Cities And Housing Archive
Thread: Where is the CIty Tax Revenue?
Dear Friends,
I have been an ardent supporter of this game, since launch. I am a leader of a community of online players numbering 130-150 persons. I am usually reserved and artful in how I handle the curiously inept planning, programming and communications efforts of the Sony developers, CSR team, and other Sony representatives. But my patience is at an end.
Sony you have failed the player built cities, the elected Mayors of those communities and the many many players that work hard to build those communities. In your well intentioned effort to assist the many many players suffering the impacts of the recent hurricanes, you have inadvertently caused harm to the players who are the responsible care-takers of the player-built cities.
You removed the building maintenance. But you ALSO broke the tax revenue generation for the player-cities. The many player-built communities in this game are now forced to pay for our city maintenance out of our own virtual pockets. Yes, it is true that many communities have very deep pockets and can afford to pay for their communities for a LONG while. However, this is not true for all communities. Even the wealthy players and guilds cannot afford to pay an 875,000 credit bill each week. This is what I am paying today for the community of Aurora.
How are you going to fix this?
I have spent two years building my community. I have spent two years amassing a credit reserve for just such and emergency, all the while paying a weekly amount of cash to cover the losses my city incurred each week due to the inept tax revenue scheme which was put in place when player cities launched. With my metropolis earning 450k each week through the only truly working tax (Property Tax), and the maintenance bill costing 875k each week, I have had to cover the deficit from my architect business and the generous donations of other concerned community members.
Now generous community members and myself are forced to cover the ENTIRE tab each week, thanks to your short sighted planning. You continue to harm the mayors and the communities which they represent. You continue neglect the wonderfully diverse online communities of players which have grown throughout each server. You continue to ignore the desperate pleas of the front-line troubleshooters (aka the Mayors and community leaders) when we ask for fixes to the many broken or forgotten elements of the Politician Class and Player City communities. You continue to kick the very foundation of a successful game, THE PLAYER BUILT COMMUNITITIES. The community leaders are the volunteer CSR's of this game. We handle the desperate questions and needs of the members of our communities long before they go to the official CSR team for Sony.
Now you expect that we will pay the ridiculously high costs of our cities with no ability to generate property tax revenue; Let-alone any possibility of generating income from mission terminals, profesion trainers, or Sales Tax. Remember that little issue? SALES TAX?. IT DOESNT WORK EITHER. It hasn’t worked in 18 months. You have been asked to fix it since it originally broke and you have been asked to fix it every month and every patch and every hot fix. Your obvious lack of concern for player cities shows in your complete disregard for Mayors and the communities which they represent.When you ignore the requests of the Mayors, you are in effect ignoring the needs of the communities they represent. This isnt about one profession or faction. This is about your ignoring the player built community needs of all players.
It is the Mayor that spends the majority of their time recruiting new citizens, builds or acquires new structures, organizing the city, ensures that the streets are well lit, that mission terminals and trainers are placed, recruits merchants and ensures that they are well inventoried in the city malls or shops, balances the budget, works to set up community events and runs them efficiently, places gardens, builds a supportive and responsible militia, makes sure that yearly community surveys are sent out, collated and reported on, and does a whole host of other things that in my eyes makes the Mayor the lynchpin of every community.
Mayors are not paid for their efforts. We don’t get a reward for adding new citizens to the city. We don’t get special loot. We don’t get special titles. We don’t even get abilities for our Master Politician box. We cannot move other people's houses. We cannot remove derelict houses. We don’t even get recognition by the game developers and managers for the vanguard role we play in mitigating the problems of the communities which we manage. We don’t even get the ability to see where all of our tax revenue comes from each day.
I am not asking for you to improve the Politician Profession, or to add new content to this damnable game.
I am asking that you provide us tools which were supposed to be part of the Politician and Player City build when you first implemented them. FINISH WHAT YOU STARTED!
FIX THE DAMNED TAXES OR REMOVE CITY MAINTENANCE COMPLETELY
Are you going to replace all the missing street lamps, fountains, mission terminals and trainers which I lost last week, before I noticed the broken taxes?
What are you going to do when people start to lose civic structures or their city halls? Will you replace them as well?
Will you replace the millions of credits that Mayors are spending each week to sustain their cities while you try to figure out which short-sighted code monkey failed to implement the building maintenance suspension correctly?
Help us help you.
Help us build, support and maintain the many successful online communities which we have built in Star Wars Galaxies.
Help us help you make this a successful MMPORG.
or don’t....and watch yet another community die and its many players leave SWG for another game.
Sincerely,
Hadrian August
Mayor
Aurora, Naboo -- Flurry Server
aka Trajann Augustus
aka Septimus Severus
/sign
great post, it really is a collosal pain the way the city taxes 'work' in this game - and that's before they borked maintenance tax 
Very nice post. I too agree that shutting off maint to assist those that have been hit with the terrible weather and floods was a great jesture, however, cities have always been a problem when trying to generate money. They are the biggest sink in the game and unfortuately those it is draining are not the credit hogs.
Mayors get absolutly no payout at all, they absolutly no credits for all they do. Try telling a RL mayor they will fund a city and get paid nothng and see how many will run for office..LOL
I have a level 4 city, i have very minimal gardens and dont use streetlamps or fountains anymore because of the cost of these items. I am a non guild city so it is difficult to get residents, therefore i can not even charge taxes as people would leave my city to move to a tax free city.
The issue of player cities desperately needs to be addressed form maintenance problems to housing problems, etc.
I honestly do not think that rushing to put another expansion out, one that will cost us even more money is what needs to be done to save the game. The devs need to stop, take a step back, listen to the outcries of the community on what is broke and what is bugged and then aply a determined effort to get what is in the game working correctly.
They need to train the CSR's to supply customer service to the current expansion RotW before adding another expansion. Yes you heard me correctly, the CSR's are not trained to correct problems in the RotW, submit a ticket and see the response about them not being able to handle RotW issues. How can they introduce a new expansion?
PLEASE hear our cries and help us. Help us to help you save the game.
and while I agree with the post, don't "/sign" it and turn it into a petition. petitions are bad, and you can agree with the post by posting something constructive.
