One of the biggest contributors to the 'community feel' of original SWG was the entertainment professions. By having a game mechanic that enouraged people to spend time in the cantinas players were encouraged to socialize

I would like to see something like this added to ESO in the following manner:

1. Add a bards guild

2. Add a stat along the lines of 'stress' but with a better name

3. Make certain events cause stress to rise e.g.

• Dying
• Quest events (e.g. a quest leads you to fight for a while with an NPC companion who later dies, causing you stress)
• Cyrodill war losses (for everyone in the alliance)
• Exposure to nastyness in the world (too long hanging out in sight of a dark anchor)

4. Have high stress cause a negative effect such as slower pool regen, higher vendor prices (due to snapping at the poor NPC), slower walk speed

5. Have bardic abilities lower stress

bardic skills could be things such as:

• increasing the radius of the stress releiving effect
• increasing the effectiveness of the stress relieving effect
• providing a stress reduction buff

There could also be an ultimate ability that allows another bard to perform a 'duet' synergy

Posted something similar on a different post yesterday, talking of why we don't want to see a bunch of bards running around throwing musical damaging spells out with a guitar or a flute... On that note i think the addition would be an awesome idea. Handing out some sort of buffs as you sit in the "Winking Skeever Inn" , and people can take a second to socialize, even someone might just want to roleplay and hang out in the inn all day. It really does open up allot of possibilities. --God i miss S.W.G.

I'll basically agree with any changes that are inspired from pre cu SWG, that game just had it going on, on every level

Tell me about it ... i was a MBE/MCH and used to love sneaking around dath in my underoos jabbing rancors in the butt with my sampling needle then hopping back home to my lab, creating successive generations of dna and producing some kind of uber-bunny-monster i could show off in the middle of my guilds town or, indeed, in the cantina. chatting over a glass of blue milk while a cute twilek was dancing away and a wookie was bashing out a tune on some drums

I had a jedi defender, a combat medic/rifleman, & a bounty hunter/pistoleer. Nothing was better than me chasing padawans/initiates back to there house to camp them for days on end. Ofcourse the same thing happened to me on my jedi, numerous times so i think it was karma! That game had the best world pvp ever...sit in theed in line waiting for buffs from a doc. heading to the cantina and then out to explore/quest/pvp for a few hours, then back to town again!

I liked the idea of slow-accumulation of a variety of fatigue in SWG. This game already has three resource pools the way that SWG had them. SWG had Health, Action and Mind. ESO has Health, Stamina and Magicka. So something similar can apply. As you take damage, you accumulate wounds to health, essentially a growing percentage of max health that will not recover on its own without being treated. As you exert yourself, you receive physical fatigue that works the same way on Stamina. As you use more and more powerful magic, mental fatigue begins to affect Magicka the same way.

What I don't want to see is the accumulation of wounds/fatigue that happens so fast that one always finds themselves having to go to an entertainer and have to sit there for an extended period of time. The biggest complaints about SWG's entertainment/fatigue system was all the downtime it FORCED on people. That's why it got changed with the CU/NGE. I remember a heated discussion back in the SWG forums where someone very pointedly told an entertainer-player, "I don't want to be YOUR content!"

In a way, it can be perceived to be just as bad as PvPers forcing their playstyle on those who don't want PvP. When one group's enjoyment comes at the expense of another group's enjoyment, then it is a fundamental flaw in game design. To that end, Entertainers who do not take a break, sit down and in turn be entertained should accumulate stamina and mental fatigue. Fair is fair. SWG was loaded with too many special case rules that applied to this group, but other groups were given a pass on. The rules need to apply to ALL in order to be fair.

I would love a musician skill just like it was on SWG! I used to run 5 musicians AFK on a macro, all on different instruments, playing all the songs in a loop in my cantina near the Tuskon Fort. Oh man I miss SWG...

I'd be happy to have anything from Pre-CU as well, well maybe not purma-death haha, that was a pain in the rump as a jedi.

I agree it needs to be balanced well to be fair and not force too much downtime. the optimum effect would be a system that results in players being able to continue doing what they are doing without regular visits to a bard but giving those that chose to a suitable reason for doing so.

taking the suggestions in my original post for what could cause stress:

dying:

this would form part of the cost of death. should be balanced such that an average player can accumulate a full play sessions worth of deaths before the negative effect causes them to want to find an entertainer. but someone repeatedly suiciding themselves against a foe way beyond their level would get an increased downtime.

in pvp, this would provide a need for a few bards at spawn points to help get the defenders back into the seige

Quest events:

i suggested this as it seemed a unique use for the mechanic that would work very well with the richness of quest storylines in ESO. It shouldnt be common as it would simply cheapen the process but i wouldn't be suprised if some of the story is designed to leave you a little sad/grief stricken, in which case its a nice mechanic to add some immersion

Cyrodill war losses:

This should be a very minor effect but nicely ties the status of the cyrodill campaign to the rest of tamriel

Environment:

Again this should be a minimal effect but is, imo, a nice system for adding what in other games would be handled by a 'fear' effect.

With all these methods the average player should not need to see a bard more than once per play session and the time required to 'listen' to the entertainment should be fairly short .... basically it should add to your occasional 'town run' to vendor/bank loot, craft etc and for most players would probobly replace the time they naturally stand around town deciding what to do next or waiting to meet up with friends

Another thought... the Bard should not be stuck at a tavern or specific place to be able to use entertainment healing... That was something I found annoying about SWG. Camps helped, but since we aren't likely going to be able to place structures in the open world like we could in SWG, the bard should be able to use his/her abilities wherever needed, so long as there are no hostiles within max combat range. There could be a debuff on entertainment healing effectiveness out in the wild to make it more appealing to perform in a tavern. It's only logical that a comfortable chair and good food in a cheerful tavern would make recovery easier, than squatting on the ground or sitting on a log in the wild...

i completely agree

Didn't we see some one playing a lute? Seen it in one of the videos someone here or mmo champ posted. So might be I game already sort of.

its an emote

The one thing I hope, if ZOS even considers an entertainment mechanic similar to that of SWG, is that they set it up so entertainment-related actions cannot be assigned to macros, so that if someone wants to play an entertainer is actually PLAYING one.

I'm not going to reminisce about SWG, to me it wasn't that great. I don't know why people all the sudden started loving it in droves at the end of its life while it was hemorrhaging to death from the very release.

Anyways, there were parts I liked. I'd like to see more sociability like this.

SWG was an amazing game, it would be competition for wow if the developers would have listened to the community instead of going there own way, infact i know id be playing it if it was still pre cu or even CU. but anyways, a bard class would be a great idea i think.

Well, usually people don't do CPR on a person that's well and walking. Developers didn't do NGE for no reason at all.

Other parts were great, but it was dying pretty quick.

edit: NGE, sorry. I confused my acronyms.

This developer, Dan Reubenfield, a leader developer, said this http://rubenfield.com/?p=86 about SWG:

Anyways, offtopic.

I could see a mix of SWG and LOTR, then you would have a "PLAYING" style mechanic. Unfortunately if you make it too close to the real thing, you will be hearing a lot of bad music.

Perhaps musicians could have a mini game similar to Guitar Hero that requires you to play correctly before you get the effect.

Although I'm not sure why assinged macros are an issue, you could PLAY as one without macros even if you had the option to do so.

Useful information, but its simply a fact. SWG would still be around being played if they would have listened to the community, i read an article a long time ago clearly stating in PC gamer: the developers name was Freeman. " We didnt listen to the community and we learned that as a team." They developed the NGE because they didnt listen to the community at all, instead they catered to the whiners who were complaining about a jedi taking too long to achieve, and the simple minded. I can recall a day when swtor went from 30 professions / classes, to like 8. No dev team in there right mind would make such a drast move on a game even with the lower ammount of money they were earning, unless they didn't care about the community. And they really proved that. They could have kept the servers the same, downsized and everything. But not put in NGE, and turn it into a 10 yr olds game.

Game might have declined, ofcourse. But not the way it declined when they promoted the NGE. That is what destroyed SWG.

You will have to excuse me if i come of harsh-like. I am a vet of swg and loved star wars lore, especially during the movie times. And they destroyed it due to their own greed.

Hmm. I have to disagree since it was dying in the first place. It was on a slippery slope to destruction from the beginning, which is what caused that to happen. Listening to the fan base would have done almost nothing but slow the inevitable from that point.

IF there was such a thing as Free to play at that time, SWG would still officially live on.

All games go downwards no matter how long they have been out. the fact that devs didnt listen to people, and kept changing game combat mechanics to there liking, made the downfall that much more quicker id say 20x. Imo i honestly believe if they would have just kept it pre cu or cu, the game would still be going along just fine. whether it had a sub or not , who would know.

Well, agree to disagree I guess. =)

SOE did the NGE because LucasArts TOLD them to. LucasArts looked with longing at WoW and its MILLIONS of subscribers and at SWG's typical MMO 6-digit numbers (at the time) and decided it wasn't good enough.

It was dying because LucasArts kept SOE on a very short leash in terms of what they could and could not do with the IP. SOE should have approached LucasArts seeking rights to produce a game set AFTER ROTJ, as an alternative Expanden Universe. Instead, they chose to seek the rights for the classic trilogy era, smack dab in the middle of Lucas's directive not to write any third-party material. So they got the rights to the classic trilogy, but were not allowed to do anything with it.

Dan Reubenfield was correct. SWG WAS bleeding subscribers. But he exaggerates the rate. I remember pre-CU. Almost every official city was packed with players. I was always seeing lots of people in the wilds. At its height, SWG had at best around 500k subs. If they were losing as many as he claims, at the rate he claims, then there would have been a much more noticeable drop in active players... Where the noticeable drop DID occur was when the Combat Upgrade went into effect. They lost a massive number of people overnight. Of course, for many who left, it was a knee-jerk reaction and many were returning, only to be slapped in the face by the NGE six months later, which totally reinvented the game into exactly what it was originally meant to get away from.

Does anyone remember how when the NGE launched, the forums erupted in rage. We're not talking about the usual malcontents in a forum who gripe about every little thing just to gripe. We're talking about droves of people who had never posted before, who had been content to just play the game. It was so bad that SOE actually put the forums on subscription-based blackout. If you weren't paying, you couldn't even READ the forums. They knew they had messed up big time. But rather than owning up to it, they buried their heads in the sand, systematically banning those who spoke out against the NGE. If you have to resort to gestapo tactics like that, you've really screwed up.

SWG was always designed as a niche game. It was never going to have WoW's numbers... Heck even WoW wasn't expected to have numbers like that. The industry has yet to get it through its thick collective skull: WoW's numbers were a FLUKE. They were the exception to the rule... Even to this day, NO MMO has managed to come anywhere close. Some may hit maybe 1 or 2 million, but they also are the exception to the general rule. Had LucasArts let SOE off the leash and taken a hands-off approach, then SWG would have thrived because it would not have been redesigned into something that it originally was not. And had SOE simply done what the community was asking, from the beginning, namely fixing bugs and adding content, the hemorrhaging would have been a lot less.

They were sitting on a goldmine. But LucasArts wouldn't turn SOE loose, and SOE never seemed to care what the community at large though about where the game should go. The only one who had any sense of design direction was Raph Koster. He got promoted out of development and was put in charge of the California wing of SOE. Whatever grand plan there was for SWG, Koster took it with him, and nobody had the courage to step up and even try to GUESS.

When I look back at SWG, I recall a game that had so much potential that it is inconceivable that between Lucas Arts and SOE, they could not capitalize on it. It is pathetic.

I know how mad people were.

There was no thing as buy to play or free to play back then. I mean, holy crap, there was like no competition when it came out.

But because nobody had ever heard of buy to play, or even free to play, they had to do something to make it profitable rather than bleed them dry of money. The last report I read, was that on a Friday night during peak hours, only 10k people was their record before NGE. It was dying and they didn't know how to fix it. So it only sped up death, It was going to die anyways.

Works for me , may the swartz be with you.

Ah .. No. As I see it, bards have no musical magic and does not belong in Tamriel.

As for SWG .. *sigh* its too painful to talk about.

*sheds a tear with a quick glance at collector ed box*