dancers Leotard. We have talked about how musical instrument experimentation should mean something and perhaps we have some common ground here. Perhaps this should be a modifier along with possibly FT healing. After all, a fine instrument has a sweeter sound then a poorly crafted one and does effect the listener. I think some dancing props with the same abilities should be added for dancers too, to be fair.
It would be nice to get some help in these areas as those skill tapes are rare andextremely expensive. The current system makes it very hard on live entertainers as their sources of income islimited with passive healing and AFK player NPCs to contend with. Its a sad state of affairs when the buffbots are the few who can afford to have +20 added mind enhancement. Having a enhancement on the instrument also allows real entertainers to change outfits, something NPC's could care less about.
Mariki wrote:
Even footing? Buffbots have to go entirely. Their presence is a blight on all entertainers and everyone knows this except perhaps some combat people who couldn't care less and only think of themselves. I really believe that this is needed for our very survival. I'm on a server now that the problem isn't as bad as it could be. I left a server where the situation was much worst. Buffbots replace live entertainers.
I'm proposing enhancements for the live entertainers that are affordable and make instrument experimentation worth anything. I never ever thought of it as equal footing with buffbots asthey need to be shut down. I won't settle for their buffs to be toned down, they need to be shut down, period.
And whats so wrong with more people having access to the enhancements? We are all entertainers. I don't consider myself in competition with anyone and support the work of all entertainers. I run a PA that its expressed purpose is for the benefit of the arts. I don't want to see these enhancements rare and expensive, I want entertainers to have access to them. Be it crafted instruments, quests, etc. Rare expensive loot drops for items that are for a class that are traditionally the lowest paidin the gameis just wrong. Look at the missions payouts for entertainers. Look how many tips one can expect to get healing in the cantina. Thankfully there are a lot of entertainers who are not in this for credits.
Well, and you know yourself how a lot of people think: given the choice between a live entertainer and a buffbot side by side, and all other things being equal, they'll choose the buffbot. After all, typing /invite is so much easier than actually having to interact with a live person... and with all buffbots automatically at the enhancement cap, there wouldn't be any reason for those people anymore even to look at live players.
And to your suggestion itself: the problem for me is not one of competition or lack thereof. I don't see any other live entertainer as a rival, and I certainly wouldn't be eager to outperform them with my buffing skills as quickly as possible. The point is that if everyone is buffing at the same level, it does not matter what that level is. It can be 100%, it can be 125%, or even 314.159%,the specific numbers aremeaningless when they are the same for everybody. Therefore you might just as well not bother to hand out that bonus in the form of instrument quality or whatever, you can just bump everyone up by 25% and be done with it (although I'd argue as well that even stronger mind buffs is not what this game needs in the first place).
Yes, I would very much like to see instrument quality matter, but it should ideally be an artistic improvement, I think. Maybe give us more flourishes based on the quality of the instrument (0-9% --> 1 flourish, 10-19% --> 2 flourishes, etc up to 11 flourishes at a full 100%), or introduce some kind of failure check for musicians (dancers cann fall, it would only be fair), and tie that oneto the instrument. Make an instrument attuneable, so that I will always play better with my bandfill than with yours... and so on, and so on.
But hey, I don't disagree with you on the general topic, just on specifics of the implementation
Mariki wrote:
Yes Tiaga, same problem and I think they should have given you some dancing props by now also.
Thing is they can easily add skill modifiers to items.They can easily add these modifiersin the crafting process. Both those systems are in the game and functional with other items and skills, they always have been. I suppose the easiest mod they could add to instruments is HAM costs though. (They do it with bio clothing, skill tapes, and ham costs on weapons). Having experimentation on instruments now seems to me like they put it on there but then were too lazy or didn't care to finish the job. This seems to be a concurrent theme when it comes to entertainers and then they probably wonder why we are cynical.
Frag, what you suggest would have to be all new code as far as flows. Asking for new code will certainly take much much longer then asking for something they just need to activate. To get modifiers on instruments all they have to do is aggree and add the existing code they already have to apply to instruments.
Eeeek
That was to me?
Personally I wouldn't link buffs to flos exclusively. In doing Flos for duration and MME for power they have created a simpleprocedure but spamming of flos to move faster is , I'm fairly sure, not as it was intended. XP looks at a specific block of time and sees up to 2 flos per tick (1 for dance) and calculates based on that. Buffs could simply be based on the number of 10 second intervals that have 2 (or more) flos in them so that time is the primary factor. It would reduce the action expenditure for them, but that all would need to be reworked. This would remove a second system of keeping track of flos and link to the existing XP one.
On a side note, the total action expenditure for dance buffs far exceeds that for music. Both require the same number of flos but dance flos cost more action. For XP there is a balance in that dance requires only 1 flo per tick for max XP while music requires 2, but in buffs, Dance requires the same 60 flos.
Rewriting the code......well I wouldn't. I would look at the ways the bots exploit the system and fix those. Deal with the AFK situation, and then re-evaluate. In building an interface, which this process sure needs, they may need to rewrite the code to make it work, but that would be down the road.
Fragpuppie Uber
Master Entertainer, Master Musician
Founding Member - Frag's Puppies
President and CEO - Fragpuppie Enterprises and Uber Instruments
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