Admin Notice: Factions

[Ursus]

I view the problem from a bit of a different direction. In a time long past when the server pop was still relatively low compared to today, factions were made to simplify a group of friends flying together, as well as to gain notoriety faster. The "official faction" system came later, and the "one official per npc faction" even later than that, but the reason that people joined officials back in the day was that they were the only organised group of players playing as an npc faction.

I think this is the root of it, but not all of it.

Other games have "clans" that are loose player groups who have self-affiliated for some reason (they play together a lot, they are coworkers/schoolmates IRL, whatever), and player-factions serve this same purpose in Disco too. If you spend a lot of time with some group eventually you feel like you ought to join their clan, or sometimes you spend a lot of time with them and decide you dont want to join up with them, because of whatever reason (numerous possibilities here: strict ranks, whatever). So, from that perspective, player-faction membership is primarily a reflection on how desirable it is to join up with some particular clan and pal around with them. My opinion is if player factions cant draw in members, then their failure is their problem, not a server problem.

There is also the point that the underlying NPC faction has to be attractive to play in order for anybody to fly the NPC faction ID when nobody else is around. This is a wholly separate problem. You can track this number separately by tracking ID activity on the server, and get a feel for which factions are weak then make them more attractive to play (or not). I dont think we need to direct activity into any of these, we just need to be aware that some of them are less attractive for a variety of reasons, some of which can be helped and some cant.

So, two problems, clan activity is a clan issue, NPC faction activity is a dev issue. IMO.

[[As an aside, Disco is still RP-centric--clans are essentially prohibited here because you have to play the faction not the clan; there are a few exceptions of people ignoring faction lore and milking tech for clan advantage, but they stand out because they are exceptions]].

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