Quote:The official factions should nurture new players as some similarly "official" player groups have done on all manner of private roleplaying servers - be it Neverwinter Nights, World of Warcraft, Lineage, etc
For this, it is actively bad to be official. Especially if you bring in stricter standards. By far the fastest way for new guys to learn is by mistakes, playing the game, messing up, and improving while being part of a faction, feeling like they belong - but being official opens you up to a much greater likelihood that people will report you, write negative feedback, go after you etc, call entire faction low quality that shouldn't be OF etc. And you have stuff to lose, when you aren't official - you don't, you don't mind players being active, making some mistakes even getting sanctions on the way to learning.
Quote:However, why should official factions in their current form carry any extra weight for story developers when often a better quality story prompt can be written and posted by independent players? I judge a dev request by the quality and appropriateness of the content rather than by who submitted it. OFs don't deserve any special hotline to the Team if they barely resemble their npc factions and their goals.
And this is why OF should never have increased passing standards. You treat them like garbage, why should they care? OFs put in the effort to become official, are deemed good enough to become official and represent the NPC faction and then they get this disrespect from staff. They see people having a bigger impact on the NPC faction if you are a buddy of a dev than when you lead a successful OF.
In the context of the thread, I think 3 days should absolutely stay as the sole requirement + auto pass. But we could add a slight allowance for say "if you were reasonably near 3 days, you can remain official if staff deem your forum, events, quality etc. worthwhile. The more hours you missed the greater contribution you had to have to pass" so the factions that miss by a single digit hours don't get failed anymore, there's some reasonable approach to OF checks.
