Politician Archive
Thread: News Flash: Planetary Caps Leaked
I'm not saying I dislike the idea. I'm just saying that they should have told us BEFORE we spent all this years planning our own city.
When I see the city mechanics, I see this is what will happen on heavily populated planets:
1) A 150m radius where the outpost was initially planned. All the houses will follow some design plan in this area.
2) Outside of this radius, a lot of people will build, trying to get inside the city. They will build as close as possible to the city hall, and there will be LOTS of houses in this area. No plan or design will be followed in this area. And the mayor won't be able to do anything to prevent this.
2) Most of the carefully designed cities will end up in the hands of some other group of PAs, an alliance quite probably. Few city hall owners will remain as mayors on the third week (level 3 city).
NikkiT wrote:
Plinka wrote:
According to Deep Snout the big three planets will be limited to 10 new cities each, while the other buildable planets will each support 25 new cities.
Hm, so 130 cities per server...should be enough. I'm a bit disappointed though that there are only 10 cities per major planet, but I think it is an opportunity for Rori and Talus...honestly who ever spents more time there than necessary to maintain a harvester? Maybe people will move to these less used planets.
Well, there are limits as to how much information any server can handle. Cities take up a lot of information / data. However, thats not to say that anything is "written in stone" either. If there is any additional balancing to be done, bring it up to myself or Plinka and we'll see what can be done. Lets not jump to conclusions though. Lets see how the Player Cities launch goes and we'll go from there.
When is the launch ? I need to book my time off work to sit at the comp staring at the screen waiting for the server to come back up. We can do the entire proccess in about 10 to 15 minutes once we are in. Can you at least tell us if its going to be wednesday (tommorow) ? If I dont get enough time to book off then I will have to pull a sicky and you can explain to my boss the reason 
Seriously though. We have 110 buildings in our city right now and if we dont get a cityhall down its going to be a travesty.
Well this issue has just forced those of us who have a city in the "outskirts" to go train politician and haul our a$$ to our PA location and hope that nobody else dropped their City Hall yet.
DISGUSTING that you would drop this crap on people so close to the patch. You should have allowed MUCH more time for players to talk to one another for a possible solution amongst ourselves at least so there won't be a "gold rush" type scenario 10 min after the servers come up.
Train in polictican, wait for a shuttle, then RUN FOREST RUN.
Poor planning by the devs and/or poor communication by the devs.
Plinka gave the two options:
1) Limit the number of cities at first, or
2) Wait another month to release cities.
The correct answer is 2.
I won't argue that cities are something you earn, but to make people earn them based on how quickly they can log in a get a city hall down is something I can only describe in words that will get filtered here.
I'm willing to wait a month for cities in order to ensure we can get our city hall down without having to rush it out there.
This decision to penalize players because your system is not up to the task is wonderful customer service. I like everyone else in this thread will be very quick to cancel my account if my PA can not get our city started on the first day.
I posted this on another thread but will place it here as well. It is the best solution in my opinion...
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Let people place city halls for exactly 24 hours after the patch. Those people thathave dedicated time into getting resources readywill place their cities down. Thosepeople with knee jerk reactions who want to flood thelandscape with cities will not have time to do this. Then after the 24 hours assess how many player cities are down and on server up say how many more cities can be placed on eachplanet given the stats you have.
THIS is fair andthose people that have been waiting months... nay Years for this will not miss out as they will be ready. The possible griefers and land fillers will be leftout in the cold with not enough time to make up city halls.
This is a MUCH better solution IMHO.
Regards
"Lets see how the Player Cities launch goes and we'll go from there."
TH, what you're doing is basically ENFORCING MANDATORY LOGON at a specific hour ona specific day to get something out of the game. So long for casuals. SoE is going the HCG way all the way, Jedi, cities, these items that took a lot of development time are going to profit the HCG only. In that case, it means they get more out of the game, while we're waiting for our issues to be solved, they get the benefits of the game.
Competition in SWG now can be summed up with "who can log first". Great. 
Plinka wrote:
I'd like to take a moment to further explain the current situation.
There's currently a very real database limitation that says how many player cities that can exist at the momemt. This cap will be raised in the next publish but for now it's what we have to work with.
Well then even out the cap ... make it 20 on every planet ...
... and I thought this was the next publish ... but since the "new hardware" on servers like Gorath didn't seem to make anything better (extrem laag ... still extensive long loading times after server down ... which makes me even more uncomfortable with these plans) I don't have any faith in this glimps of hope that is trying to be brought to us here
Given that, there are a couple of choices:
1. Release cities with a planetary cap
2. Don't release cities for another month.
While I can't speak for everyone, my vote goes with option one. Luckily, this is the option the developers have chosen as well.
What does this mean?
It means that Cities are going to have to be the cooperative effort of large groups of people. (Part of the design anyway) This is particularly true on the three most populated planets.
No ... you have to be a rival to get a city ... it's a race, no time for "cooperation" and gatherings of large groups ...
It means that the lesser used planets will start seeing more use. This too is a Good Thing(tm).
It means that politicians are going to have to actually be politicians. They are going to have to win votes and not expect to just be a politician mule. This, to my mind, is a VERY Good Thing(tm).
Win votes? I think it will rather end up in tricking the system (granting zonerights ...checking the number of "loyal citizens" to not expand ... baning unloyal citzens so they can't enter the city hall to vote) all to stay in power
It means that the big three planets will be a political arena where campaigning and voting are real gameplay elements. Again, a VERY Good Thing(tm).
Sorry, but I just don't see this coming, I just expect to see more griefing and domination of lucky players
Cities and the Politician class were never intended to be a reward for having played since the beginning. They weren't designed to be something every PA has. They also weren't supposed to be easy for everyone to "own." Ownership of the city is meant for the hands of its citizens and the care of the city for the hand of the person ELECTED to be caretaker.
Holo said cities were supposed to be plateforms for the fans to create their own communities ... now these already created communities will likely be shattered
Yes, there will be a lot of people disappointed to not have their personal city right away. But there are, built into the city and politician system, options for those very people.
The political game is upon us. How will you play the game?
Quote:
"Lets see how the Player Cities launch goes and we'll go from there. "
I have a better idea... since its pretty darn obvious you should have known of these limitations months ago.
There will be an insane land rush as soon as the dervers come up... those of us working will have ZERO chance of getting our town set up.
Since we built our towns out in the wilderness there is NO chance that they will survive waiting for you to let up make them into cities (with no clue how long a wait, or even IF you will), plus the extra 3 weeks for shuttle port capability.
I, and Im sure many others have dedicated weeks/month getting ready for this... with absolutely NO warning from you that this would happen.
If this goes the way i expect it to, Im sure I won't be the only one letting SOE "See how it goes..." without me.
Thunderheart wrote:
NikkiT wrote:
Plinka wrote:
According to Deep Snout the big three planets will be limited to 10 new cities each, while the other buildable planets will each support 25 new cities.
Hm, so 130 cities per server...should be enough. I'm a bit disappointed though that there are only 10 cities per major planet, but I think it is an opportunity for Rori and Talus...honestly who ever spents more time there than necessary to maintain a harvester? Maybe people will move to these less used planets.
Well, there are limits as to how much information any server can handle. Cities take up a lot of information / data. However, thats not to say that anything is "written in stone" either. If there is any additional balancing to be done, bring it up to myself or Plinka and we'll see what can be done. Lets not jump to conclusions though. Lets see how the Player Cities launch goes and we'll go from there.
If we wait for the launch of Player Cities, and they go as horribly wrong as we believe they will, it'll be too late to fix them. You can't expect those of us that lose out to believe that you'll delete the existing ones that won, or that you'll just up and increase the cap right away?
Once you release Player Cities and they launch, you can't take them back. Once the 'database' is 'maxed' (as it currently stands) there is nothing you can do to correct it, short of fixing the database to hold more. But how long will that take? and how many PA's will be ready for their 2nd or 3rd PA owned city by the time you increase the database capabilities?
As long as you make short jumps in the limits, giving out only a few more cities with each patch, the big PA's will consistantly eat them up and chew them up.
If you've still got them, check your statistics. How many Master Architects were there after the 1st month? and how many of those were in large PA's vs independant? If I recall... there were PA halls on the 'first' day (second day.. but the game didnt work on the first day!)