Politician Archive

The point of this thread is becoming (and should become) how can a city maintain itself without the Mayor kicking in huge percentages of cash from their own pocket. It doesn't matter if it CAN be done, the matter is taxes are supposed to be the AUTOMATIC method of taking care of town expenses. It cannot be done with cities as written. They need to lower the costs, or raise drastically the tax caps.

RbT

in the beggining all cities will prolly be are 50k...and apparently thats going to be reduced soon...

with 15+ ppl, 50k a week isnt that bad

and i doubt anyone will really build cantinas nor hospitals...or even gardens/lamps/etc..just not worth their costs - only shuttles and town halls and banks are most likely going to be the hot items

wow ... so it's nearly mathmatically impossible for a city to support itself... ouch

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nightrun55 wrote:
Let me ask this, if you have 5 people, why be a city?? There is no benefit for you to be a city, except waisting credits. At outpost level you gain nothing that helps.

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You miss my point - it is for the roleplayer purpose and/or it prevents people building harvesters right in front of your house right?

If the devs didn't want small towns, why have outposts? Why not make the minimum 25 people or something?

I agree strongly with TroThorns above me. But back on my personal crusade:

In my discussions with Mayors, most are not even getting why this failure of taxes is a problem. I have experience with what happens when you directly ask your citizens to tip you money: people complain. If the game takes it out of their pockets magically, they complain less. This is why taxes are so key.

If your taxes were at least capable of covering the city's expenses, but you could choose to lower taxes and pay out of your pocket is one thing. But what we have before us is a tax system that is incapable of covering the basic expenses of the smallest city, even at the maximum level!

Plinka, I urge you as our correspondant to push this issue to the hilt. Use my numbers up there. A city hall that costs more than 30k a week is not going to be covered with taxes at the start!

RbT

Borrowing from "Adopt a Highway," I plan on offering sponsorship of Parks to offset their cost. I asked the Devs about it and they said they could be named just like any crafted item. This answer doesn't really help, as I would like to have parks as memorials, and I don't know if people would be able to read the names just by clicking on something. Maybe if signs were allowed in parks.

On a related topic, are PA halls subject to property tax?

Maxxing out taxes wont work. If taxes are too heavy, people will build houses....just outside of the city radius, and conclude their vendor sales manually if /sent to. We'll see SWG tax evasion. And cities will crumble because everybody not involved in the city will do this.

Well, this is how we're paying for it . . . we're taking down our PA Hall, I'm running around running harvestors and selling power to bank like hell, we're hoping that the prices go down so that we can actually . . . oh, I don't know, play the game for something other than running freaking missions, and then hoping half of the group doesn't quit when they realize how foolish the whole thing is just trying to keep a city hall going, never mind the other things that should go into a city, just so we can have a little RP community that we have a modicum of control over for the first time ever in an MMO. Right now they are essentially telling the casual gamer "just join a big city if you want to actually have fun playing, instead of even bothering trying to make your own".

Ridiculous city expenses = "un-fun".

~~Shabhaii, Mayor of Tombra, Naboo
www.cityoftombra.com
The REAL BT
"THe FS system only rewards the Veruca Salt's of the MMO world . . . not the Charlie's"

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BlindTyldak wrote:

Well, this is how we're paying for it . . . we're taking down our PA Hall, I'm running around running harvestors and selling power to bank like hell, we're hoping that the prices go down so that we can actually . . . oh, I don't know, play the game for something other than running freaking missions, and then hoping half of the group doesn't quit when they realize how foolish the whole thing is just trying to keep a city hall going, never mind the other things that should go into a city, just so we can have a little RP community that we have a modicum of control over for the first time ever in an MMO. Right now they are essentially telling the casual gamer "just join a big city if you want to actually have fun playing, instead of even bothering trying to make your own".

Ridiculous city expenses = "un-fun".

~~Shabhaii, Mayor of Tombra, Naboo
www.cityoftombra.com
The REAL BT
"THe FS system only rewards the Veruca Salt's of the MMO world . . . not the Charlie's"

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Exactly. The one thing keeping me and my wife and our 4 accounts paying is the hope that cities will be cool, and maybe we can even have "fun" playing a game! From the sounds of it on testcenter that isn't the way it is going to be. I really don't see the harm of 5-10 people wanting a little town but not wanting to work in a game to make money to pay for that town after getting home from real world work....

But I am starting to get worried and frustrated that the devs just don't think a game should be fun...

By running missions on dathomir until I can't stand it with a few friends and guildmembers that are going to be in town. I"ll probably put the 1k income tax and a little bit of a property tax to help out but it will almost solely be missions thanks to the dev's deciding on these ridiculous prices...and why are there 5 ranks even? You dont get anything good until rank 3 and have to be at 4 to get the only truly useful thing in cities...shuttleports. Really after you reach rank 4 you have the means to grow fast, and yet when you reach rank 4 you dont truly need to grow anymore. Sort of a crappy paradox.

If you plan to have 0 factories and 0 harvesters in your city limits, then yes the max tax may not cover the tax. Stick a few heavy harvesters in there, max out the tax, and then see where it goes.. My point is a city with 5 ppl in it, really shouldn't be holding up 1k worth of land.

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Riis wrote:

I agree strongly with TroThorns above me. But back on my personal crusade:

In my discussions with Mayors, most are not even getting why this failure of taxes is a problem. I have experience with what happens when you directly ask your citizens to tip you money: people complain. If the game takes it out of their pockets magically, they complain less. This is why taxes are so key.

If your taxes were at least capable of covering the city's expenses, but you could choose to lower taxes and pay out of your pocket is one thing. But what we have before us is a tax system that is incapable of covering the basic expenses of the smallest city, even at the maximum level!

Plinka, I urge you as our correspondant to push this issue to the hilt. Use my numbers up there. A city hall that costs more than 30k a week is not going to be covered with taxes at the start!

RbT

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And I fully agree with Riis, any system where taxes aren't able to cover the city expenses is a flawed system.

And on a related point, I don't think people should be budgeting in a percentage of millions of sales a week into their budgets as many crafters will not join cities to avoid taxes, and I guarantee the lesser known crafters will use cost to hurt the sales of those crafters whose prices will suddenly go up because of taxes...

plinka:

my guild has 20 members. We dont have any artisans. We dont WANT anymore "attention" brought to ourselves than we already have (aka we dotn want alot of shops.)

we really want to avoid having outsiders as well because we want it to be GUILD run and soemthing for ourselves. If we needed we wouldnt mind having friendly peeps around....but we dont want to have a hostile takeover of OUR city either.

what this is saying to me is that guilds like us arent supposed to have cities. Therefore it is a useless feature which MY main profession squad leader isnt gettign fixed because this development has held it up.

Cities should be for EVERYONE....not the wealthy and not large guilds or collectiosn of peopel who dont care whos in charge.