Politician Archive

Wow I thought politician would be the one profession immune to grinding. But no, here we go.Cross server grinding even!

Ok, so maybe they'll have to make it so citizens actually HAVE to vote for you to get XP. And that will suck for all us politicians who aren't trying to artificially inflate their XP rates. People forget, and I don't want to have to send out a reminder to everyone a few timesa week.

But then, that's what real politicians do, so maybe people who do this should get more politician XP, since they are acting just like the real ones who lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top.

So here's my solution: Players only vote automatically when they log in at least once during the week the voting is for. It won't eliminate it, but it will make it a bit harder and more annoying to do.

I think they should actually have to vote, that votes do NOT automatically go to the incumbent. Also that a decleared residence cannot have another as an admin ( man that seems stiff, wish there was another way )

I think the vote on login for the incumbent is a fair compromise.

I already had someone tell me as I logged in one day - "I have been sitting here voting over and over again for the past half hour, I've done it at least 200 times, are you getting all this xp?" I was amused He was dismayed when I explained how the process actually worked though.

Another problem I see with this practice is that it could allow someone to stay in power when they shouldn't

I urge all citizens to not allow this from a mayor. Just imagine... you've got 10 people together and make yourself an outpost. Then you get 20 more people to set up phantom houses. What happens then? You CAN'T VOTE HIM OUT! The phantom players always give him their vote and you're stuck, unless you can get another 11 players that oppose him to join your city. Oh, but he won't let those people build if he knows what they think. Suddenly you've got a tyrant you can't get rid of!

Also, even a nicer mayor could be stuck. As admin he can pay for a house, but he can't tear it down. He has to let the maintenance lapse and let it fall apart. He can't trasnfer ownership of it to a new, real, resident. He can't even rename it.

Citizens, I urge you to resist the temptation to short-circuit the process, or you will find yourselves in a stew you can't easily get out of.

You will never convince people not to mule, that is why SWG is SCS, and even that only cut down on the problem. We are going to have to come up with a way to make this kind of lame muleing as inconvenient as possible.

Not allowing other admins on a declared residence is giving up a lot, but would work to stop this. I hope we can come up with a better way to at least slow it down.

I agree that the auto-incumbent vote is the problem here, more so than having secondary characters. I play a tusken raider on Bria named Zakariah sometimes, but my main character is on Lowca. Does this mean you think my tusken doesn't deserve to have a nice place to live just because I play my rodian on Lowca more often?

Eliminate the auto-incumbent vote. It cheapens the so-called democratic election process. What you get is a dictator, not a fairly elected official.

Gatuu Tetsu of Lowca

Zakariah Cirion of Bria

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SweetaboEwokJedi wrote:

I agree that the auto-incumbent vote is the problem here, more so than having secondary characters.

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I agree that this is probably the biggest part of the problem. However, I think that the auto-vote is OK as long as the players are playing regularly. I have people in my town who may only come to the town once in a particularweek. And if they forget to vote then, I'm out the XP. As long as the person logs in at some point during the voting week, their vote should click on to the incumbant.

Now, if they allowed remote voting with a /castVote command, then you can turn off auto-voting and that's fine with me.

I think the auto vote for the incumbent rule has to go as well. For the cross-server problem, but also so that politics is more interesting. Getting your supporters out to vote can be a whole nother aspect to the process. Imagine you have a 20 player town, and 5 new people show up. If 4 of them want to vote for thier 5th member for Mayor, then I think the Mayor should have to at least put forth a little effort to get his people to vote. If his populace isnt inspired by him, thier apathy should be a negative mark on him (making the town easier to take over), not a positive one (where he auto gets the votes). I would take it even further and have an election day. Votes would only count during that one 24 hour period. This would make getting the vote out even more important. It would also get the politicians out and polling the populace so they can figure out where they stand instead of being able to track it all week.

Politicians need more political work, as is, the class is very low maintenance.

Jako's points are interesting, but I'm not sure whether I agree. On the one hand, if we want the politics to reflect real life more, then auto-voting should be removed. But keep in mind that this is a game, not RL. In America voter turnout for non-presidential elections tends to be pretty low. And that's in real life when the outcome actually matters. I shudder to think how few votes most mayors would get in a game if very citizen had to slog back to town and remember to pull the lever.

On the other hand, PA-run towns would probably have a much more efficient "get out the vote" aparatus, since they probably have agreed for months at least who whould be mayor and what they want him to do. So we would end up with a real imbalance I think, where PA-towns will have master a mayor in a few months and towns made up of more "casual" or less organized players would be stuck with lower level leaders.

There are numerous arguments to be made on both sides, of course. Some people think that if a town's citizens don't bother to take the time to vote, then they don't deserve a high level mayor and the benefits that come with him, like exotic gardens and shuttleports, etc.

But again, this is a game people play for enjoyment, and real world numbers show how many (few) people actually enjoy voting. Idealists vote, others don't.

Perhaps the best solution would be to allow a player to decide whether they want to auto-vote. When you become a citizen you get an email taht says "Auto-voting is enabled. To turn it off, type /autoVote off at the prompt". Then cities who want a more realistic method can have one, and players who really don't want to be bothered but still want an advanced town can have what they want. To be honest, I don't see a lot of fighting over who's mayor in most towns for at least a few months. All the initial towns were backed by a decent sized group of people who have been planning this for awhile now, and already had a mayor chosen. As long as that person does what they want in the order they want, no one is going to get voted out. May as well let them get XP based on the size of their town. As it is a town of 30 (pretty good size) will take months just to get their mayor halfway to master. And that's with autovoting on.

This is a VERY GOOD point.

If I were to have 20 people from other servers owning homes in my city and 19 people from my server owning homes, there would never be a way to oust me from office unless the city population (peope from my server) rose to the point of overcoming the other people.

Eliminating the AFK is a bad idea. Not all of us placed our cityhalls within easy reach of a shuttleport. In fact, ours is 9K m out from the nearest NPC city. Most of us are biding our time until we get a shuttleport and this city becomes truly livable. It takes 30 minutes to run there 1 way, and while those of us who are actively working to make the city livable spend a lot of time there, the vast majority of our citizens (mostly crafters for whom the 9km trek acorss Lok is a dangerous prospect) are maintaining residences nearer to an NPC city until we qualify for the shuttleport. Eliminating the AFK vote hurts those of us who were adventurous enough to seek to develop a city in an out of the way, underserved location.

Cross-server citizen swapping is definitely an issue, but likely not a big a problem as you all fear. Make sure you're targetting the right people when you propose a game change like this.

I've always felt that you should have at least one tier 4 box in a novice profession before you could vote. This would make cross-server swaps much more rare.

I think characters should have to be at least a week old and master a profession or play for 100 hours before they can declare residency.

Politics should be for established characters/players rather than newbies or ghost residents. If someone is going to be able to tell me wheremy charactercan live and where I can gather resources, I want them to be elected by people who have invested time and effort on our server.