Politician Archive
Thread: Player Cities are now simply NPC Cities where you can build a house
With the removal of the militia, and along with it any means of creating a unique society, mayors are now left with generic cities that are identical to NPC cities with the sole exception that you can place a house within it. Is this honestly what you all expected back when player cities were being discussed? I expected to see hostile pirate cities, exclusive smuggler cities, and other unfriendly areas in addition to the typical neutral cities. I expected to see mayors given the ability to create their own unique laws, and enforce them. I expected to see true player government, in every sense, where players had to follow different sets of rules depending on the city or else risk becoming an enemy.
Doesn't anyone else remember the Millenium Falcon being fired upon by the patrol as it came in to land at Bespin (Cloud City)? Doesn't anyone remember why the Imperials are regarded as evil? I'm sure Luke's Aunt and Uncle do.
Bad things happen. They happen to good people. They create conflict. All good stories are all based on some kind of conflict. What would have happened if the militia (the stormtroopers) had not been able to kill Luke's parents? Luke would never have left Tattooine. There would have been no story. Was Luke upset that his aunt and uncle were killed by the militia? You bet! Would you be upset if your character was killed by a city's militia? You bet! Should we remove a feature (/citywarn) because it upsets people? Heck no! Why? You can't create any real form of conflict without upsetting people, and you can't have a fun game without any real form of conflict!
-Raystonn
There are ways of solving the problems and keeping /citywarn. See my post on them here:
Solutions for /citywarn? What do you think?
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=925169
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Politician&message.id=16719
There have literally been hundreds of suggestions on what can be done to allow /citywarn to remain. The problem is not a lack of ideas. The problem is a lack of desire by the developers to want to implement any of them. Self-government and the ability to enforce arbitrary laws was something promised by the developers. As of right now, they have gone back on their word.
-Raystonn
> There have literally been hundreds of suggestions on what can be done to allow /citywarn to remain. The problem is not a lack of ideas. The problem is a lack of desire by the developers to want to implement any of them.
It's clear that you have no idea what you're talking about. Ideas don't become code in 14 days. The problems with /citywarn were not accounted for in the initial design. What makes you think the developers are not looking at ways to turn a few of the ideas into reality? What makes you think it will take less than a few months to design, code, test, adjust, and test again the new militia code before it's announced to the players? Announce it now and you simply set unrealistic expectations for the samepeople who think a few days without comment equates to a lack of desire.
Whilst i agree with the spirit of your point PSchirf the other issue here is that player cities were advertised by representitives of SOE as having certain features for example /Citywarn, to remove that feature renders the advertising by SOE representitives as false, my understanding (though limited) of american law (im english) is that false advertising is illegal in nearly if not all of american states.
by law the developers are obliged to find another way of dealing with this, a method that doesnt put them in a position of breaking the law, for example they could fulfil one of there other advertised promises of dealing with greifers by banning their accounts which would solve the poi abuse problem immediatly. i find it hard to believe ther are more than a handful of poi sites that are being actively abused on each server, would it be so hard to have one or two csr's going through the reports on the cities that have been doing this and deal with them accordingly ?
The problems of citywarn not known?
EVERYONE should have known this was going to be a problem. The clone center griefing was talked about long before cities went live, as was the faction strongholds with scanners, mines, and turrets outside the clone center and shuttleport.
I don't think anyone really expected the POI griefing because I don't think anyone expected the Devs to be stupid enough to let cities control POIs.
Removal of citywarn allows players to live closer to a shuttleport than an NPC city for an increase in taxes, that's it.
PSchirf -- you're right, but an ounce of prevention would have been worth a pound of cure here.
The problem stems from the devs being so busy playing catch-up with broken Beta-level systems that they failed to anticipate easily anticipated issues with militia police powers.
Yes, it will take an unreasonable amount of coding to fix this problem imaginatively ... but whose fault is that? Certainly not the customers.
People are aggravated by this decision for two reasons:
1. Despite all the talk about "improving communication" and "wanting our feedback", this was dumped on us without deliberation. It gives you the impression that "improved communication" just means a more efficient way of saying "Screw what you want, here's what you get."
2. The fix they applied was unimaginative and will probably cause just as many people to be griefed as they were worried about with the system that's in place, only it will be different people (city residents) being griefed as opposed to the old system (city visitors). And they'll have the nerve to say "Gee, we didn't anticipate that" when it happens, despite dozens of people spelling it out for them in neon letters on this forum.
Bad planning, bad communication, simplistic and unimaginative problem-solving .... just more bad management from a team that's been governed by confusion and lost focus since before the word Go.