Musician Archive
Thread: Idea to help stop AFK macroing
Well the AFK Musician/Dancer thing obviously annoys some people, even those that ARN'T Musicians/Dancers.
The fact is people, some of us enjoy Dancing/Music for only so much time each day. After a nutty day on my almost Master Tailor doing Custom orders, I like to sit back and play my dancer for a bit. But you know what? IT GETS BORING! Thats why people go afk.
To fix this the Entertainer Lines need something different to do other than sit in a cantina 24/7 and get gipped on tips (Couldn't help it, sorry).
My suggestion is simple... Merge the Fatigue and Wound tiers into one and add a new one. The Gig tier. You could put so many cool things in this line... And add some more interaction in the stupid classes for pete's sake.
Group SFX skills
Group interaction flourishes (Dancers catch each other, or acually DANCE with each other) Instruments do a quick duo flourish
Customer/Dancer flourish interactions (This wouldn't neccisarily be for gigs) This would be cool, you target a customer and use the skill, they get the option to Accept/Decline, if they accept they get a healing bonus/you get a exp bonus and then a neat animation plays (Twirl around the customer, slide hands down face for exotic, etc... But not too dirty lol)
How about some props? Ribbon-on-a-stick for dancers, Speakers and mics for Musicians.
Back to the gig tree they could make the new Entertainer mission terminals give gig missions. You have to have at least 3 people in a group to activate one, then go somewhere and play. Maybe thats a bad idea, whatever...
The point is, you want macro AFK Dancer/Musician to stop? Add more content to their class... Now that i've written the post, I really like the idea of 'Interactive' flourishes with other Entertainers/Customers, any comments on that?
C'mon people, its not hard to give ideas...
. In the dead of the night with hardly anybody on in a rare cantina then yeah I can udnerstand this. But in the middle of the evening when there are literally hundreds of people going in and out, and lots of dancers to flirt and/or talk with and the seemingly rare (in my experiences) femme musician to flirt &/or talk with, you won't get bored 
.Most of the people who go AFK are going AFK not because its boring but because they dont wanna be bothered sitting at thier keyboard when there's things in RL that need to be done. I'm from the school of thought where, if you're not at the Keyboard you shouldn't be playing
. I love what the dev's did with surveying and only wish something similar will be done to music, i don't care about dance so much as the sound doesnt bother me, but it's only fair I guess that they get hit with it too . After playing music for about an hour, and hearing that n00b musician playing the same riff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. I start to go mad
(they're obviously too new at it to realize that they should do flourishes to get xp, OR they've got 1 flourish every whatever period of time because they want to play for as long as possible without heals.Anyway, I can't possible describe the level of irritation that causes for me, and then when they come back they whine about getting so much E. Healing XP but not enough Music XP. I tell them to double-floursih while they play, it will come faster.
I understand their pain, but if you're not playing the game why should you be rewarded as if you had been? Yes I macro, so I can better talk to people around me, if they did something similar to music what they did to surveying (having a window pop up to give you an XP bonus for a super flourish or something, if you dont answer the window you stop playing music). Just a quick idea at 5:35 in the AM and no sleep
. But I had to get my feelings on the matter out there none-the-less.
Socialize can be fun, but you don't always have the Right People, or the Right Time to do so!
That's important to realize, u anti-Afkers!
Still, WHY can't you just tell the AFK people that standed in the middle of Cantina (Hot spot) and caused problems to just be more considerate and move to the corner next time?
I might be wrong, but I think I am pretty sure most people are not that selfish, and be willing to do this.
No offense, but you people seem really dependent (on Devs) to me.
most afk dancers will stand in the middle of the floor any way, they want healing exp too :/
its not that they're just in the "hotspot" they're annoying on many levels
mainly(for me)because they're gitting reward, for no work,
if you don't want to do the grind, pick something esle to play
the best way would to have a afk sencer (like the auto on that in the game allready, but can't be turned offf) that stops the exp after 10 mins of no mouse movement
Argh! Again, we are at a "Let's punish Everyone, justbecause some are annoying" principle.
*sigh*
However, Wander, you do have good suggestions.
They mighthelp get rid of some people's boredom
I afk macro, but not to gain xp, I do it as a service in lightly populated areas. I will afk macro to keep going while I sleep so there will be one entertainer going when someone comes in with battle fatigue and mental wounds.
As far as getting something for nothing, writing a good macro that keeps you playing afk for hours without timing out takes some doing. Especially if you use stat migration to optimize for combat. Everytime you adjust your stats the timing on all your macros changes. The single entertainer in a small town is the only time I would tip an afk entertainer, I know I will check on things early in the morning before work and I will find a few hundred credits on me.
JediMutant, I agree with you on one point. We don't need the Devs to help us.
I dislike AFK-macro'ers. Severly. For numerous reasons, which I feel have been hashed out numerous times by a mulitude of people on these forums. (As such I won't rehash them here.) I play everyday in a small cantina on Talus, a place with a real "Cheers" sort of feeling, you know, "Where everybody knows your name." We recently had a guy come in and AFK macro for close to 24 hours, right in the center of the main floor. This bothered not only me, but the other regular entertainers. So here's what we did:
I personally talked to ever other entertainer who plays in that cantina (as I know each of them very well.) And we decided that he the AFKer wanted to play as an NPC, we would treat him as one. We all agreed not to train him on a single skill. Nothing at all. If he wanted to train, he was going to have to pay for it. After all, for 24 hours, there was nothing to distinguish him from an NPC that the developers had placed in game for the occasion that a real entertainer wasn't available. Why should we share what we worked hard for with someone who doesn't know one customer from another. Entertainers often complain about the lack of tips, and how it makes them feel like an NPC, and well it's people who play like an NPC who, in part, egg on this mentality of not needing to be tipped.
So, the solution as I see it, is that we as a community of "anti-afkers" as it was put, must band together and announce that we will not train people we know to be afk-macroers. Yeah, they'll still level by doing little to no work, but they're going to have to go out and run endless missions to pay for some of that training. This probably won't stop the problem, but it was a way for me and my fellow entertainers to feel like we weren't being taken advantage of. After all, everyone I've talked to has agreed that Entertainer is the most social profession in the game.
-- Jigs Sunphire [Master Entertainer / Novice Musician - Nashal, Talus - Eclipse Server]
If they wanna be NPCs then let them be NPCs. Btw I don't talk to NPCs either so maybe adding the AFK'ers to the /ignore list is a good idea too. lol