Musician Archive

The second possibility sounds much more realistic. Well, except from all those quests you mentioned, because those would require serious development time, and I don't think they would be willing to devote that to a 0 skill point profession. And anyway, if you really think they have a "vision" or a plan for us that will magically make us valued members of the SWG family and are willing to actually follow through on that plan, then you're giving them way too much credit. Don't get me wrong - I hope you're right, I just don't believe it until I've seen it.
In my eyes the current SWG Development team is in serious need of a clue or two about this game in general (not just about entertainers specifically). They may be well-meaning, and I don't doubt there is some real talent among theactual coders, but someone in the SOE hierachy is clearly exceptionally incompetent, that's the simplest explanation for the state this game is in. And I'd wager it's someone pretty high up on that hierarchy, not the actual Developers themselves.

I think there is a third, much more realistic explanation for things like taking out BF and not replacing it.

The devs have no earthly idea what to do with entertainers. So they're going to take a bunch of shots in the dark, like they seem to do with everything, without any real planning or solid input from the player base (whom they mostly ignore).

I will say this: if we become bards so that our main role is running around following combatants playing music at them, I'm out. I'll drop musician and probably cancel my entertainer's account (hell, maybe both accounts). I can't picture anything more UN-Star Wars-like than entertainers playing music and dancing in the middle of a battle. When did that EVER happen in the movies?

C

First off I'll say that your post wasn't that long. I've seen...and made...longer ones.

While I think that the 2 directions you propose are good ideas, I don't see either happening in that manner. First off, I don't see the direction for musicians going towards being bards. The devs have always said that they do not want to make up bards, and its been something the community has been violently against (though I guess that means that the devs have considered it seeing as though they implement lots of stuff we never asked for or spoke against). In addition to this, if they were intending us to be part of the greater combat game as bards, they would have implemented it in the CU....and we know what happend with that. Also they recently stated (a couple months ago) that musicians will (someday) be getting additional buffs for NON-COMBAT skills. With that on top of that they link our final remaining skill of inspires to locations (cantinas, houses, camps), which has always been so, I do not see bard happening. Lastly, unlesss they give us some way of protecting ourselves, there is no reason for us to be in the field at all. I get 1 hit incapped often and that's on my speeder. So standing (or walking even) around with a combat group would be suicide. 1 aggro hit and I'd be dead.

As to your second idea, though this is what I would prefer, I see it as LESS likely. For one thing, they reduced ID skill points at the CU. If the other entertainer professions were going to be reduced, they would have already done so. Also, the professions that are 0 SPs have distict reasons for being so. Politician didn't start at 0 SP, but was reduced to such because they realized the burden it placed on players to run a city. Basically you needed an alt to be mayor. The politician also has never really had any effect on the greater game, only for RP. Furthermore, Politician was added after the fact when cities were added so they didn't try to integrate them 100%. Hopefully they have learned to try to better integrate professions all around.
The only other professions added have been the piloting ones (well except Jedi, and that is its own issue)...well OK and shipwright, but shipwright has the same cost as any other elite crafting tree. Pilot skills were added at 0 SPs for a couple reasons, first because to lose SPs to pilot, people would just bypass it and stick to the ground game, second because they were getting money for the expansion. Getting new skills for a small cash output makes sense. Getting just a different path is not as attractive, and thus not as profitable.
As Ailar said, they are not going to make an investment in converting us to quest based without return. They also would not be implementing the changes they are doing next week if this was the direction they were going to head.

The direction I see that the devs will take will be a continuation of what they have already done. We will have no direct role in the combat game. Eventually....maybe...there will be other "inspire type" buffs for non-combat skills, but most likely they will either be AFKable like the inspires are now, or completely useless like the inspires.....or BOTH. Skill points will remain the same high ones they are, but our value will be less than ever. We may see a real quest someday, but I doubt within a year. The theatre manager one is not a real quest. Its more of a random NPC arc like the Brantlee Spondoon ones in Coronet Cantina or the little ones in Mos Taike. Oh its like that except you have a HUGE cost for the reward at the end. Hopefully they will add a new expansion with real non-combat content (in addition to the combat content). I can dream can't I.


****NOTE TO DEVS WHO MAY READ THIS****
THE ABOVE WAS NOT A REQUEST BUT AN OPINION. PLEASE DO NOT IMPLEMENT ANYTHING AS DESCRIBED ABOVE. FOR IDEAS PLEASE SEE THE MUSICIAN 'Cool Gameplay Ideas for the Devs to Consider' THREAD, OR EVEN BETTER 'Musician Top Issues 5/23/05', BOTH OF WHICH ARE STICKIED IN OUR FORUMS.


Fragpuppie Uber
Master Musician/Master Entertainer

Message Edited by Fragpuppie on 07-15-2005 10:45 AM

The logical move is for us to become a zero SP profession.

The way i see it, it's not all doom-and-gloom, there are somegood points for this kind of move:

Good: Everyone will be able to come to a cantina and jam for fun.

Good: Entertainer will have no grind to it, come in, Jam, meet some people and have a good time. None of this xp animosity, none of this "must have the best players in the group" mentality.

Good: Since the CU entertainer professions struggle in combat, particularly crafter CL1's who cant wear armour, you can now spend a full line of SP's in a combat discipline.

Good: Increased community aspect for the game, instead of AFK macro entertainers (annoying, thanks holo-grind!)and silent "im only here to get my 3-hour buff" patrons, you should get huge bands, dance troops and all kinds of fun events. Everyone can join in!

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Alivelle wrote:

The logical move is for us to become a zero SP profession.

No. We will be plagued with bots who want to do nothing else except drive us nuts.

The way i see it, it's not all doom-and-gloom, there are somegood points for this kind of move:

Good: Everyone will be able to come to a cantina and jam for fun.

And everyone and anyone can go in the cantina to be an annoying jerk, at no penalty to them, and they can do it all day and night while they work or sleep. So long as AFK is possible, zero skillpoints is out of the question as far as I'm concerned. Not everyone will use this opportunity for fun, some will use it to hurt other's gameplay. For a recent example, see NPC actor usage and their imminent removal.

Good: Entertainer will have no grind to it, come in, Jam, meet some people and have a good time. None of this xp animosity, none of this "must have the best players in the group" mentality.

Even if it takes no skillpoints, it will still have to levelled up. Politician isn't instantly mastered, though it has no skill point costs.

Good: Since the CU entertainer professions struggle in combat, particularly crafter CL1's who cant wear armour, you can now spend a full line of SP's in a combat discipline.

A lot of Entertainers are Entertainers because they're not that into combat. They like it because it's an alternative to combat and crafting.

Good: Increased community aspect for the game, instead of AFK macro entertainers (annoying, thanks holo-grind!)and silent "im only here to get my 3-hour buff" patrons, you should get huge bands, dance troops and all kinds of fun events. Everyone can join in!

If Entertainer professions were made more fun, there would be more Entertainers. Removing skill point costs would allow more people to be Entertainers, but it'd allow some folks to just destroy the cantina atmosphere.

I'm not saying i approve of the move (if it happens), but sometimes you have to learn to adapt to situations and look for the positive points (something entertainers excell at usually)!

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I'm all for adapting to change. I have no problems with that. Even though there *could* be positives to removing skill point costs, I'm afraid that given our AFK-plagued game, we must be realists. People will use the opportunity to harass Entertainers or just be annoying.

I would much rather see Entertainer move beyond this "useless" stigma that it's now mired in, become a fun and desired element of the game community, and have it's skill points made worthwhile - rather than throw away our skill points.

Once all of our changes are done, I will then revisit the idea of removing skillpoints for Ents. Until then, though - it's way too early to call for their removal, and it looks like the opportunity given to any player could be easily abused.

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Chessack wrote:
I think there is a third, much more realistic explanation for things like taking out BF and not replacing it.

The devs have no earthly idea what to do with entertainers. So they're going to take a bunch of shots in the dark, like they seem to do with everything, without any real planning or solid input from the player base (whom they mostly ignore).

I will say this: if we become bards so that our main role is running around following combatants playing music at them, I'm out. I'll drop musician and probably cancel my entertainer's account (hell, maybe both accounts). I can't picture anything more UN-Star Wars-like than entertainers playing music and dancing in the middle of a battle. When did that EVER happen in the movies?

C

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No kidding. Who orginally came up with the Entertainer Professions? Probably left this game a long time ago. =(

I personally see things developing into something good. Not exactly the way people want it but something better than we had.

Just from the way the skill tree looked it seems they are prepping us for new inspiration buffs. I wish we had the new buffs when the BF was removed but I'd rather have them work and work well before they are put in game.

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Bronski113 wrote:
I wish we had the new buffs when the BF was removed but I'd rather have them work and work well before they are put in game.

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They will have to be good (as in something people want) AND work nearly flawlessly, in order to compensate for the way things have happened. With BF gone before new buffs added, people will be out of the habit of coming in. Without the inertia from BF healing, we'll have to make a huge advertising push to get people to come back when these are introduced. It will be like trying to pop the clutch while pushing a 1 3/4 chevy van on flat ground. If there are even a few buggy implementations, it will sabotage the whole thing. That's one of my biggest issues with the current events.

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ThreeTimesOneMinusOne wrote:
Who orginally came up with the Entertainer Professions? Probably left this game a long time ago. =(

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That would be one Raph Koster, known by the forum handle Holocron. He left near the end of 2003, and the game has been getting worse and worse from a design perspective ever since, because the people who took over for him did not understand what he was trying to accomplish, and lack the ability to bring that to fruition even if they could somehow be made to understand it.

What's funny is, a friend of mine, a fellow gamer, when he first tried SWG, "got" it right away. He had just started playing, and asked if there were NPC vendors and such. As I explained how the game worked -- BF, docs and wounds, vendors and merchants, crafters, etc, etc, etc, he said, "Ah! I see... they're trying to build a whole world. Impressive."

THAT is what Raph Koster was trying to do... not build a cool 3D skin with some visual effects and Star Wars gun sounds. He was trying to build a whole Star Wars Universe that we could all live in, and get immersed in. Entertainers were born of that vision, because they are a part of the SW films, so they belonged in the universe. BF and mind healing were the draw to get people into the cantina, etc. Raph did not see the cantina as "down time" but as interaction time. He envisioned that, because everyone had to go to the cantina, that is where people would meet, mingle, and whatnot.

The main flaw in his vision was allowing AFK macros. However, he did say in one post (right before he left) that hearing of such things made him 'wince' because that is not what the entertainer professions are all about (grinding). I believe that if he had stayed on, over time we could have made him see that AFKing was bad for the game, and he would've had it removed. BUT, he left, and thus departed the only person who would've "gotten" the arguments we were making. The rest don't understand what he was trying to do with Entertainers, and never will (with the possible exception of SOETyrant, who also thought AFKing needed to be removed from the game, but who is also now long gone).

Now I'm not trying to say the game was perfect at launch. Many things did not work as designed. Those were bugs, though, and not really Raph's responsibility (he's not a programmer). He was responsible for the design and the design, as he implemented it, was quite good. Since they've changed the design, they have had to change the role of entertainers. But this is why I laugh at people who say, "Entertainers were never meant to be healers." That's B.S., pure and simple -- in the original design of Raph Koster's, Entertainers were most definitely healers, and he gave us the TRUMP healing item -- BF, which affected both your combat (high BF = miss a lot in the original system) and your ability to heal all your other wounds. If he had not wanted us to be healers, he'd not have given us the trump thing to heal.

They've totally gotten away from his original design. The CU was not just a "combat system upgrade" -- far from it. The CU and ROTW have totally changed the fundamental design philosophy of the game. The problem of course, is that they didn't change everything that went with this design philosophy, so now they have a kludgey hybrid, with half the elements of the old design, and half new, and none of it quite works all together.

C

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lesniak wrote:
Me thinks you give the devs WAY to much credit for thoughtfullness or imagination.

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/agree