Citizens, Farming, and trust.
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In the current system farming is necessary for city ranking and upkeep.
Frankly it is extremely easy to do this what with only having to worry about 2 crops and having 60 free fields outside of (most) towns. Alone it takes at most an hour a day for watering, harvesting, and rotation of these fields. I know, I have done it every test the last 4 tests and am doing it currently in Zenith. Yes you have to up this time commitment if you plant rice, but lets leave that aside. As long as there are no outside influences, and you dedicate the time, then there is no problem.
Introduce the outside influences - citizens.
Cities -require- citizens for them to exist. Both a minimum of 20 or face de-ranking and practically for placing houses in town to up the prestige of the town to then rank up. Because houses outside of town don't count, duplicate city buildings don't count, and even some city buildings just don't count... which is totally sustainable and reasonable what with everyone only getting 1 plot per account -sarcasm-.
Citizens get full access to the crafting facilities inside of town and at a seperate tax rate than residents or transients. This is great and a good incentive to join a town in of itself. They are also allowed to buy a plot in town at a special rate with no rent, also good hurrah hurrah.
But then we get into the marsh.
Citizens get access to all chests/smelters/tanning tubs/ and fields. And this is where the trust problems come in.
Ever since city population requirements went from 5 to 20 there has been the required need to make unknown people citizens, just to make things possible. And ever since then there have been people who steal from chests, replace -your- tanning warg hide for -their- animal hide, and replace the wheat growing with cotton (cuz they want cotton armor and this is the only way to get it).The consequences of this theft and undermining activity have been felt by just about every group. Bussy infiltrated multiple towns and stole grain, opportunists take city resources and sell them in the market for personal profit, crops that are hours away from harvest get replaced thus wasting -days- and causing a town to loose ranks. We have been begging for activity logs for these stations in order to help separate the good people from the asses. It seems this will never come.
Instead I propose that access to these very sensitive and necessary functions of towns be limited to the lieutenant governors.
This way cities can be more generous with their recruitment, creating bigger and better communities, while also being secure in their huge investments. It is much simpler and more reasonable to scrutinize 5 than 25. By removing the temptation the environment will also be more pleasant. By raising the bar it makes the successful infiltration and betrayal all the more satisfying for those who are motivated by that stuff.
Thoughts?
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@OlivePit
I think that it is the perfect solution and that it can’t come soon enough. We have had the nutrition on the soil for our cereals reduced to 59% by careless, greedy folks. Our city is going to be in debt because the same folks can’t wait a few hours for the rice to finish growing. Instead they rip out the rice and plant cotton!At this point I am not even getting to play the game as anything other than a farmer, and to be honest it is a losing battle with no way to know who the bad guys are or prevent them from ruining the fields. We have to have a solution or the whole thing is pointless and this is the best solution I have heard.
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Activity logs would really help out players.
Regardless if activity logs are done. Cities need to have more then Gov, Lt Gov, and Citizen roles. There needs to be some sort of city permissions list, something like: who can accept new citizens, who can place new buildings, who can place plots, who can spent/change research points, who can use forges, who can use smelters, who can use tubs, who can use any crafting station, and who can use farm plots. And with such permissions, a normal citizen could also have the "farmer" role and be trusted to deal with the cities farm plots. Along with trusted crafters who'd have access to the crafting stations.
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@OlivePit said in Citizens, Farming, and trust.:
Thoughts?
Acceptable band-aid solution at this stage of development. That being said, we can't lose sight of the real changes though and need to push for them to become real sooner rather than later.
Citizen and prestige requirements put the newer towns at a pretty big security disadvantage. Even today, some of the more established towns are still suffering from greifers stealing crops and sabotaging their stability. At Braavos we never suffered from these issues, we started strong with a solid core and never needed to take in any unknown player citizens. We always try to develop our town with security and preparation for the worst in mind. IMO, newer towns are sort of sitting ducks with things the way they are..
As others have mentioned.. We need logs, we need custom user groups(guild roles/ranks), we need clipboard utilization for easy copy & pasting of groups from container to container etc. None of this appeared on the roadmap, so I doubt anyone can say when to expect this sort of stuff but these things are crucial. These features go a long way in taking care of the people who look after and provide content for the community while the game is being developed.
Fun fact, Albion officially launched like mid July 2017.. Now at that point the community had already been asking for similar features for two years already during alpha and beta stages. Asking for guild QoL improvements and other basic functionality just like this stuff mentioned in this thread. It wasn't until mid March 2018 roughly 3+ years before Sandbox interactive finally delivered their first QoL update for guilds and their management in the Lancelot update.
I hope we see some attention regarding these concerns by the team at Dynamight.. Sixteen months post-launch for SBI to take their first pass.. Over three years.
https://albiononline.com/en/news/devtalk-guild-ui-improvements
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Ahhhh, what? You are making it very complicated. First of all, no one other than a Governor or Lieutenant Governor should ever be able to adjust research points, place buildings of any kind, or accept or remove citizens or any of the other things that you have listed. FFA is currently a great example of why!
Lieutenant Governors are trusted to carry out all of the duties of a Governor but frequently check in with their Governor to be sure that their actions fall in line with policy. They may be friends or have proven themselves trustworthy in some other way. To put it bluntly, they can be trusted not to screw over the Governor, the city, or its citizens.
Citizens, on the other hand, are often of unknown quality. They are simply new faces in town. While this doesn’t mean that they aren’t fine upstanding people it does mean that there is no way, at least in the short term, to determine if it is safe to give them control over any aspect of a city.
However, at this moment we are discussing issues with farming and the fact that we can’t trust the “citizens” of a city to keep their greedy hands of the fields. So far @OlivePit solution is the best and most efficient one I have heard and I seriously hope that the Devs take it under advisement and soon. Seriously @LordSkykal I can’t keep chasing ghosts in the fields hoping that we can salvage enough to make the next upkeep. We need a solution, soon… Perhaps a word in the right ear, if possible?
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We have had plenty of discussion on how to handle permissions in a town. When the game launches you are likely to see 100's of residents in each town. Some may be helpful, some may be agents, some may be thieves, you have no idea.
We discussed in TK having a town with set blacksmith tech but no smelters (minimum) in town and we would do all crafting in our own or housing plots (too much time and resources to be wasted).For farming if you have no control over the residents the town (multiple towns) can easily die. We are in BETA with limited numbers yet people have been sabotaging or stealing the farm produce. There needs to be permissions for farming at least. Leave the town Blacksmith and Tannery alone if you want (I would use my own plot for mats anyway).
Permissions for farmers!!
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Games really not about fun. It's about wasting.
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My permissions idea may be complex, but it would also give freedom to all the cities to name the roles with permissions. Governor, Lt. Governor, and Citizen could be renamed however the city's founder leader wants. Maybe someone would rather the title be Mayor instead of Governor? Or even King? Who knows. Maybe some founder would like to call the lowest role Peasants instead of Citizens?
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@TekNicTerror said in Citizens, Farming, and trust.:
Maybe some founder would like to call the lowest role Peasants instead of Citizens?
Wouldn't those that live outside the confines of a city or kingdom be known as commoners or 'peasants' instead?
Also, just to make sure I'm understanding correctly, does Lt./Lieutenant Governor mean Vice Governor?
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Sorry, yes, Vice governor is the term... Lt gov is another short hand equivilent.
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@OlivePit It's okay, I just wasn't sure if they meant the same thing or if it was being suggested as a role under the Vice Governor.
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I agree 100%, an activity log would be great, more city roles with a permission system would be fantastic but ya the farming needs to change asap. At the very minimum farming should be restricted to gov and vices only.
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@TekNicTerror I am not saying that your ideas don't have some merit (although I believe that the title of King is already reserved for one Kickstarter individual) but that this thread is about a very specific problem that needs a pretty immediate solution. Your ideas were too much for this thread. It would be fun to talk about some of the ideas that you brought up in a separate thread though.
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There is of course an issue with giving only governors and vice governors all the control, which is a problem even now (though there will I believe be ways of replacing these people by voting or siege etc.) Namely; what if the people with the power to do all these things happen to be offline for whatever reason? Time zones also come into it; what of the players that are on when all the governors are asleep?
I suppose that the main thing is citizenship, which a player might have to wait for, but that shouldn't be an issue, are there other things that require direct access to a governor? I'm beginning to think that this is much less of a problem than I thought
Still, what if a governor stops playing completely? and are there powers that vice governors don't have? All I can think of is the power to promote someone to governor
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I am agreeing with all the concerns and suggestions @OlivePit made.
Beside this I want to add some concerns and problems of town management from my side, that I was stating in the past more than once:
- Account vs. Playernames
- If a (Vice)-Governor always just see account names, we need to make a complicated offline list about every citizen account + playernames relation and we never know which newly created character is related to any of the accounts on our list, since they are automatically town citizen account wide.
Even if you spot a player doing bad stuff to your town, which one you will kick out? Just purging whole citizen? And for this reason making intown houseplots unusable forever, since they didn't get freed?
And what you have won, if you reinvite everyone, you simply don't know who the guy was. Just staying on your 10 closest friends for Citizenship, to be able to get the needed Prestige for Rank 15... oh wait, it was 15, since public buildings don't count anymore if double builded.
I am suggesting in this case, make all related Playernames visible on the Townlist, at least for (Vice)-Governors.
- Last Online
- Give us the possibility to see, when a player was last time online.
Since we don't have any possibility to manage player of our town correctly, it would help much to be able to see, who is active and who not.
- Ingame town communication
- Yes I know, we can use third party chat programs to get connected.
But for all the Residents that I most likely never met nor know who is Resident, since there is no single hint of ownership of that houses outside of the town, I am not able to give these People any order or information about the town, except with limited townhall description.
Some kind of townboard or town chat would be nice, where all Citizen and Residents are in.
It would make it way easier to govern a town in a good way. To leave some informations for everyone who is related to that town. Also it would be easier to make them clear, what is needed to get the town to the desired rank and stay there.
- visible Tech-Tree
Make the Tech-Tree visible, means readable for Citizen, Residents or even Public.
I not even understand, why it is just visible for Governors at all.
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@Kralith said in Citizens, Farming, and trust.:
Ingame town communication
I'd love to have this alongside other forms of communication in cities like announcements (bulletin board) or a Town Crier a Governor and Vice Governor can have shout things to everyone—the less reliance on third-party chat programs, the better.
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@Vortech said in Citizens, Farming, and trust.:
@OlivePit said in Citizens, Farming, and trust.:
Thoughts?
Fun fact, Albion officially launched like mid July 2017.. Now at that point the community had already been asking for similar features for two years already during alpha and beta stages. Asking for guild QoL improvements and other basic functionality just like this stuff mentioned in this thread. It wasn't until mid March 2018 roughly 3+ years before Sandbox interactive finally delivered their first QoL update for guilds and their management in the Lancelot update.
I hope we see some attention regarding these concerns by the team at Dynamight.. Sixteen months post-launch for SBI to take their first pass.. Over three years.
https://albiononline.com/en/news/devtalk-guild-ui-improvements
Learn from others' mistakes... I remember how guilds shutdown their operations just because the guild management was so hard. It might sound small that guilds need logs, roles, ranks and rights, but without those QoL features the officers can easily burn out.
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Or change the smelting mechanics/tanning mechanics to "instant", to reduce tedium and promote gameplay that isn't make a billion smelters and wait simulator. Changing smelters & tanning tubs to "crafting stations" as opposed to what they are now would also solve the problem of citizen trust-worthiness and make crafting more tolerable (at least for me). Like, I really don't understand the need to be unique in this sense, when tried-and-true methods already exist whilst being incredibly less painful by lacking "heavy" materials which need to be picked up and loaded onto a bloody cart.
If gear ends up proliferating, reduce the durability of lower quality stuff and/or add major durability loss upon being downed by ANYTHING. Excellent gear (enchanted stuff) would be limited by reagents as is.
Activity logs are obviously needed for city managers, so I hope they implement this ASAP.
Another possibly crazy idea: Remove farming/food requirements for cities all together, replace growth with gold which is now supplied by taxes. Along the line of food, I'd be happy if they removed food & rest requirements altogether, as this game doesn't feel like survival mechanics suit it very well, and appear very cumbersome at best.
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@BECKFAST The problem with a lot of your suggestions is they go totally against what FO is all about.
The game wants cities to be based on more than just gold...and farming is a big and well anticipated part of that system.
Same with time sink things like tanning tubs and smelters. Higher tier gear is locked behind a few things, time sinks, and extra component requirements, and now recipes..;although many of us disagree with recipes, for the most part, the only thing about tanning tubs/smelters that has really been in doubt is how long their timesinks are, and how balanced it is compared to like mage armor type selections. Rather than removing tanning tubs/smelters time sink elements, they need to add a time sink to cloth level armors, even if it isn't exactly as long as leather or metal.
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@BECKFAST I think the need of farming and hunting for town management is nice and should stay but the system still needs some improvements. But I agree that something should be done for the refining and crafting because I have experienced it as well, ...somewhat repulsive.
