Orex Industries - Official Faction Request [2]

[Haste]

I'm going to go off on a quick tangent to set up for one last thing I would like to address.

I almost exclusively use my Discord for Gaming™, and am in quite a lot of different Discords both related to Discovery and otherwise. Surprising absolutely no-one, many of the Discovery-related servers -- although I left most of the worst offenders years ago -- are, generally speaking, toxic, bitter and quite unpleasant to be in. In contrast, many of the non-Discovery servers are fun places to be. People chat about the latest Monster Hunter game trailers, their struggles with the Elden Ring DLC, their epic D&D character ideas, whatever. Sometimes even the dreaded subject of real-world politics! The pattern that quickly emerges, however, is that the latter group almost always has a zero tolerance policy for asshole behavior, racism, and people will often call out others who get stuck being overly negative.

I lifted a tiny piece of the veil of Orex' internal communications once, and at the time the faction was firmly in the former camp. Negative, bitter, with liberal use of racial slurs. Now, I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt and say that I don't really think Orex' players are racists. I think, unfortunately, that various Gamer Words get used by people trying to appear Cool and Edgy on the Internet without really thinking about the repercussions of normalizing their use. I would assume that, after this was pointed out when your first official faction creation request was denied, an effort was made to fix this. However, it leaves a bitter taste that's hard to get rid of, and with so much Discovery-related communication having moved from the game chat to Discord text & voice chats, one could cynically assume that the problem wasn't actually addressed, but rather that it has simply moved from places the staff can see to places the staff cannot.

I want to live in a world where Official Factions reflect the very best of what Discovery has to offer. Solid roleplay, high PvP standards that are considerate of "the other side", and perhaps most importantly of all, a welcoming home for (new) players that provides them with community and guidance. Lazily or poorly written infopages can be rewritten, but deeply-rooted toxicity can be much harder to get rid of. So, my question at the end of all this is: did you take that "nit-picking", as Venkman described it, to heart? Can we trust that Orex can tick all those boxes we want an Official Faction to tick?

---