Admin Notice: Faction Diplomacy Changes

[Garrett Jax]

Faction diplomacy is an ever changing dynamic in Disco. The official diplomatic stance between two factions can change from neutral to hostile in moments. One of the concerns the Admin Team has with this, is that proper notification of diplomatic changes does not always get stated in a public manner and a player who thinks they are neutral toward a given faction, may come to instant blue realization that they have become Kill On Sight by that same faction.

Up to now, many factions have a line in their IDs that states something to this effect:

Can attack ships which are in violation of <Faction's> laws or belong to a house or organisation considered hostile by <Faction> within their Zone of Influence.

The issue is that said Faction could, via RP, consider virtually anybody as hostile, post to that effect in their Faction's diplomacy page, and then fire at will when encountering the unsuspecting enemy. In theory, a faction could use this ID line to bypass the entire FR5 process and become full blown terrorists. The Admins would be unaware of said diplomacy change as well, creating the potential for a sanction scenario.

Any drastic diplomacy change* will have to be posted by the faction leadership in a central public thread:
Faction Diplomacy Change Declaration Thread or some better name we'll replace it with later

- The post should include every RP justification for the diplomacy change, preferably by factions of both sides.
- Those changes will be reviewed by the staff and approved if deemed appropriate to established faction lore & previous diplomacy developments.
- In case of diplomacy changes where both sides agree/support, they're allowed to RP it out and build it up between themselves (limited to interactions between official factions only) before posting the declaration post to officialize the diplomacy change and make it apply to their indies as well.
- Factions would be free to start playing out the posted diplomacy change before it's approved by the admin team (approval will be shown as a greenstamp added to the bottom of the declaration post), but they'll have to accept the risk that if the change is denied, the administrators reserve the right to revert the factions involved to their pre-change state.

* A "drastic diplomacy change" is defined as any change which:
- Effects docking rights (granting or removing such rights, i.e. crossing -0.55 rep)
- Effects engagement rights (going from red to white or vice versa, i.e. crossing -0.6 rep)

The goal is to make diplomacy changes between factions more transparent and to eliminate odd diplomatic scenarios that go counter to accepted faction lore.

From,
The Admin Team

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