CUEmu - Thread Posts

Bajeezus

Tue Mar 23, 2004 11:59 am

I'll make a new thread each Monday for use throughout the week for youto let me and the rest of the Politician community hear how things are going in your city, events planned, tips you might have learnedlike ways ofusing specializations efficiently, new facilities being placed, any interesting dynamics like mergers with new partners to grow your cities or issues of disagreement between your citizens, anything having to do with your politician skills, new skills, skills sold back, newissues, frustrating bugs, or just a quick status report. It will be easy for me to keep up with a digest version ofthe goings-on of the community this way, and perhaps a way for you all to get to know each other as players dedicated to the concept of building communities in the Star Wars universe.

One of the hot issues around has always been succession or resignation from office. We made it one of our top-five issues because it can be a big problem for those who have a hard time getting 50%+ of their citizens back to the city hall to vote inside any given week.

So, not having any personal experience at all with this issue after having run unopposed since the release of player cities, we decided to place an opponent into the race against me, to allow several of us who all have access to that account to administerthe mayoral duties, andto give my main character on the live server some flexibility in his skill and profession choices (I will have access to this new mayor character as well as the mayor I run on Test Center, so fear not, I'll be as on top of things - or not as the case may be - as always.

)

It was tough to get 50% of our citizens back to the polls, and actually, we failed to do so. My main character remains mayor for another week. The unexpected result was that my opponent, who garnered 42 votes, kept his 42 votes even after the city update and election. At this moment, five days after the last update, he still has 42 votes. Several citizens who went to vote for him the first week he was on the ballot also went again this week to see what would happen if they voted for him again. What happens is that their votes do not count twice. If they voted for him previously, he has kept that vote, but he will not gain another vote from their secondattempts, which is good. Now we just need to track down the citizens who didn't vote the previous week and twist their arms until they get to the polls this week.

I actually don't know if this is working as intended or if it is a bug, or if it is what everyone else has experienced, or if this case of the opponent keeping his votes from one cycle to the next is rare. I would like to hear from all of you. Could this be the source of the issues with people only getting something like500 XP when they have many morecitizens? Could this be the source of the contradictory reactions from the CSRs who are telling some politicians that they get only XP for votes actually cast for them?

Let me know what you all have seen in the case of opposition candidates who fail to win but stay on the ballot the next week. Have they kept their votes from the previous week or returned to zero after the update?

What else is going on out there? I haven't had any experiences at all with the citizeninactivity rule, but then I didn't expect to since we don't have many inactive citizens, so let me know how many of you are seeing those notices and how much of an effect it is having on your cities, and what you are doing to combat the issue.

Jedi_Odin

Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:02 pm

#2

well, i lost 6 citizens to inactivity this week....

but on a lighter note, my garden that caused 4 shuttleports to bug on my server when i tried to uproot it is now successfully removed thanks to the fixes today

_____________________________________________________________________

¤Xakk Aurrox¤ 12 point Armorsmith / *RIS Certified* (retired)
¤Xinn Aurrox (retired) ¤Master Doc

Laeren

Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:45 pm

#3

Starsider--Rauha, Naboo

Our town is growing and receding all at the same time. We've had some inactive losses of course, but I took a manual count of our town based on the houses present and having seen individuals logging in and we are about 62-63 active citizens strong, with 7 inactives (which weren't ousted last night, but I'll check again today). The losses that we have had, however, had their houses poof, so we're unsure if this is a side effect of being inactive or the houses were ready to go poof on their own and just needed a nudge. Can never be sure.

Finally 95% finished our Rauha Public Library (submitted to GarVA for the Galactic Home show, otherwise I'd post pics here). Another of our citizens is putting up a museum, which I've been helping him decorate (on my off-time from 3 decoration projects I'm juggling currently). Our cloning facility is still up, pending negotiations with the neighboring Imperial City. We haven't noticed raids coming out of it lately...perhaps spreading our intention to remove it prompted people to look elsewhere for cloning. We'll have to see.

Commercial area is thriving. Our merchants seem to be happy and doing well for themselves.We now only have a few spots left over in our commercial area, due to the thriving merchants. Our treasury is doing well, though we're still consideringmore taxes. We just raised the income tax from 1k/wk to 2k/wk. Almost all of our citizens approved this change as negligibly affecting them. We're considering adding on property taxes, but not until people get a feel for the new income taxfirst.

Aes Sedai Industries
::::Swarriorx Irow: Mayor of Rauha (Naboo), Starsider (www.rauha.com)
::::::Laeren Misha: Teras Kasi Master, Master Rifleman, Master Journalist, Master Interior Decorator
:::::::::Apprentice FilmmakerVisit my movie page: Triquetra Pictures AIM: LegalMinn

Akaara

Tue Mar 23, 2004 2:40 pm

#4

It took me about 3 weeks to finally be voted into office to replace the encumbant. I may be wrong, but I could have sworn the votes added up each week, until I finally had enough to win. I guess if people vote for one person the vote remains with them until they manually go change it. So it took 3 weeks just to get enough people from the city to GO and vote manually. It seems to me it just takes time and perseverence.

Sythera City Corellia: This week was very hectic. I had 10 to 13 new people move into the city. However, it seems like when 4 would move in, 1 would leave. One person left because he could not place a large house. I am finally up to 80 citizens. I want to build the city slowly though and perhaps add 3 more citizens this week and 3 to 6 next week to get to metro status.

I am happy to report that most of the city has active Citizens. In all honesty, I do not want to be the Mayor of a ghost town. I want to see my city bustling with players, and it seems like it IS becoming more active. I hired a Cantina Manager and she is trying to get the Cantina a happening place, however it's not an easy job!

I had a TKA tournament Sunday night, and this week we are having our first Home Show. People can go to our city and check out the homes. Some of our citizens are very creative. The Militia Headquarters has an interrogation room. LOL

I guess that's it for my city weekly report. It' exciting to be getting close to Metro status even with the 6 week rule in effect.

_____Chiana_________________________
JEDI ELDERCL 90

Sying ~ Master Entertainer
Nikeesha YMaster Tailor

Numen

Tue Mar 23, 2004 2:43 pm

#5

Seiryuu wrote:
The unexpected result was that my opponent, who garnered 42 votes, kept his 42 votes even after the city update and election.

This sounds exactly like the bug. It sounds like incumbants are "keeping" their votes the same way, even after they lose.

We haven't had a second person running in our city for a month now, but if the votes will carry over, we might actually be able to beat the incumbant after a few weeks. (The old mayor is rarely on and wants to surrender it. I hate using a bug, but this sounds like it might actually be the break we need.)

I wouldn't really call it a bug.

Take this situation

Someone comes into a city. 2 people are running for mayor. The person votes for the new person(They had never voted for the old mayer). Now next week comes along.

If the old mayor wins, where should the vote that person made go then? It surely shouldn't go to the current mayor. They never voted for them. While I don't really think the vote should go anywhere, this is how the game deals with voting. People don't have to go vote each week, the system votes for them. The system believe they haven't changed their mind since last week.

If this is a bug, it is a bug with current mayors as well. The bug would be that autovoting shouldn't happen. I highly doubt many people want that.

When I go vote in November. The system doesn't automatically place a vote for me for Bush because I voted in 2000 for him if I never make it to the polls.

Amandil Morier - Tempest - Master Chef

JediKozel

Tue Mar 23, 2004 3:03 pm

#6

Bajeezus, that is definitely a bug. A very annoying and nasty bug. According to CSRs (the ones that areon the know) it is. And it was supposed to be fixed with Publish 7. Our city had the similar issue. I posted this few times already. However, up until last week I wasn't 100% sure what was going on.

Our city was one of the 1st ones founded on Kauri. We chose a desolated planet of Lok for the location. Our mayor turned out to be ... no an honest person, so we lost him at the beginning of this year. Since banned accounts are not deleted, he remained to be the mayor of our city, even though he was banned indefinitely and wasn't not planning on coming back. Ever. So, our city was stuck on auto run with about 105 citizens. and 0.97 Mil credits in maintenance. It's probably worth mentioning that our PA was disbanded at the same time as the Mayor/PA leader was banned. This caused massive exodus of our guildies from the game, which drastically reduced the number of active citizens in our city.

I volunteered to take over the city. First thing to do was to register to run against the Mayor. As soon as I did so, the incumbent mayor showed up on the terminal with all votes automatically registered for him. The 20 active players we managed to scramble were not a match to the rest of 80 + registered citizens. After trying to recruit more former guildies and new citizens for about 2-3 weeks we managed to raise active membership to 30. Still not enough. There were still about 70 completely inactive citizens. Judging by names some of them were definitely alternative characters never meant to be active. Others we were able to contact in RL and knew for 100% that they are not coming back. And that's when I decided to try the unthinkable - talk to CSR.

I must say that dealing with CSRs on this matter was my best Customer Service experience ever! And I am not joking or being sarcastic. I was working with 3 different CSRs who went out of their way to help me out in this matter. It started as ticket for my lost Politician XP and end up with one of the CSRs coming back every week to restore me as Mayor. Ok, I'm getting side tracked, back to the point - Voting.

After CSR discussed my problem with a supervisor, it was decided that we need help and I was placed as a mayor. At the time of this placement I had 27 votes, with incumbent having the other 70 or so. From that point on I would get 2700 xp on every city update. We got about 15 -20 new citizens, who declared their residence in the city. Yet, their votes did not automatically go to the new incumbent (me). It seems to me that their votes simply did not count, since they never actually voted. To make matters vote, the system remembered that the old banned mayor, who was removed from office by CSR, had those 70 or so votes. Every City Advancement the old mayor would win the elections as a citizen, kicking me the incumbent from office. What makes this even more annoying is that nobody was running against me.

Eventually I run an experiment - I asked all my guildies to go back to the terminal and simply vote for the incumbent mayor.I knew for a fact that you can only cast your vote ones, and only for one candidate. So, my thinking was, that if the system remembers all the votes the old mayor had, it might remember all the new votes that I'll get. By this time we lost about 10-20 inactive citizens as their houses started to poof. And now that we hadabout 50 total guild members and new active citizens, we managed to pull this off on the 2nd try. This is the 1st week that I'm actually a mayor without a CSR help, elected by my own citizens. I can't wait till next City Advancement to see what will happen this time around.

Sorry for this being a bit long, but I felt that I need to share my experience.

Thanks, if you had patience to read it all

Mokael Openg
Mayor by Day, Fixer by Night, Gunfighter by Need
"Face it, if crime did not pay, there would be very few criminals."
Laughton Lewis Burdock
(from Shadows of The Empire by S. Perry)

Songe

Tue Mar 23, 2004 4:30 pm

#7

It happened to me as well when I was trying to get elected to replace the former mayor who wanted to resign. I had to register to run the second week but I did keep my votes. I even posted here about it but I guess it got lost

------

Novice Lekku Stomper

Bajeezus

Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:08 pm

#8

Nice story, JediKozel. And a good experiment you have coming up. Let us know how it goes.

Arrya

Tue Mar 23, 2004 8:14 pm

#9

Well, the big news this week was the maintenence cycle that we just had - the inactivity timer kicked in and we lost 25 citizens, went from 137 last night to 112 today, *poof*. I was figuring between 20-30, so it wasn't too suprising to me. A few are actually active citizens that gotted bugged for one reason or another - and we are getting them redeclared so its not a big issue. One was the mayor of another city, lol. At least one though, we are not sure whats going on, she got taken off the roles with the inactivty timer even though she is an active player, but when she tries to redeclare in her house it tells her she is already a citizen there. So it appears that there are a good deal of bugs still floating around.

_______________________________________________________
Arsenal
The little green Napoleon
_______________________________________________________

Seiryuu

Wed Mar 24, 2004 1:27 am

#10

The unexpected result was that my opponent, who garnered 42 votes, kept his 42 votes even after the city update and election.

This sounds exactly like the bug. It sounds like incumbants are "keeping" their votes the same way, even after they lose.

We haven't had a second person running in our city for a month now, but if the votes will carry over, we might actually be able to beat the incumbant after a few weeks. (The old mayor is rarely on and wants to surrender it. I hate using a bug, but this sounds like it might actually be the break we need.)

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Doctor_Gyr

Wed Mar 24, 2004 2:21 am

#11

Had a small active guild ask to move into the city, after alittle trial and error on possible placement sites things started moving along.

Lost 12 inactives.

2 were actives, who redeclared.

1 couldn't redeclare and still can't.

1 showed up as still on the citizen list, yet I got an email

the rest were truly inactive

Brings our citizen count to 59-61.

As a mayor of a medium guild city with several inactive buildings, I really wish there was a way I could clear the land. I understand SOE will never allow us to simply delete a house.. but how about an option to force a redeed in 2 weeks(proper emails sent out and would only work on houses belonging to inactive players.), moving all the items to a "safe" storage location.. Call it long term Storage accessible from any bank on any planet. The player keeps everything but the land within the city, which he/she wasnt using anyways.

Doctor Gyr & Tyndel Amor

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Laeren

Wed Mar 24, 2004 5:55 am

#12

As an addendum to my spost above:

I checked our city roster last night. The people that I had figured out weren't actually part of the city were (woohoo) deleted, and of the remaining list, only a couple are erroneous (still one guy who doesn't have a house in the city, but is still on the roster, etc etc). According to my calculations we have 63 active and playing citizens (whom I can verify as having seen over the course of the past few weeks), and growing daily. Made me very happy to see the terminal finally catch up to the true city status.

Aes Sedai Industries
::::Swarriorx Irow: Mayor of Rauha (Naboo), Starsider (www.rauha.com)
::::::Laeren Misha: Teras Kasi Master, Master Rifleman, Master Journalist, Master Interior Decorator
:::::::::Apprentice FilmmakerVisit my movie page: Triquetra Pictures AIM: LegalMinn

ArthurP

Mon Mar 29, 2004 7:08 pm

#13

The Inactive rule is a GRIEF, plain and simple. You rob a player of his status as a citizen AND rob all his fellow citizens of LAND where they MIGHT be able to keep a constant flow of citizens coming in.

Would it also be acceptable that the player who is inactive lose his knowledge of his skills, pets, faction, etc.? No, of course not. Then why are citizens and cities being hurt this way?And as long as a player is paid up on maintainance and his Sony bill - WHY would the devs see fit to start disassembling his character and associations?

It's not that we dont see a REASON for this.. but the cure is worse that the problelm. Removing a citizen without removing his house KILLS the city QUICKLY, with no recourse. Conversly, removing a citizen's city status and his house (all of which are paid for well in advance) while he may well be away on extended military duty - is arbitary and mean-spirited. Why is it SO hard for the devs to wait until the player actually leaves the game (happening more and more, I see) - or the house is destroyed from lack of maintenance?

PLEASE SPEAK TO THE DEVS AND END THIS SANCTIONED GRIEF

NOTE: My city status is safe for now. We are built VERY tight and still have room to grow - but it will soon BE a problem at this rate. I hope this can be removed soon.

Message Edited by ArthurP on 03-29-2004 06:19 PM

¯¯¯¯ArthurP Coodle¯¯¯¯
Now Playing in the NEW Bantha PooDoo Cantina
in Beautiful, Historic Kestrel City, Naboo
ï Now with Mayor Power ! ð

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Thread: This Week in Politics 3/23/04