Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Player Cities: Where we are and where we are going.
I have a question about this, that's puzzling me.
You wrote that outposts can elect toremain outposts and they will then not count against the server limit of 10 (or whatever) cities.
Question 1: so could they decide to remain an outpost even if they have more than 20 residents?
Question 2: what happens if they decide to grow, but the cap is reached?
I think, there should be some kind of warning:
1) If you place a cityhall, but the planet cap is already reached, so you won't be able to grow, you should receive some warning like: "This planets cap for cities has been reached, if you decide to place your hall nevertheless, you will remain an Outpost and not be able to grow beyond that until further notice".
2) If you could grow, but opt out: "Warning: the planet's limit for cities might be reached soon. If you opt out of growing now, you might not be able to do so in the future and will remain an Outpost".
If you don't give players these warnings this could lead to more frustration.
Please think about it.
TH, here is a huge problem in this whole system. It is called cross server trades for house lots and votes.
Next is the null auto vote for incumbent mayor. Folks are allready trading cross server at a huge rate. What this is doing, is increasing the item count on servers by folks that dont even play there!, also with admin on these ghost citizens houses, a person now has an additonal 150 storage, more item count on the server.
I would like to see 2 things done, but it may be 2 late.
1, a 1 week placement rule on new players. You cannot place a house for 1 week after the charector is made.
2, let 2 folks share residance in the same house. This would cut way down on the number of houses in a city area, less lag in that area, less items on the server, and be a better deturrent for cross server trades. I for one would not let someone I do not know live in my house with all my stuff=)
Please consider these before your new patch, wich is FORCING more item count on the severs, wich is also the reason for the cap in the first place.
Ok, so now you have a whole lot of Lvl1 Outposts out there with no cap (or a very high number). The cap for Lvl2+ cities is ten now. What happens when you raise this and there are dozens of Outposts that qualify for these few spots. How do you decide who gets upgraded?
Maybe who has the most citizens currenly?
or better
A combination of who has the most citizens currently and who would have the most if they were allowed to upgrade to Lvl2. This would ensure that the most built up areas (ie- the most potential citizens) would become cities, which seems appropriate. Be kind of silly to see a group of 20 buildings that's a "city" and then a much larger group of 100+ buildings that's still an Outpost just because the first group had more people living closer to city hall.
Sorry if someone brought this up already. 
aldure wrote:
TH, here is a huge problem in this whole system. It is called cross server trades for house lots and votes.
Next is the null auto vote for incumbent mayor. Folks are allready trading cross server at a huge rate. What this is doing, is increasing the item count on servers by folks that dont even play there!, also with admin on these ghost citizens houses, a person now has an additonal 150 storage, more item count on the server.
I would like to see 2 things done, but it may be 2 late.
1, a 1 week placement rule on new players. You cannot place a house for 1 week after the charector is made.
2, let 2 folks share residance in the same house. This would cut way down on the number of houses in a city area, less lag in that area, less items on the server, and be a better deturrent for cross server trades. I for one would not let someone I do not know live in my house with all my stuff=)
Please consider these before your new patch, wich is FORCING more item count on the severs, wich is also the reason for the cap in the first place.
1) No. Sorry if it bothers you that some of us are smart enough to figure out ways to keep our cities. In my case, I wouldn't have had to do it had they not announced this retarded raise in outpost minimums.
2) Maybe.
SwanStormrider........I believe the answer to your dilema is simple.......take your 100ish + people...find that city on the planet you want to try and dominate......have a meeting......vote your mayor.......have him infultrate the city as a citizen......slowly pull your weight and gain 51% of the electoral votes.........then have your secret mayor pop up one week running for office.....everyone vote for your man (which is 51% of the ballet) tada the city now is run by your guild/faction........Just so you know I am not being sarcastic........and even though I did not get the planet I wanted I am gratified to have one period......I did not have a mount nor did I have the resources and ability to get my city but I spent hours at least six hours and finally got to place a city hall on Talus....and that was after my charector got rolled back three times and I had to get politician all over again.....with each rollback ensuring even more people with more oppurtunities than myself at gaining a state in history..........Read about the land rush in Real life that America gave ...if you guys have over 100 players and you could not secure a spot I find that to be lack of effort and/or initiative on your parts....so please don't say cause you have been here since day one screw everyone else.......my city was placed with the help of 2..........only 2 and I even helped secure a trade of 200k in ore for a city hall to 1 of the 2 that did help........we both placed our halls.......
As for the increase in the civilians per level and such I am neutral......however if I understand correctly the oppurtunity to become a larger city is now being capped as well? That is truly not fair at all.......I feel that every outpost that made it should have the same oppurtunity across the board to either grow or not........if you want a cap place one on the amount of cities aloud to be placed.....but not on the ones that exist already or in the future if you decide to help the unfortunate ones that did not make the cap...
his is really getting old really fast.I am sick of you people changeing the rules midstream and screwing everyone over.This is utterly ridiculous that now we need 20 for level 2 and not 15 as intended.Wow must be great to make it up as you go.
We once again get screwed over.I must say I was in this for the long haul with my 2 accounts but if this BS continues I will say farewell to SWG.
My 5 year old son plays games and make the rules up as he go'e along .I guess that pretty much says it all about the SOE mentality.Set the rules and play by them dont change them everytime johnny cries because he didnt get his.
Am I reading this right? The solution for the land rush mess that was created by this cap is to create an unlimited group of second class communities with no taxation powers? No abillity to grow (unless this vague promise of raising the cap to a number you don't know, because you haven't properly stress tested this system yet, takes place)? And creating a whole other set of issues as we are forever behind those cities who were granted to right to create their cities first.
If this had been implemented on day one then I would be ok with it. Now you are going to set all of us except the elite 10 in a third world status for however long it takes you to decide what the number is .. a number you can't tell us because you haven't even tested it. Was test center even used to test more than 3-4 cities on a given planet? Were player cities above 10 ever tested AT ALL with a large planetary population? What is the company line going to be next week if the testing reveals that the code just can't handle player cities above 12? If you have information that this isn't going to be the case stop being vague about it and release what you do know. Get the bad news out in the open instead of constantly sandbagging us until it can't be hidden from us any more.
You guys are only making this worse. This code shouldn't have been released in this manner with unanswered questions about the number of cities you could handle. Of course if you had been honest with everyone and we had all talked about this a month ago maybe you could have made the current proposed changes before going live, but instead you held back on this 10 city cap until the last minute, then you misrepresented its impact until after it was live and the damage was irreversible. Now you offer what seems to me to be a half though out plan for how to shut up the critics of this situation by giving them a city hall locked into a certain city size forever while people who managed toget logged in after a 10 hour patch and the usual log in shuffle after a reset get the opportunity to grow. Every day that this change isn't made puts the rest of us that much farther behind in our goal of becoming a city.
I would not be at all opposed to the structure as outlined in TH's post if the system were not already implemented differently! Many people have based plans around the structure as outlined prior to the release.
Allowing infinite outposts: not a problem.
But add the 5 requirement at all levels is horrible at best. It messes over players at 2 critical levels. First, there is the 5-9 group size who got an outpost. What happens to them if they can't place 1-5 more residences? All of a sudden a huge amount of work/time/development is out the window. Not to mention an increadible investment in resources and credits. If a group that small plays by the rules and puts together something on a grand scale for that group, they should not be penalized for their efforts.
THe second is the 5-19, but especially the 10-19 group that qualifed for one of the coveted spots of "player city" prior to changing the rules mid-stream. These groups, many of whom had plans for growing and building who would now be subject to the etheral "city cap". Now if they don't make that 20th residence, they lose their spot, and somebody else will snap it up in minutes.
Excuse the analogy, but it is like taking all the candy from one child to give to another.
Frankly, the total lack of any stability and constantly having to change directions is extremely frustrating. If there is a dev or customer rep out there anywhere, I would urge them to reconsider adjusting the numbers for city sizes. It is a huge mistake.
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I was really excited about the player city concept. However, based on what I have been reading about the limits on player cities, I am very concerned. From whatI have read, the players cites is a wonderfulfeature of the game. However, creating a limit on the number of cities is a completely unfair system. Idon't have problem with the caps being inplace asa temporary measure to work out the bugs. But fundamentally a any permanent cap, assuming it is ever reached, is unfair, because some groups get cities and some don't based soley on the fact some groups got their halls up first. Only those few groups who are able to get their city halls placed in time will able to enjoy this feature. SOE has known that many many groups have been planning their player cities sincelaunch, yet it never said only a small group will get actually use the major update that it has beenworking on, and ingnoring a number of professions in the process. So for the months of dev work, Iget no help forSqaud Leaders, and a player city system that I may not beable to use or use fully,because my groupdidn't build in 10 minute window these caps are creating.
Given the info in the Politician forum (look for a post on info from Greenmarine), it seems that not only is this decision not open for discussion, but coding has already begun on the hotfix to implement it. Given that, would it not have been better to post this under announcements and prevent people from wasting their time in unread/unanswered commentary? I don't mean that to be harsh, but I'm feeling a bit beat up after having the rules changed 2 days after the introduction of the profession, and to find out that the opinions here are immaterial is a little disappointing as well.... /sigh
Unless of course, I'm mistaken, and there's still room for some discussion of the planned changes, even with a hotfix to implement them coming soon....?
Thunderheart , if the devs could look at this idea for outposts that dont want to become a coveted city , i think itmy go some way toadressing whata large percentage of the player population wants from the game.
We were lucky enough to get a city hall planted on the site we have been living at near theed ever since the start of the game, we have a city of 10 registered voters, with the next lvl city set at 15, we were seriously cnsidering inviting another 5 poeple to join us and make the cuty the 2nd rank but to grow no further.
All we want from the player cities is to have a mission terminal , to be able to controll building rights and to be able to beautify our surroundings with gardens and structures. At the outset we reasonable expected to be able to achieve this except for the fact that gardens have been placed in the third tier of politician experience tree, well i guess it might be sometime next year before we canuse the the most important feature to our outpost, which is a real shame.
If only we were able to place a hamlet hall a structure that requires 10 registered residents, a structure that only checked a 200m radius , would not grow past that size , did not require a politician , and that allowed players to build any and as many of the non civicstructures e.g bank cantina etc they wanted to , provided they can meet the maintenance costs.
I beleive that there are many lifestyle players out there in swg and this would cater to all our needs and free up the system for dedicated city builders , while not denying the smaller groups of lifestyle players like us the chance to beautify our surroundings and the overall atmosphere of the region.