While I respect and am happy that there is a good admin and support team still running this mod and developing new content for an almost twenty year old game, I feel like this system is a little archaic, detached, and clinical. It has no real meat to it except to say that "You don't login for X amount of days then your faction is either dismantled, forgotten, or taken off the official listing". While I understand the reasoning and principle behind this, it doesn't feel like it measures up to the quality I'd expect from an RP server, if that makes any sense. Now that I've got that out of the way, allow me to offer a something of a possible solution.
Instead of having only the requirement to login for X amount of hours per quarter period, we add something onto the end of that but not make it require one or the other.
As an example, say that I run an official faction--lets call it Ultimate Awesome Dudes. or UAD. Now, myself and my people are only able to log 40 hours in one period. Currently, by the rules of an official faction (going by the metrics put forward by St.Denis), means that we are 5 hours short from maintaining official status or getting a warning that we're below the metric required for maintaining our status. There are a multitude of reasons for falling short of this. Holiday seasons, work related things, personal emergencies, you name it. If we fall short again, that's it, we're done and out of official status until we can get it back by showing that we're active.
So, here's where my idea comes in. Let's use the same situation as above. We've only been able to log 40 hours in a given quarter and are in danger of being removed or being given a warning. At this point, the administration could look to the RP forum to see if our faction has had a RP post going over that same period or has done any RP on the forums whatsoever. Let's say that I can't login very much as of late because I've recently had a new addition to my family. Taking care of a small human being is a lot of work and I may not always have time to login to do trading, get in spats when other factions, or what-have-you. However, when I get a spare moment, I throw up a few RP posts with my buds, do a few communication posts, and stay active where I can on the community representing my faction. That should count along with how much time I login to the server representing my faction in a live setting.
TL;DR - Use RP posts as a metric on top of the login metric to gauge whether or not a faction needs to be removed from the official listing. This is an RP community after all and should be counted along with activity.
~Edge
You fear oblivion. Yet you forget. The universe remembers every atom of your being. Even dust hums your name in the dark. Roleplay is dead. Long live Powertraders and PvP I guess.
