Politician Archive
Thread: Um....Baj? I'm not sure this is a good idea on TC...
I think it's a generally good idea, and suggested something similar before. But I think a month (four weeks) should be the lowest time they should consider, as this allows for longer holidays and breaks. It might affect someone that goes overseas for three months, but you'd hope you have enough citizens to cover it until that person returns.
I also don't think the city should lose their mayor if he's inactive for the time, though perhaps the terminal should flag a warning when the mayor does that. It gives time then for the city to mobalise, and vote in a new mayor if they need to. Or if they know he's coming back after two months, they can wait.
Ghost houses should clear up on their own. Even cities in hard to build areas can fit in more than enough houses with planning.
• Citizens will now be removed from a city if they haven't been online for about 6 weeks.
You can't do this (without *seriously* working over cities) unless you also give mayors the ability to REMOVE THESE HOUSES.
My city does not have limitless space. Everything is where it was planned to be. If I now have to go about adding even more citizens because the ones I have don't play, those derelect houses become cancer. The city will shrink due to population loss over time (we really don't need to get into all the reasons why someone might no longer be playing), and I won't be able to do anything about it (unless I start cramming 1-lot houses into the streets just to compensate).
Please do not take this idea live until it is implemented as a maintainable, workable system.
I applaud the efforts of the devs at addressing the issue of cross-server and citizen ghosts but not the approach that they are taking.
I suggest keeping the 3 week (not the 6) of not logging in to unregister a citizen for that player city. All novice politicians would get a command /citizenexemption. At novice level, the politician can exempt one citizen for a period of 3 weeks from being unregistered. At each level of Civic Policy, the politician will get another citizen that they could be placed on /citizenexemption. At master politician, the politician would get 2 citizens to place on this. So a master politician would be allowed to exempt 7 citizens from being removed from the city due to inactivity. If a politician loses the skill, they lose those extra people they could be placed. If a mayor gives up master politician and has 7 people on the exemption list, the two latest individuals would be removed from that list.
How would this command work? Using the city management terminal, the politician would access the Citizen Exemption and then type the citizen the name in. For three weeks, that citizen would be exempt from being unregistered. Once a citizen is placed on that list, they can not be removed. After the three weeks is over, that Citizen Exemption slot would be open for the mayor to place that citizen on the exemption list again, place a new resident or wait until it is needed.
Just my idea how to come up with an acceptable solution and gives us mayors something else to do besides being glorified managers. If you see this idea is bad, post you reasons why. If needs tweaking, tweak it. If good, well, leave that response up to you.
Hey Slug....I think we all get it by now that your stuck at your level. Quit whining here....How many posts are you going to keep making complaining about this....Actually, did you get all of your so called 80 players tosend complaints to SOE? Wait, whats that sound i hear???? Oh, its just the Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaambulance.
I keep reading posts about people suggesting that city levels should be a competition. You know what...it was when this feature came out....Some leveled up and some missed out....And dont blame power gamers for getting cities first...we've already gone over that many times now.
Folks, get real on the mayor beingallowed to remove ghost homes (I would love this feature actually..but...). Sit back fora second and think about it. There will be no way that SOE will allow us to remove someones home/structure in our cities. Remember the /citywarn and why it was removed. SOE wont allow us to control another players account. There are numerous situations of cry-baby mayors destroying city halls....Would you like to give your mayor the ability to also screw the citizens now as well....SOE already has a server memory problem so "storing" there belongings wont happen...Also, y'all are assuming that everyone reads the forums for information...Most dont! So a casual player logs in after an extended period of time and finds all his stuff gone....Now he/she sends a ticket in to the CSR's....a day or so later they may get a response....Sorry, it just wont happen.
Our guild has seen 60% members leave the game over last 60 days. That is not my fault - I cant make the game fun for SOE. now, based on this - we are going to have 50% of town disappear, dropping down in rank. This will mean all of our new members - and active members will be outside of the new lower city limits. Thus, they will need to move all their houses.
Newton13 wrote:
I should lose these paying customers? They should lose their stuff because they're being punished IRL for some reason or another?
So we're talking about "non-destructive" scenerio that I'd cited. Instead of "virtual" ghost towns, we have real ones.
Still not a good idea. If I'm losing citizens for ANY reason, I need room to replace them. If my borders shrink and the inner ring is full of non-citizens..
Gee thanks. So SOE is allowed to grief us instead of players? How would this be different than a hostile takeover or a group deciding that a ring of nasty-named harvesters looked good around my City Hall (if I were dumb enough to disable zoning) ?
Wanna know what might stop alot of the complaints?
Lower the shuttleport requirements to a level 3 city.
I was wondering if the 6 weeks posted on the Test Centre Forum patch notes is more recent than the 3 weeks posted on the In Testing section of the website. If so, is this a concession to people being concerned about 3 weeks being too short for casual gamers?
Apart from that, I think the devs really need to look at what they are trying to achieve with this change, and then consider the impact it will actually have.
Is it, as most people assume, an attempt to remove cross-server citizens from helping a city taking a spot that counts against the big city cap? If so, I don't think this code will actually achieve that.
By nature, the people that are interested in cross-server trading have some sort of power-gamer mentality. This means that they are likely to not be concerned about having to log in once every 3-6 weeks to numerous servers to maintain citizenship. They either have time or can make time to do that. I'm not saying its the case for all cross-server traders, but I suggest that it would hold true for most. So immediately, the group that this change is assumed to be targetting are the ones that find it easiest to work around the new rule.
As many people have stated in this thread, it is the casual gamers who will be lost as citizens. The people that turn up now and then to have a look at the new things, or who play weekends but can just as easily skip three or four weekends in a row due to other committments. These people generally have the most trouble with the maintenance aspects of the game, sometimes need help with paying their house maintenance, don't run harvesters or anything because they can't log in enough to look after them. They generally use up the least database and server resources, but pay the same subscription fees as everyone else.
Unless the suggested property removal is implemented, the casual gamer themselves won't really be impacted by the new rule. There are no real direct benefits to citizens that visitors to the city do not experience, except for the ability to store items in your house, or open a vendor in that city.
Instead, cities will suffer for having casual residents. Maybe the interview process for new citizens will start including the question "How often do you play?" Perhapsthe gap between casual and power gamers willwiden a little more. New or casual players will lose the chance to be a part of the great community that a city can be, while mayors will be balls of nerves looking for reliable citizens that like the game.
Wise powergamers will look for even more cross-server citizens, since they will be better able to rely on other powergamers than casual gamers. Cities will be deprived of their periodic citizens, so will be less active, not more.
Me personally, I have a large city of over 90 residents.We have a "live" city, but I believe it is alive because of the vendors, not because all of our residents are always there and active. We have enough citizens that run vendors and spend time in town doing so, that there is almost always someone around, as well as customers looking at those vendors. The Imperial bases also provide a focus where people can run missions from the city, and to a lesser degree the regular mission terminals, less because my city is on Naboo and most people like to hunt on advanced planets. Again, its not always or even usually citizens running these missions.
We also have alot of people who I never see in the city. A number of those seem to do most of their hunting on advanced planets, but at least some of them have to be casual gamers. We have 5 guilds and a large number of unguilded citizens living in our city, so in the most part I do not know everyone's schedule. I do know that at least three people from my guild will probably lose their citizenship when the change goes live. Still, we'd have to lose 35 citizens to lose the shuttleport, which I don't think will happen, and the shuttleport is the thing that brings crafters and customers in and keeps the city alive.
If you want cities to be alive, add in something like that great idea I read on these forums about Mayors being able to create quest NPCs for RP and questing in the cities. Players will go where they can get something that is useful to them. Make a quest engine for players to create their own quests in cities, make it so they can give worthwhile rewards, and cities will be active. A player-based economy, combined with the tools to deliver to customers while the crafter is offline (vendors), is one of the best things this game has for player interaction. Add more things like that.
If you just want to reduce the amount of large cities that are only large because of cross-server citizens, then address that directly. Make it so you can only declare citizenship on 1 galaxy, or even on 2 or 3 to cover people who legitimately play on more than one server. Or make it so that you have to have played for X hours before you can declare, as suggested by others on this thread. Although, I feel that the power gamers will just macro a character for however long is needed to get those play hours and be able to swap.
There needs to be a better solution than what has been proposed to be fair to all players.
"Hey Slug....I think we all get it by now that your stuck at your level"
I'm the mayor of a rank 4 city with 62 citizens and no quick plans to get to metropolis, so do your homework and come back.