Admin Notice: Factions

[Blodo]

Sadly not everyone has a dreamteam HC.
The one's who have should consider themselves extremely lucky.

* Blodo feels lucky

Anyway, regarding the official faction lore input: there are a bunch of things missing here that weren't mention.

1. Friday offered official factions the ability to deliver clear input into the storyline. Negotiated input. I know for a fact that some official factions forfeited their right to supply this input (furthermore, despite being asked not to because the idea behind 4.87 storyline was "no faction left behind"), so that's on them and not on the dev team. As much as it annoys me to say this, we seem to be unable to work with everyone.

2. Some people here think the dev team should go ahead and put in every single thing the official factions decide to dream up. Well I am sorry but I disagree with that heavily. Some things are making it into the story, one of the best historic examples are the Nomad - OC connection which has been expanded from a single vanilla rumour into an entire storyline section. 4.87 itself will be absolutely filled with various player faction storylines as well. But then other things are not making it in because they are powergamey. Despite the glorifications of official factions in this thread, it has to be pointed out that they have proven time and again that they cannot be trusted to not take advantage of the dev team connections that are offered to them in order to powergame their own faction to varying degrees: some tried to get away with murder, others tried to use small steps... I won't point fingers, but we are all guilty of it at various times.

This is exactly why the dev team reviews all storyline proposals and rejects those that are nonsensical or designed as a booster to factions that don't need it. This position is currently represented by Friday who has no major connections to any official factions, is specifically trying to not make friends around the community and look at every submission with an incredibly critical eye so as not to get influenced by emotions too much, and as such can be trusted to remain unbiased more than any official faction leader can.

I know us faction leaders like to toot our own horns a lot, but seriously now: you all get mad when your faction loses stuff and happy when it gains stuff. You may have no malicious intent, but dev team announcements influence your emotions because deep down you do want your faction to succeed and become top dog, that is just our nature. Official factions (whilst suffering from the problems outlined in this thread) are too deregulated to have absolute power over anything, be that the storyline or docking rights or capship sales or weapons/technology or indies or (insert thing here). Myself being a faction leader for about 3 years running, I have seen enough crap happen around most of the aforementioned stuff to be firmly entrenched in my belief that official factions aren't capable of not abusing the trust that the community would put in them by giving them power to do something, and there have been many examples over the years that have proven that that I will not be stating explicitly here so as not to start a flame war.

But anyway: I know the logical point to make from my statement above is "give official factions absolute power, let admins remove faction leaders that abuse it". Sadly, the admins aren't infallible either, and I wouldn't trust them to be able to keep carrying out such a huge amount of work as keeping tabs on the internal/external politics of every single official faction out there would be. Faction numbers might be dwindling but they are by no means low still...

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Regarding the posts that showed up while I was writing this:

Seriously guys, you have to understand that "power redistribution" is a stupid idea that will not help anybody. Neither the indies, nor the official factions. Especially not the server. Currently a measure of a faction's "power" is the charisma of its leadership and its members, the faction's reputation so to say. This is something that the admins can't fix for you. Taking away caps from the indies will only serve to depopulate the server and suddenly you will be asking the admins "why is disco dying?", and then they will say: "because the faction leaders asked us to make the game unfun for the majority so they (the minority) can have their sandbox to play in". And then we will all delete our forum accounts and go wait for Star Citizen. Please come up with something that will not cause the server to depopulate in favour of the nihilistic few.