Originally posted by azhrarn Squidii, you're missing some very important points in your views on entertainers.
1) Before the NGE we WEREN'T confined to the cantinas. I can't stress this enough. We were not stuck in a single location type at all.
IDs could do their makeovers anywhere. Only stat migrations required a special location (the ID tents) and those were taken away with the CU. This is still true in the NGE.
Yes, but if you were a full time entertainer, where else would you be? You could be somewhere else, but your clientel would be looking for you in the cantina.
Dancers and musicians could and did heal battle fatigue in scout and ranger camps out in the wild. We could and did give buffs in those same camps. We were free to travel with groups who saw a point in having us along. This was true of both the Pre-CU AND the CU. Removing camps limited us severely.
But what contribution did you give to the hunting party? You reduced battle fatigue, which was unlikely to get super duper high in a single outing, so that somebody else could do the real work and heal them. You were an extra step, and when you weren't being that extra step, you were a third wheel that contributed nothing else to the party.
An entertainer can gain xp ANYWHERE. They do not require any specific place and do not require that anyone be listening or watching to gain xp. Listeners, watchers and ent teams INCREASE the rate of xp, but they are by no means the only way to attain xp.
2) No one ever forced anyone to use the services of an entertainer in any iteration of the game.
Every time you say that you were forced to use an entertainer, I want to whap you. Nothing in the game mechanics forced anyone to use an entertainer. Battle fatigue and buffs were OPTIONAL services. If min-maxers felt they had to have us, perhaps they should have considered different armors and tactics to avoid feeling that we were so hatefully mandatory.
Doctors would not heal you if you had high battle fatigue, since they would waste more resources healing less wounds. They'd check you out and go, hey go to the cantina for a bit and come back. Battle fatigue was not something you could let get too high, especially when the result of three consecutive deaths would yield so many wounds you would be incapped in one hit.
3) You can't seem to accept that noncombat gamers need as much of a sense of progression and reward as combat gamers.
Not need, but can find progression/reward to be engaging content, absolutely I agree. Absolutely. But SWG didn't do it well.
There HAS to be a rewards and progression system for entertainers and other noncombat professions. I know you think you know where we're coming from, but you really don't. If we didn't need to be a profession and we didn't need a concrete sense that we were getting somewhere and attaining something, we'd probably all be playing AO instead of fighting for the ability to even BE a profession in SWG.
I disagree that there HAS to be rewards and progression for any system, just like I think people who quote "risk = reward" as their sole game design philosophy are idiots. I've been on MUSHes that had absolutely no combat - you could say that the entire community was nothing but socializers, builders, and entertainers. They didn't have progression/rewards, but they had the freedom to express their creativity and individuality, which is far more fundamental to all gameplay in my opinion.
The entertainer profession in SWG is a promise of a gameplay ideal that it never lives up to. It was only valuable to a core select type of player, despite the fact that many of the gameplay devices were implemented to FORCE value on other players. They resented this, ignored it, or simply minmaxed it into a minor inconveinence.
Publish 28 demonstrated this very clearly to anyone who really paid any attention at all. Before Publish 28, atk entertainers were on the rise on Chilastra, Lowca and Starsider (Starsider outshining all listed, as it's a roleplayer/entertainer haven). When Publish 28 rolled out, they introduced a condensation of entertainer skill milestones, doing away with the boxes between milestones and making the time between "level up" rewards agonizingly farther apart. Almost overnight, afk entertainers replaced nearly every atk player.
Why? Because we require the same reinforcement that your playstyle does.
No, not my playstyle, but I get your point. What really happened, I believe, is that they made the minmax value of entertainers worth less than the minmax value of another persuit, almost guarranteeing that those who remain with it are the ones who personally identify with the profession. Smugglers have sucked for years, but people would still play them in a gameplay retarded state because they identified with the concept of smuggler, or at least wanted to. Same difference for all those Jedi that run around. That's what happened to entertainers. They were made "worse", so the only people who stayed were the ones there for non-gameplay reasons. Which is perfectly valid, in my opinion.
The very idea of being relegated to an auxilliary skillset for combat players infuriates most of us. Many of us are ONLY here because we finally had a game that would let you be PART OF THE GAME and to actually participate in an MMO without ever HAVING to engage in combat to progress.
What it does is insults you, suggesting that you aren't valuable or integral to the game. From a gameplay point of view, you'd still be capable of doing everything you can now - it just not with the same emphasis. Technically, it is not a step back at all, but it feels that way because it feels like YOU are now secondary.
And I never said that entertainers had to be secondary for combat professions - though realistically, that's the world of MMORPGs at the moment. I'd like to see non-combat characters be a valuable part of any online community because I think that combat games quickly degenerate into a game of minmaxing where a 0.1 dps difference suddenly makes your entire class worthless.
However, I question the need to make it a profession. There is not a single non-combat activity that can compare to the variety and focus of combat. However, there are a thousand mini-activities that can be combined into a single non-combat profession. Crafting, house decorating, politician, entertainer, preCU doctor, guild leader, tour guide, etc. Combining all those, complete with their own rewards and progressions, into one a collection of sub-professions that everybody can participate in would all players to pick and choose which activities they participated in (even combat) with enough variety and value to sustain even the most obsessive player's time online. You say entertainers should be separate from combat classes. I say parallel progression is the way to go (SWG already has ground separate from space and politician - why not make entertaining/crafting separate from combat too, and let players decide how far into each they go?)
The pre-CU game was a paradise for us. Hologrinders were an annoyance and a hinderance, but they did not and could not ruin things. Buffbots were annoying as all hell, and they cheapened our game, but they did not ruin us.
What IS ruining us is the external perception that since everyone who ISN'T one of us is abusing our profession, it's okay to punish US by taking away, piece by piece, our profession and our GAME because a crapload of people can't be bothered to get THEIR OWN HOUSE IN ORDER and make THEIR crap fun enough to play, instead of suffer through.
Sometimes, you've got to take away things so that you can replace them with better alternatives. I'm not recommending the reduction of the entertainer class, I'm recommending the growth of it - but in a different way than it currently exists. What I want to take away, I want to replace with something more valuable.
THE ANSWER HAS NEVER BEEN NOR IS NOW TO BREAK, BACKSEAT OR REMOVE ENTERTAINER AS A PROFESSION. THE ANSWER HAS AND ALWAYS WILL BE TO FIX THE COMBAT GAME so that people will no longer feel the desire to exploit the entertainer profession.
Comments
Wow that was odd. I quoted Azhrarn last post, the big one, and it quoted one up 3 posts.
Still QFT!