The mayor voting system

[Kim!]

Another city got stolen today, maybe it's time to take steps towards preventing hostile takeovers?

A recent trend has been that a group of players will find a high fame city with lots of empty spaces, join the city in the middle of the night, vote in a new mayor, and kick out the old residents... keeping the city's fame and building upgrades for themselves.

A second common issue is mainly in new player cities, players tend to vote for themselves (often accidentally) and leave the city mayorless.

I propose the following changes:

1. When a player joins a new city, place their vote on the current mayor. If there's a tie, put the vote on the player from the tie who's been in the city longer. (In the current system, when a player joins a city their vote usually defaults to the original founder or to themself.)

2. Add a cooldown on voting after joining a city, maybe 12-24 hours before they can move their vote off the current mayor. This would give an existing city time to notice a dozen players joining and decide what to do, whether that's to welcome new players or boot them.


I think that'd go a long way towards fixing current issues without overcomplicating the system or getting in the way of normal gameplay. It would keep the democratic system in place and still let cities do mergers easily or vote out a bad/inactive mayor, but also make it harder to abuse the voting system.

[alanx]

I think you’ve found the solution to the problem! They can just the same 10 day countdown timer for moving cities to maintain a 10 day lock on the vote.

I think when a new player joins; for 10 days their vote itself should either go to the existing mayor or better yet should be frozen and not counted.
After 10 days the vote can go to the existing mayor as well as that person has the option of changing their vote in case th vote was already with the mayor.

This way takeovers are no longer practical. Why 12-24hours? I think 10 days makes perfect sense and is very consistent with the existing system. It would need very little coding changes. I think this would work really well.

@Darkis, @Tethys, please genuinely consider this

[Kim!]

This way takeovers are no longer practical. Why 12-24hours? I think 10 days makes perfect sense and is very consistent with the existing system. It would need very little coding changes. I think this would work really well.

I would lean towards it being shorter for the sake of new players, early game is more fast paced with a high turnover rate so 10 days would be an eternity to them. It would make it really hard to remove an inactive/lazy mayor from a starter town if no one could vote for 10 days after joining, especially if new recruits go inactive after a couple days too. But I think a timer of any length would help out with the recent takeovers, so it's just a question of balancing it.

[alanx]

This way takeovers are no longer practical. Why 12-24hours? I think 10 days makes perfect sense and is very consistent with the existing system. It would need very little coding changes. I think this would work really well.

I would lean towards it being shorter for the sake of new players, early game is more fast paced with a high turnover rate so 10 days would be an eternity to them. It would make it really hard to remove an inactive/lazy mayor from a starter town if no one could vote for 10 days after joining, especially if new recruits go inactive after a couple days too. But I think a timer of any length would help out with the recent takeovers, so it's just a question of balancing it.

There will always be pros and cons. However, it would be easier for CC to implement it if its consistent. I have no issue with shorter time.
As for lazy mayor issue, the real fix for this would be implement the deputy mayor feature and have a default active assignee if the mayor is AWOL

[Mitrax]

Disable Major System and add some sub-mayor
only sub-mayor can kick/vote mayor when offline for minimum of 30 days

Regards
Mitrax

[Shiroe]

This way takeovers are no longer practical. Why 12-24hours? I think 10 days makes perfect sense and is very consistent with the existing system. It would need very little coding changes. I think this would work really well.

I would lean towards it being shorter for the sake of new players, early game is more fast paced with a high turnover rate so 10 days would be an eternity to them. It would make it really hard to remove an inactive/lazy mayor from a starter town if no one could vote for 10 days after joining, especially if new recruits go inactive after a couple days too. But I think a timer of any length would help out with the recent takeovers, so it's just a question of balancing it.

Probably 90+% of new players won't know there is a voting system and that the city creator isn't the eternal mayor...
So 10 days wouldn't really matter there either, since unless they asked in world chat, they likely wouldn't know how to remove an inactive mayor.
(and even if they did, would probably have difficulty organizing the newbies into a vote. (IIRC, "City Chat Alert" defaults to off, so I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of newbies take more than 10 days to discover city chat exists))

[alanx]

Probably 90+% of new players won't know there is a voting system and that the city creator isn't the eternal mayor...
So 10 days wouldn't really matter there either, since unless they asked in world chat, they likely wouldn't know how to remove an inactive mayor.
(and even if they did, would probably have difficulty organizing the newbies into a vote. (IIRC, "City Chat Alert" defaults to off, so I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of newbies take more than 10 days to discover city chat exists))

^what he said
10 days would be good over-all. The existing system is a deterrent to city-hopping and the same system should adequately suffice to counter city-takeovers as well without much effort coding wise.
I would be fine if CC tackles one problem at a time. Expecting a perfect system just ends up with more delays. Straightforward fixes seem more likely to get implemented or so I guess..