Politician Archive
Thread: Anyone NOT HAPPY that inactivity rule is gone temporarily?
I'm glad it's gone. Not because I'm worried about our citizens being active (about 95% of them are), but because it was implemented badly and without forethought to various issues which plague keeping a city happy and running. It was implemented without explanation of its specific details, which left mayors guessing (and in some cases, praying) about these details.
It was not implemented correctly to stop cross-server lot-trading, if that was its intent (which I believe it was not). Cross-server lot-traders are active, and will simply take 5 mins to hop over to another server and be active for a few mins, thus satisfying the criteria. So, I don't believe that was the case.
I think this rule was a 'cleanup' of the various city rosters which were incorrect, which it did accomplish. Our city's roster is now clean of double-members and have-totally-left-the-game-house-has-disappeared members. It now fairly accurately reflects the true population of our city, which has made me very happy.
The removal of this hodgepodge implementation is for the best. The only reason some people wanted it was so their cities could advance. So perhaps they'll just raise the city cap instead.
PsychoticChipmunk wrote:
I think this was the plan all along. Put it in so all the lot swap homes get de-citizenized (screwing over some for the greater good) then pull it out to be "tweaked" never to return unless lot swapping becomes a big deal. After all, now those cancerous homes aren't getting upkeep (and may be taxed to oblivion)so they will disappear in a few months helping the server database.
I'm very glad it's gone....as it is, a citizen decided to move their house and we nearly lost rank 4 by four hours and one citizen. I'm not pleased with the lack of communication about it....what exactly is "temporarily"? Should I be recruiting every warm body that can drop a house to fill a spot for when it comes back? What's to be done about the death spiral for cities who's older (and thus more central) population has left, leaving dead houses behind? If we had lost rank 4, it's entirely likely that we could not have regained it until some of the houses decayed. Remember that your radius shrinks, and you lose those citizens outside that radius as well as any civic structures. The potential is there for an otherwise healthy city to be leveled by inactive houses. Bad Thing.
I was referencing ghost town mayors who were supplying the 10k a month or so cost of having small homes in their town who's owners have left. These will be destroyed since their purpose is gone beyond excess storage at a pretty good cost. The 6 which you reference were not intended to be addressed with this publish and honestly you shouldn't expect the game to solve this since it is a political issue and time to start up the Ari Fleischer translator. So in a few months a lot of lot swap homes who went inactive or just make an alt, drop a home, declare then delete houses will no longer exist. I have 1 of them that I use as a storage shed (I put more then a few months worth at the start to help her out since she was a newb but apparently she quit the server or all together.) and so I'll drop it when the maint runs out rather then keep it on like I would have otherwise.
jemelby wrote:
PsychoticChipmunk wrote:
I think this was the plan all along. Put it in so all the lot swap homes get de-citizenized (screwing over some for the greater good) then pull it out to be "tweaked" never to return unless lot swapping becomes a big deal. After all, now those cancerous homes aren't getting upkeep (and may be taxed to oblivion)so they will disappear in a few months helping the server database.
I was pretty pleased with the concept, but the execution was horendous. Going into first purge, I had 147 citizens. I lost 23 on the first pass. None of these were a suprise. Total, after three passes, I lost 25. Of those 25, only 4 of the houses have poofed. 6 are being actively maintained by uncooperative non-citizen players, and 15 I expect to see poof eventually.
There were many problems with this plan. First they are unable to proved new content quick enough to make many old players keep paying to play. Most of their customer base is old players. This causes more unpaid accounts than new accounts being opened. This means most cities are losing active citizen quicker than they can replace them. Player cities are a very important part of the game. Players on the edge of quiting may be pushed over that edge by losing their city services they worked hard to obtain. The suits don't like this one bit and may have had a role in this rules removal.
The second problem is one of land. People quit the game faster than their houses go away. House maintanence is too cheap and they can easially pay up for 6 months until the space expansion comes out. This is a very commen occurance with people leaving the game. They like the game and are willing to play more when there is more content to keep them from getting bored, ie space. This leaves cities with a lot of structures yet little land. Then once a city falls in rank they lose even more land. It creates a domino effect that doesn't leave many options to rebuild other than a full relocation.
Before (when Poli was first introduced) the Politician profession was a very competitive one, now it's dead! I originally made an alt so I could vacation from all the /tells and emails that would bombard me. Now I play my alt to have fun.... I miss being a wanted Mayor! 
When is PreLaunch or Bejeezus gonna tell us which planet and city on TC!!!!!!!!!??? LOL