I'm going to advocate for the deletion of Omicron-100 and the deletion of Londonderry, as well as any other Guard system out there. Whilst less so for the Mollys - I know how easy it is for Order players to suddenly jump on this post and throw my point off and consider that I'm making this post out of spite or some other ooRP bollocks. Well, I'm not. Not entirely at least. But nothing here is aimed at Order| or Order players. Omicron-100 is the example here because it's the one I can relate to the most and my own treatement in the community relates to that.
I think it's really bad for the community/RP if we keep guard systems in the mod. It creates loads of implications if we bring them into the RP enviroment. More so than people think.
They encourage people to invest time into a non-canon system, and then when threatened with deletion they unfairly hold the devs at gunpoint and label them tyrants for wanting to keep mod quality intact. Not only are they a waste of time invested for devs, but for players as well. They also encourage factions to inflate their positions, which causes even more problems for mod lore and mod consistency.
Case and point: Operation Spear. Nothing wrong with the outcome of the event itself. The RP behind is extremely dubious though. It's riddled with holes. And an extreme case of double standards that arise from it.
Post-Minor: Core and Order had new holes torn open in them by the Nomads. Both sides were decimated, to put it simply. Up until the Delta story events, the story with the two factions was that their numbers and resources had shrunk greatly. They were beaten and batterd and retreated back to their own territories.
When I started up Core| (disclaimer: the topic here isn't really official factions, the faction itself is just relevant becauase it's related to the npc faction revival) I had the intention of trying to represent those changes/struggle wherever possible. I created things like the supplies board. Did RP to show how we needed to get help from other factions to get us the resources we needed to keep the war machine rolling. Whilst undoubtedly I could probably have done a lot more RP, I did my best to fit the current mod lore and bring the faction up to speed from it's BHG Core past.
Order however... what has Order done since then? It would certainly put my mind at ease a little bit more if someone could point me out to some material. But from what I've seen, this entire time since Minor Order was re-building their forces in Omicron-100. A guard system. A non-canon guard system. They had no external help, they did it all on their own secretly inside Omicron-100. Canonically, Order right now has a bunch of holes because the current Order RP rests on the shoulders of non-canon material.
Now, what I think is amazing is that I am continually railed and hounded for how I explain Core's power/size/influence and where they came from etc. It doesn't matter how much I rewrite my lore, or how many millions of pages of watered down fan ficiton I write, people complain. In many cases it feels like these people complain for the sake of complaining. A bit after we got official I still felt unsure about my lore. Even months after I had still been doing rewrites. Now that I was able to rewrite my lore with the Story Team involved too, I am fully confident that Core now fits in lore-wise with the mod. And even today, I'm still writing more and more lore to expand on every detail possible.
Meanwhile no one asks any questions about Order. No one brings up the validity of Omicron-100, or how it has affected the Operaton Spear event. They don't get hounded constantly by complaints and no one is rattling their cages. They just said they did something, and it's the story the mod and the community roles with without asking any questions whatsoever. The Order NPC faction gets a free ticket through RP-logic-land and gets to slide into the mod they want, no matter how big the puzzle piece is. I can't go a month without some pompus arsehole starting a skype debate about how much sense my lore makes, with me having to drag through the same collection of roleplay links I always drag through.
Applying this to Mollys, there could be similiar cases. There could be similiar cases in the future. I don't pay as much attention to Bretonia, so my knowledge is limited.
But as I can see in this thread people have rallied to the staff about how "unfair" it'd be to delete their guard system, even at the offer of placing the assets into a system where things will make MORE SENSE. A system that was 'roleplayed' with a purchase 500 million credits. These systems have been decreed not being canon as part of Disco lore. But this isn't the biggest issue.
The biggest issue with Guard Systems is that they set up oppertunities for huge double standards and create big inconsistencies beyond the single faction they attach to. Beyond that the fact that there's detrimental implications for getting a non-canon system and assets within it inolved in a canon storyline event, other factions in the same enviroment then either have to scale themselves up, down or do god what knows to make sure everything stays consistent. And guess what happens when some of those factions try to do that? They get unfairly hounded by the community because they're trying to scale up with a prepetrator that gets no backlash at all.
So if we want to keep consistency, keep double standards to a minimum, keep fairness across all factions then we need to delete Guard Systems. Since we've already talked about Derry, there's no reason why the assets inside 100 can just not be deguarded and thrown into Omicron-Mu instead. But even then, all Guard system assets could be seen as bloats of power/influence/size scaling.
Guard systems just create problems for everyone, and they allow a faction to get away with bloating themselves up or powergaming without needing to answer to anyone for it. And when it comes to placing them on the chopping block, the owner faction just plays the victim card and holds Devs at gunpoint - insisting that all their non-canon RP goes down the drain and reduces the credibility/integrity of the faction if it goes. When arguably, the deletion/removal of Guard System increases not only mod quality, but the quality of the owner faction. And hell, there's Guard Systems that have been deleted or merged with other systems. How come those factions are forced to either 'like it or lump it' but other factions can get away with it?
(and funny how some Guard Systems are kept but a factions inRP Caps that aren't in a Guard System or Guarded just get deleted because the system modder can get away with doing it ))) )
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