Official Faction Activity Fourth Quarter 2020

[Thyrzul]

Cool, now that we're past reinventing the wheel with "something must be done" kind of observations and +1-ing eachother, the actual ideas for solutions can flow. A few reminders to help figuring out where to start:

1) Last significant change to the officialdom maintenance process I recall was the Faction Status Report system in 2016, lasted just a few months. People wanted a review system based on quality rather than on quantity, which gave factions and leaders some extra monthly paperwork. Didn't really work out, so we got back to the easily quantifiable, evaluable and administrable features, like online time.

2) Near all benefits of being official were taken throughout the years following debates by elitism-criers, abuse-shouters, equality-warriors, the rest has either become obsolete or barely used for similar community backlash reasons. There are still people in this community not trusting anyone with much more power than what anyone can get by default, keep that side of the coin in mind when giving OFs their long-deserved love.

3) We have a shrinking playerbase, a lot of NPC factions, and no limit on OFs for each. Activity requirements used to get lighter over the years to accomodate to that, but the single-OF-per-NPC limit wasn't reintroduced (used to be a thing when I joined, then got removed sometime in the early 2010s). It could help reduce playerbase spreading, but also limit player freedom.

Now, good luck figuring out what you want OFs to be and to do, how many per NPC faction, how you plan to measure and review that, and what you want to give them in return.

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[Karlotta]

The death and zombie-state of OFs is just another natural symptom of disco's overall population decline, and that's caused by many things, some of which we cant change, some of which we could:


1. Drama and hatred between player groups caused mainly by:

- a lack of adequate code of conduct / rules / guidelines for GMs, devs, OFs, OFLs, and house governments, and their resulting inability to wield their pixelpower responsibly

- POB rules that promote spam, wrong expectations, and bullying

- story progressions that involved parties didnt want and which pit factions against each other

- lack of transparency everywhere

- unwritten and contradictory pvp honor codes / ideas about "fairness" that raise totally unrealistic expectations and promote finger pointing

- gossiping and smears that staff do more to promote than to discourage


2. Its hard to find something fun to do when logging on because:

- few players online

- players are spread out while staying in too many different systems

- players are spread out while travelling along too many different possible routes

- traveling to where you want to go takes too long

- players cant go to where they can find action because of too small ZOIs

- players cant do what they want on the characters and factions they like because of overly restrictive IDs

- the rock-scissor-paper balancing between ship classes cripples every ship class against most other classes, making pvp between them pointless

- If you are in an official faction, or POB owner, or have have anything else to lose, you are under permanent pressure to not do something that will make some other official faction make you "suffer IRP consequences for IRP actions" (translation: screw you over) because that's the only use some people see for pixelpower.


3. Disco's inability to be appealing for a large portion of new/inexperienced players long enough for them to gain enough experience to be able to enjoy the game. Caused by:

- overall poor and sloppy presentation of rules, lore, and game mechanics, which make integrating into the game hard and slow, make it impossible without extensive player help, make it hard to understand for non native speakers, and make disco look amateurishly run and uninviting to people who do have "standards".

- unwritten pvp honor codes and ideas of "fairness" that punish players for siding with noobs

- pvp balancing that makes inexperienced players cannon fodder more than they need to be

- a population of mostly people who played for years, in which new people will hardly ever meet and win against equally inexperienced players

- a community that has been "bred" over the years to be cruel to "outsiders", or at least be accepting of said cruelty


So these are the main "fixable" causes of the population decline (and constant drama), which do have potential solutions that will at least mitigate the problems even if they dont fix them 100%.

There is of course an underlying cause for all of these problems persisting despite being fixable...

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User was banned for: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...tid=200950
Time left: (Permanent)

[Shiki]

Good to see many valid points rise in the thread, especially by @Thyrzul and @Karlotta. +1

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[Thexare]

1. Drama and hatred between player groups caused mainly by:

- a lack of adequate code of conduct / rules / guidelines for GMs, devs, OFs, OFLs, and house governments, and their resulting inability to wield their pixelpower responsibly

- POB rules that promote spam, wrong expectations, and bullying

- story progressions that involved parties didnt want and which pit factions against each other

- lack of transparency everywhere


2. Its hard to find something fun to do when logging on because:

- few players online

- traveling to where you want to go takes too long

- If you are in an official faction, or POB owner, or have have anything else to lose, you are under permanent pressure to not do something that will make some other official faction make you "suffer IRP consequences for IRP actions" (translation: screw you over) because that's the only use some people see for pixelpower.


3. Disco's inability to be appealing for a large portion of new/inexperienced players long enough for them to gain enough experience to be able to enjoy the game. Caused by:

- a community that has been "bred" over the years to be cruel to "outsiders", or at least be accepting of said cruelty

Former dev and mostly former player here, just quoting some specific things that drove me off.

[Megaera]

Karlotta raises good points.

Ive seen many new players who are literally lost in the game and have no clue what they are doing. They seem to be discouraged by the lack of direction and the fact that most factions simply ignore them instead of helping getting more familiar with the game itself.

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Matriarch Of the Gen'an Chrysanthemums - Ishikawa Aya
Gen'an Cell Information - Recruitment - Communications Network

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Megaera - Ishikawa Masako
Feedback - Data Storage - Birth of a goddess

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[Lemon]

Well there are people that don't log, are unwilling to teach and train new players, ridicule them and are proud they don't accept them, boasting about "quality", often just generating activity to block people from doing something that isn't in line with their idea of how the game should be played.

If they put 10% of their scheming effort into training a couple new enthusiastic guys, they wouldn't have to afk at edge of a system on last day of the month

[Karlotta]

Well there are people that don't log, are unwilling to teach and train new players, ridicule them and are proud they don't accept them, boasting about "quality", often just generating activity to block people from doing something that isn't in line with their idea of how the game should be played.

If they put 10% of their scheming effort into training a couple new enthusiastic guys, they wouldn't have to afk at edge of a system on last day of the month

While Official factions wanting power but no responsibility to integrate noobs are a problem, they are only a part of it.

There is also the staff who do diddly squat to make the mod more noob friendly, and who, with full intention, purposely keep other people from doing it for them, out of pure vanity and malice (and also stupidity).

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User was banned for: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...tid=200950
Time left: (Permanent)

[WizardLizard]

I don't agree with the new player bit to some extent, only because my experience being a new player entailed Kalhemra showing me his kick ass capital ship, skorak ramke and venkman showing me the mining bit, and all that jazz. I agree that some people aren't very good to new players, or to any players, but they dont usually hang around Pennsylvania or new player zones.

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[WizardLizard]

Well there are people that don't log, are unwilling to teach and train new players, ridicule them and are proud they don't accept them, boasting about "quality", often just generating activity to block people from doing something that isn't in line with their idea of how the game should be played.

If they put 10% of their scheming effort into training a couple new enthusiastic guys, they wouldn't have to afk at edge of a system on last day of the month

While Official factions wanting power but no responsibility to integrate noobs are a problem, they are only a part of it.

There is also the staff who do diddly squat to make the mod more noob friendly, and who, with full intention, purposely keep other people from doing it for them, out of pure vanity and malice (and also stupidity).

See, I don't agree with this. My interactions with staff ingame, from the moment I joined till now, have been really good interactions, especially if I had questions early on. I do agree with the official factions needing to integrate new players, and it makes it hard to integrate newer players because that usually draws heavy criticisms by other players and factions (which seems all too important in this community). Factions are still integrating, just not the official ones.

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[Lemon]

Well there are people that don't log, are unwilling to teach and train new players, ridicule them and are proud they don't accept them, boasting about "quality", often just generating activity to block people from doing something that isn't in line with their idea of how the game should be played.

If they put 10% of their scheming effort into training a couple new enthusiastic guys, they wouldn't have to afk at edge of a system on last day of the month

While Official factions wanting power but no responsibility to integrate noobs are a problem, they are only a part of it.

There is also the staff who do diddly squat to make the mod more noob friendly, and who, with full intention, purposely keep other people from doing it for them, out of pure vanity and malice (and also stupidity).

See, I don't agree with this. My interactions with staff ingame, from the moment I joined till now, have been really good interactions, especially if I had questions early on. I do agree with the official factions needing to integrate new players, and it makes it hard to integrate newer players because that usually draws heavy criticisms by other players and factions (which seems all too important in this community). Factions are still integrating, just not the official ones.

Well there are people that don't log, are unwilling to teach and train new players, ridicule them and are proud they don't accept them, boasting about "quality", often just generating activity to block people from doing something that isn't in line with their idea of how the game should be played.

If they put 10% of their scheming effort into training a couple new enthusiastic guys, they wouldn't have to afk at edge of a system on last day of the month

While Official factions wanting power but no responsibility to integrate noobs are a problem, they are only a part of it.

There is also the staff who do diddly squat to make the mod more noob friendly, and who, with full intention, purposely keep other people from doing it for them, out of pure vanity and malice (and also stupidity).

See, I don't agree with this. My interactions with staff ingame, from the moment I joined till now, have been really good interactions, especially if I had questions early on. I do agree with the official factions needing to integrate new players, and it makes it hard to integrate newer players because that usually draws heavy criticisms by other players and factions (which seems all too important in this community). Factions are still integrating, just not the official ones.

My point was aimed at Official Factions specifically - many are awesome, accept new guys and help out a lot , but many will ridicule factions that do try to teach and train new guys and make them stay in the game, while being lazy, not logging and then afk farming activity off plane.

Imo this should be re-thought, the OF approach to newer players - the ones that make heavy mistake making beginners and make great players out of them that stay in the game should be put on a pedestal and perhaps even valued the most.