Politician Archive
Thread: Inactive List Should be tied to housing
If the devs cannot/willnot remove the houses of inactive citizens - it is very damaging to remove them from the citizenship of that city. I understand the benefits of the inactive citizen rule - but it should be tied one way or the other- to thier house.
As it is, a city losses citizens, but potentially has no geographic space to add more citizens to reclaim their loss. It's all arbitrary - 6 weeks inactive, city caps, one week update, etc. The Devs have much room to change how they do this.
Message Edited by ArthurP on 03-27-2004 09:16 AM
ArthurP wrote:
However, - and this is a BIG HOWEVR.... If a player is paying SOE a monthly bill, AND thier house is paid up in maintenance - they have EVERY reason to expect to be able to come back to the game with their character, status and inventory and they way they left it.
dhcpSilicon wrote:
If they're inactive to the point of losing their citizenship, their house and all the goods contained therein should be thrown into a pack in their inventory. They can then place it when they come back.
There are people whose houses are engulfed by growing cities, or who are members of other cities, and never have citizenship to begin with. Why are they any different? If someone pays maintenance, goes to fight in Iraq for a while, and comes home, would you uproot everything they own?
This still gets back to the mayor-as-God thing. The city is a political structure laid OVER the underlying system of house ownership. It doesn't supersede it.
Karquile wrote:
dhcpSilicon wrote:
If they're inactive to the point of losing their citizenship, their house and all the goods contained therein should be thrown into a pack in their inventory. They can then place it when they come back.
There are people whose houses are engulfed by growing cities, or who are members of other cities, and never have citizenship to begin with. Why are they any different? If someone pays maintenance, goes to fight in Iraq for a while, and comes home, would you uproot everything they own?
This still gets back to the mayor-as-God thing. The city is a political structure laid OVER the underlying system of house ownership. It doesn't supersede it.
- The one on Lok is in a player city and is my declared residence.
- The one on Naboo is in a player city and used to be my declared residence, until I redeclared in Lok.
- The one on Rori has been engulfed by a player city, but is not and never has been my residence.
- The one on Tatooine is outside the boundary of any player city.
Your vote count does not trump my property rights.
It is a disaster for a city to be the size of a Metropolis LOOSE services and be left with a ghost town. Hmm just like most NPC cities - we don't see THEM loosing Shuttles, Starports, Bazaars, etc.
DEVS PLEASE DROP THE INACTIVE RULE. This isa GRIEF plain and simple. Whether you revoke citizenship or pull up a house to reclaim land - you are GRIEFING someone arbitrarily. Do away with the whole inactive plan. If a customer is paid up on both their game bill and house maintenance - they should FULLY expect to be able to come back to the game as they left it.
Or are some paying customers more important than others?
You know what is funny, is all these people who love this rule and are drooling over leveling their city don't realize one simple thing, the piper always get paid. No mater when you build your city and no mater how much you grow it up, you will be in this situation. Lots of structures, few citizens and no land. It isn't a matter of if, but one of WHEN. Those wanting a shuttleport so bad and saying how great this is need to really think about this, because it will hit them.
For me I am on Dantoonie and we did not lot swap and no leveling problems. All those 90 some people were real players. Now we are down to 80 because a few people quit. Now we hit the domino effect where we lose everyone one in the 400-450m radius and land locked 400m and under. We just go down down down even though we have the people.
If we lose the citizens, then we need to gain the land back some how. The player base is shrinking, anyone can see that. You will lose more people during this time than you can hope togain.This rule does nothing but point that out. Houses are not just cheap, but free. Any Coronetspamer will tell you that, even though they are afk.It is bad enough that you lose a friend, but then you get to lose a city to boot. It is just WoW, how stupid can the Devs be. This is one of those cases where the suits need to step in and doing something right for the game and their business, i.e. not to alienate their remaining customers by taking away something they worked hard for because their friends have quit. There is a second domino affect in play here, and the second one has to do with people quiting the game, not losing citizens.
This is a hard issue for me. On one side I am a retired soldier - and I truly understand being deployed and not having access to our accounts while serving our country. Also, rl issues can come up - accidents, illness, etc. On the other side, I am also a mayor and have the same problems as others with land filled with empty houses of players I know have quit the game to go play EQ or other such stuff. We truly need to come up with a balanced solution to SOE on this.
For example, if I know that a player quit to play another game, why cannot I not identify them to SOE? On the other hand, many of us know who is in the military in our cities (if we truly are an interested mayor) and could identify them to SOE also. The unknowns we would just have to live with, because we do not know if rl has them in a bind atm.
Brainstorm on this.
Cettina
the solution is really simple. Create an algorithm.
if SOE created an algorithm that measured how often a player logs on( if the acct is still active), the housing situation within any given city, the cities traffic based upon 1) residents 2) proximity to a POI or other traffic inducing landmarks 3) terminal usage 4) shuttle usage 5) credits generated by taxes, etc...
It willeffectivly find a pattern in there, and hence a formula... to lay plans for which cities need help and do it on a case by case basis. the many hours wouldnt be alot on soe's part after the initial release of this because the closer we get to se, the more people will be coming online to play this POS, bug filled RL money sink of a garbage can game. (or so we hope)
Sony's Answer to our problems?
You want fries with that? It's a shame.