Politician Archive
Thread: #3 issue: Militia ability to defend. Submit your solutions.
I think that they should give city warn back and the first time you are warned in a city you get 10 min to get out. (Incase you miss the shuttle and someone has placed landmines outside the shuttlebay) the next time you get 2 min. you have been warned and should not come back if you do its your own fault.
Mayor Sretsi Wolfinger
Corona Talus, Eclipse Server
I don't think we need anything. City Ban should prevent intruders from using facilities. What else is there?
I like a few options I see so far:
1. City warn should be fine with the changes they made.First, time increased from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to allow a person to get out of the city. Second, they got rid of the death, cloning center loop that caused griefing. If they come up with a way to keep access to POIs then just put it back in.
If necessary have a city declare if it is citywarn enable or not, toggle like the zoning rights. People would get a message when entering town, or buying a ticket for that town that city warn is enabled and there is a chance they could be warned. If they go in with knowledge of what could happen that is their problem.
2. I think the idea of a non-combat /cityignore is a great idea. First, they can't enter any buildings, unless they own it or are on admin for it. No one can see there spatial emotes or messages. Lasts for 1 hour or something like that. This would let us deal with idiots and takes combat out of it entirely. I do not see any potential for griefing here.
3. /Cityoutcast where people are teleported to edge of city may be too much power. You then give people the ability to control a sphere of influence entirely. You could put faction bases in town, and they could never be attacked. I do no see this as a viable option.
I think getting #1 and #2 would be awesome. As a mayor I am not great in combat. So having a non-combat option would be a huge benefit. I am still for having citywarn come back someday. The militia needs the ability to roleplay and attack folks if they want. If the devs will not put it back because it allows non-consensual PVP then at least give us cityignore.
Bajeezus, maybe one thing that could help us all on this very importanat issue for us is if the Devs could clarify their position on why it was taken out more thoroughly. If they can site some specific examples that would be more help to us than the vague answer they gave us when it was removed. I think maybe some of usare going out of our way to change some parts of /CityWarn that maybe the Devs didn't have a problem with.
If we can focus on their problems with /CityWarn our thinking caps might fit a little better.
"Help us Thunderheart, you're our only hope." .......yeah, or something like that.
TitusAndronikus wrote:
Bajeezus, maybe one thing that could help us all on this very importanat issue for us is if the Devs could clarify their position on why it was taken out more thoroughly. If they can site some specific examples that would be more help to us than the vague answer they gave us when it was removed. I think maybe some of usare going out of our way to change some parts of /CityWarn that maybe the Devs didn't have a problem with.
If we can focus on their problems with /CityWarn our thinking caps might fit a little better.
"Help us Thunderheart, you're our only hope." .......yeah, or something like that.
I was under the impression they did tell us ... people are being kept from ingame content ... this is of course (as I think Holo admited) because the Devs forgot to put in No Build Zones around certain POIs (don't know exactly which) ... And I just suspect that removing excisting houses/cities is not an option - even though you could lay it out as an exploit ... taking an unattended (by devs) advantage due to a game "bug"
So a new Citywarn funtion would have to allow people to stay in cities in general (not be killed out) because of the few cities that violate against this "content for all" policy. At least that's how I put it and how I would handel it if I RPed a SWG Dev 
Cities that are placed where unique dynamic spawns occur - the POI should include it's own "region" that is seperate from the city. People inside this region (when the POI is present) are not considered to be in the city.
Citywarn should give a 5-10 minute grace period, and require more than 1 militia member to citywarn someone
Players citywarned should be able to fight back - the stronghold should give militia defensive bonuses
Citywarn should ignore all faction. It should not give a TEF, and no faction points should be lost/won through death of a citywarn'd player.
There should be no decay on items from incap/death involving citywarn. There should be no financial loss to the warned players. Again, this is to stop griefing.
Citywarned players that are killed should automatically clone to the nearest static city.
City malitia are combat classes, not urban planners.
The ability to grantzoning rights should be seperated form the ability to /citywarn (or hopefully /cityignore).
Then the citizens of your city can truly "police" it instead of just the Mayor's most trusted friends.
)
As a former Mayor and Miltia member in my new home, I think we do need /citywarn back.
The idea for an extended timer sounds great (two to threeminutes is more then enough for someone to finish shoppingand head out of town), or as I've expirenced a few times, explain why you're in that person's city an why they shouldnt kill you. I've more then once walked Overt into an Imperial town (I'm a Reb) and have asked the Milita to kill me to prove that I'm not there to cause trouble.
I also love the idea of taking out those danged pets/droids people leave behind.
If you beleive that a person or group of persons are using /citywarn to block a POI or something of the nature, contact the CSR's, they can check the logs and see what happened and where. Reguardless of what they might respond sometimes, that's what they are there for, but if they havent been instructed on how to handle the situation yet, they wont be able to help at that moment.
When /citywarn is given back to us, and if you goto the Krayt Graveyard and some moron keeps killing you with /citywarn, get 10 friends and go pay him a visit, see if he warns you then.
To help focus the conversation I went and found the actual statement from TH and SOE regarding the removal of /citywarn.
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As many of you know, the Player City feature /citywarn has been removed from the game with the next publish. There has been a huge number of people praising the change and a huge number cursing the change, so I wanted to make a "status of" post so everyone knows where we are and where we are going.
Currently, the /citywarn feature is being used as a way to grief players. The two ways in which its impacting the game with widespread grief is:
Player Cities are being used to ring off and wall in key content in the game and /citywarn is being used to prevent players from getting to that content.
/citywarn is being used to kill characters who are unsuspecting bystanders
Both of these grief types are unacceptable and that's why the /citywarn feature was pulled from the game. Now, that doesnt mean "forever". This is a great feature and we will put it back in the game, but thats a future item. It is going to require development time needed to re-design and re-implement /citywarn and we don't have that time right now.
Currently, the development team is working to polish professions, upgrade the combat system, add content to the game, upgrade various loot systems and many other items. Once we get through this round of feature iterations and additions, we will revisit the /citywarn feature and get it back in.
Before that feature goes in, I'll add it to the "in-development" part of the website and everyone can submit their ideas and concerns.
Kurt "Thunderheart" Stangl Assistant Community Relations Manager
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I searched on "citywarn" posts from Blair, Pex, Holocron, Q-3PO and JustG and found nothing, so this appears to be the main communication on the removal of /CityWarn from the developers.
There are a couple of points I took away from this. First and foremost, /citywarn as previously implemented will not be returning. The first reason that it was removed is that people were using it to effectively deny access to a POI to the rest of the server population by keeping a standing militia guarding the area. The unstated part of that was that the city milita, by doing so, was effectively enabling the other city residents to farm the POI for loot (likely holocrons). The second reason is "to kill characters who are unsuspecting bystanders." In plain english, people were getting ganked because they entered a town's borders.
TH labels both of these acts "grief" and "unacceptable." The next statements he makes are indicating a complete re-tooling of the system is viewed as required by the developers before this type of function can be reimplemented.
That said, my opinion on the matter is that the developers oversight regarding the placement of cities is a large part of this equation. If people had been unable to place a city hall close to a POI this problem might not have escalated to the point where the feature was pulled. The regrettable part is that we are now beyond the point we can change city placement or POI placement now. Even if we put aside whatever technical challenges (programming) would need to be overcome to move the POIs, we are still left with the logistical problem; that is to say if we were to move the POI 500m away from a player city on Bria, it might be moved within the radius of a city on Wanderhome, thus the problem would persist. The problem gets worse as you consider more and more servers. And moving the player cities on every server away from every point of view, dealing with every single player effected, every house, every inventory item and every city structure is even less feasible.
So we need to be focused on the stated reasons for removing /citywarn. Reimplementing it exactly the way it was does not appear to be in the cards, nor does moving the POIs and cities. Nor does implementing any system that allows for a militia member eject a person from city limits, or that allows militia to "kill unsuspecting bystanders" as TH put it.
I think /cityignore is a great suggestion, and I am still partial to the /citywanted concept. They address the developer concerns and still leave us with a means for defending ourselves from griefing players.
- Acroyear
Very well put, HiroBlack ...
The old /citwarn isn't going to happen ... we need a new concept that doesn't allow griefing as TH stated ... mainly that doesn't keep out players of major ingame content.
/cityignore is best to prevent vocal griefers from bugging citizens and potential customers. Of corse it isn't as "fun" as /citywarn was ... and it doesn't give the RP-power that /citywarn gave (a player driven conflict or war in the city between "thugs" amd police for example).
/citywanted sounds quite nice, although it of course also has these 5 (or how ever many) people permenantly "banned" from the city (not really banned, but they won't survive staying long ). I would expand the list with the feature that it will delete people entered after 24-48 hours and not let that same person be added to the list for the next 24-48 hours.
But I would also like to see an optional /citywarn feature ... where the warned person has to agree to the /citywarn ... this is because /citywarn with the created "Team" of the Militia just has that much more ingame power of creating scenarios than the tidiouse /duel has.
I started this in another thread cause I feel its different but this could provide a solution if nothing else. So I am coping it here to be safe.
Before I started playing this game I had visions of what it would be like, I thought there would be prisons or jails to detain people or POW's.
This may co inside with the correspondant's milita right to defend, but I kinda think its different from it however I shall repost in that thread as well, just to be safe.
The milita is in a word the Police of the town/city or MP's (military police)
The milita could be given these commands:-
/citywarn - This just warns the offending person or citizen i.e just a telling off,
/cityfine - This the Milita would be able to do if after warning the Perp like 2 or 4 times and the fine goes into city hall the finewould be set by the mayor. This would only work on people who are covert as people will attack the citys if they got bases and such.
/citylockup - This command would transfer the covert perp into the Town/citys jail or lock up and would be unable to leave for a period of time like for 5 minutes, then he would be able to leave town he would have 2 minutes to leave or the milita could fine him again.
This would be like the penelty box in the NHL, or whats called the Ice box for people to cool down.
/cityban - can stay the same and be used against invading armys.
The city lock up would mean the devs creating a new building for player citys, I think jails go with the police you get arrested.
Well this is the idea and I have to say I do like it.