Architect Archive
Thread: The Urban Planner Thread
Guess we now know where all the city structures will come from. From us, well sort of. So I'll start the thread on this one. If you haven't noticed it yet, go here:
http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/content.jsp?page=Player%20Cities
The whole modular idea bugs me the most. It sounds like more beta ware thrown at us that will only frustrate. The opportunity to comment and have input is wonderful, but at the expense of being rather frustrating. Most of the higher professions are bugged and uncompleted. Having the first uber elite profession being very incomplete from the start is a bit too much.
Urban Planner - I like this in idea only. It is neat on the surface, but in practice will be rather boring. You'll need all your artisan skills, maybe even master artisan. Then you need the full line of architect only to top that off with Urban Planner. This could work if you only needed one branch of architect to become an urban planner, say houses IV. If you had to spend all your skill points for 3 crafting professions, which is all you can do in the game. You could role play I suppose or go nuna hunting. Other than that, this will quickly become a boring game if all you could do is craft all day. Most architects take up merchant to sell their goods. You need survival 3 to get to your harvesters. Sorry the player economy isn't supportive of architects enough to buy your resources from people. Architects are stuck mining or have a lot of really nice friends.
Urban Planner Branch - Something much easier to program, something that can be done piece mill if need be, and something that architect players can have as a skill and still enjoy other aspects of the game would be to replace the worthless construction and make it into the Urban Planner Tree. Player cities can be put into place piece mill without the default broken yet required profession.
I am guessing you need business IV and some kind of entertainer tree to get city mayor. Urban Planners certainly wouldn't have the skill points to do both. This smells of getting people to sign up for dual accounts to pull this one off. While doable is rather annoying that the game is inherently designed to get people to pay more money to just to build, then run their own city.
Well these are my thoughts on the matter for now.
I like the idea... but I'm stuck wondering what I'll have to sell back to gain access to this. I was just settled into Master Architect/Master Dancer with some Merchant skills... but now it looks like I'll have to give up even the merchant skills to be able to get to this "Elite-Elite" profession.
However... for all we know, these might only cost 1 skillpoint each. After all, their prerequisites are kind of hefty (requiring that you master an advanced profession) so one can only hope that the skill point cost will be lower than that of the advanced professions. If so, I can live with that.
They mention other "elite-elite" professions are coming later on. I wonder if pilot will be one of these. Vehicle Crafter almost certainly would be, I would think... perhaps requiring Droid Engineering and Weaponcrafting, or Weaponcrafting and Armorcrafting. Who knows? Anyway... I personally can't wait to see it implemented. After all, the Urban Planner and the rest of the Player City stuff is what I've been waiting for for the last year or so of playing SWG.
I was really hoping that this path would be placed in the experimentation tree. Especially as the Devs have told us that they no its useless and dont see any reason to change it at this time.
I did not mind the skill point cap before I have master artisan (so i can build tha components) master architect and most merchant skills so i dont have to stand in town yelling and spamming about my wares.
Hoping that the point costs arent that high or its really going to hurt.
(to those adding yes i have some points left which i am using to mess with DE should it ever get fixed 
)
I agree with your points but the idea of elite-elite professions seems to be a good idea to me. As of now the problem with the economy is that people are able to have too many skills (i.e. the lack of variety). By having more perfessions like these elite-elite ones, people will be forced to give up some of there skills thereby increasin their interdependancy on other players. And as skill points spread thinner and thinner, the economy gets stronger and stronger.
All in all, the Urban Planner tree might be a rough start but it is a step in the right direction.
I dont think they said you would need master architect in order to access Urban planner. If more elite-elite professions start popping up, I would not be surprised if we start seeing more skills points opened up to players. I hope the politician is its own profession though.
From what I read into it, the politician is it's own profession.
The elite elite profession as the idea goes would be a whole other profession requiring one to use up most of their skill points toward that profession. I do like the theory behind this as it would force such an advanced profession to be very rare. However how many banks need to be made or cantinas? One per town maybe 10 on a whole planet. It does force the player to be nothing but the Urban Planner/Architect. The same problems that befall the architect will befall the urban planner. Once everyone has all the buildings they need, then what? Maybe one urban planner per planet is right and the skill point system and economy is the way to force this. However that cuts the accessibility to a profession and forces the one person to only play that one aspect of the game. While this makes for a realistic virtual world, it is horrid game play. It excludes people from playing an aspect of the game, much like the jedi thing, which will become a can of worms for sony once a few people get to play that part of the game while everyone else gets to sit on the sidelines. Lucky for them, their CSRs are more rare than jedi, so the complaints can go unnoticed.
How this will work is every guild will want their own urban planner, as they have their own architect now. How often does the guild need to make their bank or medcenter? Only when they get the points to do so. Maybe two guilds hook up and share the urban planner. That is fine, but what does the urban planner do when their isn't an order to be filled? PvP? no. Hunting on Endor? no. Get a second account and play another character so they can do something usefull with their guild and friends? most likely.
I like the idea, but the skill points for an elite profession, specially a limited use one like this, needs to be very light.
i agree with most things here, except about "forcing people to buy 2 accounts" .
the point is for one person to be the mayor and another to craft the buildings. ( if all the rest is true ; ie. lack of skill points available). in a symbiotic relationship if you will ( i watch alot of discovery channel
thats a kind of harsh thing to say.
SOE is trying to make more comunity interaction.
thats my take on it at least.
It was interesting to read, however I think it's still pre-mature to be discussing this in depth. There was no indication as to how many skill points would be need to train skills in Urban Planner.
Also, in real-life, you usually won't find a Civil Engineer who is a masterof all aspects of construction, unless they're really commited to what they're doing. My point being, PA's will probably need to have 4 Master Architects and have each of them train in each of the 4 different Urban Planner trees. That is unless one individual is brave enough, and has the patience,to try and become a Master.
However, as a Master Architect, an Artisan, a Marksman, a Creature Handler, a Merchant and a Scout, I would really appreciate more skill points 
KetsTK wrote:
Ok, you want to have a player city, which is supposed to be based around player interaction considering that you need more than one person for the city, to be a solo act. Your statements are contradictory, and your relation to the south american bull crap is just stupid. This is a game, they want it based around interaction with other players. If you dont like that then go play a game that has no online content.
The PA is of about 30 members, I am the only architect. Wanting it to be based around Player interaction is fine, but taking these steps are rediculous. Architect is already a boring career, you can either spend 3 hours making 300 structural modules or let your factory do it in 5, but to you. Then you go, make a house which takes maybe 5-10 minutes tops and your done for the day... Resources gone, nothing to do, so what do you go do? You go hunting, or exploring or whatever, but wait... your an urban planner, you dont have the skill points for any descent fighting skills now, so hunting is out, alrighty, exploring it is then... but oh wait... you dont have terrain negotiation anymore becuase you had to sell that off for skills, and oh crap, you spent last month exploring, there is nothing left to see... so now what? Log off... Oooo, $15 a month so I can spend 20 minutes in the game and be done with it.
Being social is all well and good, but what the hell am I paying $15 a month for to sit in the Cantina in Theed and talk to people when I can get in my car and go to a real one and be far more entertained? The architects life is already boring, thats why all of us have other skills, but when you go and add a whole other career to it, you have no points left over to do jack with so now what do you do? You have made and sold your building or buildings for the day, what now? You have no skills to do anything else.
As for reffering to the persicution of indians as crap, I am sure they would appreciate that. Forcing people to be social doesn't work, trying to bend them to your will is nothing more then small men trying to play god, and it is doomed to fail.