Factions!!

[Emperor Tekagi]

Total abolishment of a "official" and "unofficial" faction system. Let there be just "factions".
Streamline and highlight what you as player/group can do already in our game environment to impact it "officially" (read: Player submissions to story, event requests, Player requests, etc.)
All, individual, official and unofficial are equal for the methods stated above already. Bear that in mind.

Official faction rights are mostly redundant. FR5s are so scarce, they'll hardly be missed. Instead of FR5s, bounties should be promoted. At the end of the day, a simple rename avoids both but it is what it is. FR4, read: holding authority over ship sales is redundant with current techcells. FR3 (the event one) is also a joke, because every normal player event restricts participation and incidents of a non-invited third party ruining it are extremely rare. FR2.. is this even applied? And FR1 was always extremely situational. If someone keeps obviously defiling lore in such extremes that FR1 could apply, there's already "2.6 - Every character must have only one type of ID equipped and must play according to the role and restrictions of that ID."

As for bounty regulations, they will need an overhaul. Without OFs as "authority person" who can blanket bounty freely, BBs need obvious changes.
House Laws are already player requests and would stay such. House Govs, well, here I can just promote an open and inviting policy by those who already run House Govs. Some do so already. Are they justified then? According to some, they are useless garbage and shouldn't exist anyway and we would be better off driving even more RPers and RP opportunities off the server. So yeah, each their own here, I guess.

As for the OF sub-forums, just make it a fee like tracker for unofficials is right now, quarterly if you must so that you just take the sub-forum away upon missing payments. A sum? Dunno, 400 mill per quarter? Something normal and not outrageously expensive.

Advantages?
Everyone can have order and accessibility to their faction's forum stuff.

Downside?
More work for our poor Admins and Mods.


So why the 180° away from any "systems" for factions?
Fairly simple, the past years (3,5,8, how many you want) were all a constant decline of players and quite the drastic decline of official factions. But what happened when the official factions starting to crumble lost their status as OFs? They often disbanded altogether and quite a few straight out left the game. Why? The constant illusion of relevance. Fading into nothingness over less interest, time or appeal led to OFs slowly falling apart. Many cling to their OFs of old days though and when they're failed, they leave and do not move on. Sure, that's on them but this isn't a thing of 3-4 people only.

Honestly, Disco needs not to portray a "difference of status" between factions anymore. I know devs don't make any such differences since a few years now but the systematic approach leads to this false picture. Plus the current bonuses for being OF are ridiculous, you see above that basically all you get as bonus is sub-forum and BB rights. Everything else, anyone can do.. and this is good. But why try to restrict it still? Why restrict the casual people or long-timer players with vastly different RL situations than 5 years ago from accessing these two goodies by making them "OF only". Why keep a 3 people gang of newbies from having their own sub-forum to enjoy?
We should cater the players in a way that makes both game and forums have their respective appeal. Especially on the Bounty Boards and sub-forum page, we cater just "the entitled" OFs. We shouldn't do so anymore, these times are past.

Let factions be just factions and use or not use all goodies offered by the staff at their own discretion. Let people play, not chase hours or in a new system "chase sufficient RP posts" as supplementary to logged hours. Understandably, nobody would enjoy having an ominous "someone" judge their RP and declare it "sufficient" or "insufficient" in regards to OF activity checks.