Cities And Housing Archive
Thread: Player City and Politician Revamp (long, but thorough, so please take a peek Garva!)
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Binstubbs
Mon Apr 11, 2005 8:04 pm
#1
I have posted this in both politician and cities/housing forums because it deeply involves both. I love playing this game, but over the last year I find myself less and less motivated to play it compared to the first year when I started at launch. The CU is a the first thing about this game that has generated real excitement for me personally and I hope SOE truly is commited to consider proposals/feedback from the community as they have stated many times of late. This my vision of a framework I would love to see implemented into the game and that I truly believe could make a real positive impact for everyone, especially new players. Thanks in advance for your inputs and critiques that I am sure I will receive on it. 
The systemhas played outin a way that surely could not be intended.
There are far too many player cities for the amount of player population, it was that way even when the system was first patched in. I am yet to hear of a city in which the mayoral "race" was not a forgone or agreed-upon conclusion before it ever takes place. A bunch of people (guild) decide to buy up or make alot of town stuff, get everyone to move to X location, decide who is going to be mayor, have everyone vote for that person and, voila, that is our great town system.
The only time there is ever more than one person on a ballot is when a rival guild enacts a hostile takeover somehow (happened on scylla), or when someone cancels and a new person agrees to take over.....once again a pre-decided outcome.
If players cities were far rarer and not all over the place, then perhaps there would be so many people living in them that multiple candidates would be running. Sure each one would likely have all their guildies vote for them but if towns were not primarily guild populated, then those "in-the-bag" votes wouldn't be enough. Politicians would have to actually DO something to earn people's votes (likely only the most commited players would then become politicians, as opposed to someone's alt who rarely gets played).
City "stealing" will be far too hard, not impossible, to be worthwhile if this whole system was set up right to begin with. Althoughcity stealing is a very real problem, it happens quite infrequently when you take the scope of the entire game into consideration under the current system.It will more likely happen when such a change is first implemented but will easilybe overcome as more and more people consolidate into the 3 or 4 cites per planet and the actual player population (as opposed to a guild or two) determines who runs the towns. This should happen fairly quickly, giving no more than a cycle or two for anyone to dominate a mayoral position, and this is why......once you cutplayer citiesto 3 or 4 cities per planet and then raise the population requirements for civic benefits, then it will become impossible for one or two guildsto monopolize cities by keeping "random" players out. With fewer cities, you could raise the population requirements enough so that guildsmust let "randoms" move in just to get the basic perks of a player town.
Mayoral races will no longer be predetermined, contrived, mockeries. The political process will actually take place and politicians will have to do just what their title implies, go politicking
Well, the issues wont really be "political" at all. They will likely hinge on taxes, attractiveness of a mayor's zoning scheme, and a mayor's commitment to keeping the event schedule lively, regular, and creative. The revamp would include both the politician profession side of the things, and the cities/housing system side of things. The ramifications could be literally game changing, and I believe for the better as very few professions will not be signifcantly impacted by it. The content introduced within these cities could greatly disperse the player base from the current content hotspots, and still offer something for those not jedi-grinding or loot-hunting to take part in.
The city halls should be much more functional. They are literally "bumps on a log" in the current system. Politicians and the player city system should have the same relationship that any elite crafterhas with theircraft.
It should becompletely immersive.
Say at master politician, or at some predetermined skill level, that politicians were the only people able to request live events from the live event team? No more requests from the general population (the live event team is drooling already). How cool would it be then to be a politician?? SOE could implement a ticket system that functions much like CSTickets but instead of going to CS, it goes to the live event teams (another reason to cut way back the # of player cities so that those poor guys don't get overrun with requests). Make some sort of guidelines, i.e. onerequest per week to be accepted or denied within X number of days, to be held biweekly And then watch the new player cities become hotspots on the maps (npc cities need work too, but thats different topic).The possibilites are endless. How cool would it be to have a city on Tat that gets raided by tuskens or jabbas thugs? How about if a battalion of rorgungan commandos marched on a city on Rori? An imperial assault of ATAT's and ATST's with troops on asuspected rebellion sympatheticdantooine city? The event would not have to be short lived, or necessarily dangerous, they could play out over an entire day as beefed up durnis flock like lemmings into the sea near coastal nabooian towns for a day or two, imperial troops could execute a show of force and attempt to occupy a city for a day. Perhaps implement a tier system of what difficulty level of events can be hosted at that town. Similar to the city rankings, as a town progresses in population, more difficult events are available (scalable by the Live Event Team) as lower tier events are accomplished (defend town from 1000 jawas for one hour) then the city moves up to eligibility for the next event tier for their give population ( fend off an ATAT, whatever).They would not be required to participate in harder events, just would unlock the option. Say when a city is at the highest event ranking, the really tough events can be enacted...a Krayt Dragon migration, ATAT imperial raids, overwhelmingly large #'s of rebel troops, shield generator equipped gungans with bio-engineered (tougher) fambaas and kaadus. Obviously things would need to be ironed out to make the events go well, keep them from being impossibly hard, or laughably easy. Hopefully the line of sight issues in this game can get ironed out as well. But anything is better than the current system, and something along these lines, with the bugs eliminated (don't hate), would be immensely fun.
Declared residents of one of these towns would receive a system email, much like vendor emails, notifying them of such events and their scheduled times, an onscreen system message would also be sent to residents of a town notifying them of the event taking place at their town. Send the email, say, 48 hrs prior, and the system message60, 30, and 15min prior as an alert message, to later become a distress callonce the event kicks off.
Mayors should be given zoning abilities for their municipality that work much like the structure-compatability-shading works. Meaning, just like when you drop a structure and the terrain shades itselfred (no drop) or green (drop), the mayor can designate a certain area according to his vision. Each sector could have a default, or even mandatory "front-door orientation" (north, south, etc) to keep some sort of tidiness and organization to the aesthetics of the town.Examples of this Zoning ability would be acommerce shade for merchant tents, an industrial shade for harvestors/factories, a municipal shade for guild halls / gardens / municipal buildings each with its own recognizeable pattern, and finally a residential shade for homes possibly incorporating a pattern typeto indicate limits on#'s ofvendors per house so as to encourage use of tents in the commerce sector. If people have a problem with the limit they can petition the mayor to raise the limit on their house on a case by case basis. Some sort of "sim city type" interface would be necessary for politicians to effectively execute this, the current structure placing interface is absolute garbage. All of this would be done at a terminal within the city hall.
Terminals should be located within the city hall and accessible to both residents and non-residents. A player should be able to see what the current layout is (accessing the terminal would bring up a "Sim city type" view of the town) and what the proposed layout for the future, unused lands are. The terminals could give demographics of citizens, professions, faction affiliation #'s, a feature that can be enabled or disabled according to citizen wishes.They should be able to see what events have taken place in the past in that town, along with some sort of stat report.... X number of citizens killed, X number of Enemies killed, over X amount of time, something to give prospective residents a sense of what is happening in that town and whether or not they feel they could be a help. Maybe an armorsmith finds a town that is getting owned by jawas? They look into the archives (you know maybe give that library-type-room an actual purpose?) and see there is only one AS in that town with only one armor vendor, voila!! Said armorsmith has found himself a new home. Maybe a Ranger sees that there are many chefs and tailors, but very few ranger/scouts, he too now has found a home.
With player city staus reduced to the 3 or 4 largest cities on each planet, the population size in eachwill grow so much that mayors will have no choice butto immerse themselves into the profession to satisfy as many citizens as possible in order to stay in office (much like a top notch elite crafter). Nosingle guild (of any size I have ever heard of) would possibly be able to monopolize an election. No politician could afford to neglect his duties and go grind jedi for 6 months.
So what is in it for the politician you say??
Well here is the tricky part......
Aside from the pride of being able to hang your hat on the fact that you are the architect of a prosperous, popular city.........perhaps a small kickbackfrom municipal proceeds (cloning/insurance fees, shuttle fees, garage fees, etc). I have no clue what type of revenue these cities could expect since we have no cities near the size that these would reach, but perhaps 1%? obviously the devs would have to tweak this and some trial and error would undoubtedly take place. But it should be enough to make it worthwhile. There may be a need for a ceiling on mayoral income to keep unique situations from turning any singlemayor into the SWG version of a Saudi prince, again an issue for the devs to wrestle over.
One last thing!!!
No body wants massive uncontrollable urban sprawl, especially when cities take root near POI's and the like. SoI believe a hard cap on a city's radius should be very much in place. How it should differ from current cities I cant say, as I dont even know what current radii are. But I do belive a metropolis should be considerably larger than they are now.However this raises the issue of a radius-cap creating a population-cap as room runs out on a city for more folks to move in.Well, Architects rejoice!!! New building schematics to resemble those found in static cities!! High rise buildings like in Coronet and Tyrena! Multiple occupant structures like thosefound in that pointless area of Bestine. Keep them restricted to each planet (no bestine style slums on Naboo, and make them un-vendor-placeable....strictly residential). Multiple occupant structures will obviously have maintenance issues...as in who pays and what happens if someone doesnt pay. To solve this, multiple occupant structures should be only placeable by the mayor, just like a garage, and the maintenance will be paid to keep you from beingevicted. It reaches zero...automatic bank deduction. That reaches zero......same as regular houses, except instead of the building disappearing, all the occupants stuff disappears and the admin rights for that unit are cleared for a new resident , with those rights granted by the mayor. The mayor cannot move or redeed one of these structures until all residents have vacated it. So placing a large 10 resident structure should be done with great foresight, as it will likely become a permanent fixture. A lower maintenance rate should be set for each resident of a multiple occupant building than what the rate is for a private home in some proportion. For example, if the building accomodates 10 people, the rate should be 20% that of a medium house, if it accomodates 5 people then 40% so on and so forth. Maybe set the max items at that of a medium house in each unit reagrdless the total number of units in one structure.Private homes should still be affordable as they are now, but multiple occupant structures should be far more attractive to not only the penny-pinchers amongst us, but more importantly, to the new player who hasnt found his or her economic niche yet. Maybe even enable this function on guild halls. At the terminal allow the leaders to enable or disable multiple resident capabilities. The benefit of multiple resident being that the total max items go way up (evenly distributed to each room to prevent someone from buying a guild hall just as storage and not having multiple rooms occupied by different players, but just so they can store more in one room). And the guild gets an increased sense of untity. Guild halls will undoubtedly become like SWG fraternity houses, lol, I can envision the streaking already. Multiple occupant structures, will expend lots just as homes do, also to keep a mayor or guild leader from using one for personal storage.
So there is my huge brainstorm that I feel has immense potential for much needed content in this game. The new GCW stuff is a great step in the right direction, but I feel the player city system can really take it to another level entirely. You can take the basics of what I have cooked up here and go so many directions within the scope of features already incorporated into the game already. I just hope the Content and Live Event Teams areup for it andare truly commited to make something like this happen.
Message Edited by Binstubbs on 04-12-2005 03:10 AM
bluejanus
Mon Apr 11, 2005 10:29 pm
#2
There's simply not much involved in a player city other than landscape planning and citizenship. What are political candidates really fighting over? Mostly a thankless job.
I don't see the one candidate elections as mockeries of democracy that you seem to. Politician isn't exactly a favored profession even without the sp requirements. Most towns are geared towards people who are willing to accept that responsibility in lieu of their fun time playing.
As for uncontrollable urban sprawl, there is far more of that involved with just ordinary houses than with player cities.
Binstubbs
Tue Apr 12, 2005 1:07 am
#3
You're preaching to the choir on that one, thankless indeed. Thats why they should get something out of it, but must put as much effort into it as an elite crafter.
It's not so much the mockerie of democracy as much as it is a mockery of a process. To me it is tantamount to the CU being patched in, and all actions are reduced to a "/fight" command. A window pops up and tells you in a couple sentences that you fought really hard and now you are either dead or your opponent is dead, congratulations/condolences.It is completely lacking any point. Why should it only involve landscaping and citizenship planning --->synonymous with spamming a city ad in coronet, and moving your guild and maybe a partner guild, with the occasional "random" player mixed into a vast minority.
As far as someone willing to accept responsibilty to undertake it........undertake what? your guildies vote you in, you dont have to do crap, the guild can easily pay maintenance on buildings like medical centers and theaters that are completely useless and pointless, other than to waste money for mundane aesthetics........I'm sorry not to rant but we the player population are being sorely neglected and let down in this system, given the possibilities that could be realized with less effort than a space or wookie expansion. both of which I greatly appreciate 
And the issue with the random houses being placed where they shouldn't be is something that is not good. The devs should intervene. If you have an "offensve" name they will ask you to pick a new one or else they will pick one for you (and all they do is jumble the letters). They should expand all no place zones from POI's to the point that no house is within sight of them. Any pre-existing structure that needs to be moved can easily be done so by the devs. The tell you to do it yourself, give you 24 hrs of in-game-time to do so per-structure, and you do it or else they make it go poof and overload your inventory with the building and everything that was in it. And, yes, it can be done because when they gave away 2 holocrons in 2003 to every player, players with maxxed inventories received them anyway. It wasn't a /claim command like the veteran rewards, it magically appeared in your inventory.
I understand your concerns but I feel they in no way let the SOE off the hook for such a worthless system that begs to be revamped, 2nd only to the imminent CU.
Message Edited by Binstubbs on 04-12-2005 07:17 PM
GanymedePharuu
Tue Apr 12, 2005 1:12 pm
#4
binstubbs, your ideas are AWESOME!
it's long overdue that something is done to make the player's living situations more fun and immersive.
i'm glad you mentioned multi-resident structures because that is an important part of making a city feel like a City.
multi-resident structures plus a hard cap on a city's radius is a must, otherwise we'll have cities like Los Angeles rather than New York.
i love the idea of an city overview showing you the zoning types and automatically having houses and things face a certain way. that would also go a looooong way in making cities look and feel like Cities, rather than just thrown together towns.
as far as the issue with random houses strewn across the landscape outside of any city's boarders, i think i have a workable solution.
make the maintenance for buildings (not factories or harvesters) which are outside of a city's limits high, and make the maintenance for buildings inside of a city's limits low.
the difference should be enough so that it would be worth your credits to live in a city. but those who are wealthier can afford to live out in the countryside (it could be considered a summer home haha).
it makes sense for maintenance to be lower in a city because most real life cities have their own systems like sanitation, ect. which support its citizens.
a person living out in the countryside would have to fully take care of themselves.
i really hope that once the CU is taken care of, we'll get a bunch of revamps like this which will make the game more immersive and fun to play.
check out my ideas for a vehicle revamp. i posted it on this forum because part of it deals with parking garages, which are of course found in cities.
it's long overdue that something is done to make the player's living situations more fun and immersive.
i'm glad you mentioned multi-resident structures because that is an important part of making a city feel like a City.
multi-resident structures plus a hard cap on a city's radius is a must, otherwise we'll have cities like Los Angeles rather than New York.
i love the idea of an city overview showing you the zoning types and automatically having houses and things face a certain way. that would also go a looooong way in making cities look and feel like Cities, rather than just thrown together towns.
as far as the issue with random houses strewn across the landscape outside of any city's boarders, i think i have a workable solution.
make the maintenance for buildings (not factories or harvesters) which are outside of a city's limits high, and make the maintenance for buildings inside of a city's limits low.
the difference should be enough so that it would be worth your credits to live in a city. but those who are wealthier can afford to live out in the countryside (it could be considered a summer home haha).
it makes sense for maintenance to be lower in a city because most real life cities have their own systems like sanitation, ect. which support its citizens.
a person living out in the countryside would have to fully take care of themselves.
i really hope that once the CU is taken care of, we'll get a bunch of revamps like this which will make the game more immersive and fun to play.
check out my ideas for a vehicle revamp. i posted it on this forum because part of it deals with parking garages, which are of course found in cities.
Binstubbs
Tue Apr 12, 2005 5:36 pm
#5
Wow thanks for the big thumbs up! I spent alot of time over the last year or so since the cities were introduced, tragically in the same timeframe as the holocron fiasco, reading posts about what people hated about the system and the negatie impact it has had. I sat and thought long and hard about it and just spewed it out onto my keyboard. Now the keys are all sticky. The biggest complaint in this game, aside form hardware and bug issues is the content and atmosphere of the game. "So you've grinded X profession out, used all skill points, now what?" Unfortunately the answer is, loot hunt. ehhh
Seemed so logical to me that the way to get the maximum level of content to the most players, of all levels, was to incorporate it into the most common denominator, homes/cities of residence.
The only issue I could see with the higher maintenance "country homes" is that if hypothetically, cities became saturated, then new players and everyone else would be forced to pay more than other players, which is really unfair. This scenario isnt all that unrealistic when you think of all the millionaires who drop like two years worth of maintenance into a house and then quit playing, or go to another server. Plus Players should still be able to set up their own little villages like before the player cities were around, without paying penalties. There is nothing wrong with the random houses in the countryside really, it's the house 75m away from Nyax's compound that should not be allowed, or the literal shanty town of homes outlining the no buildzone border of the entrance to the krayt graveyard or surroundingthe busted up sandcrawler. They should not be able to be within sight of areas that give the game its Star Wars feel.
btw I'm cooking up some good stuff to revive the static cities...stay tuned
Message Edited by Binstubbs on 04-12-2005 07:41 PM
GanymedePharuu
Tue Apr 12, 2005 6:31 pm
#6
well i think if they make the maxcity radius large enough then players can find a place to live in at least one city. say the limit of total player cities on each buildable planet is 5(i think there's 8 buildable planets right?), that's a maximum of 40 player cities in the galaxy. if they had a radius which would allow say 100 small houses within it's boarders that's already 4000 houses for players. now of course some players will want medium or large houses. that will adjust the amount of space within the city's boarder.
but if you factor in the cheapest space saving multi-resident buildings (there could be two styles, small and large. small would take up the same space as a medium house and have 5 living spaces, large would take the same space as a large house and have 10 living spaces) that would increase the amount of citizens within a city.
so say the largest city could hold on average 300 citizens (that would be a city with a good mix of housing types) with 40 citiesthat would allow room for 12,000 players. that's more players than almost any server has i think (just an estimation, i could be way wrong). but anyway, if they do it right, there won't be any shortage of room in player cities.
i think right now, house maintenance really doesn't affect people's decisions when placing a house. that's one of the reasons i suggested the increaed maintenance on houses outside of cities.
maybe it's not the best way of promoting the living in cities. but i just feel like it's too easy to own a large house and dump a year's worth of credits into it like you said.
there needs to be some sort of incentive to have people living in cities.
one of my biggest gripes in this game is seeing those houses surrounding the no build zones outside of Theed and Coronet.
they make the landscape so messy.
there should be something to make people think twice when setting up their house so haphazardly outside of a town or city.
bluejanus
Tue Apr 12, 2005 8:30 pm
#7
GanymedePharuu wrote:
well i think if they make the maxcity radius large enough then players can find a place to live in at least one city. say the limit of total player cities on each buildable planet is 5(i think there's 8 buildable planets right?), that's a maximum of 40 player cities in the galaxy. if they had a radius which would allow say 100 small houses within it's boarders that's already 4000 houses for players. now of course some players will want medium or large houses. that will adjust the amount of space within the city's boarder.
but if you factor in the cheapest space saving multi-resident buildings (there could be two styles, small and large. small would take up the same space as a medium house and have 5 living spaces, large would take the same space as a large house and have 10 living spaces) that would increase the amount of citizens within a city.
so say the largest city could hold on average 300 citizens (that would be a city with a good mix of housing types) with 40 citiesthat would allow room for 12,000 players. that's more players than almost any server has i think (just an estimation, i could be way wrong). but anyway, if they do it right, there won't be any shortage of room in player cities.
i think right now, house maintenance really doesn't affect people's decisions when placing a house. that's one of the reasons i suggested the increaed maintenance on houses outside of cities.
maybe it's not the best way of promoting the living in cities. but i just feel like it's too easy to own a large house and dump a year's worth of credits into it like you said.
there needs to be some sort of incentive to have people living in cities.
one of my biggest gripes in this game is seeing those houses surrounding the no build zones outside of Theed and Coronet.
they make the landscape so messy.
there should be something to make people think twice when setting up their house so haphazardly outside of a town or city.
I don't think SOE should penalize people for not wanting to live a player city. I think SOE should design things so that living in a player is more fun, more useful.
GanymedePharuu
Wed Apr 13, 2005 8:59 am
#8
bluejanus wrote:
GanymedePharuu wrote:well i think if they make the maxcity radius large enough then players can find a place to live in at least one city. say the limit of total player cities on each buildable planet is 5(i think there's 8 buildable planets right?), that's a maximum of 40 player cities in the galaxy. if they had a radius which would allow say 100 small houses within it's boarders that's already 4000 houses for players. now of course some players will want medium or large houses. that will adjust the amount of space within the city's boarder.but if you factor in the cheapest space saving multi-resident buildings (there could be two styles, small and large. small would take up the same space as a medium house and have 5 living spaces, large would take the same space as a large house and have 10 living spaces) that would increase the amount of citizens within a city.so say the largest city could hold on average 300 citizens (that would be a city with a good mix of housing types) with 40 citiesthat would allow room for 12,000 players. that's more players than almost any server has i think (just an estimation, i could be way wrong). but anyway, if they do it right, there won't be any shortage of room in player cities.i think right now, house maintenance really doesn't affect people's decisions when placing a house. that's one of the reasons i suggested the increaed maintenance on houses outside of cities.maybe it's not the best way of promoting the living in cities. but i just feel like it's too easy to own a large house and dump a year's worth of credits into it like you said.there needs to be some sort of incentive to have people living in cities.one of my biggest gripes in this game is seeing those houses surrounding the no build zones outside of Theed and Coronet.they make the landscape so messy.there should be something to make people think twice when setting up their house so haphazardly outside of a town or city.I don't think SOE should penalize people for not wanting to live a player city. I think SOE should design things so that living in a player is more fun, more useful.
yes you're right. and i think many of the ideas from the original poster would make that so.
but they should have certain constraints to prevent things like the South Coronet slums.
it would be so much nicer if there were a well organized town there rather than the mess of houses people put down at random.
Binstubbs
Mon Apr 18, 2005 1:15 pm
#9
this gives me a great idea
GanymedePharuu wrote:
they should have certain constraints to prevent things like the South Coronet slums.
it would be so much nicer if there were a well organized town there rather than the mess of houses people put down at random.
Scolirk
Mon Apr 18, 2005 7:51 pm
#10
Iv been mayor of 3 active cities:
(Old) Hibernia (Now MIRAGE), Tatooine, Corbantis
LRAH (Lokian Rebel Alliance), Lok (DUUUUH), Ahazi
(New) Hibernia, Lok, Corbantis
I think thats a cool idea. There are alot of crummy sities around. Also we need maybe some new things with the poli tree, cool things that make us want to get exp =P
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