Politician Archive

1. Revenue from mission terminals and trainers.

2. Need a vice-mayor or town council comprised of others with politico skills.

3. Abilitiy to find out who owns a particular building - call it 'Title Search'. Also, need someway, to get rid of housing from dead accounts.

To those I 'borrowed' some of these points from I hope you do not mind - I just wanted to throw another voice behind certain remarks you've already made.

And for the record, I love Politician and rarely put my feelings about it in the terms I have below. We do have issues though, and our correspondent asked to hear them.

Short Term Goals

1. Restructuring the maintenance pricing plan for objects such as Streetlamps and other 'decorative' items so that they aren't overly expensive. There is a demand for these items from the general public - right up until they see how much they cost. 2500cr per lamp per week is not practical, it is borderline extortion.

2. Better in game city info controls for budgeting. Break out all costs in a worksheet (or graph) tied into the city to allow us to play with tax rates and see the impact. We should not be wondering if our taxes are set high enough to meet our maintenance fees. Also, this should be public information that anyone can view, and should perhaps be sent out to the citizens automatically via email. Also, this interface needs to be made very accessible. This is a video game, and while I want the type of data I get ina spreadsheet I would much rather manipulate changes with slider bars (a la harvesters) and have the changes display realtime on a graph than have to sit there with a calculator and hammer it out like I was at work.

3. Either fix or replace the Militia functions. Cityban is not a valid reason to have a militia, and as another poster pointed out there are a number of people qualified to be a member of a militia but are not exactly on the ball for zoning. If the Developers do not have a short term fix for the milita problems as they percieve them then those functions should be pulled and replaced with something functional and fun. Please don't let us languish like Smugglers with a useless branch in our skill trees. Either divide player cities from the GCW and combat altogether or correct the issues and let us have at it.

Long Term Goals

1. Makeplayers want to be a Politician, rather than forcing someone to have to be a Politician just because the city needs one. This is huge. There is a widespread perception that Politician is useless beyond half way up any given skill branch and that there is little reward vs. the skill point expenditure. Many of the perks of the profession are one time rewards, as most cities do not need multiple clone centers and shuttleports. City specializations are expensive above and beyond the rewards granted. These elements taken as a whole cast the profession in an undesirable light. There are many fixes that could be suggested, and I would suggest that the correspondent create a sepparate thread to collect them.

2. The costs of maintaining the cities and specializations needs to be reduced. We are all aware of SOE's attempts to create viable money sinks for the game. They have left the Politicians responsible for implementing one of those sinks. With the influx of new players from holiday sales the proposition of around 4000cr to 7000cr a week in taxes per player is just not flying (other extraneous factors are the cost of maintaining speeders, insuranceand item decay - taken as a whole new players are finding it harder than ever to stay financially afloat without grinding mission after mission). Factor in that our XP is generated by citizens and that our structures are enabled by population numbers and you are left with the Politicians scrambling around for ways to generate large sums of cash (currently ~180k a week in our city of ~50 with no Shuttleport or specializations) to keep residents. The rewards of specializations do not balance with the costs.

Example: A city population of 35 gets a clone center and specializes in it for 80k a week, at a cost of 2285cr per citizen a week, to save 200cr per clone data storage. To break even on the investmenteach citizen will have tostore clone data at thefacility 11.43 times a week. Most citizens will use that function no more than once a day, making for an unusable specialzation.

3. There needs to be a reward system for Politician beyond getting re-elected. This is a concept that has been the topic of debate on the forums with various possible rewards being cited. Those interested in the GCW and PvP tend toward wanting more military oriented rewards or missions, those less interested in such things have suggested salaries or Politician mission terminals and the like. Additionally, the currnet system leaves little reason for a Master to desire remaining a Master other than that no one else in the town wants the job.

Pet Peeve - A comment by Thunderheart that has gone without any clarification, which I am concerned will hurt the profession: "I know in January, we're having a special city mission thats been especially designed to whre 2 NPCs will be buying off player votes with some neat loot." If this is what passes for content, we are not amused.

- Acroyear

Short Term:

1. Give us a kickback from the mission terminals

2. Give the malitia members auto zoning rights like the Mayor has

3. Give Master Polo something, anything (Player garages?)

Long Term:

1. If it can't be short term, add PC garages

2. Give malitia some skills or purpose beyond what is currently has

3. Give more detail to the power the mayor is granting to malitia, for example - Being malitia does notalways mean you can grant zoning rights. The mayor can assign the skills individually.

Some great ideas. Just listing the issues I face as the second mayor of a tight knit village.

1. Fix the bugs! - removing decorations is flakey. And what is the deal with mission terminals are we charged weekly for them or not.

2. Better tax reporting, it is very hard to form fiscal policy based on guesses.

3. Terrain tool! Terrain tool! Terrain tool! I am based on Talus. Puhleeze. I love it there, but floating fountains are not terribly realistic. And I don't care for the feeling that I should mow the bank.

4. The idea that the mayor would be warned if a structure was about to decay is great. Would love to be able to kick in maintenance for a friend that had his computer stolen, and couldn't get on for a while. If it were needed.

Oh and since wookies can't wear tiara's,a mayor title would be nice.; )

Reea

Mayor of Lahsan, Talus - Intrepid

Great responses. Let's keep this running until Friday, when I will take all the responses and make some kind of summary or tabulation of everything.

Thanks, everyone.

Short term:

1. The ability to resign


2. Terrain tolerances


3. Fix the garden redeeding

Long term:

1. Senate or some other interaction forum/mechanics between Politicians


2. More civic buildings and class specific city buildings


3. More hands on administration of cities (something to do every day)

The one that's shocking me is that we've got a 15 page thread asking for the reimplementation of /citywarn, yet its on so few of the Politician responses as a top issue. Is it just not needed any more for most people?

Don't answer that here . . . we'll wait and see if Baj starts a thread on that on his own.

~~Shabhaii, Mayor of Tombra, Naboo
www.cityoftombra.com
The REAL BT
"The reason I don't PvP in this game is because no matter what side I picked, I'd be guaranteed to be fighting alongside at least one idiot. And I don't defend idiots."

Short Term (1Q04):

1. City Management tools. Detailed income and expense reporting. Ability to identify structure owners. Add /CityChat.

2. Civic structures. All incoming generating structures (cloning, terminals, trainers, et al) should have a % of the revenue heading to the City Treasury. Have a complete list of trainers available (+ Bio engineer) with the inclusion of Spynet Operatives. Add Pavement as a garden type and have it available in 3x5, 5x5 and 7x7 sizes. Add garage capabilities for Master Politicianswith Tier 5 cities.

3. Fix known bugs and issues. Radii shift, double or missing XP. Include an ability for mayor to leave office.

Long Term (2004):

1. Enhance City Specializations. Allow city declaration of faction or other type of focus (criminal, trade, arts etc) with respective benefits extending the basic City Specialization infrastructure. Maintaining a specialization could allow research that citizens could donate resources and credits to build over time. Benefits could include unique civic structures, enhanced NPC populations, special unique bonuses etc. These special bonuses would take a very long time to complete with incremental bonuses.

2. Diplomacy. Build interactive relationships between cities on the same or other worlds. These relationships could include trade agreements or embargos, factional warfare, cultural envoys, etc.

3. Coruscant effect. Allow cities to expand beyond 5 tiers. Larger tiers (100's of declared citizens) could enable the research functions (outlined in City Specializations above), and other unique civic structures like a Starport.

I just have one thing,

Give us back /citywarn, the way it is right now the militia is totaly usless

1 garages

2 more decorations allowed and a price reduction on them (50 is nothing)

3 spynet ops

4 make it so a mayor can put people on admin for the city hall again, not banning though

5 mission terminal kickbacks

so many good ideas hope they listen

Short term:

1)- city email - other than the withdraw from treasury... the "reason for witdrawl" bar just isn't long enough for a long message hehe

2)- Removal of Pests -while I am not of the PvP mind, i agree there needs to be a way to remove troublemakers. City ban plop them on the border?

3)- Financial Reports - an email telling us how many taxes were taken from what area... should i milk that shuttleport for all it's worth? this will make more sense also after the long term #1 would be in... with the taxes i got from that... would it be worth these fees to keep...trainers and terminals?

Long Term:

1)- Revenue and tax options - taxesfor everything that a player pays for in the city... to include trainers and terminals

2)- Terrain options - It was said that leveling terrain isn't possible.. then how about flat stretches of road that can be placed over it like a park.

3)- Decorations - Along the lines of lowering the cost of decoration... I think street lights need to be made more available...or at a minimum increase the light output immensly. Tho this is probably city specific, since we are in the middle of a forest on Coronet (God awful dark at night)

One note. There seems to be A LOT of agreement here on what needs to be done to make it better. Never seen so many people come up with similar ideas. And I don't think everyone is simply stealing from each other.

Almost to master... This profession needs:

1)militia power changes. We need to have the ability to chose which militia members get to grant zoning rights and which ones don't. This should be a simple fix (PA's already have similar), but until it is done how can I trust my neutral/rebel citizens that are in the militia to NOT grant zoning rights to an entire imperial guild overnight... ( I didn't waste millions of credits andmonths of time to have this taken away from me)

2) a reason to keep it. If They don't give me some reason to keep my skill boxes, then I won't. I want something, otherwise my skill pts are being wasted. Suggestions that I have; defenses(could include dodge, counter attack, and ranged/melee defenses), the powers of a faction recruiter (my favorite idea, and includes the ability to authorize players to go overt), others...

3)a city email. I have been using thefriend list to email all citizens, but that means I can only have my citizens on my friend list. Maybe a list of citizens for the mayor, one that he could chose "Mail all citizens" from...

4) the garage, should already be in, what's the hold up?

Mayor of Amber

Bria Server

70+ citizens