Consultation: Revised system for official factions

[Haste]

Also with incognito/untagged characters? These are mainly done to prevent meta (especially when ur doing piracy) but this seems to do away with it?

I don't think anything really changes about untagged characters. An untagged ship is just not part of the faction and cannot make use of an OF ID or any of the perks that OF has that are specific to itself. That's already the case. "Under the hood" it can still be the same character/person, I don't think there are any rules against that.

Otherwise incognito characters are accounted for, as you'll note that the roster can include purely ship and character names with no player mentioned.

While deployed, an FDS extends any ID with a matching IFF’s ZOI to the system it resides in.

With regards to the FDS, this seems to be a line people are glossing over. This, rather than PoB mechanics, is the main use-case. BAF could drop it on Dublin, a Rheinland faction could dabble a little further into the Sigmas than usual, etc. This is also a perk designed to not require much staff workload, as deployment would be done by players. Abuse would, of course, have to be handled by staff, but we're obviously hoping to not have to have abuse concerns by the Pillars Of The Community™ at the top of our mind when designing perks.

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[Kauket]

Also with incognito/untagged characters? These are mainly done to prevent meta (especially when ur doing piracy) but this seems to do away with it?

I don't think anything really changes about untagged characters. An untagged ship is just not part of the faction and cannot make use of an OF ID or any of the perks that OF has that are specific to itself. That's already the case. "Under the hood" it can still be the same character/person, I don't think there are any rules against that.

Otherwise incognito characters are accounted for, as you'll note that the roster can include purely ship and character names with no player mentioned.

No, it has never been against the rules. It explictly states it's allowed to have OFL ID but untagged ships.

* While your Faction Tag is needed for the Activity Tracker, some groups have members untagged, but flying with the Official Player Faction ID. This is acceptable, and not against the Rules, but will not count towards your Faction's activity. Keep in mind, this only applies to the Tag. If you're tagged as/a member of an OfficialFaction, you're required to use that Faction's ID.

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[Orex Industries]

ii - Public Roster (members may be anonymous, but they must be revealed to staff during the officialdom process).

Why?

It's way more fun seeing overly enthusiastic speculation enthusiasts try and guess who's behind a certain character or faction, all the conspiracies it generates is way way more entertaining.

In the end, you'll remove all the factions you deem unworthy, don't like, or constantly get killed by even though you're a so called ace, and eventually go back to the same old shit.

~Venkman

edited two words to make this post more advertiser friendly - Kai

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[Amba]

Only thing I'm a bit iffy on on the new rules is the whole 1 day and you're out of the tracker bit. If I'm not mistaken, with the new rules an aspiring OF would have to log every day for a month to even get the opportunity to go official, right? Assuming the average age of people in this community trends older with plenty of people having jobs and stuff there's probably a good chunk of weekend warriors who would struggle to meet that. It sounds just a little bit too punishing, or like it would otherwise just encourage mediocre activity in the same way people farm for log time today.

[Lord Caedus]

Only thing I'm a bit iffy on on the new rules is the whole 1 day and you're out of the tracker bit. If I'm not mistaken, with the new rules an aspiring OF would have to log every day for a month to even get the opportunity to go official, right? Assuming the average age of people in this community trends older with plenty of people having jobs and stuff there's probably a good chunk of weekend warriors who would struggle to meet that. It sounds just a little bit too punishing, or like it would otherwise just encourage mediocre activity in the same way people farm for log time today.

I'm extremely sure this meant one day of cumulative flight time, not a consecutive month of active logging of ships.

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[Karst]

I generally agree that there should be a review process that somehow accounts for what a faction actually does beyond simply passing the activity requirement. That's a good approach.

There are two things I want to talk about here though.

One, this ruleset is extremely long and convoluted, which kinda goes against the spirit of the heavily condensed rules rewrite we did in February. Pretty sure it's significantly longer than the entire rest of the rules put together.
I'd like to think you can trim some redundancies out of it, like I'm pretty sure it goes into vague "standards being upheld" stuff more often than really necessary. Maybe try to cut some ultra specific rules out of there and treat them case-by-case.

And two, I'm perplexed by this extreme hostility towards shared ships, and ship sharing. 4.1 de facto blanket forbids shared ships.
The requirement to link ships with specific characters that must be catalogued is completely nonsensical to me. Most faction players will have one or a handful of specific, defined characters with personalities and backgrounds, but might also play random clerk/miner/escort pilot #14. Since even the smallest factions in lore have thousands of members, that makes far more sense to me than a faction in which the same 5 people happen to fly every single ship and perform every administrative role across Sirius.
And related to that, it is inexplicable to me why you would bar nonmembers from logging ships for smaller roles. Faction players that need a quick "can you log a miner/combat ship/hyperspace beacon real quick?" having to rely on actual members is completely unrealistic with the current player numbers, which in terms of ships on the server stood at 5 at the time I started writing this post. And to do such a minor task, anyone who is willing to help would have to make a public recruitment post, come up with a character for every single ship they ever intend to log, and have those characters be intrinsically linked to said ships? Complete idiocy, that one.

That bizarre, arbitrary restriction alone, that unofficials don't have, would categorically turn me away from ever applying for officialdom.

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[rwx]

If I'm not mistaken, with the new rules an aspiring OF would have to log every day for a month to even get the opportunity to go official, right?

Look at rule 2.1.b btw

I get this as your inoffial faction have to be in the tracker for one month before applying for officialdom.

[TheKusari]

- What do you want official factions to be? What do you feel their purpose is?

My answer:
Primarily to be a staple of roleplay, highlighted and held to a great standard as examples of what others can achieve. That's what they should be. Their purpose is to entice others to do the same, or join to develop the faction. Their benefits should include bonuses to faction-specific tasks or activities in addition to be able to influence the world around them (up to a certain degree)

- How do you feel this can be achieved?

My answer:
To actually give the factions an avenue to influence and control certain aspects within the game (story, systems, whatever). Majority of this post expands on keeping up with the requirements without really giving much back. Sure, giving us cool art pieces and the FOB Core 1 PoB is nice. But that's not influencing the world, that's just a cosmetic for "being official", a reward more than a benefit that you can achieve once you're a few months into being official.

- What are the failings and / or benefits of the current system?

My answer:
The failings are that not enough change or influence via rewards or accomplishments is given to OFs. The system as it stands now is pretty good, of course adding on the forum assessment would make it better. I feel that perhaps you're overcomplicating the upkeep process. If you introduce any form of grey area, then there's a chance of it being abused, or the players being confused, no standard or anything. I guess that's the only solid benefit that log time has, as it's a rigid number to meet, despite me despising it being the only metric currently being measured.

My own faction hasn't been Official for very long, and I haven't exactly had the chance to explore all possibilities when it comes to faction perks. What one could ask for or influence. Having hearing storied or anecdotes from others who have been official for years saying that story developments were usually influenced or impacted by them was a cool thing. Don't see much or any of that right now.

- What benefits to being official do you feel are needed to balance out obligations and duties?

My answer:
Open up an avenue to the systems ( @Antonio) and events (@Barrier) developers. Allow that influence that I mentioned beforehand come to life via these developers. For arguments sake, if I asked for the Retrofit Transport wreck solar in Ontario to be removed due to this roleplay I went through, would the team approve it's removal? If no, then I have no hope for this. If yes, then there's a basis for doing simple stuff that can be expanded on later.

There's a lot of other good stuff here. I like the custom IFF and the control you give up due to it, I like the custom art (unnecessary in my eyes, as effort could go towards other stuff but still cool and appreciated that it's brought up) and activity over 2 months instead of 3 is a neat change. I do have a question, there's no such thing as grandfathering the current OFs, all are expected to follow whatever new system is agreed upon?

The better system to introduce is new mechanics or new tasks or jobs, activities for the players to enjoy. That way the factions that can do those things will log and do those things. Introduce other group-related things. Adding more stuff onto the requirements may backfire. I dunno, I see where you guys are going with this, and it's great that it's being discussed, but I'm afraid that if a new system is deployed and the expectation is to follow it then it may not... work in practice.

TLR

I like some of the stuff brought up, mainly that forum work will be accounted for but I feel it will be easily abused to some degree. My main issue here is that with these new layers to keep up with, we aren't actually getting much back for it.

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Discovery's Best Faction:  Starfliers
Second Best: Liberty Navy 46th Fleet

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[Prysin]

This reeks of future abuse and micromanagement. No thanks. It's also clearly going to hurt some factions much more then others. Thus disproportionally hurt people. I also do not see how shared ships could be legal under such a system. As they would just end up in a massive grey-area that is, eventually, going to lead to a sanction when a person the staff dislikes uses it too much.

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DHC Discord

[Xenon]

Good luck to you implementing that new system for official factions... That if official factions survived this system.
The server population is low and I am not sure that it will help. Again, Good luck.

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