Politician Archive
Thread: Letter to my citziens about the structure maint. change feel free to copy please post yours too!
Feel free to copy the letter or parts of it, don't forget to change the city name or my references to particular incidents in our city or you may look like an idiot 
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Citizens of Helios,
This is not a regular Helios Update - in the regular Helios updates I try hard stay in character. This however is not a regular Helios update by all means so please excuse me of writing OOC.
There is a horrible change on Test Center that will have a drastic impact on player cities including Helios in a very negative way. At first glance the change may not read that bad:
"All maintenance fees will automatically attempt to deduct from Bank accounts after the maintenance pool has been depleted. Once a structure reaches 0 hitpoints, it will flag itself as condemned instead of deleting itself. Condemned houses are not enterable, and all other structures are not usable. To uncondemn a house, simply enter it with enough money in the bank to pay the repair cost. To uncondemn all other structures, use them with enough money in the bank to pay the costs."
What this effectivly means for cities is that houses of inactive players will stay forever and never collapse. We already struggle with ghost houses on our main street from people not disciplined enough to remove their shops when they quit or switch the galaxy. With this change such houses will never ever collapse.
You may encounter people pointing to the character purge. The automatic character purge is not active yet. It is scheduled to go on test "in the next few months" and even if it will be implemented it would still only purge houses of players after six months - which is far too long - and it won't affect houses of players that switched the galaxy or reactivate their accounts from time to time - or playing other Sony Online games using the station pass. E.g. we just recently had a house on main street south that was placed with the help of a lot swap. It collapsed last month. If this patch would have been live at that time it would have never collapsed. One of the main issues of the City Council are empty houses from inactive players on our two main shopping streets. This patch will turn a major headache into an uncurable cancer.
The politician forum is up in arms. But the politicians only are only a small force.We need the help of our citizens to protest this change. Most politicians - including me - are not entirely against this new concept - but implementing it without remedial actions to prevent turning cities into empty ghost towns will be the death of many player cities. Even in a large and active city like Helios it will slowely but surely cripple our two main streets.
Please help to prevent this catastrophy from taking place and make your voice heard on the official forums!
Ronen
Mayor ad interim
Message Edited by Rehavam on 01-20-2005 08:16 PM