Story Railroading.

[Lemon]

This has always been a messy subject. The issue I personally have it is that we could never sit down and agree just what degree of control faction leaders have over their factions, and if should or should not encompass the whole of the NPC faction as, for the sake of uniqueness, many factions are not meant to represent the whole NPC faction, while others do.

I do not really remember who was the story lead at the time, I am sorry, but it was brought up during that time (Early 20teens) that basically it would make more sense to take away the full freedom of the story progression from regular members (And this also included 1ICs of official factions) and leave it up to the story devs to provide them with two things. A rough outline of the current story state, a possible result for the next patch (with or without spoilers) and then allow the players (faction, indie, etc) to get from A to B in whatever way they wished RP-wise.

So yes, you are basically railroaded by an overarching plot, but the story itself is yours to write and figure out.


For obvious reasons this was never adopted as people felt as though it endangered their writing and however many years of effort has been placed into developing an ID, faction and its ties with other factions.
In order to change anything about this the current members would have to get together, agree that yes - to make changes it is to risk past work and have it subject to change if needed. Only when this understanding is reached, you can start screwing around with the process itself. Figure out if it is 1) needed, 2) how much of a flustershock it will be to change it in the first place and if it is worth the drama/effort.

It got worse actually - there is now a form "dev plan" which is how you are supposed to contact the Dev team.
Submissions are getting eithere responsed to months down the line with "doesn't fit story" or straight up ignored.

Communication and influence works on the buddy system instead - it all depends on who you know on the Dev team rather than official channels to be able to influence story. Official factions have no control over their own reps either - request are denied by admins and you are constantly told to "talk to story" while there is no official channel that you can talk to story through (there used to be) in the first place.


The story devs don't care, the change would need to come from them as it has been proven time and time again that the input of the community is not important to them and threads are these are plainly ignored.