Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Design Topic: Player City locations
I have one big suggestion for you Q on this. If you want to spark people away from the major metropolis towns, you may want to think about making shuttle ports mid to low on the town contruction list for the mayors. That way people will not be discouraged by having to walk 3km to their 'town'. Reward the ones that dare to build their citya 15min walk from town. To help in this, program in a minimum distance a player city has to be in order to even place a shuttleport. That way you don't have 20 shuttleports all surrounding Theed and those that want to build 3-4km out of town can do so and flurish. I realize that mounts may cut down the inconvenience of walking 3-4km also, but this is my suggestion for better or worse.
To answer your question, Building 3+km outside of a major city...secluded 
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This is a chicken-egg thing, Q.
Cities grow up in places where people gather. This much we know from history.
Accessablity is a contributing factor. Chicago is the second city because Stephen Douglas realized how railroad access would impact its growth.
If you park a shutteport in the middle of nowhere, a city will grow up around it. Not the other way around, though.
Ifyou wait too long to give advanced player cities a shuttleport, they'll never develop in remote areas. They'll never be able to achieve the mass needed on their own without a lot of energy being applied and a lot of incentives being tossed the way of players. Like reduced building costs, or some other tangible reason for the city to be there. You're going to have to sweeten the pot a lot if the shuttleports come late in development.
The transportation infrastructure needs to be there first before the city takes off.
Otherwise, the player cities are going to be basically suburbs of whatever NPC city they are clustered around for some time, because transportation is so central to their growth.
This week we picked up our PA hall and all of our houses and moved further back from Dearic on Talus.
We did this with the intention of the Player Cities patch and the fact that we wanted to provide enough area for city growth.
We have been throwing around the idea of moving 4k or more out if and when the details are released.
I don't want to be anywhere near a city at first. As a master craftsman, I would be a huge idiot to pass over the experimentation bonus I can eventually get from living in a city. But I can always market my goods elsewhere. I'm looking at location, location, location. Battlegrounds are irrelevant, I want to live some place that looks nice. Once it has a shuttleport, it'll be just as good as any other city. Until then, I'll need a mount to move around, I guess. =)
chuff94 wrote:
This may or may not be a potential problem. I can see player cities poping up in area's where guildscan set up a shuttle port to their establishments to increase business. However, this could add to the already existing camping nightmate of the high level mobs since the big ones like Krayts and FS cave only spawn in one spot or general area. I personally would rather run or get there by mount/vehicle.
I was going to post that this would be a GOOD thing. Not a bad one. It will definitely be good business for anyone wanting to sell weaponry, meds, etc by these attractions. I just wish one would pop up on Talus near us
hint, hint...
We moved 5k from any large city over 2 months ago. We did that thinking about PA Cities. We have hated the 20min run since. We can't wait for the cities to go live. We are ready. We have positioned ourselves near a small battlefield. and not to far from a PvE battlefield. We hope to get some traffic out that way.
So yes we will be away from a major city. Yes it is remote. But that is why we are there.
I've always wanted a city in the SW corner of Naboo but it's hard to convince anyone they want to make the trek out there. The land is perfect for a city, but finding the people to populate it was nearly impossible because it's so far off the beaten track.
Maybe that will change when the player cities go live, and players can shuttle back and forth (or use their own vehicles / mounts) a lot easier.
Faction and friends.
I wish guilds and cities were seperate.
However, shuttleports come at the advanced levels of cities, so we now get into a chicken and egg situation. At a minimum, it will take 5 weeks to get to a point that a city can have a shuttleport (lvl 4 city IIRC). If the crafters want a city with a shuttleport but away from the main city, that will leave them a month roughtly where they can't sell any goods. They have a situation of "maybe move to a new location now to get good access and help it grow" or stay where they are, wait for the city to grow, then move in at a later time once the shuttleport is established.
Another factor to pull in here is that the majority of house owners are the crafting professions. Of my customers that are combat oriented, more than 3/4 of them don't own a house and really aren't interested in getting one. This contributes to the problem too - if the majority of potential city residents won't move to a place without having a shuttleport, a city can't grow to what is needed to get the desired features to attract them there in the first place.
Balancing this is the fact that the majority of the initial cities will be PA driven. They'll have the resources and "group desicion" to move their guild crafters to the new "remote" location. This is good and bad. Guild crafters tend to sell a lot to their guild-mates and are therefore less concerned about proximity or having a shuttleport.
Ideally, I think the shuttleport needs to be one or two levels lower in the tree in order to help attract crafters to cities. I think most crafters could handle a week or two with greatly reduced sales, but 5 weeks would financially ruin most. As an example, I'm living in a non-guilded "crafter's city" just outside tyrena on Bria. There's 15 different crafters there, plus a big pile of factories. We all look after each other and chat on a daily basis. Many of them are up and commers, only a few of us have recently reached master status in our respective professions. We're actively seeking a politician to join the group (most of the group belong to disparate guilds, or like me, unguilded) so establish a player city where we already are. Moving the city to some out of the way place while we wait for the city to get to the right size to get a shuttleport would ruin us all.
Won't people build up their cities near "good spots" like the Krayts, or near where the holocrons are found if you let cthem build starports?
Just wondering..
Our city is already 4000+ meters away after we have everyone build right on top of our other PA hall on naboo. It's not that we don't want to be that far out but at that time we had someone plant another PA hall within 300M of our existing one right in the way of our expansion, so we packed up and moved.
We might even considering moving a lot farther out on top of some remote mountain now as well so that we can even get further away and more distinct special city.
Well, Q, We already are developing our city North of Keren on Eclipse... Its developing very quickly! We may have a rather Large PA join very soon, which will help the advancement and such greatly!
I personally would like to see a Player City in the far reaches of Naboo... Where its about 10-15km from a shuttleport now