Politician Archive
Thread: #1 issue: Politician Gameplay and Skills. Submit your solutions.
There are a lot of tools that I would love to have as a politician. Simplefeatures that would come in handy to help me keep track of the city, or delegate responsibility.
1) Mailing alias. I find myself week after week wishing I had an easy way to email the people that I want to without having to hunt down their names. Sometimes I want to be able to just email the city council, or just the artisans, or just the hunters. Right now, I have to keep track of who is who, mostly by sending notes to myself which fill up my email box.
2) Cut and paste. I'm a recovering perfectionist. I would love to be able to compose my weekly reports, stories, announcements, memos and such offline, then cut/paste them into an email in the game. I would also love to be able to cut/paste from an email in the game, into a text file to be saved off-game.
3) Logging. We had our first city meeting last night. No way to log, and I sat there being chair with my notebook and pen in hand while trying to run a meeting and take minutes, then had to turn around and send out said minutes to the rest of the city.
4) Titles and positions. I would love the ability to set specific titles, and duties, to the other players in the city. We just elected a Huntmaster, a Treasurer, our own 'Rebel Coordinator', and I have a list of positions that I want filled in the city. (Secretary, Public Relations, Newbie Helper, Event Coordinator, the list is endless.) The ability to grant a title, and the ability to give these individuals the ability to mass mail would save so much time and headaches and allow us to get to the fun parts.
5) Message boards in game. I'll definitely second this one. Perhaps even add a calender as well. I'm finding a lot of other cities are running as a consensus or democracy.
6) MOTD. Another second on this issue.
7) Spellcheck. I like having all my i's dotted and t's crossed, and I think that a lot of roleplayers out there are like that as well.
8) Awards and recognition. Perhaps allow a politician to award their own badge to a character, or otherwise recognize outstanding civic duty.
9) City chat. A definite must for city wide communication without having to add everyone to one guild, and without having to exclude anyone in a city by not being in a guild.
10) NPC's. Having been a storyteller for well over a decade, I second the ability to be able to place and run NPC missions. I just cannot figure out any decent way of doing this short of becoming a Dev.
So much of my time is wasted in paperwork, imagine that. I go on to play my politician character only to do business, then I leave and play one of my other ones. Not because I don't enjoy it, but after four hours of doing nothing but paperwork, or city business, or making sure everyone is taken care of, is stops being fun and moves straight into work really fast, and it never ends. There is none of the up sides of being a politician right now. I get to place fountains, rearrange the city, and beg the city to give me input beyond, 'we love you, your doing a great job, now when do we get our shuttleport?'
I don't have much trouble making it fun, I have more trouble finding the time to have fun. We've have our own rival city with a wonderful mayor that is a roleplayer much like myself. We hold events that cross planets, with many more to come. I just want the tools to make the job that I do go faster, to allow for more game play rather than the frustration of doing little more than mass emailing and spamming the poor citizens of our city.
I want more communication tools in game. At this point, I'd just be happy with personal mailing aliases and cut/paste. A lot of this can go with different politician levels as well. Additional mailing aliases with each level, additional NPCs, additional badges that be awarded of specific types (Good Citizen of Such and Such City at the basics, maybe personalized later one), additional different types of message boards, the ability to type more than three lines of text (I'm longwinded, maybe that's why they choose me to be mayor?) and give a real speech, more assistants, give admin rights over the treasury, over zoning, over citizenship.
Well, I can dream, can't I?
Lady Illyria, Mayor of Firelake Stronghold, Talus. Kauri server.
In the milita brach of the politican tree could be used to involve your city is the GCW. At the third box you get to place a rebel/imperial diplomat. This diplomat is the citys link to GCW.
Players may donate faction points to the city using the diplomat. Then the mayor can spend the city's fp on things like a stormtrooper regiment to patrol the city or rebel NPC missions. You really have infinte city faction perk ideas that could be installed in the city.
Nostradamus Smyth
Here are a few other ideas I'd like to post for people to consider before this thread closes down. The property tax idea has been suggested before by many people but I don't think it's been mentioned here yet.
- Allow separate property tax for houses, factories, and harvesters
- Allow mayor to setup various zones within a city where only certain types of structures may be placed (buildings already placed become grandfathered).
This way even with zoning rights disabled you have some level of control over the placement of structures within your city.
This could be accomplished through a mayor /setzone zonename command which would bring up a screen similar the structure placement screen with a default zone footprint.
- Free Zoning (all types of buildings are allowed)
- Residential (houses, gardens)
- Commercial (vendor tents, bank, cantina, theatre, hospital, cloning facility, shuttleport, etc...)
- Industrial (factories, harvesters only)
- Free Zoning (all types of buildings are allowed)
HiroBlack: "there has really been only one suggestion with that kind of depth. Your Diplomat idea."
Thanks for saying so. I can tell you now that the feedback on that idea from the devs was positive, they were interested in ways to give politicians more gameplay, but that the schedule simply doesn't allow them to get started on something that development heavy at this point. For anything like that, we've been asked to keep the ideas, don't lose them. I am working on a way to bank the great concepts, suggestions, and system proposals that come out of this forum for a future time when the devs are ready to addess a large-scale addition to the politician profession.
For now, you may be exactly right that boiling our number one concern down to one simple feature addition may be sending the wrong signal, that we can be satisfied so easily. But here's what we've got to do: boil this issue down so that a dev with three or five minutes between meetings can quickly "get it", digest what we want and evaluate his ability to help us with it. I think a statement about our general desire for more ongoing gameplay opportunities such as the one I posted above might be that kind of thing, and then when they are ready, I'll be there to barage them with our ideas and the creative solutions that come out of this community.
Given that, beyond raising the awareness of the devs regarding our desire for more ongoing gameplay, is there something that we want to directly request from them at the top of our list. We're going to be able to get their attention here for a moment. What do we want to spend that attention capital on?
Bajeezus wrote:
I can tell you now that the feedback on that idea from the devs was positive, they were interested in ways to give politicians more gameplay, but that the schedule simply doesn't allow them to get started on something that development heavy at this point.
As the devs have seen your idea and submittedpositive feedback to you onitI feel better about substituing something which can be developed more rapidly.
Bajeezus wrote:
For now, you may be exactly right that boiling our number one concern down to one simple feature addition may be sending the wrong signal, that we can be satisfied so easily.
I was not so concerned about us appearing to be easily satisfied as I was of appearing to be crying that the sky was falling, then following up with "Can we have lollipops?"when they ask us how to fix it (that's not a knock against any of the simple and clever ideas here, just an exadgeration to make a point and/or elicit a chuckle). If I were a dev and heard talk of serious issues that need to be addressed, agreed with those issues, and then got a very simple solution to the issue that didn't appear to match the problem I'd be confused. Again, you having an open line of communication to the devs changes things considerably.
Bajeezus wrote:
...is there something that we want to directly request from them at the top of our list. We're going to be able to get their attention here for a moment. What do we want to spend that attention capital on?
That is pretty tough for us to respond to without really understanding the game mechanics in ways only the developer can. We don't really have a good way to judge the level of work to implement a given feature beyond common sense, and any droid engineer forum follower can tell you that the systems that drive this game are sometimes surprisingly complex to do the simplest things.
That said I would probably prefer to put forward the Politician buff idea, implemented to allow a master Politician to "give a speech" that was capable of imparting a tangible and desirable combat oriented bonus upon a group of players within a set radius (60m?). Nothing game imbalancing (attack speed bonus? ideal range modifier?), but tangible and sought after - something we can suggest they donate to the city coffers for in exchange for the buff. That would remove some of the financial sting of running a high level city for the Politician without removing the money sink. And the buff should not overlap or be redundant to those given by other professions (particularly Squad Leader).
- Acroyear
Bajeezus wrote:As far as all the big pie-in-the-sky stuff, I'm thinking of phrasing that something like this:
There is a great desire in the Politician community as well as numerous suggestions for ways to get politicians interacting with other politicians from other player cities, from planetary councils, to diplomacy systems, anything that will provide ongoing, player-to-player politician gameplay beyond placement of facilities and granting of permissions. When the development time is available, the Politician community is extremely eager to suggest profession design solutions that will make us more than just facilitators and give us some real on-going gameplay.
Great wording, but I'd suggest one tiny change. Your statement mentions getting politicians involved with each other, but many of the great ideas in this thread are also politician-to-citizens play.
If we're voting for one relatively easy thing to implement, I'm going with the community bulletin board feature.
This could have an interface similar to the bazaar (except much simpler) where people could browse the titles of messages and examine the ones they wanted to read more about. Only citizens should be able to pay a fee to post messages. This would be a great way to promote events, advertize, set up trades, and help citizens communicate with their neighbors. If they wanted to get a little more complex, they could let the poster of the message choose who could view it, they could set viewing rights to everyone, citizens only, or even only members of their faction (that way factional towns could use their messages to promote raids or other faction events without making it easy for the wrong eyes to see).
Okay my top five choices for realistic improvements would have to be these:
1. City Chat Channel
2. Politician Buff to skill/def mods (put them on the skill tree so that at each lvl you can buff something new and better) For example: Lvl 1 Pois/Disease resist Lvl 2 Block/Dodge adds Lvl 3 Melee/Range Def adds Lvl 4 Speed/Accuracy adds Master say the ability to raise all in one buff or something I may have missed.
3. Master getting discount on maintenance fees
4. Placing Bulletin Board Terminal and/or Bazaar Terminal
5. Make all furniture and crafting stations decorations that can be placed outside. Also increase the caps of decorations in cities so we can have well lit nice looking cities.
ACK! Sorry for post flood!
1. Politician Skill Enhancements
This would basically be a motivational speach that a politician could give. I would suggest only at Master Level or one of the IV boxes. The buff could be related to the tag the personwas wearing. So if a Novice Pistoleer gets the buff, then his pistol speed would go up 5-10 points for a period of an hour or two.
Combine this with Doctors, Dancers, and Musicians and it would be possible to get SUPER ENHANCED. Players would love this and would flock to player cities, hounding the Mayor for buffs. A savy Mayor could charge for this service and put that money into the city. There could also be a crafting component involved here. Mr. Mayor would have to get some resources together to craft his Declaration or Speach. Each speech could have 20 uses and could be given to a target, or to a group.
The politician buffs would only work inside the city and only by the mayor of that town.
Let my main charbe a player and a mayor. Current skill points requirements inhibit that. Even with the above suggestions, once you hit master you have no use for more PoliXP.
Cut the skill points required way down (so I can be morethan mayor)but... make me spend Politician xp to do my mayoral actions. This will make me always strive to be a good mayor, to always want more votes/points.
Let's find ways to 'spend' that PoliXP.
-Need to place a shuttleport? you need the (reduced-cost) skill box + 2500 xp.
-Switch the specialization? you need the (reduced-cost) skill box + 2500 xp.
-Sell 100xp back to the city terminal for 1000cr deposit into the treasury.
-Buy a 'purple' small plant or one of those other paintings for 500xp
-Advertise a city event on a sign: 500xp
Basically allow them to be spent like faction points. You need to be a higher ranked mayor because otherwise you're xp will be capped and won't be able to accumulate as much PoliXP to buy the really cool things.
Keh' Icoh
This is a fantastic idea.
Kerico wrote:
Cut the skill points required way down (so I can be morethan mayor)but... make me spend Politician xp to do my mayoral actions. This will make me always strive to be a good mayor, to always want more votes/points.
LadyIllyria wrote:
There are a lot of tools that I would love to have as a politician. Simplefeatures that would come in handy to help me keep track of the city, or delegate responsibility.
2) Cut and paste. I'm a recovering perfectionist. I would love to be able to compose my weekly reports, stories, announcements, memos and such offline, then cut/paste them into an email in the game. I would also love to be able to cut/paste from an email in the game, into a text file to be saved off-game.
This is already in game ... go to options (ctrl+o) -> Controls -> Keymap -> All - and rebind the options "Chat Edit Copy" and "Chat Edit Paste" to Keycombinations of your choice (I have put my character sheet on shift+ctrl+c and the map on shift+ctrl+v and have copy and paste on the windows standard of ctrl+c and ctrl+v)
3) Logging. We had our first city meeting last night. No way to log, and I sat there being chair with my notebook and pen in hand while trying to run a meeting and take minutes, then had to turn around and send out said minutes to the rest of the city.
type /logChat ... or just /log and all your chats will be saved to a text file in one of your SWG Folders ... in SWG/profiles/[AccountName]/[ServerName]/[CharacterName]_chatlog.txt you will find everything with timestamp and Chat Channel it was posted in
10) NPC's. Having been a storyteller for well over a decade, I second the ability to be able to place and run NPC missions. I just cannot figure out any decent way of doing this short of becoming a Dev.
Create a simple Macro to create and join a public or even privat chat that even has a Message that can be used as "Message of the Day" ...
/chat create SWG.Gorath.Chat.KC 0 1 "\#3399ffKheraba-City.de \#ffffff- Big Event in Cantina today";
/pause 1;
/chat join SWG.Gorath.Chat.KC;
... for a public chat - and for private:
/chat create SWG.Gorath.Chat.KC 0 0 "\#3399ffKheraba-City.de \#ffffff- City Members Only";
/pause 1;
/chat join SWG.Gorath.Chat.KC;
/chat invite PlayerName01 SWG.Gorath.KC;
/chat invite PlayerName02 SWG.Gorath.KC;
/chat invite PlayerName03 SWG.Gorath.KC;
...
agreed, Kerico that is just inspired
Bajeesus i know this is coming in a bit last minute but this deserves some serious attention as an idea i have to say personally im running out of reasons to carry on being mayor ....the city is pretty much finished in terms of structures and layout ill be master next week and after that.....to be honest me and a few other mayors have been discussing retiring to a village well make on naboo or something yknow to get away from all the tells and mails with no reward, but this xp idea of kerico's could well be a good reason for carrying on being a poli