(08-15-2016, 09:37 PM)Magnifique Wrote: The only scenario where I would support restricting things or giving perks to "official" factions or groups is where it's feasible for anyone who is willing to put effort into it to obtain that "official" status.
I'm all for perks for people who put effort into RP, but it's never going to work as intended (the intent being to improve server gameplay, immersion, RP atmosphere, and RP quality) if it's going to be up to the subjective whims of the chosen few to hand out those perks.
What is needed to make perks work is a standardized, easy no-work-for-admins, and objective process which will also grant those perks to causal no-name players, without need to gain the subjective favor of anyone first.
So, impossible when the server is RP first.
Not really. You just need to lower the standards for giving the perks to a point where everyone agrees to "yeah, it's still RP within the Freelancer universe", and lower the perks to a point where everyone agrees to "yeah, giving this guy this perk isn't going to ruin the game for everyone around him, even if they all hate him".
For example, making someone fill out a sort of inforcard (like setinfo or whatsitcalled) before unlocking cap ships for him that makes him at least think about what he's supposed to be IRP is already going to raise the minimum standard for cap ships.
Enter your ship's name (must be a fitting for a capital ship of your faction affiliation):
Enter your Captain's name:
Enter your Captain's biography:
Enter your ship's primary function within your faction:
Enter your ship's history:
Filling this out with ascii character will unlock caps for you (maybe give some sort of mountable license or special ID like guard ID of your faction), and will generate a /showinfo that anyone can read. Or to make it even simpler, just make filling out /info with that information mandatory for caps.
If you /showinfo someone and he wasnt able to give halfway logical answers to that, you can file a rule violation report.
Only work for admins is processing those.
tl;dr: Making /info with minimum requirements mandatory for certain ships or gear would be a start for quality control.
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I'd support mandatory /setinfos on battleship-class ships, maybe even cruisers. As far as ideas that have been tossed around for years go, it's a pretty good one, considering it takes five or maybe ten minutes of one's time and contributes to awareness of an underused feature.
Limiting caps to official factions still wouldn't boost faction numbers, even if there was (theoretically) no backlash for doing so.
People simply aren't interested, the ROLE part of roleplay is lost to Discovery and as much as people want to deny it and stick to "War is good" mindset, it was the roles that made the server feel alive. Now it's just genericlancer with a handful of characters and several thousand "ships."