Politician Archive
Thread: Cities Good or Bad? What is the Politicians perspective
)Server lot trades - The reason so many cities are literaly ghost towns is because they are mainly filled with ghost citizens. There are a fair number of mayors who saw the introduction of player cities not as a means of building communities, but more of a means to play SimCity in the SWG game enviroment. This isn't that big of deal on the secondary planets where there are still open city slots, however on the three primary planets, these lot swap cities quickly filled up all the avaiable city slots. What's even worse is that now some of these SimCity inspired mayors, who have now grown board with their city and want to hand over the reigns to someone else, arefinding it impossible to do so due to the way that automatic voting works.
Not allowingthe lowest rankcities to have a shuttleport- Back when player cities were first being introduced, a lot of people pointed out that if the Devs wanted player cities to be build in good locations than the Devs should make it much easier to get a shuttle port. For example, I'm sure on most servers there is a city up near the Krayt Graveyard, and due to the high amount of traffic that is always heading in and out of the graveyard, there is always a lot of activity in this city. Sadly, the Devs didn't listen, and as a consequense, a lotof the original player cities were put within easy walking distance of the NPC cities. (Remember, back when player cities were first implimented, we didn't yet have speeders to get around on.) For example, on my server there is a huge mass of cities between Bestine and Wayfar, and almost all of them have turned into ghost towns. In the age before speeders, there was a lot of foot traffic along this route, however as soon as vehicles were introduced, and especially as soon as the farthest city along the chain got a shuttleport, virtually all traffic along the route dried up.
The inability to modify terrain - This is another contributing factor that has led to cities being placed in poor locations. Rather than having cities placed near prime travelling focal points, players have been forced to search high and low for an out of the way flat piece of terrain that is large enough to hold the planned city. Once again this has resulted in cities being placed in places where players don't go.
Lack of player starports - There's a reason everyone hangs around the NPC cities, and that's because everyone hates waiting for shuttles when they want to head out to one of the adventure planets. Heading out to a player city to do some shopping, or just to do some looking around, can be a relatively big time sink. Especially since shuttle times aren't synced. In fact, on the average outing to a player city to look for some goods to buy, I'd say that more time is spent waiting for shuttles than actually shopping. This is compounded by the massive amount of empty vendors that make shopping such a crap shoot anyways.
Lack of high level content on the three starter planets - As I said ealier, most servers have a fairly active city located near the Krayt Graveyard, and back before the Death Spawn Cycle was nerfed at Fort Tusken, I'm guessing that most servers had a fairly active city near that locale, too. However, besides these few exceptions,there is pretty much no reason for high end players to ever go out hunting on the starter planets, and thus there's no reason to ever use one of the player cities on these three planets as a staging point for a hunt. I think this also explains why on most servers Dantooine is so heavily populated. Just like in the real world, people like to live near where they work.
Lack of city involvement in the GCW - If cities were able to declare to a faction, and architects were able to build attackable faction related structures that could be used to turn a city into a true stronghold, then I think you'd see the PvP crowd putting cities to much more uses.
Cities for the most part are just plain ugly - There needs to be more building types available, more decorations, the ability to put buildings at odd angles, the ability to put down roads or to pave the terrain, and the ability to add walls. The devs also need to find a way to improve the game engine so that it is able torender player cities from a greater distance away. I understand that bandwidth limitations restrict how close a player has to be to a player city before the server can start sending him information on the buildings, however that's no excuse for having the building despawn so quickly. There should be a slider in the options menu that lets a player determine how long his client will continue to render a building that it knows to be there, even though the player has now moved far enough away that the server is no longer sending him actual data on that building. This would allow players to take in the full granduer of player cities without actually putting any more strain on the server.
Making the Politician proffession cost skill points - For a city to be successfull, it needs a good leader, however leadership is not a skill that can be learned simply by putting points into a skill tree. In a sense, leadership can be thought of as a "twitch" skill. You either have it or you don't. By making it take skill points to become a politician, the Devs have created a situation were mayors can be broken down into two groups.Group one, which is quite large, are those mayors who are not interested in being leaders and are insteadinterested only in creating a solo SimCity type situation. The other group are those who have real life leadership skills, and have simply set up an alt character as the mayor of thier PA's city, though the only time they ever actually log in as this mayor is when they need to do some city administration. The problem is, not everyone who has natural leadership skills has a second account to play with. If the skill point cost for Politician was removed, I think you'd see a lot more of these natural leaders jumping into the politcal forum and eventually driving out the "SimCity" mayors.
