What do I need for a faction?

[Benjamin]

Ok. You have to give people a reason to join your faction over going indie. A lot of the veteran members here who are die-hard roleplayers on their fighters, will often have no-name no-rp indie smugglers as cashcows. This is your target market I suppose.

So basically, you can't give them any reason to NOT join your faction. Reasons to not join would be:

Paying the faction money
Making them start in turdo freighters with 11 units of cargospace.

Why join a faction and fly a terrible ship and make no money and/or make money but then pay a bunch of it to some guy? People just wont do it. Some people will, and do, sure, but you're cutting off others.

And then you have to give them reasons to join your faction over staying indie.

This is the tough bit that I wish I'd cracked.
Escorts.. ehh. Do people really like them that much? I don't think so.
Bounty war chest..similar. I mean sure I guess it's nice but I mean, I've been playing for months and I've never even wanted to put out a bounty.

Basically the two that I can see are:

Buddies and roleplay.
Trading is boring. Boring as turd. But if you're in a group chat, trading suddenly becomes totally fine. Ultimately, even oorp chat is enough. An active faction can provide that. But, if you can get in-character chat going on, then fantastic. Chatting in character to each other on those long, long, long, long trade runs lets your trader's character become very fleshed out very quickly. You will love him and see all your other characters as the inferior turds with parents who were killed by corsairs that they are. Then you will want to show your character off to other people because of how great it is. So you will start chatting around to everyone. You will fly down the tradelanes throwing words out. And every now and then, some words will stick to someone, and then something interesting happens. Roleplay with people outside your faction happens. And because you are a faction, with people around, recogniseable tags, etc etc, it has a nice chance of permanence.
Basically what I'm saying there is - embed your faction in to other faction's rp. Don't see it as a trading faction, just see it as any other faction. Buy a bunch of eagles and try and organise some shooting events with your pirates of choice. Trade commodities some pirate hates right in front of them, just to make them mad. Get some faction leader character hammered out in game or on the forums and fly around/write letters, making friends and making enemies. Making friends is easy and fairly rewarding, but it's enemies that give you real activity.
From what I've seen, a good strong enemy, with just a smattering undertone of oorp hatred, is the best way to get active. Wouldn't personally recommend it, but there you go.
Basically, give people no reasons to say no, and reasons to say yes. Give them things to do in the faction other than just fly a 5k around making money. Events, diplomacy, friends, enemies, allies, acquaintances.
And then also write threads to the admins demanding Corp IDs be allowed more pvp freedom and the ability to collect bounties.


edit: also, before you create some weird new faction, fly around all the liberty bases (all the planets and corp bases) and read all the rumours. Chances are you'll find out some corporation you thought was boring is actually way more interesting than you gave it credit for.

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