I belive official factions claimed all responsibility for indies when they started to dictate which indie player can and cannot use what piece of faction equipment/ship and asked them to follow rules made by the offic faction.
Not ideal situation, but having control means having a responsibility as well.
It's a bit messed up as a whole, some officials indirectly (or even directly) say indies are "not good enough to be offic"players and such nonsenses, of course provoke the other side to be a bit hatefull as well. And I am not really counting in the plain oorp idiots, like pirating LPI ID guy in Hacker gb and such - that's not even a player and faction member in my opinion.
So lot of anger around here. But I agree that yelling at officials for something that indy has done is really misplaced. As is yelling on another indy.
I buy things I don't want to make an impression on people I don't like.
' Wrote:[color=#FFFFFF]So my question is:"Are the actions of independent players important for the diplomacy of the official factions?"
While more often than not an independant player's actions on the server won't have much of an impact, it does cause the official faction to have to do an awful lot of work if they screw up.
A recent example (which I've not got round to sorting out yet as I've been out the house for a while) is this...
A pair of Liberty ships being generally annoying and offensive to some zoners, a neutral party. This means that I have to clear up the paperwork and smooth the issue over in RP. In doing this I also have concerns for the players out of roleplay.
I do have some power (as an official faction leader) to order them not to act in specific ways, provided my orders are in line with discovery canon roleplay. I can enforce those orders with guns if I have to. If the liberty ships in question don't respond well to this, then I can request their ships are made hostile to the Liberty navy NPC faction.
The rights and responsibilities of official factions are outlined here.
Using FR#5 is an extreme thing to do. It's not something I like doing as it can really ruin someone's day. Essentially, it's a last resort if you can't sort the issue out in any other way.