Development Cycle Archive

Blair,

Thnx for update and I am sure most of us disgruntled people understand this situation, but my biggest complaint with all of this is, if this was known beforehand, then why werent we, the players, informed upfront a month or 2 back. What happens if for some reason now your servers cant handle more than 10? Or you can only add another 5 to the cap?

The point is, most players wether large or small setup their towns with PC's in mind and not once since release was a mention of a possible cap, if so, then some may have moved to the harder planets to establish their cities and towns. Just to give ya an idea how much a town means to us we are debating destroying what it took us 2 months to build just to move to another location to start a town. This was how bad we wanted the town, but then we would lose our choice spot and possible get stuck in some crappy location since most prime spots have been taken.

Hi Blair, remember me?

http://www.andromalius.net/images/Screenshots%20JPG/Misc/will%20Blair%20tell.jpg

hehe.

Well, to sum up why we felt we were letdown:

-Last minute cap warning, we were all quite celebrating in anticipation for what should have been the best day of SWG for a lot of us. Remember me hounding you about the politician back then?

-Giving cities a headstart. I'm not sure other cities will recover from that, honestly. Once the first cities ghave drawn all the business...

-Needing to relocate to other planets that get tickier navigation rules and overal are longer to reach.

-Can't relocate even if we'd want to: prepatch houses are no good.

We felt very screwed, can't create a city, can't move to some other planet to create one either. We have the choice of being arseholes and taking over someone else's (we have the numbers for that) or playing nice and getting screwed.

Well I am very glad to hear that this is just a hotfix and not a huge patch to increase the city cap that gives me hope. For you see the guild I am in along with 5 others have had a space of land set up on the coast of the lake north of deeja on naboo. We have around 150-200 homes there. Knowing that the patch would only allow for 10 player citys on naboo we made sure to be ready to jump online when your servers finally went live(radiant being almost last as usual but that is another story). So we have our deed ready, go get our mayor trained, run out to our city spot and try to drop our city hall. Then all hell breaks loose, our mayor's game crashes, and when she logs back in she has noticed something terrible, ROLLBACK!!! So now she has no deed, no politician training, and is very very far from our city, Well by the time she got back to our area with the training and the new deed there of course were no more city halls to be placed on naboo, cap already hit. So your rollback screwed over about 200 peoples long term plans to have fun in this game. As a temp fix to make a city we started one ontalus but are already having many ppl threaten to either leave our guild(or the others that are with us) or leave the game all together, bc honestly noone wants to leave a beautiful lake side retreat on naboo for a bland slab of land on talus and also moving in this game SUCKS.

So we have already sent in quite a few csr tickets explaining this situation, but I think an asap hotfix to allow one more player city on naboo would be much better and the right thing to do considering it was your buggy game that rolled back our mayor and screwed over A LOT of your paying customers. We were ready to drop our city hall in time to have a city on naboo, your game for some reason was not.

Jeremiah Dee

One more note: A while back as we were building our prospective city we even had a csr come out and view our work(don't know which, they talked with our leader Julissa Bromnad) who said it was the best city layout they had seen so far. Such a shame that if you don't act soon it will all be a waste.

You guys just let him off the hook that easily?

True- Blair thanks for a response. In my eyes that's all you did. You haven't addressed the real concerns. You said the caps would be raised, not lifted completely.

I'm for restrictions, really, I am. Some kind of restriction is great, but what you have instituted here is down right oblivious to the game, and how it is played.

You gave the guys who could be online during working hours the upper hand. You allowed them to build player cities too close to bigger cities, and it wasted one of the slots. You forgot about the larger PA's, you forgot about the Guilds as a whole who have been planning to place a City Hall for months. You have yet to address those issues. You have yet to address the player guilds that are totally ticked about the cap.

In my opinion, you haven't addressed anything. You said the cap would be raised, to me this means a higher numerical restriction, perhaps 15 instead of 10. Whatever the case is, you still leave it to the lucky ones to become player cities. Regardless of whether or not they have 6 or 50 people living in the city. So, in the next hot fix, they lift the cap, but who will get to place their cities? The lucky ones again.

My suggestion, talk to the PA Leaders, see what they have to say. I would suggest that in order for a city to beplaced the 'settler' must be the leader of a PA. That PA must have a minimum of 25 people. CSR's come in game and determine the location of a City Hall, they discuss with the person who placed it, and if it is too close to another city, player or game city, it is rejected. Make City Halls require authority from a CSR to place. Maybe a little bit of work, but then again, you gave the upper hand to people, and made it unbalanced.

Blair, thanks for coming forward. That said, are you nuts?

In my experience there were 2-8 places on every planet where your player community had already gotten out ahead of you and built trully amazing settlements. I went touring and saw gridded cities, circular layouts around lakes with formal boulevards linking neighborhoods, variations on the connected plaza schemes (ie Washington, Phila, or bits of Paris) and a host of other trully inspired places where your player base cooperated and produced communities worthy of recognition. Plinka started a thread -- tell us where you are! Her efforts should have been made serious, as in send us a petition for city-hood. Your staff could easily have visited these places -- we're only talking about 10 on the main planets for gosh sakes -- and interacted with the planners.

Our settlement, an alliance of 4 guilds and nearly 100 homes, would have loved the opportunity to have worked with your staff on the rollout. Provided feedback in an organized and disciplined way -- a live beta phase if you will, leading to growing numbers of settlements over time.

You could have rewarded hard work and accomplishments over time, rather than a day off for a team of three (the poltiician, the mount trainer and the achitect) to out race anyone. You folks went from offering nearly universal city opportunities (as long as you went far enough into the wilderness to have the 1k diameter), to a hard cap with a promise for a day's warning, to a sudden release that was delayed for hours. The absolute worst customer relation strategy, the absolute worst scenario for interaction with your player base would have been a randomly timed release to a randomly selected set of winners. Oddly, that's what you wound up doing.

Whoever was responsible for managing this process should be ashamed and looking for another job. They blew it.

Excellent. It is always good to hear directly from the Devs, even when it's not really what most of us want to hear.

Actually everyone, the Devs HAVE been saying that there were going to be restrictions on player construction on every planet. They have been saying that since beforeday one. Granted, they never mentioned a hard cap on the exact number ofplayer cities on a planet, but none of us should be surprised that there is one. Do we really want to see Corellia (or Naboo or Tatoonie) essentially turn into a continousplayer city with patches of wilderness andno areas for independant construction? I completely understand why people are upset and disappointed, and I personally believe that Bounty Hunters and Smugglers should have been cut from release and the game delayed long enough to ensure the inclusion of Player Cities at launch. And this little scenario is exactly why I believe that. If they had done so, their not telling the community about the capinitially would have been no where near as troublesome as it has turned out to be and the community could have eased into the establishment of player cities with much less trouble. I also think that the initial presence of player cities would have helped foster the development of much more "player created content" for the GCW thru the establishment offactionally aligned cities. (I am so looking forward to that. ) I'm just glad that they're finally here.

Oh, and DarthApothis, if you really are a Computer Scientist and hold advanced degrees in that area then surely you realize that there is a "night and day" between academic (ideal,"by the book")programming and professional programming. Even if most of the team is extremely careful with their code, all it takes is one person being sloppy with their programming habits to screw an entire project up. :: chuckles:: And besides that, even the most model of students don't always code clean when "under the gun". I wouldn't be too hard on them as far as that's concerned, though I have been rather disappointed to see a lot of the minor bugs in the game go unfixed as long as they have. It should get a lot better once they get player vehicles launched and can shift more resources over to maintenance and "bug-squashing".

all you guys are a bunch of babies, stop complaining about how many hours you spent prepairing for your player city and how you deserve to have one because you have wanted one from the beginning. if you really want to be a part of one, join someone who already has a city hall placed. The whole point of a player city is to have a congregation of players to socialize, sell, trade, fight, ect. ect. They arent made just so you and your buddies, guild, or whatever can have your own town. I love the cap, im kind of disapointed that the devs are going to lift it. having a ton of player cities across the planet would be horrible. I would much rather have 10 metropolis's with 5 or 6 different guilds,a ton of players, merchants, entertainers, ect. than60 or 70 smaller cities with just a guild and its guildies. As for player cities, i think the update is awesome, but if more people would start joining up instead of racing each other for player city slots. The cities themselves would turn out alot better.

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Blair wrote:

We have always had the intention of starting with a small number of cities, then increasing that number as time goes on. We can increase the number with a hotfix; it will not require a full monthly update

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Thanks for not telling us until 24 hours before releasing it... if you always had the intentions of 'starting small'... why didnt you bother to tell us sooner?

Developers:

Let's allow Player Cities to be something more than a larger guild hall.

Keep the player city cap low so that different members of various guilds live, trade, work etc. in the same player city.

Keep the player city cap low.

As a suggestion for the futureincrease in the allowed number of player cities.Why don't you implement some sort of auctioning/contest whereby people who want to place citiesallhave a fair chance at getting it?With a auction or contest this allows everyone toget involvedin a positive manner and provides SOE with a way to tightly control city count!

thanks!

Annie

Blair,

Here's your report card just go it...

Development Team for Player Cities A+

Pre-Release Production Team A

Final Release Production Team F

I am in the alliance with Creigh. We have a huge group and are one of the best release candidates you could ask for. We are dissappointed on the way you handled this and I guess it didn't suprise us any. We don't expect much better from SOE where SWG is concerned. Does that bother you?

I suggest that someone at SOE figure out how to start providing roll outs like this that benefit all parties concerned.

There are an endless number of things you could have done... Require 40+ buildings in the 1st 10 City Halls placed seems like a reasonable solution. No City Halls within 2000 meters of a static city. Have players apply for one of the 1st 10 spots. blah blah blah.

Thanks for the headaches SOE.

Hal'Khaan Darkrunner, SWG Protectorate Academy Dean

What's the date for the lifting of the cap?

Hi all; I m the leader of a PA on Chilastra. But if this cap isnt increased I wont be much longer. My members are so upset with this very poor administrative decision, that half are planning on camping in order to carry out a hostile take over of one of themany cities that sit right on the edge of build zones of existing cities. All the new player cities have become annexes to existing cities because pa members rushed outto get their cities placed as quickly as possible for fear of not having the chance to. This is a ridiculous situation. The other half think that that is griefing and so will leave the PA and probably the game. This is an appalling situation and you have caused it. If a single member of my PA quits, then I will be joining him, and another PA will be weakened considerably by this foolish cap.

One other thing; Why in gods name did you only give us 1 days notice of this cap??? thats poor management!