Proposed OF Check Overhaul

[SnakThree]

I think that Official Faction status is no longer so sought after, because it's harder with dwindling server population and activity. Instead of pure activity timer that is applied to all factions, even those that are slight disadvantage (shipping corporation has less to do than mining corporation, some unlawful factions not having access to capital ships), it should simply be judged if factions overall activity is beneficial to community.

For example, Ageira~ was more interested in forum-side roleplay, but the projects are big, long and sometimes you just run out of ideas. Reporting trade runs in message dumps is exhausting and boring. The only benefit to being official faction was some ID lines that we could utilize once in a month (and at this level of activity, that would already be strech)
While I was in lawful factions, doing patrol reports was much more exiting, but that activity in game is very dependent on local criminals being present to be worthwhile to log and go out to find them.
And finally, leading The Lane Hackers, which is very character-driven and objective-based faction, is hard to find enough people that want to go through such challenge and career. So activity is hard to accumulate, unless we spend time trading through jump holes (which by itself is boring and not really conductive to roleplay interactions on multiplayer server).

So to sum up, I think that activity requirements don't match the actual capabilities of current times and staff should judge each faction individually, whether their overall activity (ingame and forum) is beneficial to community. Some factions have inherit disadvantage and is bound to have difficulties in attracting enough players willing to play it and staff should be more gentle with such factions.

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