ID Rework - 5.1 Aftershock: Dev Diary #8, "In Search of The Wild West"

[Wildkins]

Discovery 5.1 Dev Diary #8 - The ID Rework: In Search Of 'The Wild West'

Art by @CuteyCAI

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Hello and welcome back to the eighth dev diary, this time chronicling my personal hell for the last three months the ID, IFF, and reputation rewrites, referred to in short as the ID Rework. Yes, yes, the patch is already out, yes the IDs won't be in until the server restarts, yes the server crashed eighteen times and yes I haven't slept yet.

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Overview

The "ID rework" came out of a personal frustration I'm sure has been shared by many players new and old over the past few years. ID rulings were overly verbose in many cases, redundant in others, inconsistent from one card to the next. Some cards had massive blurbs detailing the whole history of their faction on their ID, while their IFF was a single-sentence summary last updated in 2003. As such, I laid out a very small amount of work for myself:

- All IDs would be sorted by region and type, with rule wording that remains constant between IDs.
- ID description blurbs were kept to 350 characters or fewer. The primary purpose of an ID is as a rules reference; the blurb is useful for new players to get an at-a-glance idea of who they're looking at, but the IFF should do most of the heavy lifting here.
- Rules wording would be stripped of any wording not essential to understanding. The largest example of this is IDs that allow for attacking ships and engaging in piracy. If you can attack a ship, you can engage in piracy with it (unless you are specifically barred from piracy by another line) - so having a separate 'Can engage in piracy' line is irrelevant.
- A general IFF writing pass, updating, editing, or rewriting blurbs as needed to best describe the faction without descending into purple prose.
- A general reputation, empathy, and ID rephack pass, as many IDs were still setting player reputations based on years-old status quos that had long since passed.
- A backend update removing all unused IDs and IFFs, reducing both new player confusion and technical debt. This includes all former guard IDs and IFFs not since reused. Additionally, several IFF/ID internal names were altered to better reflect their current faction. Sorry Technocracy, you're no longer Xeno Guard.

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ID Changes

Actually putting the ID changes in a reasonable way onto the forums is practically impossible. The new IDs are in-game pending next restart and will shortly be available in the ID reference. For a comparison with the old IDs, you can go here: Google Sheets

A large swath of the changes have to do with Corporations. Every Corporate faction (except Core, LPI, a couple other standouts) has a much-expanded ID and an expanded ZOI. The new key word here is competitors, which can be found in every corporate faction's IFF. (Now you see why we had to do it all at once?)

DSE's competitors in 5.1: Aftershock.

In general, competitors' ships are now able to be attacked immediately by corporate IDs outside of House Space, and within their ZOI. Most Corporate factions now have a ZOI that encompasses both their House of residence and two immediate bordering regions of interest - usually either border worlds such as the Taus or Sigmas, or in some cases another House. In that ZOI (and, again, outside of House Space) they are also able to pirate all Corporate ships, not just ones hostile to their patron House. Outside of their ZOI, they retain only the ability to pirate their competition.

Obviously, this alone is a huge shake-up to the "ID metagame" as it were, and we'll be monitoring closely for abuse here. But as we've already seen in the opening day of 5.1, the new mining systems in Dublin showcase a potential for a much wilder west, and this seems to fit well alongside that.

Elsewhere, we have more minor tweaks. Certain factions have some experiments to try and make them unique - Gaians getting systems with Planetform bases added to their ZOI, Interspace being able to pirate any corporation for credits outside House Space in a system with a trade lane, or the allowances for more open military skirmishes in the Taus and Sigmas.

5.1 also sees the return of the Militant ID, intended to "take the heat" as it were of Zoners throughout Sirius who are tired of being tread on, while allowing the Zoner ID and IFF to return to a more neutral footing. This is essentially the third re-tread of the Zoner Militant idea, but between Erie, Gran Canaria, and Freeport 9, Zoners have had quite a few grievances to air lately, and we hope this will help to voice that. (It's also a slightly more fitting place for ex-Insurgency to end up than just slapping a Pirate ID on!)

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IFF Changes

Second verse, same as the first, there are 68 IFFs in the game with new infocards and writing them all here is just going to be text soup. Instead, go HERE to see the side-by-side comparison, if you're really curious.

In general, IFFs have been rewritten to get as much information across about the faction as possible without meandering too hard into esoteric history or trying to give you The Entire Loredump. Competitor lines have been added explaining a Corporate faction's primary competition (and to explain the new ID lines on Corporate IDs, see above). Allies and Enemies have been tweaked as we saw fit to better match with the current status of each faction.

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Rephack Changes

Well, this was probably a rude awakening to some of you, but the other major portion of this 'rework' is an update to all of the faction rephacks in the game. For those not in the know, every ID not only sets your affiliation to match your current faction, it also places some limits on what factions you can have a positive rep with. In other words, you pick an ID to join with a certain faction, that's going to make other factions very unhappy. Your Corsair is not going to convince the Hessians to like you, no matter how many spirited getaways to Trafalgar you promise.

Guess what, it's in another Google Sheets! >> HERE <<

Left column is the rephack before 5.1, right column is after. Except in a few specific cases, all rephacks are "no more than" -- i.e., your reputation will never be able to go higher than the value listed. -0.55 is neutral but unable to dock, -0.7 is hostile, 0.7 is green, 0.9 is flashing (IFF).

These values were, in general, very outdated. Several wars and faction shifts had come to pass and the values had been left unchanged, allowing for some incredibly silly occurrences and factions holding hands that should instead probably be poking each others' eyes out with sticks. One of the other sweeping changes is that, in general, Intelligence factions are a lot more distrusting of the average joe, and also of any other Intel factions. Unless it's a house corp or an otherwise-trusted organization, intel factions are going to default to nodock neutral. We'll see if this ends up just causing heartburn, but I think it's a lot more fitting for the cloak and dagger types.

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Conclusion

As always, expect typos, mistakes, and errors in judgment. Comments, questions, criticisms, and concerns may be levied here, in Player Requests, in the Discord admin-lounge, in my DMs, or via carrier pigeon.