Politician Archive

1. Property Tax - Every player who owns a structure in the city pays a percentage of their maintenance as property tax. This amount is automaticallyadded into the structure maintenance and is charged per hour in keeping with the scheduled maintenance payment of the structure. When a player examines a structure they can see the hourly maintenance rate and it will state on that dialog box what the city's taxes are.


2. Income Tax - A flat fee tax charged to every citizen of the city. The money is automatically removed from the player's bank and is charged to citizens on a weekly basis. This tax has a cap of 2000cr. If a player does not have the funds to pay the tax, the Mayor is notified of a delinquent payment. (**This tax is currently bugged. There is no notification of delinquent payment and the Income Tax is only taken out if the player logs in during that city cycle.**)


3. Sales Tax - A sales tax is added to every item sold by a merchant in the city. The vendor owner sets a price for a given item, and the tax is calculated in when the item is listed on the vendor for viewing; this tax also applies to items offered to a vendor. Tax is collected at the time of purchase. (**This tax is currently bugged. It does not calculate into items being sold, nor does it put any money into the city treasury.**)


4. Travel Fee - An additional fee added onto the normal ticket price for traveling from the city. The maximum amount that can be added is 1k credits. (**This tax is currently bugged. The travel fee only goes to the city treasury on outgoing tickets bought at the ticket terminal inside the Player City.)


5. Garage Fee - A percentage tax added into the total repair fee at the city garage.

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You may have all heard by now that the house pack-up option has been pushed forward a few publishes for further testing. I know many of us were excited by the feature itself, let alone the possibilities it suggested, but it is in all of our best interests if this new system is full fleshed out before it goes live. We know it's almost ready and we know what it looks like. It's current incarnation only allowed for actual housing roll-up (PA Halls and Merchant Tents were excepted during its run on Test Center), so further testing of the system will hopefully allow for that to be expanded to all structures.

I asked about the connection between the house pack-up and the character purge, but basically it was just reiterated that we will have ample notice of the character purge before it happens. Of course no hard dates were mentioned (that rarely-never happens), but my *personal* guess is we still have a couple of months to go. Tiggs's latest post on the house pack-up said it was probably about 2-3 publishes away now, and we know that system has to be solid before the character purge can come about.

Test Center Prime is down so that QA can do some internal testing, but TC-Bria (TC2) is up and running. For those who have established characters on the Bria server, all you have to do is load the current Test Center version and your character will be there waiting for you at whatever stage the character was at the time of the server snapshot. If you don't have a character there, you can create one at the Test Center log-in server.

This week's featured links:

• In-Testing Forum -- You can find the current patch notes for Test Center here as well as the discussion and bug threads for the test servers. The links change as things are added, so this link will take you to the main forum directory for Test Center.


• Player Event Schedule -- The event schedule for all galaxies has been updated. You can view the current events for all servers at this link. To submit an event of your own, use the threads stickied in your server's forum.


• Home Show Challenge Winner -- Garva started a Home Show Challenge separate from the regular Home Show. The latest one challenged decorators to create using only resource containers and tools. There were some amazing entries, but the winning design was a shrine created in a Kettermoor City Hall. Keep an eye on the Cities and Housing forum for the next challenge.

hm, aren't Trainers supposed to put money into the treasury too?
For each teach there goes 5% to the city or something like it?

They're not supposed to, but I certainly wish they did. Same for mission terminals.

amt my method for city funding is wait till thers 3-4poeple on who anrety busy for a bit and pester tmh einto going hunting to raise some city funds


its actually working quite well and is a vast improvemnt on my previous method (i kepe funding the place whiel dropping not so subtle hints that its quite expensive)

they need to sort out tax issues, personally i would like to see citizen tax fixed and hae a cap of 5k. 5k a week isnt alot, 1 mission and that is paid and its not hard for most vendors to make that much, 5k per citizen is

50k -100k rank 1

100k -175k rank 2

175k - 275k rank 3

275k - 425k rank 4

425k+ rank 5

This would allow cities to have enough cash in the treasury to keep the city afloat with civic structures. But thats just my 2 cents

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Eulbobo wrote:

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$consequence = some credits to the cityhall and some xp for the mayor;

-> Mission taken in the city and completed -> $consequence
-> Cloning -> $consequence
-> insurrance -> $consequence
-> speeder repair -> $consequence
-> buying a shuttle ticket -> $consequence
etc...

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I like this idea, but I really don't think we're going to get anything new in the way of additional functionality. I believe it was Tiggs that stated SOE's direction was going to fix bugs first, then roll out new features. Perhaps if shuttle tickets and sales tax bugs are fixed, a lot of our towns treasuries will fill a lot faster. That's not to say new ideas aren't helpful or welcome though.

Although inour city (Imperius Dextra, Tat, Tarq), we have no taxes. Money is so easy to get in space that it's really not worth it to tax my citizens. Our city is only rank 3, but with a 200k'ish maintenance fee, I can usually pay off the entire city with a 1 hour destroy duty mission in space. Now, we have citizens that just want to feel like they are contributing, and that's wonderful! It's nice to see a citizen /tip me some credits to help pay for the city, but I don't ask or expect it of anyone.

Ekir

Hmmm. Much to talk about on this topic. But no time today. Ill stop by tomorrow and sit at the round table. After 19 or 20 months (I forget when day one was) of running a city I have a lot of experience in managing my city's finances.

My method is a move-in fee & don't charge taxes. This way all the bugs don't hurt my city.

We have tried a few methods of helping to collect money for our city/guild, and each has ended in disaster. Our latest disaster was this: 2 Master Rangers in our guild took out a hunting contract for 1 Million units of the current Bone shift on Dathomir for 20 cpu!!! After the first 1 Million units filled, we had an open-ended contract for 13 cpu for another crafter. We had a lot of ppl interested in helping out with this. We decieded to run Missions out of the Science Outpost for Brackasets, 80 & above.

As incentive to help hunt, we sponsered a contest even along with it. The top 5 contributors would recieve the following:

1st Place - 1 million credits
2nd Place - 500k
3rd - 5th Place - 250k

This only worked for non-guild veterans and non-rangers. It was a disaster. Only myself and the 2 Master Rangers did it. We really didn't get any help at all, which I can't understand. We collected our 1 million units and stopped. I just find it hard to believe the lack of support we had. Its pathetic. I have been mayor of our guild's city since we founded it (the city), which is like 8 months or so. Pre-CU, I funded A LOT of our expenses myself and won't do it again. I took a few month break when the CU hit and came back and resumed my mayorial duties, only to find new guild members who aren't Team Players. The three of us that filled the contract decieded to be greedy, and are keeping all the profits for ourselves. We are the only ones who worked for it, so we are keeping it.

Sorry for the rant, but I just had to. I wish all the rest of you better luck then what I have had.

But, my idea after all this is, do what we did. Watch the trade forums for Hunting contracts paying over 10 cpu, and get the guild/city together and fill them. Its a great way to make money and with a few people, its not hard to do.

Currently my city is funded soley by myself and donations from other players and friends.
Otherwise our town would be broke.

We dont use taxes as we are a non-guild city and well there are so many cities people just wont pay to live in one unless it is associated with their guild.

I wish there was more ways to create revenue for a city, but currently the system kind of sucks.

All mission took into a factionnal base used to give 10% of the mission reward to the maintenance of the building.
That should be easy to do the same for a town...

All missions could give 10% of the reward to the city maintenance. So that we could run missions to make money and already have 10% of what we had collected dumped into the city hall pot.


10% means around 1000 credits per mission given to the cityhall for a lvl 80 mission in a improved job market city.
The use of any city structure that require money should give some to the cityhall (and some xp for the mayor).

We are mayors, not civic structures rentals managers....


But i guess we won't see this for a while

note that all my ideas is to link mayor, cityhall and all civic structures so that anything impacting one is impacting all
$consequence = some credits to the cityhall and some xp for the mayor;

-> Mission taken in the city and completed -> $consequence
-> Cloning -> $consequence
-> insurrance -> $consequence
-> speeder repair -> $consequence
-> buying a shuttle ticket -> $consequence
etc...

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Khristen wrote:

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What methods do you use to get money into your City Treasury? What ideas do you have for new sources of revenue for Player Cities? Are there any new taxes you'd like to see available or changes to existing ones (besides bug fixes)?

Income tax needs to be what it says on the tin..income tax. It should be a range between 0.1% to 5%.
Any amount of money a player earns/recieves goes into the city hall. If that's too harsh well income tax should go upto 10k (and actually work).

Mind you many city funding problems would be solved if Sales Tax actually worked.

And as people have stated: trainers and mission terminals really do need to contribute. Cloning, insurance should assist too.

As for the bug with the city terminal, that badly needs fixing and the mayor tools need drastic improvement. For example how much is 5% property tax actually bringing in?