Politician Archive
Thread: Pappi, RE: I still want a 'Mayor' title
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Vinjar
Tue Jul 27, 2004 1:17 pm
#1
Jaspor wrote:
Where would you put it though?
Replace the "Master Politician" title? Replace the "4th Box" title for one of the 4 skill skill trees?
I'm sure a lot of people like their "Warmaster" or "Master Politician" titles.
And if you actually expected it to only be available to Politicians that are actually Mayors of a city (and not just anybody with Politician skills), that adds a whole new level of complexity for it being implemented.
Jaspor, although I was hoping for Pappi to respond, thanks for posting.
If you've read my posts carefully, you will notice I only asked for a 'mayor' title. I'm sure it would be based on incumbancy. I've never suggested replacing any of the other titles. You suggestion of introducing yourself to people on my other thread is fine. I do it and I'm sure many of the other mayors do as well. Unfortunetly, I dont spend all my time in my city. I often leave and feel like that title would cause more people to ask questions.
And if you actually expected it to only be available to Politicians that are actually Mayors of a city (and not just anybody with Politician skills), that adds a whole new level of complexity for it being implemented.
Making this statement, I assume you are a programer of sorts. Can you please explain to me how this would be more complex? I dont understand programming, so laymans terms would be fine. All I'm looking for is an answer. I always thought that since the sytem recognized me as mayor in respect to placing/removing city decorations, placing/removing trainers, etc, it would be fairly easy.
Oh and what city are you mayor of? I've created characters on about six servers to check out some of our fellow mayor's cities. I'd like to come by check yours out.
Thanks
Pappi
Tue Jul 27, 2004 4:42 pm
#2
alright, let me do this once:
please don't assume that I haven't mentioned various issues to the devs. of all the pre-CB changes suggestion list all the correspondents submitted, mine was the second longest... and I already left out some of the minor issues. on the top of the list are 7 bugs that I'm asking them to fix, then 20+ items that affects politicians. (yes, including mayor resignation, empty master box, city defense, skillpoint useage, etc.. I really don't want to see any more posts on these topics...) I don't have that many "wishlist" items on that list besides city ledgers, duel specializations, more ways for politician to get xp, and things like that. unless you guys would like to bump one of these items off the list...
lets skip over to the coding for a moment. I don't have their source code, but if can either be really easy, or really hard. I don't remember if SWG is in C or C++, but imagine if the city stores the name of the mayor but not vice versa. now they have to modify the code for each avatar to include a field to indicate if they're a mayor, and where they're mayor at. this adds DB stuff... and that's assuming they already have the display all set up. I donno if you've notice, but changing details in any code (and especially so in SWG, it seems) can really mess things up.
to sum this all up, I assumed that most people want their bugs fixed before adding in new features, and that's what I'm pushing for. if I'm wrong, correct me... I'll let the devs know.
please don't assume that I haven't mentioned various issues to the devs. of all the pre-CB changes suggestion list all the correspondents submitted, mine was the second longest... and I already left out some of the minor issues. on the top of the list are 7 bugs that I'm asking them to fix, then 20+ items that affects politicians. (yes, including mayor resignation, empty master box, city defense, skillpoint useage, etc.. I really don't want to see any more posts on these topics...) I don't have that many "wishlist" items on that list besides city ledgers, duel specializations, more ways for politician to get xp, and things like that. unless you guys would like to bump one of these items off the list...
lets skip over to the coding for a moment. I don't have their source code, but if can either be really easy, or really hard. I don't remember if SWG is in C or C++, but imagine if the city stores the name of the mayor but not vice versa. now they have to modify the code for each avatar to include a field to indicate if they're a mayor, and where they're mayor at. this adds DB stuff... and that's assuming they already have the display all set up. I donno if you've notice, but changing details in any code (and especially so in SWG, it seems) can really mess things up.
to sum this all up, I assumed that most people want their bugs fixed before adding in new features, and that's what I'm pushing for. if I'm wrong, correct me... I'll let the devs know.
DaQuilla
Tue Jul 27, 2004 4:53 pm
#3
Pappi wrote:
I don't remember if SWG is in C or C++
In one of the latest posts (well ok ... could be a few weeks ago) I think it was GreenMarine or Shug... or whoever ... that said it's in Java!
But on the rest I agree ... for one even "simple" changes could be really really messy ... and for another, befor I run around with a "Mayor of" title, I want to have a good runnin' city to promot ... with working sales Tax, for example :/
Vinjar
Tue Jul 27, 2004 5:31 pm
#4
Thank you for the explianation.Thats all I'm looking for. For the record, all I ever wanted was a Mayor title, not Mayor of ______. Even I in my non-existant knowledge understand that would be difficult. Fortunately, I've not noticed any of the bugs affecting others, and I suppose that make me a little selfish.
Anyway, thanks again.
furrycat
Tue Jul 27, 2004 10:07 pm
#5
Quoth Pappi,
> lets skip over to the coding for a moment. I don't have their source code,
> but if can either be really easy, or really hard.
I don't see why it should be too hard. The game already does "know" who the mayor of each city is. The only slight sticking point when determining whether a particular player can have the Mayor tag is finding out which city he is the mayor of. I would imagine the server would have to enumerate all cities and check each one to see if the mayor is the player in question.
This might indeed be a comparatively expensive operation but you only need to do it in two places: when building a list of possible tags for the player in the GUI or when checking the validity of a player's /setCurrentSkillTitle command. Furthermore the check trivially fails when the player doesn't have Novice Politician. Most of the time this block of code would never even need to run.
> lets skip over to the coding for a moment. I don't have their source code,
> but if can either be really easy, or really hard.
I don't see why it should be too hard. The game already does "know" who the mayor of each city is. The only slight sticking point when determining whether a particular player can have the Mayor tag is finding out which city he is the mayor of. I would imagine the server would have to enumerate all cities and check each one to see if the mayor is the player in question.
This might indeed be a comparatively expensive operation but you only need to do it in two places: when building a list of possible tags for the player in the GUI or when checking the validity of a player's /setCurrentSkillTitle command. Furthermore the check trivially fails when the player doesn't have Novice Politician. Most of the time this block of code would never even need to run.
Vinjar
Wed Jul 28, 2004 12:44 am
#6
When you get the chance, if possible, can you please bring this to someone's attention? Maybe at least we can get an explaination why this can not be done. Seems it would be easy enough, but I have absolutely no clue about coding and such. It would be such a boon to the Politician profession.
Thanks, I know you're busy.
Jaspor
Wed Jul 28, 2004 12:55 am
#7
Where would you put it though?
Replace the "Master Politician" title? Replace the "4th Box" title for one of the 4 skill skill trees?
I'm sure a lot of people like their "Warmaster" or "Master Politician" titles. 
And if you actually expected it to only be available to Politicians that are actually Mayors of a city (and not just anybody with Politician skills), that adds a whole new level of complexity for it being implemented.
Jaspor
Wed Jul 28, 2004 1:57 pm
#8
Yes, I'm a programmer of sorts (avoiding work right now, heehee).
I think Pappi and Furrycat explained it pretty well, but the bottomline is this:
Bang for the buck. Implementing this would require code changes. Easy or hard, possible or impossible, a change would need to be made. And as nice as it would be and as happy as it would make many of us, we're a small minority of players.... The time required to design, implement, test, and make sure this didn't break anything.. well, it's pretty much not worth it for a "cosmetic" feature very few players would even be able to use.
That's why we won't see it.
Oh, and I'm Mayor of Constellation, Naboo on the Chilastra server. Hanging strong at Level 4 and established Day 1 of Player Cities. 
furrycat
Wed Jul 28, 2004 6:26 pm
#9
Balancing new features and small fixes against larger issues is always fun. Every profession in the game probably has at least one thing that they think is so bad that fixing it should take precedence over everything else and people are always going to complain at what they see as wasted development hours going into irrelevant projects. Witness the PvPers mocking the decision to fix the displaying of necklaces in the inventory in the recent mini-publish. "What's the point of that when the TEF system is so broken?" they ask. What indeed? Tailors are happy.
If you have a bunch of large issues which are going to take a long time to resolve and some smaller features that could be done quite quickly, why not spend an hour or two on those? Bump up the score in the "things we fixed" column and remind a few professions that yes we are paying attention to you too. The vast majority of time can still be spent on the larger problems but you are getting stuff out to the customers.
If you have a bunch of large issues which are going to take a long time to resolve and some smaller features that could be done quite quickly, why not spend an hour or two on those? Bump up the score in the "things we fixed" column and remind a few professions that yes we are paying attention to you too. The vast majority of time can still be spent on the larger problems but you are getting stuff out to the customers.
Vinjar
Thu Jul 29, 2004 9:02 am
#10
Look, I now realize this will not happen. Furrykat mad a very valid point in fixing something small, while working on the bigger stuff, but that still means nothing to the smallest group of players in the game. There aren't many of us, and none of us will quit since in a way, we are some of the most dedicated players in the game. We dedicate not only a lot of time, but also our own money, and of course skill points all to enrich the gameplay of others. If I could close this thread, I would since it's obvious something like this is not gonna happen.
Anyway, I'm at 4224 and should have master locked up within a month. It's not as special as "Mayor", and of course we don't get diddly squat for it, but it's something.
Jaspor
Thu Jul 29, 2004 9:17 am
#11
No need to close the thread. It's still something we'd like to see, I think we're just trying to be realistic and not get our hopes up for it.
Don't let the reality that SOE has little time for us stop you from posting ideas and suggestions.
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