Towns Changes to Make Gud Game

1. Town population limit
In order to discourage "megatowns" with populations in the hundreds from forming and to encourage smaller, tight knit communities, i'd like to propose a town limit. By implementing a town limit, towns would be encouraged to include all residents in town affairs, leading to increased interest in the town from residents due to higher involvement. This would also allow for towns that would usually have trouble getting started due to competition from larger towns to establish themselves and have no difficulty recruiting residents. This does, however, come with the downside that the demand for towns may exceed the amount of positions in towns available, leading to a large homeless population. This could be remedied by having a low price to establish towns and by giving all players ample space in the bank and /chest to store the items that they will accumulate while getting established on the server without having to join a town.

2. Uncouple max plots from town and nation size
In previous iterations of meepcraft, if you wanted to grow your town, you had to recruit more residents, whether you wanted to or not. While this made sure that all towns would want to recruit residents, it ultimately detracts from the game for people who simply want to create large towns for themselves and their friends without having to worry about managing a community and providing for the needs of citizens. It also consolidated all towns into a single nation, as there was no reason not to join the largest nation possible in order to claim more plots. I would like to suggest that, instead of the maximum number of plots being determined by town and nation population, it would instead be increased by paying meebles to increase the maximum plots possible. I would recommend that the function for determining plot price be exponential, to keep extremely wealthy residents from being able to claim inordinate amounts of plots, and to encourage towns to use their space efficiently. This would prevent towns that don't want to recruit residents from recruiting residents, ensure that towns that buy large tracts of land have enough money to develop it, encourage dense towns, and provide a money sink for an economy that can only increase in value.

3. Add a strategic and competitive edge to nations
In previous versions, there was really no reason to not join the largest nation possible due to the plot bonus, and nation membership had no benefits or drawbacks other than that. I would like to see that changed, and I have a solution for this problem that does this and encourages towns to build interest amenities that encourages travel from other town. A toll of 10-100 meebles should be implemented when travel to other towns is done via /t spawn [townname]. However, unlike in previous versions, this would be added to the bank of the town being traveled to, and not removed from the economy completely. This toll would be negated when players are traveling to towns in the nation that they belong to. While this may seem like an insignificant and annoying change, it would add depth to nation membership and encourage towns to have a vision as to what the function of the town is. For towns that draw considerable traffic through shops and other amenities, it would be beneficial to be part of a small nation or be completely independent. However, for towns that do not draw much traffic or that want to make themselves as appealing to prospective residents as possible, it would be most beneficial to either provide competing ameneties(which gives town leaders something to do) or to join a nation that contains town that draw considerable traffic. This would create interesting dynamics between towns and nations, as well as providing ways that poorer players could establish shops that compete with the monolithic shops established by wealthier players.

 

First two: No. Third: eh.

 

Explain?

 

1. No. Towns should be able to grow infinitely or else town mayors will be discouraged. Not all large towns keep growing. Take gamma for example. It shrinked from population of 400 to 144. Town growth should be dependent on the mayor's abilities.

2. No. The 140 nation bonus was enough for most hermits and residents should represent how powerful a town is. Maybe we could change the nation bonus by how strong a nation is. (Tying into 3)

3. Unfortunately, -1. Meep needs to take out as much money from the economy as possible to avoid economic disasters. I think that nations should have different nation bonuses instead, determined by their strength. No one cares about 10 meebles tbh, and most major towns have a pwarp set up anyway.

 

-1

 

He's basically saying the first two ideas are trash and the third one is meh.


Towns definitely do not need to be cheaper. If you want your town to have a "tight knit community" you can do so yourself without lowering the town size for everyone else.

Isn't that kinda the point? If you want to have a bigger town, you need residents to populate it. Also, how much space do you need if you only have a few residents in the town???

If you're extremely wealthy you deserve however many plots you want. Also, contrary to what you believe people only claim plots if they're planning to use them. Which means that the plot is being used and it's an effective use of space. So just because someone's wealthy, doesn't mean that they have a whole bunch of plots that they aren't using effectively.

First of all, a 10-100 meeble fee is not gonna stop anyone from going to a town they wanna see, second of all I'm not sure if you're talking about before gamma, but in gamma the money was added to the town bank. Third of all, the money should be removed from the economy because that would just add another stabilizer for the economy.

From my experiences, people don't typically go to /t spawns to get to a place they wanna go, they use /pwarps.

Overall, -1 for all three suggestions

 

The thing is, other than the plot bonus, nations had no real purpose. I get that 140 plots was enough for hermits, but the coupling of plot bonuses to nations is completely arbitrary and joining the largest nation possible is a true no-brainer. With all the purpose nations serve at the moment, just removing them and giving all towns the 140 plot bonus would be preferable to the current state of affairs. Suggestion 2 is done with the intent of adding a money sink to the economy to stop hyperinflation like you stated needed to be done in section 3 of your reply.

I know it won't stop people, and that isn't the intent. however, 10-100 meebles will add up over time, and when you have the opportunity to save that money when doing your shopping, you'd kinda want to take that opportunity. Again, this fee for travel would be small enough that you could ignore it if you wanted and not suffer massive drawbacks, but it could be something used to create interesting dynamics and relationships between towns and nations.

The thing is, from my experience involving people with the progress of a town is beneficial. I know my evidence is anecdotal, but the only reason I became active on this server in the first place was because I was recruited into a town in which I could be involved in the development and improvement of. In towns with 100+ residents, it is simply not feasible to involve a large portion of the residents in the improvement of the town, and most tasks will be handled by a small circle of elite players in the town. The aim of limiting town size is not to limit what mayors can do, but to create more towns and get a higher percentage of players involved in building up the towns that they are a resident of.

The amount of money removed from the econ for towny travel has never been signifigant enough to create stabilization in the economy, and more money sinks can be added if this money sink is sacrificed to add depth to town and nation membership.

You make a good point there. However, the main point of this change is to give people a way around building towns with residents that they don't want. The main point of this system is to allow for people to build large private towns with farms, large buildings, etc while adding a money sink into the economy. If the system I originally proposed is too harsh, it could probably easily be combined with the current system.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 8, 2017, Original Post Date: Jan 8, 2017 ---

Yeah I know that I just want the reasoning

 

Absolutely not, one of the glories of Towny is there is no limit to how big you can get. It's just however much you can do. One of the biggest problems the Gamma economy faced was everyone, their brother, and their best friend had a town. There were so many small towns, there was no real large projects that you would normally see from larger towns. I mean, really, the top towns list had my own in the 7th place, and it only had 48 residents!

For towns that are much more private, the basic plot bonus from nations is more than enough. Seriously, I just had my brother claim me a 50 plot estate, and we still had plenty of room to go raiding, and claim houses for friends, as well. Anything over 148 for one resident is a bit absurd. I don't think towns should be able to buy an increased cap, but allowing nations to buy more is something that has been suggested before, and makes logical sense. If a town doesn't want to recruit residents, then they are probably a private town with either a big house, or lots of farms. Either way, being in a nation that can purchase additional plot bonuses would remedy the issue if one arises.

Nations have always been a bit awkward, but this seems to counteract your reasoning for #2. What happens is all towns join the same nation, to get rid of that tax. Honestly, players with big shops are always going to set up pwarps instead just because it doesn't cost their customers anything to browse. Players are not going to want to go to a shop that costs them to even get to.

Overall, these ideas won't benefit anyone.

 

Third one has some merit. Nations are quite literally pointless. To counter your point clueless, you could simply add a limit to the amount of towns in a nations that allow for competitiveness in nations. Nations compete for towns that are big and popular, towns compete for a spot in nations with cool and popular towns.

 

I'm actually surprised that you guys speak that way, implying that residents should equal power or size. Rome was #1 on /baltop and operated Pseudo Corporation, was it not a powerful town? In fact, PseudoCorp has expanded to six people, and intends to build a gigantic town with numerous huge buildings. Some of these will be very large, and thus require several (that's an understatement) plots. The nation bonus was our lifeline, as we only had three residents.

I very much support all three of these suggestions. I feel that #2 specifically reaches out to friend groups who don't wish to support a community in a town. +1

 

I would also like to note that the towns pluggin is a very, very, very, very, very messy pluggin. It is not at all simple to change things about it and the last time someone did, Sjoe erased everyones towny data.

 

I mean, the devs have a pretty good period of time to test changes atm.

I may be misunderstanding your idea, but without a way for interaction with successful towns in a nation to benefit unsuccessful towns, there would still be no point for a town to want to belong to one nation over another. However, now that I think about it, combining a town limit to nations would create some interesting scenarios when combined with my third suggestion, as it would prevent single nations from becoming monolithic like cluelessklutz stated while encouraging towns and nations to compete for one another, and would encourage towns with successful markets to establish nations in order to establish a more captive audience for their shops. However, I don't know how it would be possible to prevent the circumvention of this system via pwarps.

 

1) Yes.
2) Yes.
3) Seems a little pointless.

 

I'm not saying that we should get rid of the nation bonus, but the opposite. Baltop does not show how successful a town is, but how successful a business is. For example, Mooville was very successful but only had around a million in the town bank. NinjaRoxy had 15 mil, but did not own a successful town. I know that towns could be used for businesses, but the nation bonus of 140+ will be enough. My opinion is that they should increase the nation bonus as more towns join the nation. Byzantium had like 30 towns, so it wouldn't be difficult to just increase your nation size.

I agree with this + please look at my previous post

 

If there's any time to change it, it's before players get back on.

 

Nations were important in times of war. Nations could choose to fight, stay neutral, band together, etc. But since Meep doesn't ever have Towny War, the only purpose is the plots and some sense of community, I guess.

 

We will keep these in mind, but we already have a plan for some things.