Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Design Topic: Player City locations
Q-3PO wrote:
In other words, will you move your house to new location for a player city or will the player city come to you?
I hardly think a "player city" should be a suburb of Theed. I would much rather go to a player city as opposed to having five cities all around the major original cities.
Also do you already have plans for your player city or are you going to look for one that other people have built?
Nope, but I have been looking into RPing cities for possible places to go eventually.
What is going to motivate you to join one city over another? City Perks (shuttles, banks, cloning centers, etc)?
Yes, every city must have such things.
Tax Rates?
Of course this is important, most of us do live in America, correct? 
Location?
This really isn't too important. All of the planets are pretty homogeneous in terms of terrain. All need for close proximity to certain cities is neutralized by shuttleports.
Neighbors? Local attraction (battlefield, themepark, dungeon)?
I definitely think there should not be cloning centers and shuttleports within at least 2000m or so of all themeparks/dungeons/battlefields. It'd be pretty lame if there was little to no travel time to something like Fort Tusken.
There really should only be two kinds of cities in this game: Imperial strongholds and "neutral" cities. No where in the movies are there cities that are "openly" Rebel. If they were, the Empire sent AT-ATs, AT-STs, AT-PTs, and Stormtroopers to "fix" the situation. One whole planet was blown up because of one Rebel! The whole Imperial/Rebel relationship needs to be reimplemented if this game is ever going to truly be a Star Wars game. Rebel recruiters need to be hiding in the basements of homes and cantinas.
Faction of most of members?
I have a question, but i'm not trawling through hundreds of posts, so if it's already been answered then just flame me.
A Master Politician can have 2 Specialisations in a Player City if i remember correctly. Now, if he sets up a city and places the 2 specialist buildings, plus other buildings that are only available to a high level Politician, wht happens to those buildings when a Politician who doesn't have the appropriate level takes over? Do the buildings just disappear? Do they stay and allow an otherwise low level mayor to have the same power as a Master? This could result intwo major problems occurring depending on the answer:
1. MasterPolitician runs a city, has all the perks available. City is well established etc. A new PA challenge for leadership with their Novice Politician and (somehow) win. New Mayor has virtually no ability to place buildings... bam... all the higher level buildings disappear.
2. A small PA sets up a city, it's empty. Mr Metropolis the Master Polician comes in and is paid 10,000,000 Cr to set up every building ranging from shuttleport to the 2 chosen specialities. Following week they re-elect n00b Mayor and keep all the perks they paid for.
Now, either way, there are problems. Problem 1 leads to griefing, problem 2 is a blatant exploit.
Any ideas?
SUGGESTION:
Q3PO , i think you should also considere not allowing palyer cities TOO nearIMPORTANT andUNIQUE spots in the planets cause this could be very unbalancing and also be a source of griefing. I will explin this with an example:
Imagine that a Faction City, lets say an Imperail aligned PA city settles IN the KRAYT YARDor TOO NEAR the Krayt Yard. This would mean that the citizens of this city will monopolize the krayt uber loots and what is worth can grief opposite faction players by making the Krayt Yard an Imperila only acces area by mounting Turrets and AT-ST around it, can you imagine a group of rebels trying to get Krayt loots on a place like this?. This example also applies to a rebel aligned city, rebels can also make krayt loot a rebels only item. The same applies forother palces likeKimogila Spawn point and Agrilat Swamps and so on. I think that NO CITY, regardless of faction or anything should be allowed to bet TOO close of important and unique places like this cause it can be unbalancing.
Q3PO, PLEASE CONSIDER THIS!!! CONSIDER THIS
Eter Solwalker
YesEther, you're right on this one (exepte a don't like really much yiur exemple, why should it be imperials and not rebelles... just jocking:smileywink
.
But be assured that if it's finally admitted to build city too near of an important unique point, there will be some punitive raid on those city. No doubt about it.
and then the city would become a ghost town!!! (inhabited by the Krayt dragon for your exemple.:smileyvery-happy
Our whole guild has recently upsticks and move from 2km north ofTheed to 4.5km south of Lake Retreat. We are truly isolated until we get a shuttleport. But no-one cares, we are getting to build our own city and make a mark on the land.
So yes, I think there will be cities in remote regions. Two types, those that want a clear plot of land to build a visions and that place near to static POIs to capitalize on passing customers. Both valid reasons.
You might know (or not , that I run the player town of Spiritwood in Ultima Online. A community celebrating it's 5 year anniversary this weekend, probably being the longest standing active RP town in UO. I led the town through all it's ups and downs, fending off Felucca's army of griefers, dealing with Trammels lethargy, and I guess I know what I'm talking about when it comes to player towns, may they be supported by game mechanics or not.
As it is right now, the system proposed in SWG is in my oppinion not acceptable to anyone who wants to spend a lot of time and effort on seriously building a community like ours in SWG. Why? Because it is far too exploitable and unsecure.
It can not be, that a thriving town consisting 50 citizens can be taken over by a clan of doods settling in the town, taking it over, destroying it and moving on to the next town. As unlikely as it might sound, this will definitely happen while the original founders can't do anything to prevent it. In UO we could fight, fight and continue to fight them off, but we have no defense in SWG whatsoever to prevent that from happening. Sure, we had to deal with griefers trying to spoil our events in UO, we had PKs camping our stablemaster and tavern, but still they could not take the town from us as long as we stuck together. In SWG houses can be moved without the fear to find no spot to place it again and that makes it possible for this kind of exploit.
It is my firm belief, that this system will fail. It will generate so much trouble, that in the end it will be made secure at the cost of several hundred players who left the game over this issue. So why not implement it right in the first place?
My suggestion is simple ... someone wanting to settle in a town needs to be approved by the mayor like in a guild. If approved he is a full citizen, but will only get voting rights after a certain amount of time being a citizen.
As it stands right now, we'll rather return our attention to Spiritwood in UO than to take the risk of being hugely dissapointed in SWG ... and I'm talking about 50-100 players here. Honestly, the only reason for us to be in SWG is the ability to build player towns and under the current system this simply will not be enjoyable or even possible.
kind regards
Pad O'Lion
Town of Spiritwood (http://europa.spiritwood.com)
Custodes Fati (http://www.custodesfati.com)
In my opinion every planet is going to be wall to wall with player cities - so much so that there will be the demand for more space to build them in.
Player cities will be seen as yet another status symbol, and so every guild in the game is more than likely going to try and get one set up - and there will be plenty of disappointed guilds out there.
/hopes to be proven wrong
Pad you of all people should be welcoming this system.
First off the griefing scenario you describe above will require significant planning and financial clout, so you wouldn't have a band of griefers moving from city to city in order to shut it down.
Secondly, unlike UO where you get no "town tools" whatsoever you get plenty to play with in SWG. No least of all a town militia who may remove unwanted people from your town, not forgetting that any PVP will be on your terms, rather than anyone seeking to cause grief.
Thirdly, and particularly in the case of the Spiritwood population - you would have placed so many houses in your SWG town that there would be a physical difficulty in placing sufficient new citizens to vote you out of office.
Whereas in UO the town can be disrupted by one house causing problems, in SWG it will take a majority action to create the same issues - if your opponents can provide more bodies in terms of voting clout you will be moved on (such is democracy). The powers you would see built into the game will give too much power to the mayor (deciding who can and can't vote? nice little dictatorship) - and let's not forget that not every mayor is going to be as fixated with running tea-parties and lectures and such like that Spiritwood made it's name with. There will be a good number of towns set up for purely hunting, PVP and unSpiritwoodesque behaviour.
Spiritwood attracted a lot of grief initially because it became famous, later purely because of the response the griefers got. It was the citizens of the town causing as many problems (despite that it wasn't their intention) as the bored griefing folk who popped by for a laugh.
/former Spiritwood citizen
People are nto liekly to move to remote location without a shuttleport
I think what you will see is groups of player trading lot with a SWG version of a mule across servers to drop a small house and a residency jsut so people can get shuttleports under the current system. Which i think is bad
I am a member of a European city building PA. The PA has been running for a long time (long, long before the game went live) and since go live we have built cities on Corellia and Tatooine to try out various ideas.
Our first City was too far from anywhere and so did not attract many customers for our crafters. Our new city is about 2km from Mos Entha and seems to be ok (although it is difficult to tell since many members took a break after the announcement of euro servers).
Our city will hopefully be staying where it is, assuming we can grab the location when the euro servers open. We have made various plans for helping our architects grind up to the position to make a city hall and PA hall. The new player city features of shuttleports, cloning centres and mission terminals will help keep people in the city, either PA members who previously had to go elsewhere to clone or take missions, or non-PA members who will be able to take advantage of our shuttle port to visit our vendors.
We hope to be the first metropolis on our chosen server.
Our main concerns at the moment are the costs of running a city. I understand that SOE want to take credits out of the economy, but the exorbitant costs of running a city hall will just mean more people grinding missions just to pay those costs, which is something SOE appear to not want. We would like to know if the city hall costs scale with the size of the city - does it make sense that the costs for running the city hall for an outpost should be the same as that for a metropolis?
As a PA on chilstra (House Lymbo) I think we have the intention of starting off being near a settlement with a starport, then when we are big enough to have a shuttle port. Do a HUGE city wide movement of the city.
We would want to move to a more remote exciting place that is possibly near a POI.
put em in the trash where they belong, right along with your swg cd's.
what the @#& # are you dong this for anyways? its going to be bugged as the rest of the "features" in swg that are still bugged, fix them first morons. yeah i said that. i dont care cause obviously the devs stopped caring about this game, about a few weeks ago, maybe earlier. go @#@^ yourselves, devs.