Faction tags

[Grumblesaur]

This is no different than individual players having names that are non-indicative of their purpose in the game, except that a faction is multiple individuals.

another significant difference is that individual players don't have info pages in the Unofficial Factions forum section.

Great. That means it's already easier to find an unfamiliar faction tag when the players are flying it on the forums.

These give little to no information about anything no matter where they are at first glance. You are forced to either risk scanning them to get any idea at all or tab out and pray to god you can find it on the forum since you can't exactly search 3 characters let alone two like The Assembly uses. Can we go back to making good abbreviations and one finishing special character? That actually made more sense and could still look cool rather than attempting ASCII art in the chat.

It's not like, for example N|- tells you much. You know that the faction probably has a word that starts with N in its name. You'd have no idea from in-game experience alone that it's Gaian faction unless you went out of your way to ask. Even with three letters, like MdG/-, you might deduce that it's a faction in Gallia, but you're never going to properly know until you ask.

Or until you stumble across it on the forums. But if you see a tag you don't know, you can just PM the person or ping the shoutbox if you really need to know right now.

Recently somebody made DRA) for Dublin Republican Army, but you wouldn't know unless you asked them or looked on the forums. It could just as easily stand for "Defence Research Administration" and be a Bretonian trade faction until you find them and see Molly IFFs and Greyhounds. You might see [A]-, which we know is a Unione Corse faction if we've seen them on the forums or spoken to them, but for the uninformed, it might just as easily be a spinoff Auxesia faction, or a group of piratical anarchists.

We could go ahead and create a standard where factions have to use the initials of their NPC faction, but then we'd have trouble when we have multiple player factions for the same NPC faction, or we have a faction on the Freelancer ID. Now who gets to keep the "correct" tag and who has to use the "wrong" tag?

Faction tags are already naturally nonindicative. They compress information in a lossy way. Nobody wants to go around tagging their ships with Liberty.Navy- or Hellfire.Legion-, so they use [LN] and [HF] instead, so they actually have room for character or ship names. Everyone who knows what those tags stand for had to learn them at some point. It just happens that LN is a nice initialism. HF for Hellfire legion itself is a little weird, as you might expect HL, but it gets the point across. Some tags are better mnemonics than others, but every mnemonic involves learning, and requires context.

"Velvet|" is easily searchable, but you'd never guess what they are in-game with no context or prior knowledge.

Liberty Insurgency Navy uses "IN|", which is fairly indicative of what their faction is, being short for Insurgency Navy, but it's also a common word that's hard to search and there's a good chance it wouldn't be recognizable anyway without context.

All of this is easily resolved by finding them in space, or sending a quick PM that looks like "//hey, what does your faction tag stand for?" As such, a standard for tags, whether propagated by the community or enforced by the staff, is wholly unnecessary. Anyone with trouble remembering can break out a stack of sticky notes and a pen and remember the old-fashioned way.

More importantly,

These give little to no information about anything no matter where they are at first glance. You are forced to either risk scanning them to get any idea at all or tab out and pray to god you can find it on the forum since you can't exactly search 3 characters let alone two like The Assembly uses.

What is wrong with taking a risk to do some recon? Simulated risk is part of the game.

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A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.