Chef Archive
Thread: Patch notes for Live: whatta'ya think?
- Surveying while mounted (apparently creature or vehicle). I have to admit, sampling while sitting on a speeder seems odd to me, but maybe they couldn't break the two functions apart.
- New structure maintanance design. When a structure gets to zero maintenance, you get an email, plus it starts taking from your bank account. Decay doesn't start until it can not support itself from the bank, and even at 0 hitpoints it doesn't "poof", it just becomes unusable until you pay the repair bill.
- Politician now costs 0 skill points. So if you feel like a life in politics, you don't have to give up your other skills. You just have to get people to vote for you...
Note: this is currently only on Testcenter, with no ETA for going Live. The structure maintenance change has generated a lot of debate (some players love the idea, mayors with ghost houses are looking at having to wait for character purge, architects lose customers).
The corres were asked to get some profession feedback, so: what do you think? Have you tried anything out on Testcenter? If so, how'd you like it? If not, how does it look on paper.
Message Edited by sciguyCO on 01-25-2005 03:37 PM
For rating this, I am going to go by a golden pie system 
sciguyCO wrote:
Nothing particular to chefs, but a few nice additions none-the-less:
- Surveying while mounted (apparently creature or vehicle). I have to admit, sampling while sitting on a speeder seems odd to me, but maybe they couldn't break the two functions apart.
Think this will prove highly useful for surveying for new resources on the go, will definitely make my bike surveying macro obsolete, however it is really odd that you can sample from a bike/mount. Eerif gives this new thing Four out of Five Golden Pies
- New structure maintanance design. When a structure gets to zero maintenance, you get an email, plus it starts taking from your bank account. Decay doesn't start until it can not support itself from the bank, and even at 0 hitpoints it doesn't "poof", it just becomes unusable until you pay the repair bill.
Good for forgetful old prunes like me, however could be bad for those who do static lotswaps cause they would have to get the original owner to enter the house and pay the maint (is this correct?), plus the devs would have to make sure that they fixed that old bug where houses/facs/harvs would suddenly do a drastic decrease in maint. This is also a signal that the purge is coming, another bad thing for lotswappers and many player cities. I'm also gonna give this Four out of Five Golden Pies, simply because I am too lazy to remember maintenance sometimes.
- Politician now costs 0 skill points. So if you feel like a life in politics, you don't have to give up your other skills. You just have to get people to vote for you...
I'm kinda impartial to this one. Being a mayor, I'm glad I get my 70-odd skill points back so I can get more dancer skills, however making it so significantly easy to become a politician will mean more people becoming politicians, meaning a steady, hard working politician could be at risk if "Mr. Popular Idiot" came along whose popularity would put him ahead of the Hard working mayor. I just see alot of internal guild/city affairs with this, I mean if chef had no skill cost, how many people would be a chef? Going to give this one Three out of Five Golden Pies
If maintenance pays from your bank, there has to be *some* method for the removal of inactive player's stuff. If I cancelled my subscription today, my 10 harvs, 8 factories, and house would continue to clog the landscape for years to come. That isn't good. I like the concept, but this sounds problematic.
Ankor wrote:
Surveying on bike is cool. A completely unneeded/unnecessary change, but still cool.
If maintenance pays from your bank, there has to be *some* method for the removal of inactive player's stuff. If I cancelled my subscription today, my 10 harvs, 8 factories, and house would continue to clog the landscape for years to come. That isn't good. I like the concept, but this sounds problematic.
Well, JustG posted in one of those threads about the "character purge" getting closer. Under that policy, structures owned by an account that has been canceled will be removed from the world six months after the account ended. It looks like there was an addition to the original announcement, the character (and presumably inventory/bank) will remain for 12 months after cancelation.
Note that says "canceled account". So that's only if you actually stop paying SOE. If you create a toon on Bria, place a bunch of structures, then ignore him/her while you play on Tempest, your Bria structures won't get removed until all your money is drained from the bank, and it's not clear whether there's some period of time after a structure is condemned before it gets deleted.
Personally, based on the feedback I've been seeing on that, I don't think that particular change is going to get pushed to Live without some modifications. If you have any thoughts about it, there are active threads in the "Cities and Housing", "Politician", and (I think) Architect forums you can add to.
Message Edited by sciguyCO on 01-21-2005 02:28 AM
This modification may just be opening up a whole can of worms for them to have to re-address at a later date after lots and lots of B&M-ing from the community....
...but I still love the idea of not worrying about my structures decaying...EVER.
As far as the simultaneous dance/music buffs, I can only see good coming from that. Same goes for the decreased shuttle wait times. 9 minutes was really bad. 5 minutes was better. 60 seconds will rock!
Get it to normal servers ASAP
Receiving an email when your maintenance runs out is good, but you can keep the rest of it. The way it's worded seems to suggest that if one of my buildings is "condemned", all of my buildings will stop functioning until I pay up.
This removes all of the utility and preserves all of the downfalls of the proposal. No thanks.