Should official factions have more power?

[bluntpencil2001]

Yes and no.

For 'yes', I will say that I find that the uniformity of ranks and similar in militaries and the like are easily broken by large numbers of independents without quality control. The large number of cheating Rheinland battleships in recent times is one such problem.

For 'no', I've a number of reasons (although this doesn't mean I prefer 'no' to 'yes'...).

Firstly, there are factions like the IMG and Zoners, as well as the hordes of pirates, which are supposed to be very loosely organised, if they even bother organising at all. Pirates shouldn't be told what to do by people, right? Yar-har fiddle dee dee, do what you want because a pirate is free. Ahem.

Secondly, is that when one person, or a small group of people (old boys' clubs, it has been put), decide that not only do they want to roleplay the military, police or commerce of a nation, they also wish to roleplay as the government, by virtue of simply getting there first.

This is probably just a pet hate of mine, but to become Queen of Bretonia, President of Liberty, Emperor of Kusari or Chancellor of Rheinland, one only needs to win a race and take it first (the same goes for other government positions). Truly fair elections are, of course, impossible. That makes even the democratic nations, in effect, perpetual dictatorships, since the leaders can't really be kicked out.

Carina will not stop being Queen until Igiss says so. That means that the player who laid claim to that character will remain Queen until Igiss says so. This isn't right, in my opinion, and I would suggest that people, for the most part, stick to roleplaying as captains of space-ships, instead of taking extremely powerful control over imaginary nations as characters that should really be NPCs and plot devices.

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