I’d like to suggest that the server start using a method to measure city activity (Based on activity of owners, expansions, projects, plot sales, etc) so that players can make better choices on where they would like to settle.
If a company owner was looking for the next place to establish a store, or a new player was wanting to live where the most activity was, they could use this measure to make better choices and give incentive for city owners to keep their cities in the “active & growing” status.
I personally have gone to a lot of the private cities listed in the airport, only to find empty plots & not a soul living there. It kinda inflates the number of “private cities” that someone could actually thrive in !
While I think it’s a good idea nowadays the activity of the city really depends on the activity of the owner, so you can sorta just ask in chat and if someone responds chances are that cities pretty active, no?
Great idea in practice but depending on when you’re online, chat can either be super active & responsive or the opposite. I think keeping an actual list with the incentive to keep a city active only benefits. Plus a new player may not know the questions to ask, get frustrated and leave pretty quickly.
It’d probably be quite difficult to measure city activity, though it’d be interesting to see this implemented.
activity of owners
I don’t really believe that the activity of a cities owners is a representation of how active a city is, and some players (like Vita) own multiple cities that would make this measure inaccurate.
expansions, projects
This would probably have to be recorded manually by the city department as WorldGuard (to my knowledge) doesn’t fire a RegionCreateEvent that could be recorded by a plugin. Also, this is basically represented by a cities tier.
plot sales
If HM had a custom plugin it might be possible to listen for AreaShop’s SoldRegionEvent and record total plot sales that way, otherwise it would take too much time to record all plot sales manually across the entire server. The problem with measuring plot sales is that HM has been switching from ARM to Areashop and back, and that it’s not really possibly to prevent players artificially inflating a cities plot sales by buying/selling regions over and over
I think we stick with it aint gonna happen if city owner inactive.
plot sales
There is a line in the config that triggers the sell sign to disappear on purchase. If this is removed and the sign is kept but placed appropriately, technically the plot could be made available to be resold. Then we have to work out how we do that. Would players need to contact the city dept to evict a plot when a city owner is unavailable?
Determining activity level will definitely rely on a few key factors, I was just listing an idea of what some of those factors could be. I’ll leave the specific details to how this would work up to the team that is smarter & more capable, but just wanted to drop this idea in their heads.
I would find it insanely useful to know which cities were bustling, up and coming, and just plain dead. It could be updated on a bi-weekly or even monthly basis, and could even be as simple as polls sent to each city owner every month. Just them responding would be a good sign to how active the city is, let alone the details the provide afterwards to prove it.
I wanted to do something about this with the airport, instead of sorting by tiers i wanted to get certain cities “certified” to be at the top of the list, if they meet a number of new player friendly requirements, like airport close to city center, plots for sale, apartments for rent, stores exc
just stop using shop sell signs. Start only putting rent signs up. You don’t pay rent for that plot? Evicted! You didn’t pay for the rented land from gov you bought for argos? Evicted!
You can easily see a whole inactive city up for rent this way
perhaps signs will be the new lag