Politician Archive

This has been addressed, but not recently, and there was never a reply from SOE. So here it is. Signs Revisited

There is really no good way to provide information to the general population in this game. Vendors often have 99999999 credit items with informative descriptions for their customers, and that works well. Vendors can also bark. Players "AFK Spam" in the star ports, and we all just love that. Backpacks make nice signs, but can only be placed in interiors. And you can always name a lamp post with some limited information, but that is pretty weak.

What I'm talking about is one, some or all of the following:

Billboards: A straight up, just like on the interstate, billboard with "words" on it that can be changed. My city has no place in the decor for something like this, but some might. To lend a little color, perhaps the bilboards could come with pre-selected backgrounds. One for gun adds, one for armor, one suitable for public service announcements, etc... Perhaps the billboard could cost rent, or perhaps it could be placed by someone besides Mayors (if the mayor allows, of course). Maybe they could even be placed in the wilds around high traffic areas (like south of cornet). These "in the wilds" signs could cost an inordinate amount of money, like 500K (1M on Saturday) a day to limit the frequency and duration. This would also provide SOE with another money sink.

Signs: Perhaps the most simple thing for SOE to modify, and thus, the most likely to be seen in the game: Signs already exist around NPC cities. At present, they are rather short and don't contain much information. Seems to me that they could be added pretty easily. Once again, this would be an external "decoartion" which could be placed and modified by the mayor. No need for this to be anything but a civic item.

Directories: How many times have you been greeting folks getting off the shuttle in your city when one of them asks "where's the bathroom?" or "Where is the cantina?" or "Where is 'Killer's Gun Shop'?" Wouldn't it be grand if you could place a directory near the shuttle that could give basic directions to the various shops and attractions in your town? Perhaps even something with menues that can be navigated, similar to a NPC conversation. This could even be in the form of a protocol droid. But wait! I think that is comming in P8! Whoo Hooo! I only hope they are presistient, and do not require the owner to be logged on. I guess the down side of that will be all the droids hanging around the starports doing the same thing.

Information Terminals: How about something like the city hall terminal, but that could be placed outside? This would give it more visibility, especially around the shuttle. Folks visiting, or shopping might be interested to know the demographics of the town. How many citizens, taxes, etc... There's no telling what this could do to bring in citizens (or scare them off).

Interface Based Information: Another tool that could be added with little or no art or code developmet by SOE would be an "Examine" feature for a city. Similar to what you get when you examine a player. This could even be implimented into the Control-V Planetary Map. This would be the least radical of all these recommendations, but it would be a start. It would be a place where the mayor could place a short bio of the city. This may assist folks in deciding of a visit to your city is worth the shuttle fare. This type of thing is already in place for individual facilities around the planet. Including a snippet for the city itself doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

As with everything that is introduced to this game, I would advise caution. This is something that would just not get a good run on TC. They don't have the population to stress things like this. I can see some of the above items quickly becoming the BANE of SWG. Moderation, limitations, and restraint will have to be built in. Abuse will have to be impossible.

One of the pleasures I get from being mayor is just sitting in my garden next to our bustling shuttle, greeting the folks as they come to shop, visit or hunt. I want their visit to enjoyable and productive. But I also want them to have a possitive experience when I can't be there to direct and guide them. Some of the items outlined above would be a huge step in that direction.

Good ideas all around but I'm sure a lot of them would just be "too hard to implement right now" with the possibleexception of the signs. What they could somewhat easily do is add a new civic decoration that looks a lot like a billboard (since it would entail new art how about a holograph looking thing?) and is large enough that they would just look stupid in homes. You could put plenty of information in them about the town for instance coordinates to the vendor district, the cantina, the cloner, etc. just by naming it (give them longer names possibly stackable ones like a table?) and it would be an obvious cash sink since it would cost money for maintenance and if you ever move anything around in town or want to highlight anything different you'll have to build an all new one.