OF Perks/Requirements

[Lythrilux]

IMHO I think the fundamental issue with OF Perks is that at the end of the day the perks themselves often are only particularly beneficial or are only interesting to faction leadership or those most invested in a faction. Given how OF ID mining bonuses have been scaled back, short of solid gameplay advantages, it's hard for me to imagine if this system will ever really be worthwhile at all.

IDs are such a complex system that if you give an OF ID a perk that is actually worthwhile, suddenly you have one ID that is significantly better than the others. Whilst I would consider it worthwhile as far as 'perks' are concerned, if something like a Core OF ID had 5kers that would be hilariously unbalanced - even though at a glance it's a simple addition. There's also the balancing act where you don't want your OF ID to be outright better than the NPC ID really, because then where are your indies going to be?

The agency of official factions over their NPC faction has also been significantly reduced in the past several years. I would genuinely argue that at this point being official has zero benefit and is a pretty useless thing to have for NPC factions. The only groups that really benefit from it are generic or semi-generic factions that want to make themselves more distinct and get a unique ID/IFF that is more fitting for their roleplay.

Honestly, remove the system entirely, open the floor for tracked tags with a modicum of activity to have an easier and more streamlined access to SRPs and requests. I think that might be the best things can get whilst taking away the pressure from people to meet a time requirement.

As an enormous fan of the Official Faction system, and somebody who's seen it benefit people who are not the leadership over and over again (case in point, the entire existence of OSI, one of the longest running factions in the mod's entire history), I strongly disagree with your argument, Lyth'.

Remember, we're all talking from our own experience, and we should be careful not to extrapolate our own experiences to the experiences of everyone.

Perks might only benefit leadership if the perks requested are only of benefit to the leadership.

This should not be used to sweep away the Perk system. It's extraordinarily useful as a creative tool.

I feel like based on the example you cited it doesn't dispute my point. Generic groups are the only people who really benefit from the system as it helps them define their idea more clearly and give their group more of a purpose and a role. And that is good for sure. But OFs for non-generic NPC factions however, are more restricted and have much less agency.

I also do really feel that Faction|Joe_Bloggs really does not particularly feel the benefit of non-generic ID perks, other than those that provide additional mining bonuses or advanced ZoI features, but it seems like we're at a point where those aren't really given out that much anymore.

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