Politician Archive

I have posted this in both politician and cities/housing forums because it deeply involves both. I love playing this game, but over the last year I find myself less and less motivated to play it compared to the first year when I started at launch. The CU is a the first thing about this game that has generated real excitement for me personally and I hope SOE truly is commited to consider proposals/feedback from the community as they have stated many times of late. This my vision of a framework I would love to see implemented into the game and that I truly believe could make a real positive impact for everyone, especially new players. Thanks in advance for your inputs and critiques that I am sure I will receive on it.

The systemhas played outin a way that surely could not be intended.

There are far too many player cities for the amount of player population, it was that way even when the system was first patched in. I am yet to hear of a city in which the mayoral "race" was not a forgone or agreed-upon conclusion before it ever takes place. A bunch of people (guild) decide to buy up or make alot of town stuff, get everyone to move to X location, decide who is going to be mayor, have everyone vote for that person and, voila, that is our great town system.

The only time there is ever more than one person on a ballot is when a rival guild enacts a hostile takeover somehow (happened on scylla), or when someone cancels and a new person agrees to take over.....once again a pre-decided outcome.

If players cities were far rarer and not all over the place, then perhaps there would be so many people living in them that multiple candidates would be running. Sure each one would likely have all their guildies vote for them but if towns were not primarily guild populated, then those "in-the-bag" votes wouldn't be enough. Politicians would have to actually DO something to earn people's votes (likely only the most commited players would then become politicians, as opposed to someone's alt who rarely gets played).

City "stealing" will be far too hard, not impossible, to be worthwhile if this whole system was set up right to begin with. Althoughcity stealing is a very real problem, it happens quite infrequently when you take the scope of the entire game into consideration under the current system.It will more likely happen when such a change is first implemented but will easilybe overcome as more and more people consolidate into the 3 or 4 cites per planet and the actual player population (as opposed to a guild or two) determines who runs the towns. This should happen fairly quickly, giving no more than a cycle or two for anyone to dominate a mayoral position, and this is why......once you cutplayer citiesto 3 or 4 cities per planet and then raise the population requirements for civic benefits, then it will become impossible for one or two guildsto monopolize cities by keeping "random" players out. With fewer cities, you could raise the population requirements enough so that guildsmust let "randoms" move in just to get the basic perks of a player town.

Mayoral races will no longer be predetermined, contrived, mockeries. The political process will actually take place and politicians will have to do just what their title implies, go politicking

Well, the issues wont really be "political" at all. They will likely hinge on taxes, attractiveness of a mayor's zoning scheme, and a mayor's commitment to keeping the event schedule lively, regular, and creative. The revamp would include both the politician profession side of the things, and the cities/housing system side of things. The ramifications could be literally game changing, and I believe for the better as very few professions will not be signifcantly impacted by it. The content introduced within these cities could greatly disperse the player base from the current content hotspots, and still offer something for those not jedi-grinding or loot-hunting to take part in.

The city halls should be much more functional. They are literally "bumps on a log" in the current system. Politicians and the player city system should have the same relationship that any elite crafterhas with theircraft.

It should becompletely immersive.

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Say at master politician, or at some predetermined skill level, that politicians were the only people able to request live events from the live event team? No more requests from the general population (the live event team is drooling already). How cool would it be then to be a politician?? SOE could implement a ticket system that functions much like CSTickets but instead of going to CS, it goes to the live event teams (another reason to cut way back the # of player cities so that those poor guys don't get overrun with requests). Make some sort of guidelines, i.e. onerequest per week to be accepted or denied within X number of days, to be held biweekly And then watch the new player cities become hotspots on the maps (npc cities need work too, but thats different topic).The possibilites are endless. How cool would it be to have a city on Tat that gets raided by tuskens or jabbas thugs? How about if a battalion of rorgungan commandos marched on a city on Rori? An imperial assault of ATAT's and ATST's with troops on asuspected rebellion sympatheticdantooine city? The event would not have to be short lived, or necessarily dangerous, they could play out over an entire day as beefed up durnis flock like lemmings into the sea near coastal nabooian towns for a day or two, imperial troops could execute a show of force and attempt to occupy a city for a day. Perhaps implement a tier system of what difficulty level of events can be hosted at that town. Similar to the city rankings, as a town progresses in population, more difficult events are available (scalable by the Live Event Team) as lower tier events are accomplished (defend town from 1000 jawas for one hour) then the city moves up to eligibility for the next event tier for their give population ( fend off an ATAT, whatever).They would not be required to participate in harder events, just would unlock the option. Say when a city is at the highest event ranking, the really tough events can be enacted...a Krayt Dragon migration, ATAT imperial raids, overwhelmingly large #'s of rebel troops, shield generator equipped gungans with bio-engineered (tougher) fambaas and kaadus. Obviously things would need to be ironed out to make the events go well, keep them from being impossibly hard, or laughably easy. Hopefully the line of sight issues in this game can get ironed out as well. But anything is better than the current system, and something along these lines, with the bugs eliminated (don't hate), would be immensely fun.

Declared residents of one of these towns would receive a system email, much like vendor emails, notifying them of such events and their scheduled times, an onscreen system message would also be sent to residents of a town notifying them of the event taking place at their town. Send the email, say, 48 hrs prior, and the system message60, 30, and 15min prior as an alert message, to later become a distress callonce the event kicks off.

Mayors should be given zoning abilities for their municipality that work much like the structure-compatability-shading works. Meaning, just like when you drop a structure and the terrain shades itselfred (no drop) or green (drop), the mayor can designate a certain area according to his vision. Each sector could have a default, or even mandatory "front-door orientation" (north, south, etc) to keep some sort of tidiness and organization to the aesthetics of the town.Examples of this Zoning ability would be acommerce shade for merchant tents, an industrial shade for harvestors/factories, a municipal shade for guild halls / gardens / municipal buildings each with its own recognizeable pattern, and finally a residential shade for homes possibly incorporating a pattern typeto indicate limits on#'s ofvendors per house so as to encourage use of tents in the commerce sector. If people have a problem with the limit they can petition the mayor to raise the limit on their house on a case by case basis. Some sort of "sim city type" interface would be necessary for politicians to effectively execute this, the current structure placing interface is absolute garbage. All of this would be done at a terminal within the city hall.

Terminals should be located within the city hall and accessible to both residents and non-residents. A player should be able to see what the current layout is (accessing the terminal would bring up a "Sim city type" view of the town) and what the proposed layout for the future, unused lands are. The terminals could give demographics of citizens, professions, faction affiliation #'s, a feature that can be enabled or disabled according to citizen wishes.They should be able to see what events have taken place in the past in that town, along with some sort of stat report.... X number of citizens killed, X number of Enemies killed, over X amount of time, something to give prospective residents a sense of what is happening in that town and whether or not they feel they could be a help. Maybe an armorsmith finds a town that is getting owned by jawas? They look into the archives (you know maybe give that library-type-room an actual purpose?) and see there is only one AS in that town with only one armor vendor, voila!! Said armorsmith has found himself a new home. Maybe a Ranger sees that there are many chefs and tailors, but very few ranger/scouts, he too now has found a home.

With player city staus reduced to the 3 or 4 largest cities on each planet, the population size in eachwill grow so much that mayors will have no choice butto immerse themselves into the profession to satisfy as many citizens as possible in order to stay in office (much like a top notch elite crafter). Nosingle guild (of any size I have ever heard of) would possibly be able to monopolize an election. No politician could afford to neglect his duties and go grind jedi for 6 months.

So what is in it for the politician you say??

Well here is the tricky part......

Aside from the pride of being able to hang your hat on the fact that you are the architect of a prosperous, popular city.........perhaps a small kickbackfrom municipal proceeds (cloning/insurance fees, shuttle fees, garage fees, etc). I have no clue what type of revenue these cities could expect since we have no cities near the size that these would reach, but perhaps 1%? obviously the devs would have to tweak this and some trial and error would undoubtedly take place. But it should be enough to make it worthwhile. There may be a need for a ceiling on mayoral income to keep unique situations from turning any singlemayor into the SWG version of a Saudi prince, again an issue for the devs to wrestle over.

One last thing!!!

No body wants massive uncontrollable urban sprawl, especially when cities take root near POI's and the like. SoI believe a hard cap on a city's radius should be very much in place. How it should differ from current cities I cant say, as I dont even know what current radii are. But I do belive a metropolis should be considerably larger than they are now.However this raises the issue of a radius-cap creating a population-cap as room runs out on a city for more folks to move in.Well, Architects rejoice!!! New building schematics to resemble those found in static cities!! High rise buildings like in Coronet and Tyrena! Multiple occupant structures like thosefound in that pointless area of Bestine. Keep them restricted to each planet (no bestine style slums on Naboo, and make them un-vendor-placeable....strictly residential). Multiple occupant structures will obviously have maintenance issues...as in who pays and what happens if someone doesnt pay. To solve this, multiple occupant structures should be only placeable by the mayor, just like a garage, and the maintenance will be paid to keep you from beingevicted. It reaches zero...automatic bank deduction. That reaches zero......same as regular houses, except instead of the building disappearing, all the occupants stuff disappears and the admin rights for that unit are cleared for a new resident , with those rights granted by the mayor. The mayor cannot move or redeed one of these structures until all residents have vacated it. So placing a large 10 resident structure should be done with great foresight, as it will likely become a permanent fixture. A lower maintenance rate should be set for each resident of a multiple occupant building than what the rate is for a private home in some proportion. For example, if the building accomodates 10 people, the rate should be 20% that of a medium house, if it accomodates 5 people then 40% so on and so forth. Maybe set the max items at that of a medium house in each unit reagrdless the total number of units in one structure.Private homes should still be affordable as they are now, but multiple occupant structures should be far more attractive to not only the penny-pinchers amongst us, but more importantly, to the new player who hasnt found his or her economic niche yet. Maybe even enable this function on guild halls. At the terminal allow the leaders to enable or disable multiple resident capabilities. The benefit of multiple resident being that the total max items go way up (evenly distributed to each room to prevent someone from buying a guild hall just as storage and not having multiple rooms occupied by different players, but just so they can store more in one room). And the guild gets an increased sense of untity. Guild halls will undoubtedly become like SWG fraternity houses, lol, I can envision the streaking already. Multiple occupant structures, will expend lots just as homes do, also to keep a mayor or guild leader from using one for personal storage.

So there is my huge brainstorm that I feel has immense potential for much needed content in this game. The new GCW stuff is a great step in the right direction, but I feel the player city system can really take it to another level entirely. You can take the basics of what I have cooked up here and go so many directions within the scope of features already incorporated into the game already. I just hope the Content and Live Event Teams areup for it andare truly commited to make something like this happen.

Message Edited by Binstubbs on 04-12-2005 03:11 AM

Message Edited by Binstubbs on 04-12-2005 07:15 PM

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Binstubbs wrote: <snip>

Not to flame, but I personally don't care how hard someone worked at something (plopping gardens and buildings, oh my)if it doesn't do anything to contribute in a positive way to the game.

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Saying you don't care what someone else has done isn't going to score you any points in getting someone to listen to your ideas. Creating a city and a community is a *lot* more than "plopping gardens and buildings". A huge part of Player City content is what the players make of it, not necessarily what the devs add for it; that's the nature of social professions.

Preventing players from scheduling live events unless they are a part of one or two major metropolis cities is wrong...and will never happen. Why would the developers want to put in a huge amount of time and resources into creating all the good content ideas only to prevent the majority of the server population from accessing it?

You can't take away something that players or their cities already have, be it rank or privileges because it would be seriously unfair to those people who--whether you care or not--worked hard to get there. You can however add things to make it more worthwhile, and that's something that all of us here want to see. Rank 5 cities should have something unique to them as should Master Politicians.

Not at the expense of other players, though.

Like I said before, you've got some great ideas for new content possibilities. There's a lot of supposition on "how things are" in there, though, which makes some of the implementation ideas not so good. Just because you don't benefit directly from a particular Player City doesn't mean that the players that live there don't get plenty of enjoyment and content from it.