Official Faction Spring Cleaning

[sovereign]

Lots of polls.
A poll can only as a question....so you would have to be able to give a choice, which means you would already suspect if something were wrong...
What if you just asked for input?
I believe that would be a much broader tool than a poll.

Methinks yes. Polls can only go so far, and have to be VERY well designed to be useful. For example, people took this thread to mean Eppy and others wanted individual characters to be able to join both sides of a conflict. As in both Corsair/Outcast at same time type thing, which is totally nonsensical and killed a lot of the good points/counterpoints about what was actually being addressed. When I first saw it (and I think this goes for a lot of people) and when Eppy wrote it, I only thought about the one piece of it, ASSUMING that everyone would realize that. They didn't, and it's a learning experience for polls; to get anything useful out of it, you need to tag your vote with a post explaining it- which leads us to the method of general discussion.



Also, I KNOW for certain some factions will get flamed no matter what you do; the reason I thought of Darkwings before was their distinctly non-Freelancer background, unconventional tag usage and lack of active players. In all my days on the server I've seen two, for a whopping total of 30 mins each. To be honest, if there is any faction for whom I really worry about their members, it's them. They WILL get flamed to no end, and it isn't fair to the real human on the other side of the screen, no matter how valid or justifiable said flames might be.



HOWEVER, I think this is a good idea nonetheless. I'd say let them do a little work on their faction status before they put it forward to iron out the easy stuff that will get them flamed mercilessly (for Darkwings, allow them to write up a new background or something), but its a good idea. For those concerned about flame-wars, take a stroll through the faction submissions. Even with LRDN (*cringe*) people stayed quite civil for the quality of the post. Despite what it might seem like, there has been good feedback on all of those threads, and, for example, [Black~Lagoon] have become better RPers and started fitting the server better because they went through the flames.

In my humble opinion, it will work. However, I think that we should take Eppy up on his offer and do a test run- it'll iron out some points about process, and give us a nice "acid test".

Go for it.

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