Politician Archive
Thread: #1 issue: Politician Gameplay and Skills. Submit your solutions.
Just kinda thinking aloud here... but what about some sort of buff? That's something people want and seek out. 
And if people get a mind buff from watching a dancer or listening to a musician, is it much of a stretch to say that people could get a similar "motivation" or "inspiration" from listening to a highly charismatic Politician give an emotional speech?
Are there downsides to yes? Of course, as many Politicians would spring up simply for the ability to offer this nice buff. But for "real" Politicians out there, this would be away to attract visitors to their city, allow for more social interaction, have a chance to explain their political views and stances, and develop more contacts and relationships with people.
Just thought I'd throw that out there, I'm sure there's plenty of people who hate the idea... I'm not sure I like it myself, but here it is anyways...
Add an "issue bounty" feature. This could go at the top of the military tree. This would give a mayor the ability to issue a bounty on any citizen OR any mayor that has issued a bounty within the last 14 days.
Once you issue a bounty, you open yourself to having another mayor issue a bounty on you for the next 14 days.
Why not have a branch of the politician tree involve the galactic civil war. The politicians should be able to get into the power structures of the facitons and have an influence of where NPC troops are directed and where battles are fought. Why not have politician fighter templates?
There could be a lot of game play involved with this and I think it would be a blast. Any ideas on skills though? Maybe like a creature handler for NPCs? Or just the ability to give general orders that would change the trends of faction NPC deployment.
Taking that one step further, politicians with high faction points for a minor faction could do the same thing as mentioned above. They could change the general deployment, actions, movement of a minor faction in the politicians area of influence. It wuold be cool to call in NPC reinforcements for the defense of a town.
Another idea would be to allow politicians to have city facitons points. Where people with positive city faction points wouldn't get attacked by allied factions and the opposit as well.
Just some ideas that are really growing on me. I want to see players have more control over the game, I think it would be awesome if minor facitons could make a difference in a town or even the civil war.
"2.Something for the master skill. Give the master skill box something special, a valuable reward for the politician and his constituents for investing and organizing toan incredible degree in order to advance to this level."
I propose the following:
Masterful negotiation
By contacting the leaders of various factions on the same planet as his city, the Mayor will be able to bribe them so they might be less prone to attck the citizens of his city.
You being a Talusian Mayor like me, Baj, you know some planet denizens can be downright dangerous to lightly armed citizens. In Talus, Binayre pirates are often a deadly danger to surveying artisans. Faction leaders could be setup in permanent tents, so that they cna be contacted by politicians and bribed not to attack the citizens of the city. With a sufficient bribe, you could even open say, "Binayre missions" from the Binayre leader.
The balance, in this case, would come from an opposing faction, to avoid a rich city to just bribe everyone and avoid any NPC danger on the planet. It would make sense but it is counter productive in game design imho. You'd have to choose which faction(s) you can afford to be fighting with, and which you can't.
This being a Myor benefit, I'd also argue for the master box to contain a non-mayor politician ability/skill.
#1 ... Making skillboxes valuable
Well you said it ... balance out those specialisations ... make me acutally see a difference ... - --Don’t just give us slightly more “amazing” results ... give us actual better crafting abilities to create the most powerful items in player cities only.
- 10% less critical failure? Who could tell the difference?
-10% faster healing? Who would want their customers to leave early ... give them 20% better buffs eating and listening in that city
-Bonus to mission payoff raised? Costs of cloning reduced? The costs of these often don’t come near the credits many citizens save. Give these specialisations more meaning for the city, make them give a bonus to citizens as well as the city ... give the city half of the bonus into their treasury (no extra money not already planed will flow into the game this way) Cities can now have a much higher variety of what their priorities are, from which kind of income they want to define theirselves.
-Sample Rich? How should anybody get “rich” through sampling? And how would want to set up harvesters in their cities. Especially after we have to have as many citizens as posible to pay for these specialisations.
-Stronghold isn’t very useful anymore either. You could form it into something going with faction terminals ... up the faction gain through missions from the city’s terminals by 20% (like after monthly story or depending on who is “winning” the GCW)
Apart from balancing specialisations (a pretty short term fix if you ask me .. no new implementation) a very easy way to make you keep the skills from the lazy dev point of view would be “You need the skill aktively every update or the feature will go *puff* (or maybe you get penalty fees like with the civic structures over your limit – 75k/week) All other fixes I can think of would be “pie-in-the-sky” features.
#2 Something for master
I have to admit I don’t really have anything other than to give us back those double specialisations, but balanced of course and much more variety (let us comine research with entertainment, imroved job with clone etc) ... all other ideas are also “pie-in-the-sky” features or easier to implement features that I think belong into much lower tiers because they might be interesting for non-mayors as well.
I do like the /citymotd feature, but don’t know if it’s “strong” enough to justify the 6 skillpoints for master.
Ok … and here’s to my “pie-in-the-sky” ... this might get long … don’t really know where I’ll be going to but I want to make sure you get where I’m coming from
I know I want to start with what Holocron once told us he would like cities to be ... a place for a community to develope and evolve, creating their own ingame content. This is not only to the benifit of the player, but Holo clearly stated it is to the benifit of the develepor and the producer as well ... because for one the develepor doesn’t have to develop that much more NPC Content because players will(/should) have the tools to easily create their own world ... with scenearios develepors couldn’t come up with themselves ... and because this creates a motivation for many people to still play this game for months and years (pleasing the producer with a long term revenue). So develepers should really not play politicians and cities off as a minor game system, if they do this right they can really save themselves a lot of futur work.
Now when we are talking about politicians, we are not only talking about those few who are mayor (at the moment the only people that are politicians are likely mayors as nobody will spend 15 skillpoints if not “in power”), but we’re usually refering to all people living in a city, the whole ingame structure of this city, ways to improve life, interaction and control in these communities. And probably also want to give non-mayors the chance to actually do something as politician.
If we want to find out ways to make a politician “better” in gameplay and skills ... first we have to make clear to ourselves what we want a politician to actually be ingame. For me there are (at least) 2 sides of a politician ... one being the roleplaying side where we want to be able intrigue, pursue power, have allys and adversaries, having a hand in actually changing the “system” (faction business without war) well actually playing a politician ... the other being the social ingame side where it is necesary to guide the community and help to provide the ingame playerdriven content that Holocron once dreamed about. I think we should try to gather ideas on how to put these 2 sides into the politician profession while not forgetting people that are not mayor and still want to play a politician and help a community.
Others participating:
Creating a city council could be done by the mayor giving certain rights to certain citizens (not only creating militia but simular to the PA system granting other powers as the /grantzone ... access to the city hall (admin) and the city terminal (finance, militia). I like Bajs diplomat idea and the fact he linked rank of city with number of dipolmats .. same would work for people in council.
Actually changing something:
A planetary senate would be able to vote about general directions the planet is taking (faction wise, financially, spawning etc) there was a post about a system with specialisations only I don’t know if something planetwide should really cost only the playercities (and their citizens) money while everybody gets the benifit. Also I’d include the peole of the council in this senate so that a higher ranking city really has a bigger infuelnce (after all it does have more citizens) ... of course the city cap on planets might be a little unfair here.
Friend and foe:
A politician could get a skill to place a bounty on his political enemies (but only if this politiician also has the skill to post a bounty in return). Maybe you could link this with dropping out of office after 3 successful bounty kills in a row ... considering a bounty hunt would be unsucsellful if the BH is killed be the militia befor killing the mayor..
Making a city more alive:
Player cities definitly still have to compete with NPC cities ... we don’t have spaceports, we don’t have a galaxy wide accessable bazaar, we don’t have the nice detailed citystructure, pavement, benches and chairs to sit on outside. No NPCs giving life to the land.
Next to fixing the cafe garden I’d like a bazaar where I can at least access the galactic markt as I guess you can’t place a bazaar in a player city due to the posibility of the mayor removing it and deleting all items in it or tbe bazaar disapearing because of the city going down a rank or such.
I’d like to see a mayor be able to set down NPCs as guards or screamers, give them a text to say, or several to say randomly. Give them the possibility to put clothing on them like merchants can with vendors. Give them one or several faction standings so they interact with people appropriate maybe even acting as a NPC Militia.
Give the ability to drop certain items at least on gardens (public crafting stations)
Adding to the Community:
Give the power to create own city-internal factions to create city internal conflicts ... hutts vs lady val, militia vs thugs.
Create Events:
A dream would be the possibility of placing NPCs, giving them own Quests to give out, stories to tell, interactions to take, and player crafted items to give out as reward so you can create your own ctiy stories 24/7 for anybody to enjoy.
Sorry for all spelling mistakes and unplaned ideas (most are just a shot into the dark 
) but it's almost 3am here in germany .. I'm getting very ... /yawn ... very ... /snore
Mostly everyone has some idea of what to put in the master box, and I'll go with whatever everyone else wants, the devs will only put in something reasonable anyway.
- For the gameplay though, I would personally, really like to see some form of interaction between cities and between politicians (not necessarily mayors). The way I see it is that each city would send ANOTHERpolitician (other than the mayor) to some higher level body, that can have elections of its own. A sort of planetary council if you will, or a planetary senate, government, etc. This group would have powers over the cities on their planet, and also create interaction between the cities and this senate group.
- A different idea would be to have some form of 'agreement's between cities. More than just the 'guildwar' idea, there could be trade agreements, financial assistance, etc. Larger cities could help out smaller ones. Allow us to set the shuttleport fee to certain cities (so if we had a sister city, we could have and zero shuttleportfee between the cities). Maybe even defence agreements where militia of one city could be militia of another (assuming zoningrights are removed from militia).
Here is an idea I had and posted awhile back but it got eaten by the forum. To help ease urban planning and keeping the cost to move a large home back a box...then left a box...you know what turn it the other way at a minimum.
Well since I'm basically just starting out with my city this idea will help me and not really affect you planned and placedmetropolii out there but still I think it would be a nice addition.
Allow mayors to drop abuilding of any size anywhere within city limits (land allowing) for free. No cost to lots no maintenance needs to be paid...for 1 day. After that the home will destroy itself unless ownership has been transferred to another character or the mayor accepts the building as their own, then it takes up the necessary lots from the person that owns it and the maintenance rate begins as if the home was just dropped.
This would only really be useful if you have zoning rights enabled and basically allows you (the mayor) to shoulder the burden of placing a home just so in order to have it go along with the layout and it won't cost you the maintenance to redeed and redeed and redeed in order to have it line up perfectly with the rest of the "street". It will also help new citizens move if they have an existing house. I shudder to think how someone can move all 250 items from an old home to their new city one if they dont have admin on any other structures unless one of the future vehicles forthcoming is a U haul. This also allows you to prevent griefing since you don't just grant someone zoning rights allowing them to get far enough away from you and litter the town with harvestors and/or homes where you don't want them and defaming the city.
Any comments or ideas would be useful since I think this would be a great addition to mayorial power and really help make cities look nice without wasting 20k and making your newest citizen pissed off at you
- Mayors could zone a area and give it a name on the local map, merchant district, entertainment district and so on. Would make it a bit easier to find stores, and homes.
- Street signs, or city signs, like the ones you can find in npc cities with the city name.
- A mayor could plant a structure that can be used as market. Using a terminal citizen can plant a vendor there for their wares, with a limted number of slots for each trader. Would make trading far easier, everyone knows how hard it can be to find stores in a city with 100 house and no other way then check building after building.
Add on with NPC cities.......
Make it a council type.... even novice politician can enter.. each box can count as a vote 
(this would let people keep their skills) or at least row of boxes (horizontal) if they have all four boxes = 1 vote... thus 4 votes max per person.
now.. couple of scenarios.....
NPC mission payout, shuttle fee, repair cost.. etc.. a politician can propose a bill to "tweak" each of the settings... but changing one could effect another..... and people can vote on it... of course this may lead to many changes ballot... lets limit to top 5 vote....
thus a politician will submit a bill for an NPC city.. they can tweak the following
Mission payout (higher = less money for the city... lower = more money for the city)
Police power (higher = less money for the city.. lower = more money for the city)
Shuttle/spaceport fee (higher = more money for the city... lower = less money for the city)
repair cost (higher = more money for the city.. lower = less money for the city)
then people can vote on the bill itself.. or tweak a new one and submit... after each week.. the one with the highest vote will get implemented accordingly...
of course each time have a minimal fees that cannot be lowered research would
each item would cause the other item to scale accordingly... less police power could mean more "aggro" type mobs appear in the city randomly... repair cost for vehicals would be higher.... etc.. this is just a rought idea
alternative scenarios..
Planetwide council? as an add on to another's post.. you could have all city mayor meeting. to set up special trade agreement and such.. of course any "special" agreement have a cost.. (i.e. credits) to set up...
Builtin powers for having the skill for the city.... like auto income ability.... if keeping skill 3 in fiscal.. you can get 5% off cloning center.... and skill 4 you get 5% off insurance fee (not add on.. just take off the base)
and master get 10% of both....
discount on maintence would be nice..... like having skill level 4 or master reduce maintence cost of a city by 10% (can stack on top of merchant discount) BUT cost the city say.. 100k a week... it is a good trade off....
Wow a lot of good ideas in here so far, my time is very limited so I'm just going to throw my 2 cents in here for a master politician skill (perk). Since a master politician needs no more exp where does all that exp from voting go *thinks the same blackhole as the money sinks*. How bout once you master politician that surplus exp turns into credits generated to go toward city maintenance thus there is a benefit to having a master politician as mayor. Hope to post more later but really like the bulletin board idea and placing of NPC's that you can write your own missions for ideas also.
DaQuilla said, "I know I want to start with what Holocron once told us he would like cities to be ... a place for a community to develope and evolve, creating their own ingame content. This is not only to the benifit of the player, but Holo clearly stated it is to the benifit of the develepor and the producer as well ... because for one the develepor doesn’t have to develop that much more NPC Content because players will(/should) have the tools to easily create their own world ... with scenearios develepors couldn’t come up with themselves ... and because this creates a motivation for many people to still play this game for months and years (pleasing the producer with a long term revenue). So develepers should really not play politicians and cities off as a minor game system, if they do this right they can really save themselves a lot of futur work." and "Create Events: A dream would be the possibility of placing NPCs, giving them own Quests to give out, stories to tell, interactions to take, and player crafted items to give out as reward so you can create your own ctiy stories 24/7 for anybody to enjoy."
This would be a spectacular skill for politicians, and any other citizens wanting to participate to get involved in creating what everyone seems to want more of, Content. Here are some of my thoughts on how this could be implemented in the politician skill.
Make it or add it to a tree in politician where at level 1 the politician could program the NPC to do up to one difficulty 10 mission at level 2 they could do 2 missions up to difficulty 20 , Level 3 3 missions up to difficulty 30, Level 4 4 missions up to difficulty 40, and masters could set 6 missions up to difficulty 60(I believe that is the max mission difficulty, sorry if I'm wrong here).
So a master could for expample place a NPC with the first mission being difficulty 10 and when completed by a player would trigger the second mission up to 6 different missions increasing in difficulty as the writer sees fit. Then to take this one step further and incorporate some politician interaction that we all seem to crave, you could have one of your missions direct the player doing them to another NPC in a different player city. This would generate city travel and visitations in another form than just looking for something to buy or passing through.
As for the NPC's from a implementation standpoint, and I know very little about programming so just throwing thoughts out there, make them like mission terminals except in the shape of NPCs. This would allow the mayor to place regular, faction, or skill NPCs for missions.
Once placed the mayor could activate an interface allowing us to select a mission to edit, the amount being determined by their level on the skill tree. In the edit screen for the mission we could enter the text the NPC would say at the start and completion of the mission. Also their could be an inventory box here to place rewards in or enter a credit amount to pay as a reward which would come from the city treasury. Another possibility for credit payouts on mission completion would be to also allow the politician to set up to X amount of credits dependant on their skill level to come out of the great SOE coffers like regular mission terminals.
As I stated I'm no developer so how to get one mission to trigger the next and link missions to other NPCs in different player cities is beyond me. The NPC cities have it now so it can be done I just don't know how it would work for players to set it, Borvo's missions are a good example they take you to three different planets.
A couple other problems I forsee are as follows. First, if the rewards are placed in the NPC's inventory by the mayor or come out of the treasury, what would happen if they ran out of the item or credits. The other major problem would be griefers exploiting the missions by getting a large group of people together and repeatedly running the missions until the inventory is drained. Well as I typed that I realized that I suppose it would be possible to set it so the missions could only be done once per player as in the case of regular NPC missions.
Well that about sums it up for me, a dream? probably, but I think this would add a whole new level to the game that would make each server a unique experience as there would be no two with the same missions.
One last thing, the possibility of competitions for the best missions on the server as to content and creativity with the top ten being awarded unique items by SOE to give out upon completion of the missions. Wow I am in the dream world now, someone pinch me.
Wow Trelore, that would be amazing! That is also to say, it'll never happen. But if it did, wow!
I don't think it will happen because I think it would be too complicated to set up and manage on the developer side.
You wanted pie-in-the-sky, so here goes... sorry if someone else suggested something similar already, I have read through a lot of the posts but being at work my time to read each one is restricted to small moments.
My thought was to enable Politicians to be more useful to the population by being able to help citizens with poor NPC faction point ratings. To use an example I am familiar with there are a number of factions specific to Corellia and Talus such as Selonias, A'akuuans, Drall, Fed-Dub and others. Early on in playing I know the interrelationship of these factions completely escaped me. Due to some unfortunate decisions on my part I was frequently chased across the plains between my house and the nearest city, usually with packs of Drall on my heels. It would have been useful if I'd been able to go to someone (and I suggest Politician for this role) and be able to state the problem, and have them be able to help somehow. I can think of some Bounty Hunters that would really love us to be able to help them out this way.
There are a couple of ways this could be done:
The limitation to any of the above would be the Politician's own faction standings. One of my citizens would have little luck getting me to Intervene for them with a Drall, as I have -5000 Drall faction and would get shot on site as I tried to approach them. But if someone has a Cor-Sec problem I would be in a position to give them a great deal of help.
I think that, along with a number of other ideas posted here, this would be best implemented along side of Bajeezus' suggestion for implementing Diplomat functions into the Politician tree. It may be that the ideas I have above may be able to be implemented to degrees... that is to say out of the three ways I have thought of this could possibly be done, have the most powerful/desirable one be a Master Politician skill, and have the other two be lower on the skill tree as advancement incentives. And to be fair this idea needs to be beat into shape a bit still. If anyone can poke some holes in it maybe we can work as a group to patch those holes up.
So that is my pie for today. I've loaded into the forum skeet shooter and launched it. Fire away folks!
- Acroyear
- PS - The guy with the Politician buff idea has a really good one there, but we need to be careful. The buff should not be similar to what a Doctor, Dancer, or Musician can give, and should not be too similar to the Squad Leader group bonus abilities. We don't want to tread on other professions out there by offering a redundant bonuses. Has anyone got an idea for a unique Politician buff? I came up dry trying to imagine one myself.