Development Cycle Archive

Player city clone facilities are no longer considered for "respawn closest". Only static NPC clone facilities are now considered "respawn” closest". Players can still clone at a civic clone facility if they have stored their clone information there.

Ok, can someone tell me what the point would be to having a cloning facility at all if this takes place? As i see it, there are two advantages to having a cloning facility in my city.

1. It brings people into our city. If they die and they clone in our city, they may appear somewhere they have never seen before or just never visited and therefore, it generates more attention and traffic to our city.. thus more business for the vendors that support it. You take that away and the cost of the facility outweighs the benefit.

2. If i get killed while running a mission or some such, I WANT TO CLONE AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE. I dont want to drive 8km back from a npc city when i could have cloned a km away at a player city.

As i see it, this makes player facilities worthless for all intents and purposes and they will begin to dissappear. They are not cheap to run and from a budgetary standpoint, i would rather lower taxes and not have a cloning facility if all it means is the residents can clone near home.

Thunderheart, I know you guys have said there will be no land flattening within a city, but is there any way we could convince you guys to consider it? It's really a pain, especially on Corellia to make a well designed city when so much terrain is unbuildable or uneven.

We have buildings partially covered by dirt, tall grass sticking up through the concrete in the shuttle port and on our porches. Some of our gardens have edges hanging in mid air, the cool fire pits are nearly suspended in mid air, etc, etc.

Please walk around our cities Dev's. Yes they are a major accomplishment, yes they are impressive, but they can use a lot of improvements. City Mayors are bored out of their minds because they have hardly any content in their profession, in addition they loose a ton of skill points that could be used in other areas to enjoy the game.

*** Suggestions ***

* We need to be able to flatten land to an extent, enough to place a park or a house in what would normally be unbuildable terrain. It would be nice if players could even decide to which degree the land is modified.

* Roads, we would love to have roads. These could also be used to flatten the land around them. We place a strip of road and the land near it is flattened to allow structure placement.

* Loose the tall grass. How about having the system loose all the tall grass with in the city radius. This would stop the visual annoyance of grass sticking up through porches and the shuttle port.

* How about Templates? Here's the idea, from the mgnt terminal a mayor is given the ability to pick three types of templates, a whole, ring, and partial. These templates would designate the placement of houses, structures, parks, etc. When somebody grants zoning rights they do so with an overlay of the template, and click on the plot where the house goes. The plot in the template also designates the direction the house is placed in addition to the exact location. The person given zoning rights is emailed a wp where they go and execute the deed. The house is automatically placed facing the appropriate direction within the template. No worries about where a structure goes and how many are placed. I’ll elaborate on template types below…

** Whole Template would be the design of the entire city. The Mayor is given a number of choices which include ground texture etc. Design types could vary from city blocks to more artistic designs that fan out from the city hall, to winding streets.

** Ring Template would be per expansion ring. So when the city hall is initially placed a template is picked for the initial portion of the city, when the city levels in size the Mayor could pick a different template design for the new ring. Basically the same as the Whole, only it's broken by ring adding variety to the style of the city.

** Partial Templates would give the most freedom where as Whole and Ring would be almost completely restrictive. In the partial template, the Mayor could pick individual patterns for structure placement. For example, if he has 5 smalls 3 larges a medium and a factory, he could find a template that would allow optimal placement of all within the same area. Like above, these templates would offer choices for terrain patterns and land flattening.

** Added Benefit & Content.

*** This would enable a Mayor to charge per lot in a city. For example, if there is a city near a POI that players might want to keep a home in, they could opt to purchase a lot from the city and place their home there. The system could even be automated by letting the Mayor put the lots up for sale in a Real Estate terminal; the player purchases the lot, and it given rights to place. The Mayor could also place restrictions based on faction or PA in the event they wanted to keep certain players out. Lot types sold could include player houses, vendor tents, cantinas or theaters. Finally, if they want somebody out of their city, the Mayor could get a City Evict function that would place the deed including all the items in the house in a crate. The individual evicted would go to the Real Estate terminal to retrieve their crate. Evicting an individual should include repayment of the city lot, assuming it was sold to them, an automatic system could be implemented to calculate appreciation even.

*** Additional ideas for cities could include advertising functions. These functions could list the cities alignment, facilities, vendors, and Real Estate.

Anyhow, these are my ideas for now. I hope you guys find them helpful.

Ack! Sorry guys, my formatting went to pot... here it is again

********

I know you guys have said there will be no land flattening within a city, but is there any way we could convince you guys to consider it? It's really a pain, especially on Corellia to make a well designed city when so much terrain is unbuildable or uneven.

We have buildings partially covered by dirt, tall grass sticking up through the concrete in the shuttle port and on our porches. Some of our gardens have edges hanging in mid air, the cool fire pits are nearly suspended in mid air, etc, etc.

Please walk around our cities Dev's. Yes they are a major accomplishment, yes they are impressive, but they can use a lot of improvements. City Mayors are bored out of their minds because they have hardly any content in their profession, in addition they loose a ton of skill points that could be used in other areas to enjoy the game.

*** Suggestions ***

* We need to be able to flatten land to an extent, enough to place a park or a house in what would normally be unbuildable terrain. It would be nice if players could even decide to which degree the land is modified.

* Roads, we would love to have roads. These could also be used to flatten the land around them. We place a strip of road and the land near it is flattened to allow structure placement.

* Loose the tall grass. How about having the system loose all the tall grass with in the city radius. This would stop the visual annoyance of grass sticking up through porches and the shuttle port.

* How about Templates? Here's the idea, from the mgnt terminal a mayor is given the ability to pick three types of templates, a whole, ring, and partial. These templates would designate the placement of houses, structures, parks, etc. When somebody grants zoning rights they do so with an overlay of the template, and click on the plot where the house goes. The plot in the template also designates the direction the house is placed in addition to the exact location. The person given zoning rights is emailed a wp where they go and execute the deed. The house is automatically placed facing the appropriate direction within the template. No worries about where a structure goes and how many are placed. I’ll elaborate on template types below…

** Whole Template would be the design of the entire city. The Mayor is given a number of choices which include ground texture etc. Design types could vary from city blocks to more artistic designs that fan out from the city hall, to winding streets.

** Ring Template would be per expansion ring. So when the city hall is initially placed a template is picked for the initial portion of the city, when the city levels in size the Mayor could pick a different template design for the new ring. Basically the same as the Whole, only it's broken by ring adding variety to the style of the city.

** Partial Templates would give the most freedom where as Whole and Ring would be almost completely restrictive. In the partial template, the Mayor could pick individual patterns for structure placement. For example, if he has 5 smalls 3 larges a medium and a factory, he could find a template that would allow optimal placement of all within the same area. Like above, these templates would offer choices for terrain patterns and land flattening.

** Added Benefit & Content.

*** This would enable a Mayor to charge per lot in a city. For example, if there is a city near a POI that players might want to keep a home in, they could opt to purchase a lot from the city and place their home there. The system could even be automated by letting the Mayor put the lots up for sale in a Real Estate terminal; the player purchases the lot, and it given rights to place. The Mayor could also place restrictions based on faction or PA in the event they wanted to keep certain players out. Lot types sold could include player houses, vendor tents, cantinas or theaters. Finally, if they want somebody out of their city, the Mayor could get a City Evict function that would place the deed including all the items in the house in a crate. The individual evicted would go to the Real Estate terminal to retrieve their crate. Evicting an individual should include repayment of the city lot, assuming it was sold to them, an automatic system could be implemented to calculate appreciation even.

*** Additional ideas for cities could include advertising functions. These functions could list the cities alignment, facilities, vendors, and Real Estate.

Anyhow, these are my ideas for now. I hope you guys find them helpful.

---

FlyingElmo wrote:

Posting this once again, because it underscores the main issue with dropping inactive players from the citizenry after 3 weeks. I'm not sure why anyone upstairs will touch this with a 200 ft pole, and TH didn't even mention it in his post.

Here is what is wrong with implimenting a solution that kicks inactives from being citizens after a certain amount of time (whether that be 3 or 6 weeks) a BAD idea.

Background

I am assuming the dev's logic behind changes deal in part with three major issues. These are all valid issues and should be addressed in one way or another. The deves solution to this problem is to drop inactive players after 3 or 6 weeks.

• Some cities, in an effort to bolster their standing, make server trades with other players. These players have no intention on being active in those cities, and are only their because their home city will recieve another citizen in exchange for their cooperation.
• Because of the caps on player city rank, some cities will never hope to be able to progress to a metropolis and will be stuck in their current standing only.
• Most player cities look abandoned when visited and this change might make them look more lively.

Intended Benefits of the Fix
In a perfect world, implimenting the 3 or 6 week rule would result in the following benefits:

• Eliminate the cross server ghost citizens
• Allow every city to have a chance at progressing
• Make player cities more active when visited

At first glance, this solution seems to work fine. However, it has some fundamental problems, both logically and implimentation wise, which will cause more problems than they solves. Here are the problems:

Why this is a TERRIBLE idea.

• Discriminates against Casual Gamers - Last time I checked, casual gamers were paying customers of this game. They make a consious decision that they want to be part of a city, however, given their real life, whether they be students, military, or just hard working parents, now they are not entitled to live in cities if they can't keep up with the powergamers. End result: Mayor: "Are you a casual player?" Casual player: "yes." Mayor: "Sorry, you are not welcome here. You have a chance of just becoming another lot hogging person not affilated with the city because you can't play as much as our powergamers."
  
• Totally Surpise Nerf - When this patch hits, everyone who doesn't read these forums will be completely surprised by it. Thus, if they have city services or decorations near the edge of this city, those structures (perhaps millions of credits worth) will blow up or stop working. This is because the development team as given us NO communication on the issue, so mayors will not be expecting this change. Imagine how happy they will be when they lose double digits worth of citizens and millions of dollars in infrastructure potentially in the same day.
  
• Disappearing Space Effect - This is the worst side effect. Lets say I have a old city and its inactive members are closer towards the center of it, while its active ones are near the outside. When this patch goes into effect, I will immediately lose radius because of all the lost old citizens. However, because all my new, active citizens are on the edge of the radius, they will be lost as well when the radius decreases. And so I'll lose those citizens and then be liable for another loss in rank the next time the city updates and the radius decreases yet again.
  
  So why cant I just replace them? Because in some cities, all the central space is either used up or non-buildable. Those inactive citizens put hundreds of thosands of credits into their homes to make sure they dont grief the city or have their city status change. So eventually, as more and more players leave, my buildable space will not increase...rather, it will decrease, since the inactive residents still have houses in the city. And because the developers ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT let us remove people's houses (a good decision, btw, to prevent griefer mayors), we wont be able to do anything about it. Therefore, eventually I will hit a invisible citizen cap because there will be no space to build anything else.
  
• Does not solve the issues it tries to fix. I've already spoken to some mayors who artificially inflate their city rank using server swaps. They keep track of the emails of those they do deals with, and will have them log on at a moments notice. Therefore, the vast majority of the cities that will be hurt are the ones that actually have a legitimate city rank, while server swapping will still be as dominant as ever. And as far as livelyness goes, don't expect to see your city any busier than it is now. Guess what: in order for cities to be lively they need a reason to be; thats what will make players flock to player cities. Right now, there is no real incentive for them to do so, and when this patch hits, it will not create any more activeness in cities. The only change mayors can expect to see is now, their citizen count has decreased, and they now have useless properties in their city.
  
• Creates unnessesasry competition between cities. With this change being active, rather than cities being able to focus on important, game enhancing events and high land values, mayors will be forced to recruit almost nonstop. Why? Try running a metropolis. As a mayor, I can tell you that I lose at least 1 or 2 from mine a day. If I have to compensate for players who don't log on as much as the developers like, all of my time will have to spent recruiting, as will the mayor of any other large metro.
  
• Undue Fix, Should have been thought about prior to player city release - Quite simply, it is unfair that the developers make us develop our city to conform to certain conditions, and then completely change around that structure based upon an abstract number that one of them thought of. This should have been thought about prior to release, instead of so far into the player city lifecycle. Now some of us will be unable to cope with this change for whatever reason, and pushing this onto us and punishing us for your lack of oversight is a terrible mistake.

Alternate Solutions

1. Make players play at least 24-48 hours on a given server before being able to live in a player city.
2. Allow players to be marked inactive after 3 weeks as long as they mayor can remove those houses.
3. Cap the total number of cities on a planet. Not their ranks.
4. Add incentive for a city to be less than a metropolis other than maintence cost ( such as allowing the same structures, number of decorations, etc to be built regardless of rank)

For ThunderHeart (Links to main discussions)

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Politician&message.id=24831

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Politician&message.id=24188

To Conclude

I'm not sure why there has been no feedback on this. This is probably the most heated issue politicians have ever faced, any its like we are being left out in the cold.

I'm completely for looking at other ways to make cities locked by the cap to be able to progress to their next rank. I also wouldn't mind getting rid of the server swappers, and being able to remove those citizens who do nothing but take up space from my city. I think we all can agree on those points. But unfortunately this change isn't the way to do it, for the reasons I just listed.

---

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Crapgame wrote:

---

FlyingElmo wrote:

Posting this once again, because it underscores the main issue with dropping inactive players from the citizenry after 3 weeks. I'm not sure why anyone upstairs will touch this with a 200 ft pole, and TH didn't even mention it in his post.

Here is what is wrong with implimenting a solution that kicks inactives from being citizens after a certain amount of time (whether that be 3 or 6 weeks) a BAD idea.

Background

I am assuming the dev's logic behind changes deal in part with three major issues. These are all valid issues and should be addressed in one way or another. The deves solution to this problem is to drop inactive players after 3 or 6 weeks.

• Some cities, in an effort to bolster their standing, make server trades with other players. These players have no intention on being active in those cities, and are only their because their home city will recieve another citizen in exchange for their cooperation.
• Because of the caps on player city rank, some cities will never hope to be able to progress to a metropolis and will be stuck in their current standing only.
• Most player cities look abandoned when visited and this change might make them look more lively.

Intended Benefits of the Fix
In a perfect world, implimenting the 3 or 6 week rule would result in the following benefits:

• Eliminate the cross server ghost citizens
• Allow every city to have a chance at progressing
• Make player cities more active when visited

At first glance, this solution seems to work fine. However, it has some fundamental problems, both logically and implimentation wise, which will cause more problems than they solves. Here are the problems:

Why this is a TERRIBLE idea.

• Discriminates against Casual Gamers - Last time I checked, casual gamers were paying customers of this game. They make a consious decision that they want to be part of a city, however, given their real life, whether they be students, military, or just hard working parents, now they are not entitled to live in cities if they can't keep up with the powergamers. End result: Mayor: "Are you a casual player?" Casual player: "yes." Mayor: "Sorry, you are not welcome here. You have a chance of just becoming another lot hogging person not affilated with the city because you can't play as much as our powergamers."
  
• Totally Surpise Nerf - When this patch hits, everyone who doesn't read these forums will be completely surprised by it. Thus, if they have city services or decorations near the edge of this city, those structures (perhaps millions of credits worth) will blow up or stop working. This is because the development team as given us NO communication on the issue, so mayors will not be expecting this change. Imagine how happy they will be when they lose double digits worth of citizens and millions of dollars in infrastructure potentially in the same day.
  
• Disappearing Space Effect - This is the worst side effect. Lets say I have a old city and its inactive members are closer towards the center of it, while its active ones are near the outside. When this patch goes into effect, I will immediately lose radius because of all the lost old citizens. However, because all my new, active citizens are on the edge of the radius, they will be lost as well when the radius decreases. And so I'll lose those citizens and then be liable for another loss in rank the next time the city updates and the radius decreases yet again.
  
  So why cant I just replace them? Because in some cities, all the central space is either used up or non-buildable. Those inactive citizens put hundreds of thosands of credits into their homes to make sure they dont grief the city or have their city status change. So eventually, as more and more players leave, my buildable space will not increase...rather, it will decrease, since the inactive residents still have houses in the city. And because the developers ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT let us remove people's houses (a good decision, btw, to prevent griefer mayors), we wont be able to do anything about it. Therefore, eventually I will hit a invisible citizen cap because there will be no space to build anything else.
  
• Does not solve the issues it tries to fix. I've already spoken to some mayors who artificially inflate their city rank using server swaps. They keep track of the emails of those they do deals with, and will have them log on at a moments notice. Therefore, the vast majority of the cities that will be hurt are the ones that actually have a legitimate city rank, while server swapping will still be as dominant as ever. And as far as livelyness goes, don't expect to see your city any busier than it is now. Guess what: in order for cities to be lively they need a reason to be; thats what will make players flock to player cities. Right now, there is no real incentive for them to do so, and when this patch hits, it will not create any more activeness in cities. The only change mayors can expect to see is now, their citizen count has decreased, and they now have useless properties in their city.
  
• Creates unnessesasry competition between cities. With this change being active, rather than cities being able to focus on important, game enhancing events and high land values, mayors will be forced to recruit almost nonstop. Why? Try running a metropolis. As a mayor, I can tell you that I lose at least 1 or 2 from mine a day. If I have to compensate for players who don't log on as much as the developers like, all of my time will have to spent recruiting, as will the mayor of any other large metro.
  
• Undue Fix, Should have been thought about prior to player city release - Quite simply, it is unfair that the developers make us develop our city to conform to certain conditions, and then completely change around that structure based upon an abstract number that one of them thought of. This should have been thought about prior to release, instead of so far into the player city lifecycle. Now some of us will be unable to cope with this change for whatever reason, and pushing this onto us and punishing us for your lack of oversight is a terrible mistake.

Alternate Solutions

1. Make players play at least 24-48 hours on a given server before being able to live in a player city.
2. Allow players to be marked inactive after 3 weeks as long as they mayor can remove those houses.
3. Cap the total number of cities on a planet. Not their ranks.
4. Add incentive for a city to be less than a metropolis other than maintence cost ( such as allowing the same structures, number of decorations, etc to be built regardless of rank)

For ThunderHeart (Links to main discussions)

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Politician&message.id=24831

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Politician&message.id=24188

To Conclude

I'm not sure why there has been no feedback on this. This is probably the most heated issue politicians have ever faced, any its like we are being left out in the cold.

I'm completely for looking at other ways to make cities locked by the cap to be able to progress to their next rank. I also wouldn't mind getting rid of the server swappers, and being able to remove those citizens who do nothing but take up space from my city. I think we all can agree on those points. But unfortunately this change isn't the way to do it, for the reasons I just listed.

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I concur.

This is a great post. I quoted it entirely since he just saved me a bunch of typing!

Thanks!

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sorry SOE, I have to speak up too and say " Your nerfing the U.S. Military" youll mess with others but so far my favorite peeps to play with that ive "met and only know online" are active and former military, and i really hate to see them punished for who they are in real life (well ... those who are actively deployed anyway) .... my suggestion is ..

"Dont forget WE PAY to play this game and You need it to be FUN so we will continue to play/PAY. we dont need to be punished because some people dont show up for class!

Now dont get me wrong, I appreciate what the devs do and I enjoy SWG. I dont find the constant changes to be bad but we need flexibility built into the game cause its not always flexible in real life. When i was in the military i would go on 6 week training missions, and thats not anywhere as bad as bein deployed.

Please dont implement this change