Politician Archive

Last week have been up and down, lost a few citizens and gain some. What troubles me is if a player stop play swg his house will still be there for some time, and prevent future cityplanning until the day it get deleted, also when more then one "removes" close to a election you get kinda tired. Maybe a solution would be to give the house to the town for some days so the mayor could remove it and give it to someone else.

Well it still a days left until next election and I just need a other citizen to take 2 new boxes on the tree, but feel ok with the 60 people I already have. Its a nice bunch of people going out every night hunting and doing other cool stuff.

I expect to select CC III and improve the look of town with something more then statues

The City of "Ostium Vepres" on Tatooine (Bria) was founded by the Servants of the Shrub (SOS) as one of the original 10 when player cities first went live. I have been Mayor ever since.

It has been rather peaceful the last few weeks. Our guild continues to grow steadily and we gain one or two citizens a week. We are "just" below hitting the metropolis mark (81 or so).
Recently a few of our citizens decided to work together on a crafting company called "Galaxy Corp" and have based the operation in Ostium Vepres. After much discussion with the guild council, it was decided to give their HG a prime location in front of our town shuttle.
In the last week I also came to the conclusion that gardens are very picky about where and where they cannot be placed. One of our local architects donated a large garden which would not fit anywhere in our city on the dunes. Well, I lie. We found ONE spot in an undeveloped area. For lack of a better location I left it there, and not surprisingly I have discovered that many new citizens are trying to move in nearby.

For something a little different, and based on an idea by another guild member, I took a set of four Gungan Heads and placed them just outside the north west border of town facing the fabled location of the "shrub". Later we took some screenshots and dubbed the incident an archielogical discovery. A merchant tent was set up nearby as an information kiosk for the site.

In advanced planning is our week long "Shrub Fest" to be held starting Feb. 2nd. This celebration will include many activities and contests and we welcome everyone interested in joining us! I am being asked to prepare an opening speech.

And I believe that is all I have for Ostium Vepres.

Reporting in from Intrepid server, planet of Talus, player city of Tal'Alderaan:

This last week brought little change profession-wise to our city, as I picked up the ability to use the Stronghold specialization. Given that it is almost completely worthless for the cost the population at large was rather underwhelmed by the advancement. At least I will be getting the title of Warmaster next level, even if the ability to place faction terminals is pretty overrated given that one of our residents has placed a small Rebel base just outside the maximum radius of our town.

That said, the real meat of the Politician act is always the day to day life of being Mayor. My concerns for the city over the last couple of weeks have revolved around how we appear to have hit our churn point* at fifty residents. I see from a number of other posts that many other cities are peaking out this way as well, though at more than double our population. As we have been at ~50 residents for about 6 weeks now some changes needed to be enacted to facilitate some growth.

The first thing I did was to look at the expenditures of my time based on topic as opposed to simply considering myself to be mired in Tell Hell (as I have heard my peers call it). Breaking things down that way I saw that there were specific categories that needed to be addressed: Questions regarding missions and gaining combat XP, questions regarding factional missions and GCW content, various inter city/guild politics, questions regarding crafting, questions regarding the city, profession specific questions, etc.

Realizing that most of these were requests for information (hey, would it be possible to suggest to the devs that if they are looking to improve something that it might be the depth of knowledge to be found in the holocron, as its treatment of topics is at best superficial?), I took some time and scoured the forums for the various FAQ and posted them on my website. Next up I looked into the various roles I was playing in the city and thought about where I could break up those roles and who I might entrust with those responsibilities. Then I spent the next couple of days taking my time to discuss the various responsibilites with my chosen candidates. To that end I have recruited an Ambassador (to tour the galaxy and promote good will, tourism and commerce, and raise our visibility), a Chief of Public Relations (to find diplomatic solutions should there be tensions between our town and another), a Minister of the Hunt (to teach newbies the mechanics of using mission terminals for successful hunting and financial gain), and a Minister of War (to help folks with factional missions and GCW content). The last two have been tasked with sponsoring two weekly large group, high level content events to give the residents an opportunity to pull and participate in high level missions. That will also give all of the residents a chance to partake in high payout missions, and make taxes go down more easily.

With that accomplished and those positions announced to the populace I was relieved to see that the level of tells had begun to drop off to a slightly more managable level. My dreams of getting off planet and finishing collecting my POI badges while recruiting new residents were diverted though by a crisis in a neighboring town. It seems that one of our fellow Politicians had suffered a schism in his ranks by allowing another Politician to take over in a friendly succession, and the second mayor had begun driving the city into the ground. The populace polarized between the two Politicians and the almost cliche destruction of the city hall followed. I was up late last night talking with the Politician who had first placed the city and I believe I may have successfully talked him out of quitting the game. I have offered him the support of our city during his rebuilding, and a place in our town should he wish to avoid the Politician game altogether and simply reform his remaining loyalists into a guild.

Who knows, once this has all settled maybe I'll have pushed my churn point about 20 citizens higher, and actually be able to get some time to visit Jabba's Palace...

- Acroyear

*Churn Point - The point at which the regular loss is equal to regular gain in a complex system. In a corporate workplace this might be considered the general population of a facility (around 100employees or so, loosing and gaining a few every week). In SWG, this is the point in a city's expansion where residents are leaving and coming at about the same rate making for a roughly consistent number of citizens.

City is on Flurry

City officials have been working hard on policy making and modificationsto the development of the city. Below is a public announcement on those areas.

New Guild calls Triconica home - Myself and the city officials are pleased to inform the galaxy that The City of Triconica is now the HQ and base of operations for the guild HAND. They are a new guild with a great charter. Contact Vick in the game for information about this Imperial guild.

Treatment of visitors - The following policy has been set in place. All Imperials and Neutrals are free to travel the city. Covert rebels are treated the same as Neutrals. The city has an area of sensitivity to the North East were four Imperial bases are active. All Neutral players in this area will be asked for the reason they are in this area and they will be scanned to verify they do not have any rebel associations. The dropping of scanners will only be authorized in the North East Side of the city. Any Rebel found or identified in the city will be shoot and banned. Any player banned can be pardoned after 24 hours.

Commerce - We have worked hard on bringing in vendors to the city. We currently have over twenty vendors, offering a variety of goods. These vendors are located in front of the shuttle in tents and in the Triconica Bazaar hall. The city also boost a variety of trainers as a service for the galaxy. These trainers are located around the bank in the center of the city.

City Development - City officials are working hard to continually develop the city. With an Improved Job market as the specialty. The citizens and visitors of the city can get the most out of the missions they complete. We are currently working on completing the construction of our zoo, museum and Dark Jedi Temple. We are also in the prosess of hiring an Events Coordinator to give the citizens and the pubic the opportunity to have fun and win some great prizes. We have blocked off certain areas of the city to develope housing and the ability to support another guild.

Here is a map of the city.

http://www.priest-inc.com/Tricon/Darksidmap.gif

Darksid Darkorder

Mayor of Triconica

City of Basinia, Naboo, on Chilastra.

Our pre-planned layout is nearing completion. It has had to be revised due to garden and other placement issues, but the end product is one we are very pleased with. We have been setting several parks, and the sheer size of the footprint of the large parks has become a perpetual bee in my bonnet.

After nearly six weeks of dealing with bug reports and CSR tickets, we were finally granted Metropolis status. Having received no final input from any source, we may never fully know if the situation keeping us at level 4 (although we had over 85 citizens) was a bug, feature working as intended, or bad city karma. We may also never know if it was resolved due to active involvement of a CSR/Dev or by accident or mathematically (due to a phantom Metro cap and perhaps another Metro shrinking.) We only know that we are finally there.

We had a bit of a scare this week when attempting to place a small garden in the town square. Upon learning that upon placement, it was rotated in a direction not to our liking, redeeding it destroyed out shuttleport, leaving lamps and trainers hanging in mid-air. We feared to try again, lest the City Hall be next, but eventually I found the shuttleport deed in a backpack in my inventory (sneaky little things are these deeds,) and all was set relatively right - except for that pesky garden still turned the wrong way.

Our irritating, yet somewhat humorous, situation of our Musician and Dancer trainers going AWOL every 48 hours (simply disappearing...poof...to possibly re-appear a day or two later...happened every other day at least...) was resolved when I caught them actually at their posts one day, fired them, and placed them elsewhere in the city. (They had been on the Cantina porch...with the Entertainer trainer, who never vanished. Firing them and replacing them at the same location did nothing to help.)

Our nearest neighbor city, Fate, and we have carried out an arrangement to pool our trainers to make nearly every choice available within 1000m, and it has worked out grandly. We refer visitors and citizens to their city, and vice versa.

We have been running the Research Center specialization for a week now. Our crafters have been tracking their results, and across the board, they report greatly increased Amazing Success rates. We are very happy with the specialization and feel the results fully justify the costs. Our Armorsmiths, especially, report greatly enhanced results.

We have nearly maxed out our decorations, and maintenance runs high. However, tracking of the treasury manually from update to update continues to show us running in the positive, with no loss from week to week, so I have allowed myself to relax a bit. Taxes seem to be at a sweet spot, and our citizens are generous with city donations, so all is well.

Since this is the first of these, I'm gonna start by covering a lot of past stuff.

Virtutis Civitas (VC) was formed on the first day of player cities. I have been mayor since day 1 and have been master now for a bit. VC was formed by members of clan AOD as our personal home to start. The goal with the city was to create an exciteing place for all on the server, yet hold as a haven for supporters of the rebellion. Due to being formed by one of the largest PAs on Sunrunner, the city quickly grew to level 5, and we have enjoyed our metropolis status ever since. Luckily, I was able to avoid any the xp bugs, so was able to keep placing structures as soon as they became available.

After a short time of using our new 'home', it was decided by the leadership to expand the citizenship to other members of the galaxy. Currently, there are 4 different PAs, of various sizes, residing in VC. These are AOD, |D|, FC, and R-S. We're still in negotiations with some other groups for possible inclusion.

During our week as a level 3 city, we placed an HQ on the west side of town. This base gave us _plenty_ of excitement, and also promoted the city as a conveinent place to do rebel missions. On top of that, we recruited a LARGE number of merchants to form one of the first player bazaars. Not sure of the current count, but number of vendors is I believe around 30. Between the HQ and the bazaar, we were experiencing heavy traffic through our town. As mayor, I must say there is no better feeling then to have groups of other people frequent your creation.

Sadly, traffic has died off a bit in the last week. After days and days of hard fighting, a very determined Imperial force was able to take and destroy our base (congratz guys). The city is currently in the process of re-training our squads of defenders, and also reorganizing for better defencive positions. One day, I hope to truly realize the goal of being a mecca for supporters of the rebellion.

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Well, brief history of my time so far. If anyone wants a tour of the city, please contact Rywo on the sunruner server, and I'll be more than happy to meet with you and discuss planning, startegies, problems, etc...

This last week I hit Master Politican, so I finally got to put up the meditation gardens I've been holding onto. We also had to move our shuttleport due to problems within our city/guild between crafters and PVPers. I now have to work on getting some other buildings moved so the shuttleport can go into the redesigned city plan/layout.

We are cringing over the idea of having to move our Cantina (Which is very nicely decorated, and took ALOT of time by me to do). But it has to be done, and so we will do it. We are also going to see about placing a Theater, even if I find them pointless, but with two Master Musicans, they both want their own buildings. We host special/fun events at times, so the Theater will be useful.

We switched from being an entertainment district to a research district. I also did my monthly run around to pay everyone's maintance (for the city taxes). Sending out Housing Bills to people who's houses I had to pay more then the 1/3rd to cover our city taxes worked out very well. People are putting the money into the city hall, and I just slowly take it out, and prepare for next month's maintance paying.

I managed to visit another city this last week, and it had a very structured layed out city, but it wasn't very pretty. All the buildings were the same, in rows with Gardens in the middle of the streets.
I'm really happy that the city I run has alot of character. We have streets and districts. The hill side community is just chaos, but that's the benieft for being in that area. We have so many people/houses that we have one district that is expanding outside the city boundrys. A smaller city set up nearby, and was very polite to inform me that they will be sharing out shuttleport. Not a problem.

Overall things are going well.

Anneke Rose (Mayor of the Metropolis of Sanctuary)

I'm really enjoying hearing about all of your cities. I particularly like seeing ideas that I hadn't thought of, advice about how to use the trainers or facilities differently, and the events and activities you've had going on.

First a general introduction to the history and the general situation of our city, then I'll give my reveu of "This week in Politics".

Originaly Kheraba City was planed to start on Corellia. But as the homeplanet of Han Solo wasn't at all the pretty place we all dreamed of (everything is brown if it isn't raining), because the grey corellian houses are the ugliest in the game (in our opinion) and mainly because in the beginning there was little life on Corellia to support our mostly crafting citizens. So we moved to a friendly Guild on Tatooine (with pre-launch cityfriendship) that had pushed their city idea away and grounded the city in the Lowland Basin due to the considerable amount of trafic coming through from anchorhead to Jabba. So due to this long excistance we have a fair amount of long-term citizens and have tried to create a nice looking city from the beginning ... although we had no idea where we would once place our city hall.

We are now constantly around 105-110 registered citizens (about 120-130 different house owners) - there is constanly a shift - new people moving in, old citizens leaving the city or the game. Our maintenance of 565k is completle payed through our moderate taxes of 500cr income, 10% property, 3% sales and 100cr shuttle fee. We have a few gardens (1 exotic, 2 medium, 5 small) all decorations (about 40 lamps as street signs, a firefountain in front of every of the 4 PA-Hall, 2 statues left and right of the city hall, 5 tatooine sun statues on each of the 5 main enterances to Kheraba saying "Willkommen in Kheraba - Welcome to Kheraba). Recently had 2 requests of new PAs of around 30 members each to join the city. Although they were faction allianed they stated to be covert, so as our laws forbid to reject citizens according to religion, race or faction they were welcome. But one of them is now building up their own city, the other is still in negotiations about an alliance with one of the PAs in our city ...

Now to the present situation.
With /citywarn in the game, the Militia had a very important role in the city life. Through their ability to actually fight for the city (although we had rules to use /citywarn only in the gravest of circumstances - in self protection so to say) we had a lot of people willing to conatantly stay in the city and create a certain life and roleplay depth. They were also always eager to help out in events like the shuttleport party we did after being connected to the interplanetary travel system. Now this feature is missing, and so seams to be the inthusiasm the militia once had. On top of this I think the giving out of holocrons has drasticly influenced the playsyle of a majority of the citizens. We are having more and more problems of Vendors in the once so anticipated Tents on the market place being empty. The once always noisy city chat we create every day is now only populated with a core number of citizens, although I'm constantly letting a droid patrol the marketplace named "Join-KC-Chat". All the Ideas I'm trying to discuss with our citizens on our internal boards seam to be ignored, and the new 3-monthly vote for the mayor has just goten 13 votes in 4 days - they all voted for me having no countercandidat, since apparently nobody even wants to think about spending the skillpoints or taking on the challange and the hard work of managing such a city.

All in all, although a small amount of citizens is trying to create more content and life ingame (a racing event next weekend) I feal less and less enthusiasm thinking, planning and working for the members of the city with this little interesst and feadback I'm getting.

None the less, Kheraba is one of the largest Cities on Tatooine, having a very nice planned but still organic city layout with street names and adresses, city parts etc. every evening (middle european time) there is a number of players in our Cantina having some RP chats. We are planning on giving the militia back some "power" and roleplay meaing by implementing /duel macros (a list of enemy people to /duel or accept /duels ... creating 2 or more teams such as the hutt thugs vs the militia and some volentary citizens as victims of the conflict). I hope to get more feadback from the citizens again after our next event and our constant trying to bring more star wars life into the city.

PS - Sorry for the many spelling mistakes, but my english spellcorection doesn't seam to work here from where I'm posting from

Calling in from Halfwayfar, Tat, Bria. We are running at 120-130 citizens, taxes at 19% property(the only way to get to 4c per hour on a small house) and 100c shuttle tax(cant make it higher because it resets everyday, as you all know). The city itself has been here since the frist week of the game, i moved into the city abouta month in and became pretty popular...and when time to make the real city it was I and a friend who stayed up to make sure we got our CH down before the 3 other cities around us did But I would like to say its been a crazy ride. The first few weeks were absolutly crazy...and i swear even being a busy merchant...i have never seen this many tells at one time. We had explosive growth in the frist few weeks. We went from 20 citiens, to 55, to 85, then 110, and now are steadying out at the 125 area. But now there seems to be a calm. Our city council meets every week still but our meetings have gone from 4 hours to about 10 mins. With myself gaining no new skills and the city already ballanced and well laid out, there isnt much to do anymore. I still get the few e-mails everyday asking for help on how to move in. Man, moving people in is such a pain in the ass when you are tring to make an orgainzed, well laid out city. People dont seem to realize that if there are 35 homes on the street all facing south, that their house should also face south Anyways sorry about the ranting...its nice to hear some of your stories as fellow mayors. What i find funny is seeing all of the Merchants that are also mayors. I guess it just runs with the breed.

Im actually very good friends with Jonni, the mayor of Mos Elsewhere who posted above. His city started next to ours and i basicly "won" the race to place our CH first, but we have continued to rant and commuicate with each other on city goings and new bugs. Basicly we have come to some sort of a conclusion that down the road when we have each finished our masterpieces of a city...we will move somewhere and make our own elite player city where our best friends, and only hand picked individuals will live there. Also what will be nice is to be able to swich off and on with being mayor...as both of us are already masters. Well thats about all i got. I hope the cities get more options soon and pray the bugs get fixed VERY soon.

Ohh...one more thing...we need a better e-mail system...maybe make it a Politician perk. But we really need some sort of orgainzational system to help us keep certian e-mails, and to filter emails from City Hall into some sort of city inbox. I hate accidentaly deleting an important e-mail when im mashing the delete key to get rid of the millions of e-mails city hall likes to send me.

Desert Flower Commune, Tatooine (Sunrunner)

A second generation city, we have finally reached tier III and growth has stabilized (our growth is larger than 2 of the original 10). After being registered on the planetary map, traffic to our wonderful commune increase. I spend much of the time picking up the litter and greeting the travellers and talking to them (always looking for new residents).

Good news was that when the commune grew, those that had harvestors were kind enough to move them (/thanks). Also an abandoned house that was preventing some decorating in the commune finally crumbled (/cheers). Plus the macro to create a city channel is working fine and has help many of the residents to get information or help from other residents.

Problem has been trying to convince the merchants of locating their vendors to a central location to make shopping a bit easier for the travellers. Also, the terrain is not very favorable but has been providing a challenge since day one. I've been talking to one of the guilds to help establish mounted patrols to scare off tuskens and desert demons that may end up attacking travellers to our commune (half seem to be tied up in opening an FS slot(?) - any ideas of what this is?). And the imperial governor has ask me to investigate the rebel presence in the commune (but then he took away my militia - /looks around and wonders how to investigate this rumor without any police).

But from all the problems, the citizens have donated funds generously so that I have not had to implement any taxes and the citizens have been very helpful and understand with moving arrangements.

Plans for this week is to get the hospital placed, hopefully get the vendors centrally located, communication with a nearby second generation player city to share ideas and may be host an event,and get a few new residents.

Farstar: Naboo: Serenity nr Kaadara

Well until a couple of weeks ago we were all over the galaxy but had built up close friendships and so foolishly decided to set up a holiday home together.

Of course it didnt stay that way a week and a half ago we placed a city hall and Serenity was born.

We started with 10 commited players and we've quickly grown to 29 and hope to make our second update in two weeks without too much arm twisting.

I have to say that Mayor was not what I thought it would be, I had already settled in a Town and found it a pretty bleak and lonely place. Our town may not be huge but boy does it rock - its totally changed my view of the game entirely - ive gone from being quite a lonely Droid Engineer to Mayor, Party Organiser, City Planner and Training Director in the course of just two weeks.

I have to admit Im having a blast - and thats because my citizens are too. We dont have much in the way of facilities at the momet but I know that will come in time and everyone seem pretty happy to wait until we get them.

As a registered disabled person in the UK this has turned out tobe a pretty liberating experience for an otherwise quiet stay at home guy.

Im very pround of our community and especially proud to be associated with the people in it.

For all of the faults of the game the Player City for me on the whole has been so far a very rewarding venture.

I doubt we will make it much past level 3 but heyI think theres room for all sizes and types of community here.

The only downside has been the attitude of other Mayor in the region who dont seem to like competion. But hey every metropolis has its outlying towns and villages.