Politician Archive
Thread: Devs! Jaspor Chooses to Cheat
I read all of these posts. Many of them say something like there is no parallel in real life with a city being sieged, and then justifying this position by saying you cant go and build on the edge of a town without municipal rights...go try it!
This is absolutely right.....in a peaceful land like America for instance. But in this game WE ARE AT WAR! and there are an unbelieveable number of real life parallels with cities being sieged and taken over or trashed during conflict.
We are not only justified in our actions against the City of Constellation. We are militarily compelled by the dictates of the GCW. In simple terms, an imperial city in the middle of rebelsville aint gonna last too long! 
Anyway I am very happy with the fact that the politician correspondent (Plinka) can see through Jaspors smokescreen. I am also delighted to hear that he will be ensuring that this exploit is removed from the game.
It is essential for the long term health of this game; for all concerned; that the conflict brought about by the GCW is allowed to flourish. The ability of us to take away Jaspors city, followed by Jaspors ability to then come right back with allies and take it back again with a new majority, is totally essential to thefeeling of immersion that is the key to the enjoyment of this game. If we all are allowed cities that are sacrosanct; inviolate; placed anywhere and forever under the control of the person who built the cityhall then you must see that the war becomes a mockery. And then another nail is driven into the dynamism of this game. I
For SWG to last for as long as we all want it to, we must be able to fight! and that means the building and destruction of property; countless deaths and rebirths, the use of proper tactics that are perfectly reasonable when your fighting an enemy. These things are the spice of this game, and I hope to hell it remains that way.
Well, I haven't read this whole thread, but one thing strikes me.
People will need to stop thinking of a city as belonging to someone. Sure, the city has has a technical owner, but it's a public building (unless you're using an exploit). If you choose to spend the credits/resources to construct that building, then congrats, you are the founder of a city, but not the owner.
The city belongs to the people who live there, and if they vote you out, you're done.
Let me begin by saying that I'm a member of GotZ and a legitimate citizen of the "besieged" city of Constellation. I'd like to offer what I believe are some rational comments on this issue.
1 - We would have shared! And we still will, so long as we retain the majority. And that limitation is only really because we've lost all confidence in the trustworthiness of our opponents.
2 - This doesn't have anything to do with being a "dictator". Jaspor is doing exactly what the exisiting citizens of the city wanted. He is protecting the city from a hostile takeover and the destruction of our city hall.
3 - Jaspor has said repeatedly that we will remove the privacy if a dev asks him to, or if a dev comments clearly on the issue. In the mean time, I think this is simply one of many conflicting issues related to a brand new feature of the game. I'll comment more on that a bit later...
4 - Despite repeated assertions from the besiegers that they control the majority, the vote does not happen for another 7 days. We will surely have the majority again by then. There's still 6 days or more for the devs to install a patch or make a comment before this issue really matters all that much. We're mostly grateful for the extra _privacy_ that it provides. This way our beisiegers are not checking our citizen count every 8 hours.
5 - GotZ has tried diplomacy. We've offered everything we can think of short of moving or giving up a majority of the city. I do not believe that the same is true of our besiegers.GotZ was told very clearly on day one of this dispute thatwe wereoutnumbered. 80 to 5 I think was their estimate. The siegersbasically said that we would be never be any bigger than an outpost, and that we should just sell our city to a bigger and better prepared guild. Besides, this close to their "city", we'd just get PVP'd every day anyway. Once it was clear that we were not going to give them our city, the next suggestion was that we would be "allowed" to have an outpost but nothing more. Sometime shortly after that, we were offered an opportunity to move 2-3km away, which we declined because it seemed to risky given our current dispute. Since then, we've recieved no diplomatic offers that I can recall.
This basically all boils down to a dispute about how cities are really intended to work. Our opponents believe that the devs want players to fight over control of a city, beginningimmediately after the city hall goes down. I choose to believe that devs want player cities to be fun opportunities for players to build cities. And I do think there's a difference between minute 1 hostile sieges by guilds that are ticked off that they didn't get their own city and a real democratic dispute. If there was a dispute amongst "invited" citizens over who should be mayor, I'd _really_ unhappywhen themayor made the city hall private. And as a result, I have little doubt that the feature will be changed in some way, just as Plinka has suggested. But changed in what way?
I think zoning rights is clear indication that the devs do want the current citizens to have some say and control over how the city is laid, who is a citizen, etc. I think they're still trying to find the right balance. The city cap was certainly not put in place tocreate disputesover cities, and yet that is exactly what has happened. My expectation (hope?) is that the devs will include in whatever patch changes the /privacy command, some additional features to implement their intentions for _civil_ rather than _hostile_ city politics. Personally, I'd be very happy with the following:
As a city expands, existing houses are allowed to remain in place, but they do not get voting/citizenship rights unless the mayor grants them zoning rights. This way cities could not really be used as a griefing tool against other people's structures, and it could not be used as a griefing tool for taking over other people's hard work. (*cough*) There's a few problems here. Do you allow property taxe son non-citizens? I think so. It's a relatively weak tool for forcing someone to move a structure if they don't want to. As everyone has observed most structure maintenance is chump change in the big picture. The more serious problem is /cityban and /citywarn. I think I would favor warn but not ban. People have to be able to get to their structures, right? Allowing /warn would allowone faction to drop a house in another faction's city, and come cause trouble... But not DESTROY the city...
Bottom line from my point ofview... The/privacy thing is almost certainly going to change, but not necessarily in the simple way that our opponents would like. I consider their hostile takeover as much an exploit or griefing or whatever you want to call it as our denying them access to the city hall. We're not counting on this feature to lock out a clear majority for an extended period of time. We're just buying some more time to grow, that I believe (hope?) the devs intended for us to have.
They're just sour because they said we'd never be any bigger than an outpost, and now we are. And they don't like it.
Oh, and one more comment about the all mightly galactic civil war...
I could really care less. I have no real interest in PVP. I am declared as a covert rebel. I'm secretly a depp cover spy in an Imperial leaning guild. :-) I did this mostly so that I could run the theme park missions, which are sortof cool, and I'd like to own an Admiral's uniform some day. But I have no interest in the galactic civil war as a player.
I came to play SWG because I was interested in the crafting and economic advancements that this game appears to have made versus other games. I've only got carbine 3 for combat skills, and I'll probably give that up soon for more crafting skills. Unforunately, I've still gotta defend my self while feeding those harvesters though. :-) I'm2skillsshort of master weaponsmith now, and I've sold pretty much every single thing I've ever made. No projectile riflebarrels for me. :-) Why? Because that iswhat's fun to me. By the way, shamless plug here... Come see my shop east of Kaadara. I sell every weapon I can make (which is almost everything), and most of them are only about 2000-4000 creditseach. That's all I need to turn a profit, and I'm not trying to win by having more money than everyone else.
Where am I going with this? The devs don't really care about the galactic civil war either. They want happy and satisifed players. And to some extent, I think that means providing some protection for the time and effort of players who _choose_ not to be a part of the war.
So any argument that starts out with... But the GCW means that... Has pretty much no value to me. :-)
Well this looks like a bad situation...but i think both sides are at fault...if the one side that is the attacker has a city already then why would they put houses in there city area...if they did that to me i would /citywarn them of to 2 times to leave..and if they did not then i would make my whole guild police and everytime any of the attacker when to there house i would have them killed......
As for the cheater i have no likeing for cheaters either..i understand that you are protecting you city from attack but using this method is not a good way to do it..
And also so that everyone knows 2 citys can't be playced side buy side if BOTH CITYS can't max out....it would not have let you place the city then!!! so move your forces back into you citys and fight the war with bases and men not with house placing sabatoge...come on if this game was real and one PA (or country like entity..or faction) built buildings in enemy territory the enemys buildings would be destroyed...but a mayor cant do that..all the mayor can do is make the life of the people in the opposing houses life a nightmare...buy filling then all the time when they enter the city...
I think both side should sit down and discuss the citys and figure out a way to fix this because your fighting for nothing.....BOTH CITYS CAN AND WILL MAX unless you keep placing dummy houses in each others citys...Grow up
And also if both parties don't have a city hall (becuase in not clear on that anymore) then the one that does not have one should move a little farther away to place there own when they can..because if they dont havea town hall now there city will NOT be alowed to be droped anylonger anyway...town hallsmust.be...
Town Hall A <---450m----><---100m----><-----450m-------> Town Hall B and the 100m buffer might be even more than that but im not 100% sure...but i do know because somone wanted to set up a town hall 300m from mine on another server and they coulden't so they had to move...and they where freinds to it was peacefull but still somthing we didn't want to happen....so...thats how it is...
If the attackers are the guys without the town hall then you will have to move anyway if you will want to have a peacefull city at all....other wise there will be block wars all the time...
Since Plinka has said this an unintended feature, and he has communication with the Developers, we will take his word that it is indeed an unintended feature.
The privacy will be lifted tonight.
Sorry to have caused such a stir with this, we were trying to protect our precious town. It would be nice if someone changed the title of this thread or locked it, as it seems the issue is dead now.
Dayln wrote:
Some people here just aren’t going to get it. The citizens of the city in question INCLUDE the people that moved in when the city expanded. You loose 100% control as soon as you place the town hall.
Yeah, I agree. And anyone who convinces themselves that settingcity halls to private is not an exploit is only fooling themselves.
When a city expands, it is then able to levy a property tax against any houses in its new limits. Those people are citizens.
GotZ public board: deleted
SWGcraft: deleted
Original Sony post: unable to delete, but buried. I have left it that way.
GoA public board: unable to delete, but that one is also dead
I was looking forward to going about my work day without having to constantly attempt to defend our position. I was hoping that you would give our offer serious consideration. I was hoping that you would take my efforts of locking down threads as a sign that we were sincere in our search for a resolution.
This a horrible and ugly situation. We have offered resolutions and then have been ignored. The only choice left is to defend our investment. We will not leave. We will expand. We will realize our goal. If your guilds would simply cooperate, they would benefit from a nearby cloning center and shuttleport until you are able to place these things yourself.
Moderator: Please see Jaspor's message above. We will accept Plinka's message as a statement of the moderators intentions and remove the structure privacy tonight as soon as Jaspor is able to log on. Please prevent further slander of Jaspor's name by locking and/or renaming this thread.