Politician Archive
Thread: Potential way to help get rid of unwanted buildings in place now
We all have trouble with decayed houses and harvs littering our building areas. The ghosts of abandoned accounts are everywhere but there is a means to get rid of them in the game today if you are willing to exert some effort.
1st, you need to email all your citizens that you are going to purge the city of abandoned building, give them at least 1 month lead time prior to doing anything.
2nd, you adjust the property tax to 99%. You then give the money back to the active citizens participating in the purge (if people have multiple houses (like warehouses and harvesters/factories in town), they would prolly want to take them down during the purge so its easier on them.
as Mayor you need to go thru your town, count up the houses and types, and get a handle on how much cash will get drained out of each ones maintenance pool and give that info to all your citizens.
What this will do is put a MAJOR drain on the maintenance pools of all the houses, the active owners have nothing to worry about as the Mayor will channel the money back to the homeowners every week. (this requires GOOD bookkeeping and getting a GOOD handle on who is really gone and who is not). The active people's structures will stay up because they will be putting the money the mayor gives back to them back into the house maintenance pool (thus protecting their bank accounts from the purge)
When the maintenance runs out, the house will start tapping the owners bank account until it goes dry and gets to the 'Condemed' status (at 99%, thats a drain of 764cr/day on a small house, and 4776cr/day on a large house (5348cr/week and 33,432 cr/week respectively) If a player isnt playing at all, that will add up fast, especially if they run empty merchants, and multiple houses and factories. it means no money coming in and LOTS going out. Once the maintenace pool gets tapped, then the its an even faster slide to CONDEMED and things going POOF because all that money loss will be automatically aimed at the player bank account rather than a structure maintenance pool. (think, one large abandoned house consuming 33,432cr a WEEK, that 1,036,392cr a MONTH. Who can survive losing a million credits a month w/o adding any money back in? It separates the ghosts from the active players.
The benefit to the city is it can tap all those credits tied up in abandoned houses and abandoned bank accounts, and force abandoned structures to be eligible to go POOF a LOT sooner. (you can tell when it starts working because the abondoned ones will display the CONDEMED notice on the outside.
This is a hard way to do it but I dont see any other way execpt to wait around for a purge which may or may not ever happen. This way a mayor can take some kind of charge of the situation,
Requirements for this to work
COmmunication with your citizens
Let them know what you are doing and why
Really good bookkeeping
Really good knowledge of structures and types in your town
Mayor must be an active player
Mayor must get the money back to the citzens every week, no exceptions
Active citizens must help out by temorariliy moving extra structures out of town , and helping the mayor to identify truly abandoned structres and tell the diff between the abandoned ones and the one from people on hiatus that will return.
Cut off zoning right during the purge (unless you add new citizens who are willing to work with you on the purge)
The easy way to handle the credi drain on the active citzens is to find a way to give them a LOT of credits and fill up their maintenance pools, basically insulate the active folks against the effects of your purge. So you need to do a little math and go to each active citzen and provide them the means to pad their maintenace pools for the long haul.
Again, stress the importance of having the active citizens move their extra structures outside the city during the purge to keep their other buildings insulated from the effects. When all is said and done, eacha ctive citzen should only have ONE building inside city limits, where they have declared residence and the civic buildings and PA halls. Anything else left would likely be abandoned.
You HAVE to have the support of your citizens, dont ever try to do this on your own. This will be HARD but it can be done.
The benefits
You will indentify what structures are actually abandoned, by their CONDEMED flags
You will know who your active citzens actually are
Your treasury will gain the funds maintaining those structures, which can be spent on improving the city
You will force abandoned building into the CONDEMED status faster, thus making them POOF faster
Abandoned merchants will run out of funds as the bank accounts dry up
Abandoned merchants will POOF and deregister off the planatary map MUCH faster
What you have to do to keep the benefits
Recruit active players, and secure commitments from them that they will NOT abandon houses prior to granting them zoning rights. Impress on them the importance of /tranferinng houese to active players if they leave the game.
Instruct your militia on where houses are to be built and where they should NOT be built,
When a new citizen comes to town, a militia member should do the initial house placement and /transfer to the new citizen. Once the new citizen has established himself, and knows where he cannot build, then he can be granted free zoning rights.
This takes a long term outlook and approach, and takes a LOT of work, but there are really no other choices if you cannot get players to get rid of empty houses on their own. I dont have much confidence that whatever 'purge' SOE does will help all that much, as their interest is in maintaining paying accounts, rather than trying to keep our cities from looking like Detroit during a garbage strike.
Good luck
*gets out calculator to start checking*
You will know who your active citzens actually are
Your treasury will gain the funds maintaining those structures, which can be spent on improving the city
You will force abandoned building into the CONDEMED status faster, thus making them POOF faster
Abandoned merchants will run out of funds as the bank accounts dry up
Abandoned merchants will POOF and deregister off the planatary map MUCH faster
The only benefits you get is money out of player's bank accounts. Now, does this seem like the actions of a fair mayor?
Sure, the ability to do this is in the game, but that doesn't make it right. It's called abusing your powers. Agree with me or not, we all know deep inside what is right. Would we like it if someone tapped our bank aacount with a game system and stripped it dry? Not everyone that you dont see playing is AWOL. Some play late at night...or early morning...or are just out of the game for a month or two do to RL issues. They dont deserve this treatement anymore than the active players.
This has nothing to do with fair because if you look back, you see as mayor, he would be trying his damnest to let everyone know what is going on and why and give them a means to do something about it.
Why do active players need to put up with the debris left behind from peoples 15-day trials and/or moving on to new games?
There arent a lot of options for active (keyword ACTIVE) citizens if they get left with garbage buildings.
What other options does a city have besides twiddling their thumbs waiting for SOE to purge inactive accounts (if they ever do) or praying the inactive player will come back and clean up their mess?
You think I think this is a great option? Hell no it isnt but aside from simply 'hoping' this is the only way to actively do something in regards to those structures, and finding out just who is active and who isnt if they wont tell you on their own.
What I am pointing out there is at least something to be gained from those abandoned buildings if the remaining active citizens agree its the right thing to do. If I could bulldoze the buildings instead I would. (hell I wish that at least I could force the buildings to move out of city limits but thats all waiting on SOE again)
Personally Id rather have a smaller base of active citizens than a large base of people who havent logged in for a year.
Its bad enough that one could fill up a field full of harvesters and they will never go away, thus blocking resources spawns from being harvested by active players, and blocking content is considered 'greifing' under the terms of service.
as far as the POOF is concered, if the house is owned by an inactive account, and it meets whatever criteria SOE sets for inactivity, it will go away when they get around to a purge. In the mean time the city gets to collect monies off those buildings and the owners bank account which imho is a fair trade for abandoning a building in city limits. (I wish a mayor could levy fines on owners of condemed properties as well)
Building lots in city limits are a finite resource, you should not be hogging them up if you arent going to play. I dont care if you dont like the game anymore or like WoW better, but leave the space for the active players an go set up shop outside town.
I mean c'mon folks, act responsibly, if you know you are leaving and not coming back for a long time or not at all, re-deed your houses and harvesters and give them to someone who could use them. Give you credits and stuff to your freinds still in the game, dont leave your house to be some kind of tombstone or monument to non-play. /Transfer them to an active player..something
Make this kind of thing NOT be necessary.
Kinshi wrote:
fair, what is fair about leaving abandoned building all over the place for someone else to have to put up with?
This has nothing to do with fair because if you look back, you see as mayor, he would be trying his damnest to let everyone know what is going on and why and give them a means to do something about it.
Why do active players need to put up with the debris left behind from peoples 15-day trials and/or moving on to new games?
There arent a lot of options for active (keyword ACTIVE) citizens if they get left with garbage buildings.
What other options does a city have besides twiddling their thumbs waiting for SOE to purge inactive accounts (if they ever do) or praying the inactive player will come back and clean up their mess?
You think I think this is a great option? Hell no it isnt but aside from simply 'hoping' this is the only way to actively do something in regards to those structures, and finding out just who is active and who isnt if they wont tell you on their own.
What I am pointing out there is at least something to be gained from those abandoned buildings if the remaining active citizens agree its the right thing to do. If I could bulldoze the buildings instead I would. (hell I wish that at least I could force the buildings to move out of city limits but thats all waiting on SOE again)
Personally Id rather have a smaller base of active citizens than a large base of people who havent logged in for a year.
I didn't say it wasn't frustrating. It is, but we learn to deal with it, and not in ways that cause an inconvience for our citizens.
Your plan was to strip the credits out of the buildings, I pointed out it would strip the bank accounts as well. If it was just the buildings, you would have more of a case, but those people, even inactive, don't deserve someone that is not an employee of SOE coming along and taking money out of their bank acocunt by jacking taxes to the max on them!
Your plan was to destroy the buildings, I pointed out that it doesn't work that way.
Soo....if the buildings are going to be there, and jacking up taxes to max is going to pull from their bank accounts, not just the maint pool on the buildings, doesn't it seem more like the option would be to not do it?
My city was started day one of the city pub. I have been a mayor in the city for a very long time, and was on the council for the few months after the pub before the mayor was banned and I took over. I have seen my city grow and shrink and grow again, I have seen many MANY people come and go. I have replanned the city several times and dealt with dead vendors, dead Med centers, dead malls and yes...many empty homes. Never was I in a spot that raising taxes was need to burn them down. I didn't look at them as a problem, they belonged to someone, and I worked around them. Did this destroy the city? NO! Did this hinder the city growth in some way? NO!
Is putting the tax rate high a greif in and of itself? no
Butwe can be fairlycertain aCSR will be chatting with you if you send out an email stating that you are jacking prises to strip accounts and burn the buildings down of the inactive players, and someone logs in to find their 2Mil bank account is empty, and they cant get back in their house because they dont have the 30K in the account to activate the building from condemnation. Is that really worth the risk?
(little tip for you...want to know what citizens are active? Send each one on the citizen list a 1credit bank tip. As each one logs in, an email will be sent to you that they received the credit. Do it each month, and you will always know who logs at least once a month. Those you dont receive emails on don't log anymore, and you can mark you list as such. Just remember..just because they dont log on your server doesn't mean they don't play SWG, they could be playing on another server and view yours as a vacation spot when they are bored, and may be relying on those creds being in their bank, not your treasury.)
Kinshi wrote:
I persoonally consider abandoning houses a form of griefing simply because ex-player negligence is causing continuing headaches for the remaining players.
Its bad enough that one could fill up a field full of harvesters and they will never go away, thus blocking resources spawns from being harvested by active players, and blocking content is considered 'greifing' under the terms of service.
as far as the POOF is concered, if the house is owned by an inactive account, and it meets whatever criteria SOE sets for inactivity, it will go away when they get around to a purge. In the mean time the city gets to collect monies off those buildings and the owners bank account which imho is a fair trade for abandoning a building in city limits. (I wish a mayor could levy fines on owners of condemed properties as well)
Building lots in city limits are a finite resource, you should not be hogging them up if you arent going to play. I dont care if you dont like the game anymore or like WoW better, but leave the space for the active players an go set up shop outside town.
I mean c'mon folks, act responsibly, if you know you are leaving and not coming back for a long time or not at all, re-deed your houses and harvesters and give them to someone who could use them. Give you credits and stuff to your freinds still in the game, dont leave your house to be some kind of tombstone or monument to non-play. /Transfer them to an active player..something
Make this kind of thing NOT be necessary.
Not every player that doesn't log in is an inactive account. There are other servers, and that "vacant" house to you could be a "vacation" house to them, and those creds your are stripping from it could be their spending money.
Could there, should there be better tools and options for us mayors to deal with these? yes! But there are not and by them allowing anyone to be a mayor, will likely never be.
However, I do believe SOE should do something about this. Perhaps for an account that hasn't been payed for more than 30 days they should have all of there stuff removed from the game. If and when they return, they can then be given a placement option that allows them to put their house down in a new location (player city only if granted new zoning) and not have to worry about having lost anything.
The way I see it is that that would be the ideal approach for dealing with the problem. I don't know why soe hasn't done something like this allready.
Of course, it'd also be nice if our datapad had an additional tab that showed what structures you have, what maintenance is in them and how much power they have. Maybe even the factory status as well. It'd also be nice to know what structures you have admin rights on and their status.
Poldano wrote:
I just did some quick calculations. It would take some 20 years for me to go broke this way, and I'm only moderately wealthy.
Saego
And that justifies taking someone's credits from their bank account to pad your own how?
Ohh come on officer..they are a multi-billion dollar company. I only took a $100K It would be 20 years before they went broke!
You see, the difference between right and wrong is 180 degrees. Being a little wrong is still wrong. You can try and justify it all you like. The mayors that used to do this to burn houses down at least had a goal of cleaning up the city for doing this, (essentially Eminant Domain or right of Condemnation) and it only affected creds in a maint pool that the owner could never retreive anyways. Doing it now is just plain theft as the one and only gain is credits from a bank account that the owner never intended for you to have access to.
*and no, im not saying all taxes are theft, Im saying jacking the taxes all the way to purposefully take creds at a high rate from another account without threir knowledge is theft. Clearly, that is not what the system was intended for.
ToppDog wrote:The arguement here isn't whether it's right or wrong... because regardless of that, it won't work...This would have worked before they changed it, but now that the condemned structures DO NOT go poof, there is no way to get rid of them, short of the one-time purge that SOE keeps promising but failing to deliver. This change has made it nearly impossible to clean up player cities.
exactly, no way this will work, until they make the buildings go poof when condemned and as it stands now they wont. dont believe me, come to SiN CiTY and go NE from the city you will see several factories/harvs that are condemned by "imperial order" that have been condemned for at least 2 months now. same thing on naboo.
Would like to see some different options for this, maybe that when it goes condemned that the mayor has the right to reclaim the bldg under a city beautification project or at least has the power to move it to the outskirts of the city, or that they can redeed everything in one pack and it auto goes into the persons inventory so that they will still have their stuff. Or for that matter once its been condemned one week it goes poof, because if its drained your bank account already as to be condemned a one week city maintaince period is plenty enough time imho.
Message Edited by pammiesue on 03-25-2005 08:03 AM