Politician Archive

Last week we gathered our community's issues and formed them into a top-five list: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Politician&message.id=21001

This week, we prepare to present our issues and our solutions to those issues to the developers.Starting today, I'll put up an official suggestion thread each day, and everyone on this forum will have an opportunity to both phrase the issue and to suggest solutions before we all choose a single one to stand behind as a body of players and advocate to the developers.

Here's the schedule for this week:

Monday: #3 Militia ability to defend.

Tuesday: #2 Financial Reporting.

Wednesday: #1 Politician gameplay and skills.

Thursday: #4 and #5 Garages and Resignation (if we can agree to take on just one of our three ties for fifth).

Friday: Finalize top-five list and submit to Thunderheart and the devs.

There will be some overlap, such as discussion of each issue and voting and development of our solutions from one day to the next, but these are the days on which we'll begin brainstorming on each issue.

Now, in this thead, I'd like to invite you all to post your ideas, your solutions, your systems for giving our militias some ability to defend cities, to promote player-policing of their own cities. Please copy and paste responses from other threads into this thread rather than just providing links, so that we get every idea we have to consider here in one place for everyone to view easily. Today is a brainstorming day. No ideas are off limits, no ideas too crazy, too ambitious, too stupid. An overly ambitious system might lend some aspect of itself to our proposed solution. A crazy solution might inspire enough conversation to bring us to something really cool.

Everyone is invited to propose, suggest, and create here. However, we have a criticism by invitation only policy. You do not earn your right to critique, judge, correct or comment on anyone else's suggestions until after you have submitted your own suggestion, brainstorm or solution. We need to start off with all the fresh solutions we can generate, and finally we will whittle, and challenge,and compile, and combine and edit everythng down to our one official presentation issue on this subject.

So now, if you please, regarding our #3 issue, the ability of city militia to defend:

1. State the issue as clearly, conscisely and completely as possible.

2. State your proposed solution, system or concept.

3. Return aftercompleting steps 1 and 2 to comment on, challenge, praise, or critique, support other ideas. You may challenge but not flame or demean other ideas.

Here is a suggestion I liked from Jarob on the matter:

We need a way to control people in our city. The largest issue is people that come in and just squat or harass people for fun in your city. So why not a /cityignore command. Basically they would have 2 mins to state their case and then *MUTE* can't hear them anymore in spatial. They can still talk amongst each other in their group chat etc. And /tell works because people could just /addignore if they really make everyone mad. The duration might be 2 hours so they will get tired and run away. Also this would help with the stupid guys that macro /shout's in a city (have seen them myself). You just walk up /cityignore them and no more noise. (So emotes would need to be included in the ignore)

In addition I think a polite thing we could add to this would be that they could not enter ANY building except one they OWN or are ADMIN / ENTRY on in the city. So if you /cityignore them they can stand out in the street making gestures and jumping up and down etc. but could not follow you into the cantina and run around with pets to bug you etc.

What does everyone think about this?

What are the potential griefer uses of a power like this?

Is 2 hours long enough?

Additional ideas?

Kator of'Rubidium
Flurry

And the following were my own additions:

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I like this idea. I'd come to the forums with the intent of posting something similar to see what people made of it, though I had thought to call it /CityOutcast.

/CityWarn was pulled because of folks living next to POIs preventing visitors to that POI from entering it (prime example being the Force Crystal Caves). Being able to simply /cityignore and /cityban them would stop griefers from harrassing the citizens and still allow them access to the POI (even if they ARE being obnoxious).

The author of this idea suggested some nice time limits and limitations as well. I would think those are optional though, as I think by the time someone rates being ignored by a whole population they pretty much don't need to be heard from again under any circumstances (but that is just me).

Another command I would suggest would be /CityWanted - this would be a limited list (5 names?) of players who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to raise the ire of a town. People on this short list would be essentially under the old /CityWarn rules, and able to be killed on sight by the militia. This list may be added to at any time, but removing a name would take 24 hours after issuing a pardon (to keep cities from rotating the names quickly and thereby essentially having the old style /CityWarn griefing back). The /CityWanted short list should prevent it being used to prevent all access to a POI, as keeping five people out of your area of influence is not the same as keeping the whole server out of the Force Crystal Caves. Having a Wanted list would add to the roleplay of the cities as well.

Thoughts?

- Acroyear

Give us /citywarn back and fix the POI problem, don't remove an important feature. My city needs to keep covert Imperials OUT.

kthxbye

I feel that the following things should be changed to the way that /citywarn used to work for all the reasons listed above if not more:

Combine the powers of /citywarn and /cityban into one command (we'll just assume it keeps /citywarn as the name) so that when you use /citywarn you put the person on your cities enemy list and he is therefore unable to clone there, heal there, or travel to and from via the shuttleport. This stops the clone loop that was used to destroy valuable items from people that others just didn't like.

Increase the timer to a minimum of 5 minutes. If you have a 56k or if the server just happens to be lagging that day you could get the clone screen up before you are even told if you have been warned under the old system. That was far too short. However 5 minutes allows you to see that you are requested to leave and give you enough time to get out of the town on foot and not bursting even if you are at the heart of a metropolis. This should be the minimum amount of time in my honest opinion since not everyone has a mount or a vehicle and if you just recently bursted you may just be screwed.

If the above 5 minute timer seems like it either does not allow the milita an active amount of power or gives the person too long to get out or prepare to duke it out with your policemen then have /citywarn warp the player to city limits and start the TEF flag basically showing that they were run out of town and aren't wanted anymore.

The flag you get when entering the town will only last for 24 hours, or honestly 24 hours plus server downtime.

That would basically fix the major ways that /citywarn was being griefed. Now some cities are griefing others by controlling access to an important spawn (force crystal caves, krayt graveyard) and the only way to fix this is to have CSR's move the city away from the POI and create a no build zone to prevent this sort of griefing from happening again, no bending of the militia or stripping their power will be able to prevent this from happening.

Ideas I liked: The idea of /cityignore is excellent since not all towns are full of combatants and so harrasing them would go unchecked. I feel that on top of removing spatial and emote it may also be wise to remove the power to call pets. As was stated above people will just call out pet and then rename them or have them patrol in a way that is griefing and should not be tolerated. However if you can't kill it then you don't have too many options. So tacking this onto the idea as a rider would be helpfull.

I also love the idea of a wanted list. It would be great to be able to put repeat offenders on this list so that they always have a TEF when in town and are attackable in an instant from a militiaman. They will need to of been /citywarned at least once so you can't just put "enemies" on the list without any cause, and when player bounties are eventually introduced allow the mayor to put a price on their head. After the BH kills the person and collects the player is removed from the wanted list. He would need to get a mail that he has both been put on the list and if a contract is out on his life (not when a BH picks it up but just know that he has a price on his head) as a warning.

/cityignore is a neat feature. I like this.

As stated in the original Thread about the idea ... I love /cityignore

But I would also like to see an optional /citywarn (where the warned person has to accept to be warned) ... because this feature is far suppirior to /duel to establish own roleplay rules of gameplay in the communities (while also not being griefable)

I would like to see a post from one of the Mayors of a city that currently has a radius overlapping a POI like the Krayt Graveyards or Force Crystal Caves. Since one of the reasons given by the Devs for pulling /CityWarn was because of Player-Cities blockading POIs how would one of these Player-Cities propose to fix it.? If I'm going to try to rack my brain for a solution to an issue that I didn't cause I want input from those that are the "offenders". How would you suppose we treat the issue of a city blockading a POI?

To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, "Help us help you"

In response to the last post. I have never seen a city that envelopes a POI. The crystal caves could be possible, but the land is so steep I can't see a city out there, there is next to no buildable terrain. Maybe where the darktroopers spawn someone has a city?

My city is within 800m of the waypoint for the krayt graveyard. But krayts spawn over a huge area, not at one fixed point. Also, krayts also spawn over by jabbas palace, so it is not a unique spawn to the planet. Having my city promotes access to the area, and in no way can we limit someone from very easily walking in if they like to hunt krayts.

I can imagine people having to go around cities and being inconvenienced in getting to POIs, but I have never seen an example of a city totatly encompassing a POI such that it limited access to it.

My main issues with punishment...

1. Make all the /citypunishment lists addedable (and clearable) when the person is not actually there. If needs be, let it be a mayor only thing to manually add/remove people without them being there. It should be possible to take action on someone after they've left the city (a careful griefer could avoid retribution by picking their times carefully.

2. Add a /cityignore option to mute the says/emotes/thinks of the target.

3. Allow citywarn for non-player player owned entities. In other words, droids, pets, faction pets and vehicles that don't belong to a resident. Let the militia be able to citywarn these items. The owner gets a two minute warning message, and the option to attempt to defend the pet which will make them attackable for the militia with a yes/no clicky box. Something like: Do you wish to defend your pet? This will make you attackable by the city militia' 'No, I will leave the city quietly or 'Yes, I will stay and fight'. If they click no and stay, the militia can attack said pet with no TEF to the owner. If they say yes, both the pet and owner get a TEF after the time. This allows the militia the first hit on both pet and owner.

Like all systems, this could be used to grief. But not in a major way. You'd have two minutes to get out or store it, and at most will lose one item (or a few points of vitality on a pet). They can't really load-kill anything, as you have to be there to call your pet/droid/vehicle. There's no non-consensual PvP here, and the non-consensual item damage is easily avoidable. Anyone that clicks 'yes' consented to fight, no matter how grumbly they get afterwards about it.

It would stop the pet griefing that current goes on, with renamed pets, following people, blocking things etc. This is something /cityignore couldn't deal with, and even the old citywarn didn't really (couldn't warn droids).