Business And Economy Archive
Thread: SWG in the Digital Age?
- Harvesters: Ping to receive the amount of maintenance remains, how much material has been collected, what the extraction rate percentage is at, whether it's operational, and, well just about everything short of being able to gather the material or change the resource being harvested.
- Houses: This includes regular residences, PA Halls, Cantinas, and all other Player City structures. You can determine how much money is left, how long that money will last, public, private, and administrative information, and the number of items in the structure. Once again, it's exactly like examining the Status of the building, but you can't change any settings remotely except for adding money to the Maintenance Pool.
- Quest Waypoints: A new kind of quest type could use the system. By sending an e-mail to a special address you'd receive at the start of the quest, you'll receive a temporary waypoint that is timed and will become obsolette before long. The target is moving, so you'll have to "ping" the address multiple times in order to catch them.
- Vendors: Store owners can Ping their own vendors to receive information on what's in stock, how much longer the vendor would last without pay, and perhaps how many browsers have stopped by or items sold today.
- Cities: Player cities can give you information on who the mayor is, the population, when the next election is, what the taxes are on travel, residence, and industries, the specialization of the city,and what rank the city is at.
Tipping maintenance fees to these addresses would be just like tipping Bank Tips to players, including the 5% charge. You'd use the address that you'd e-mail, which again has an invalid character (I'm using # but there's no reason the Devs couldn't make it ! or *) so there's no way a player could trick you into tipping a character instead of a harvester.
With this system, the world would just feel more Digital, like it's in the future where information is easy to come by. Crafters and Resource Dealers don't need to run all over the galaxy to figure out what their harvesters are doing, because a couple of e-mails would do the job for them, resulting in a manageable list of replies with all of the information they need to make a decision about their business. Plus, having addresses that are mission-related can open up a lot of really compelling plot ideas. For example, combining pieces of an encoded Datadisk might give you a mysterious Address that, when pinged, gives you a quest for some unknown benefactor whose face you never see.
Srikath wrote:
Good ideas! Some of them are even begining to happen w/ house maitenence.
Sort of, but that won't help crafters by letting them know if they need to trek across 4 different planets across the galaxy to make sure none of the resources have shifted or some other catastrophe has shut down production. I think my proposed idea would put a lot of crafters ina proverbial field of flowers, without a care in the world. Or, well at least in arusted andsweaty workshop with significantly less care in the world.
ancer
I own houses all over the place and ditto on harvesters, a ping would be a godsend! 5*
MisterLeebo wrote:
Shouldn't this information be digitally retrievable? We can do our bills online now, why shouldn't the citizens of SWG?
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Personal Comlinks in Star Wars actually only work to about 1-3 km, ship communication rangesare limited by altitude (greater altitude means greater range, parked at a landing platform they are limited to only 5km). The only known instantaneousinterplanetary communication device is the HoloNet and it is controlled and used exclusively by the Imperial military for high-level (Emporer) communications. All other communication is done with hyperspace droids.
Just because RL Earth developed digital communication before useful laser weapons (although impractical laser weapons did precede the types of communication you discuss), doesn't thescientists and engineersof the Old Republic would have taken that path. If anything, we could be given access to communicationdroids similar to survey droids. But to try and equate the Star Wars galaxy to RL modern Earth robs the genre of its fantasy elements (and it is fantasy, not science fiction - that's Star Trek).
The_Real_Raptor wrote:
Besides, citizens of SWG can pay their bills online. Ever used a bank tip?
Sure have, but you can't bank tip your vendors / structures.
To your first comment and that of Nefarious2's, I appreciate that I'm finally getting some constuctive feedback on the idea. That's a good call on the HoloNet being controlled by the Empire but I'm pretty sure they allow civilian broadcasts. I turn your attention to SWG's load-screen update messages, the In-Character summaries of the patch notes that are oh-so-fun-to-read (Rodians get processed rice cheap because they can't taste the difference!). Those are distributed via the HoloNet and two of the broadcasts were done by a Reporter and the Founder of the Freelance Pilot's Guild (I hope I'm not the only one who noticed those details) so the HoloNet isn't strictly a military communication line.
About communicators having a range of 1-3km, we can e-mail each other instantly regardless of location and if we can fly to any planet in minutes, it would make sense that so could such communications. It's assumed that all of that waiting time is skipped and you just jump ahead in time (imagine a movie that lasted22 hours with 20 of those hours being the main character in his bed asleep because the movie spans three days). Since we can travel instantly, those little communication droids we send out to get e-mails too each other also get around as quickly as we can.
Finally, I think the system would be worth it just for my personal favorite idea, which was the ability to use it in Quests and to find secret addresses in datapads and stuff. Working for someone you reach only through e-mails and never meet would be cool. There could even be hidden Easter Eggs. Imagine going to Jabba's palace and on a table there's a datapad from the Rancor's handler that, when you Ping the address it lists, e-mails you with some flavor text describing how many entertainers Jabba's had the Rancor eat and for what reasons (and a complaint by the Handler about how he keeps finding bits of cloth, earrings, and bracelets in the animal's waste).