Politician Archive
Thread: The Trouble with Player Cities
I would like to consolidate my views on the current state of player cities. I have posted willie-nillie on a number of threads, and it doesn't make much sense that way.
To start, here are a few bullet facts to set the stage:
- I am a mayor of a 120+ person city on Tat, and I am one box from master politician.
- Our city has not experienced many of the killer bugs that have plagued other cities.
- Our city is funded entirely with a 5% Sales tax and shuttle fees.
- My city was placed 12 minutes after they went live.
- I belive the curent abilsmal state of player city caps is the direct result of SOE being out of touch with the way the game is played (as opposed to the way they think it should be played).
On the issue of caps: SOE truely believed it would take some time for the initial city caps to be hit. In actuallity, it took minutes. That is not so important as what SOE did/does to fix the issue. Here is a simple question for SOE and the player community: Would you rather have a handful of strong, healthy player cites, or a wide scattering of anemic, weak, struggling cities with no facilities? I would prefer the former. I do not envision player cities as Player Assosiation Enclaves. I believe in public cities with the facility to accomidate a wide variety of citizens. While our city was founded by a pair of PAs, It is open to all (reb/neut) who wish to reside there. Ultimatly, the founding PAs will control the fate of the city, but that is only because of their majority.
So what about those who didn't get to place their cities? We'll visit that AFTER we discuss the cost of running a city.
City Maintenance costs are WAY out of whack. It cost me less to maintain my city per week than it does to keep power and maintenance in my harvestors. Cities should be insanely expensive. So much so that it takes a cadre of experienced, established players to make a go of them. Many players reach a point in the game where money has no meaning. They get so much of it. What better way to give them a purpose for their riches. Make cities a true status symbol, and a real goal. For those that can't make it, get out of the way for someone who can. Cities should be so expensive, and so challenging, that they are at risk of folding every week.
This brings us back to new cities. SOE's answer seems to be to raise the cap infinitus. This will have two possible eventual outcomes:
1) The entire surface of every planet will be covered with city.
2) Every player will have their dream city, get bored with it, and go off looking for new content.
To SOE, please don't try to give everyone everything. It only diminishes the accomplishments of others. All the servers have perfectly good cities. Let the masses flock to them, join them, and make them healthy. And let those cities that can not attract the masses wither and die to make room for new cities.
Player cities are a remarkable opportunity for SOE to establish a high level goal. As they stand now, they may as well drop a player city in every new players inventory on creation. Better get rid of the melon, or the game will become unbalanced.
Fellow Flurroian; Thankyou for the constructive counter argument. Please don't take this as a personal jab, but as a healthy debate. Some of what follows may cause inflamation of the ire......
550,000 is chump chage. I spend more than that on power and harvestor maintenance in a week all by myself. What I am advocating, and I don't expect it to be popular, is that cities cost 5, 10, or even 20 times more than what would be considered "reasonable." Don't dot the landscape with dozens of10-20 player cities. Make the cities so dang expensive that some DO fail. This'll leave room for someone else to try, and maybe fail.
Rather than make it asprint to plant a city hall, make it an endurance test. A city SHOULD have to charge taxes to survive. Our city cost 720,000/week. We have 120+ citizens, and can balance the budget without charging a single credit of property or income tax. We have absolutly NO fear of withering away. We are entrenched, and the slot we take will never be available to anyone else. SOE will have to keep making more and more slots available if they want everyone to have their own player city, because none that exist will ever collapse. And if everyone can have a player city, what's the point? Sure, we can always work to make our city better, but there are only so many ways you can arrange 30 gardens.
SOE, hold the cap where it is, and scheme on how to ruin the cities that DO exist. I welcome the challenge!
65 citizens City here. 350K upkeep a week.
Although it does seem easy to us (no gardens yet, went up to civic IV first), you must remember that putting heavy burdens on cities will mean the casual can't be an acting part in one. Sure, he can be a citizen of someboduy else city, and this is the extent of it. My PA makes millions in trade weekly so personnally to me it's not a problem.
But I think a team of 15 guys should be able to have their outpost or village someplace to call their own. You can't have large cities if you don't have the small ones to compare them too. Besides, as taxation is setup, either a city is a successful trade center or it needs external funding. My city earns money with a 4% sales tax alone, but calculating full land and income tax without sales it would lose money.
thing is, the planets have all been dotted with outposts since well before city halls came along so it doesnt make a huge difference except to put in place other mechanics like tax and stop mobs spawning out front of your house, so with all due respect i dont think we have to fear the planets becoming big cities.
Well I already gave me opinion on this but because you made a new thread (great job by the way 
). I thought I would give my opinion again.
Player cities are the future of SWG and it will either make or break SOE. If SOE screws player cities up, no content in the world will be able to save SWG. Player cities are the life-line of SWG, and because of that considerable consideration should be made for cities.
As of right now, there are countless cities on each planet with few citizens and no real reason to exist except for personal goals. Now, of course, each player has the right to do as they wish, but creating a player city should not be as easy as it is now. So with that, I do agree that player cities should be much more harder to create/maintain then they are right now.
However, considering maitenance fees as they are right now, player cities are already money sinks with very few benefits. Sure player cities will be much for valuable when more content comes out on them, but at this moment player cities are currently in "lymbo" if you know what I mean. If you quadrupled maintenance rates or even just double maitenance, many cities would fall. Sure the numbers would be down and citizens of other cities will join the bigger cities, but I do not know if this is the best course of action.
I do believe there shouldn't be that many player cities, but I do believe that there should be some smaller cities not just all big cities. If the devs raised maitenance rates to 10 or 20 times higher than they are now, there would be NO small cities whatsoever. Player cities are quite expensive right now. Our city pays over 500k a week now for maitenance and it is not breaking us. We probably could afford 1-3 million a week for cities which would be about quadrupling maitenance rates (10 times or higher is just too much), but if you do that you have to think of certain things. For one, not everyone has as much money as everyone else. Sure there are multi-millionaires but some people maybe only make 20k a week. Making maitenance rates too high will drive away the casual gamers that make up the bulk of the SWG experience. You also have to consider that each server's economy is completely different from another. I know that Chilastra has very high inflation so goods cost more, we also have many millionaires. However, another server might not have high inflation so there are fewer millionaires. Raising maitenance rates too high could devastate an entire server's economy if player cities were too expensive for 100 people to pay. You also have to think if more people are paying for maitenance for player cities if they are incredibly high and putting all their money into it, that leaves nothing for profit from other crafters or miners. So, in turn, it could create a depression if people will not spend as much money as they were before because they need to save for maitenance of their city. Of course, the possibility of that occuring is quite low, but it still could happen.
I do agree that player cities should have a change to bring down the numbers of cities, but raising maintenance rates too high would cause more problems then having countless cities. If maintenance was raised, I would not complain. Sure some would, some already are complaining but the devs must do what they think is right to make the game as realistic as possible. Again bravo for the post and everyone should consider your opinion.
I'm the Mayor of a small - VERY small - player city on Scylla. We were (I believe) the third city to be placed on our server (although we had been in place and ready to go since the beginning of August) and only just made Village a couple of weeks ago. We do not actively recruit, could care less how fast we grow, and have no concerns about being guaranteed a shuttleport or even a cloning faclity. We DO, however, care about cost, because the average playtime of the citizens is about 10 hours a week a piece. Some are much more (I've clocked well over 40 a week and we've got a couple who push 60), but in general we are comprised of casual players whose average weekly income is about 15k each. Their main goal in the game is to have fun, take a couple of light missions while chatting with friends, level at leisure, and not have to make it seem like work to live. Can you blame them? They're almost all married with jobs and kids, after all. 
But just because we choose to take it easy in terms of growth (we add about a person a week) does not mean we should be penalized or driven off of the face of the server. What makes it seem like only certain types of players (ie rich ones) should be entitled to a town? If we do happen to snag a Rank III slot, are we less worthy because we aren't supported by multi-millionaires? The current prices of things are fairly well ballanced (except streetlights, those are just stupid), and there's no reason to raise them.
~~Shabhaii, Mayor of Tombra, Naboo
www.cityoftombra.com
The REAL BT
"The reason I don't PvP in this game is because no matter what side I picked, I'd be guaranteed to be fighting alongside at least one idiot. And I don't defend idiots."
I think the cost to run a city is in balance.
Recently I have been force to charge taxes.
currently 66 residents and paying 550k a week, that's not cheap.
bump, Jemelby made an excellent point and I like more people to view this.
Also Shabhaii, I understand what you mean. It would not be right to only allow the rich players to be able to create cities as you said, but you completely miss the point of Jemelby and my post. If the devs did raise maitenance rates, it would FORCE smaller cities to shut it down and join a bigger city. Joining a bigger city has the same benefits as a smaller city unless you are role-playing. Plus joining a bigger city, you can make more friends, have more people for hunting parties and the city as a whole could be more successful.
Raising maintenance rates would shut down many small towns but not penalize those people from not enjoying player cities. The only person that would be penalized was the mayor of that small town, but all you would have to do is join another town and hope to run for mayor. The whole idea of player cities was to have a living community where there would betwo or moremayors running against each other to try and become mayor. Right now, most mayors are uncontested and that just shows that 1) politician does not have much content so many do not want to be it, which is a different topic of course, and 2) there are too many player cities to allow such competition.
Though some small cities would fall, I believe ultimately it would be better for the SWG experience for all players instead of a few.
If you are going to make cities more expensive you have to give them a reason for existing. Right now there is nothing you can do in a city that you can't do in your house, except for the specializations.
1. They need to give bonuses to hospitals and cantinas for healing over a house. Right now why bother having a cantina or hospital?
2. There is no advantage for amerchant to be in an NPC city. Many actually avoid cities to avoid sales taxes. This may be too harsh, but I think only houses in cities should have vendors.
Right now the only advantage to being in a city is the research specialization. Yes you have the convenience of shuttleports but if you have a house on the edge of an NPC city that doesn't matter that much.
Right now cities are just fun roleplaying areas with some decorations. My citizens don't mind paying a little to be a part of that. But I don't see people being willing to spend 10 times as much for no benefit. Right now my city maintenance is 550k, soon to be 750k after I drop some large gardens. That seems about right to me. We charge 500 income tax, 5% property tax, 2% sales tax, the 100 default on shuttle and have a roughly balanced budget.
I know a few cities have already failed because they couldn't get a shuttleport. I think cities are challenging enough right now. Think long term, once the space expansion comes out cities will be even harder to maintain. I imagine spaceships will be extremely expensive and huge money sinks. How many people will be willing to spend a bunch of money for a city on a planet they rarely go to since they are now in space 60% of the time?
I agree with what you want to get but not in the wayyou want to get it. Yes there need to be many metropolii that are full of homes and hardly any greenspace besides parks (and streets for now) so that at any time people will occupy the land and want to be there. However I feel that the costs of a city are pretty fair. Now if I was mayor of 50 crafters all of which have a few hundred million in the bank then yes I"d say up the amount. However cities don't really attract crafters that much, at least not to drop their vendors anyway. Afterall why pay a sales tax when you could be 500 meters from Theed and sell for less and get more traffic? What people need is a reason to hit the higher lvls besides just getting a shuttleport. As it stands rank 5 is useless. All it means is you have a larger tax base and enough citizens for a shuttleport +...well change that. Make ametropois require many many more citizens (like 200) but be something to behold. Let them have a ton more decorations for starters, then go from there. Make it rare to see a metropolis on a world (especiallyuntravelled worlds like Lok or Talus) however when you see them have them shock you with their immenseness. Buildings going from close to the edge in on all sides rather then a house...then another house...then a big grouping...a cow.
True some people may just use the server swap to get by the new high member req but they are paying for more and more maintenance on all those homes so you get your wish anyway. The cost will equalize with the new number of citizens vs decorations and such but if you need to attract 200 people, well good luck.