The Newsroom

[Croft]

Official factions do indeed influence the direction of their chosen NPC faction via contact with the SLIS team and discussions of their given region. These influences actively create the situations that the news reports on, the Kyushu piece for example states a shift in pro-Imperial sentiments which were the result of player voting in this thread and the Mackinac's position was chosen by myself as head of OSC.

Why this is done in really another topic but I'll answer the best I can, if I'm wrong I'm sure the senior SLIS guys will correct and or shout at me.

At the moment with have no less than 58 official factions, can you imagine if each of those were given the full control of their NPC faction? 58 ropes all pulling in different directions, including those who share a root faction, then trying to get every single one to mesh together into an understandable storyline? To say it would be chaos is an understatement.

Stepping out of my dev shoes for a moment I'd sum it up thusly: We're all god damn nuts. Half the time we create drama out of the smallest things. Do you really want to trust the health of an entire NPC faction and by extention, the mod itself, to a collection of wackos who may or may not have everyones best interest at heart? At least with the story team the madness is contained.
If you want to test my theory, try getting every single faction leader to agree on a single ingame change.

Back on topic, currently I am working with a backlog of stories that will cover the next five weeks. After that it will no doubt be current and future affairs, current as in this mod version. Breaking news isn't planned but that's not to say it couldn't happen.
The NPC faction only thing isn't a stated rule, it was done because at the time there was discussion about letting the community submit their own news stories to be published under the Offical News. It was not my choice but I do agree that these articles should remain NPC faction only as anything posted in the Offical News section is considered lore and the fact that anyone can post their own news in the News and Commerce section.
Honestly your not missing much, the stories I post actually get less views than the standard news forum. Go figure.

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