Tracking official factions online tame is irrelevant.

[sindroms]

Greets.


Before you reply, mind you I am making this thread as someone who has been in a faction, who has lead a faction and someone who has plenty of indies. I have nothing against official or unofficial factions, this thread is subjective, yes, but is not built on some sort of agenda, something that a few people have blamed me for recently.




Now then, we all know that Official factions have a special place here on Disco. Admin-approved groups with the right to evolve and shape the future of their NPC factions lore is; in some cases they could make up the majority of the active playerbase of an ID, not counting the invite-only factions, and some are but a speck in their player pool. Faction activity tends to fluctuate a lot not only depending on the month, most of our players being highschool age after all, but also on what is going on in the particular region that ID covers.


My question is this, while no doubt deciding on faction activity via ingame time tracker is the easiest choice, does it really reflect the impact the faction has on the progression of the lore of the ID they chose to represent?



Quite a few arguments have been raised about whether the active official factions do not stagnate, their activity being only ONE of the many ways to judge their impact on their ID. The question I ask you here is pretty straight forward: Shouldn't we judge the RP activity of a player faction rather than crude online time? While it is true that a faction of 3 active people is a sad thing to see, wouldn't it be a good thing to have 3 active people who constantly participate in forum and ingame roleplay scenarios, create events, progress the NPC faction they represent in a whole rather than just disbanding that faction altogether? Even more so, while the larger official factions have no need to worry about their rights being taken away due to ingame inactivity, do they really deserve them if they, quote, sit on their laurels and contribute nothing apart from ingame activity? I am not saying that ingame activity is bad, no dobut that the majority of a factions impact comes from ingame interaction between their members and the rest of the server, but shouldn't we give them a nudge and remind them that they need to move their lore forward in a much more active manner?


I talked to a few people about this and one thing did come up. People are afraid of change, especially when we had such a nice example of how devastating change can be to a faction, namely the Order as an NPC faction. After the destruction of Minor, the faction activity, especially indie activity, plummeted. Is our community really that scared of the consequences of making changes to their RP to mix things up a bit? Is the overall contribution from a faction purely its ingame activity they show in either doing convoys or raids? Or is there perhaps a bit more they could do to actually have the right to carry the name Official Faction?


I realize how much thought and effort has been put in the creation of a faction and to promote it to its officialdom. However, shouldn't that same drive persist throughout its life? The faction rules clearly state that apart from all sorts of rights, they do have responsibilities. Then why do we judge official factions purely by ingame time?



Discuss.

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[Hannibal]

While i do agree that the lore/story should move on,i think it should focus more on activity or rather the lack of one ingame,than a few words wrote in 10-20 mins a month to decide the faith of a faction by a person who dont even play the game..
Like for example the ability to maintain the control over a certain system by activity in a system[ships visited/stayed in a week or month] or by keeping a player base alive with supply and defend like some discovery servers did..
I truly think that right now the forum and the game seems to be two different worlds,more and more every day..if there;s no way to bring those two together then we should just leave them apart..

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People want to believe that God has a plan for them.
They don't wanna believe that anyone else does..

[Treewyrm]

I talked to a few people about this and one thing did come up. People are afraid of change, especially when we had such a nice example of how devastating change can be to a faction, namely the Order as an NPC faction. After the destruction of Minor, the faction activity, especially indie activity, plummeted.

I think you're mixing two separate things. First of all, I'm not seeing much of a decline in terms of Order activity, secondly I haven't seen any cataclysmic event happening either to Outcasts or Corsairs, yet both have experienced dramatic reduction in activity (although it seems on the rise) in their times. Same could be said about many other factions at different periods throughout mod history, yet I don't recall any significant or radical changes in their environment/lore to directly relate to activity drops. I'm afraid you've made a wrong conclusion there, sindy.

Environmental changes require producing actual content, creating new or altering existing systems, possibly making all-new assets for them (models, textures, hitboxes, particle effect scripts, etc). Aside from actual content the changes to be made have to pass through various people, leaders of the affected factions, mod developers, etc. It ain't simple. In fact all this sorting out takes a whole lot more time than actually producing game content needed. All three factions (Order, Core, Keepers) were making this change together, writing story stuff, infocards, modifying systems and submittin to mod update. Perhaps this sort of active collaboration is rare elsewhere.

[Omicron]

I miss Minor but its overal location and ammount of riddiculous stuff around it was quite annoying - notoriously artifact smuggling and Order homeworld being highway. We used occasion to retcon the 16 milion population on the planet.

Order activity as NPC faction - I blame our ID which was nerfed. With inability to take our caps out, Order| took a hit too which is something I will address in 4.87

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[Eduard]

Leaving the confusion regarding the activity hits aside, I personally think that taking an official's faction activity in consideration by its quality and not the quantity of its activity would actually be something worth discussing.

Like spazzy said, it would stop official factions to simply camp a nearby base just so they get activity. But I heard that this is also sanctionable but do correct me if I am wrong please. Even if it is though, I reckon it's needless to say that you can easily avoid a possible sanction and still do it.

However, there are also quite a good number of cases which create activity in terms of quantity for an Official Faction yet the quality or Interactivity is at a low level.

Power Trading comes into mind, when people take trading not as fun but as a chore, and trade for the sake of trading without any RP or interactivity along the way as they keep themselves alt tabbed and just come back into the game to mash the F2 button. In other cases, people will sit all time on Team Speak and talk there rather than inRP talking ingame ( I am fully aware that Team Speak can be used for other stuff and yes I know, this is a big example yet you cannot say it's impossible to happen )

Piracy with low RP interaction is another example. The usual 2milrdie comes into mind.

And logging for the simple case of logging because you have seen an enemy ship two systems away from where your gank squad is docked. And you log just so you can find them ( in an obvious metagame way using the Players Online list ) and gank the hell out of them.


These are examples of activity which generate a good amount of quantity yet the quality they give out is pretty low. However I must do point out that Official Factions tend not to resort to these kind of actions as the Official Factions have a feedback thread and they may get a slap from other players, maybe admins and devs as well if they resort to this. And also, the players in the official factions tend to get a slap as well from the higherups if they do this. This would result in a decrease in their rep and their chances to get new players and eventually more activity.

However, even if the chances are... believed to be low. I must say that complete denial of the possibility that these kind of things may happen in Official Factions would be heretical.

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King Eduard is the greatest

[Blodo]

How exactly would we judge factions based on rp contribution? Amount of stories posted each month? Amount of comm channel threads? Proper grammar and transmission bars? However way you put it, there needs to be quantifiable way of holding officials up to a certain standard, because if there isn't then two things happen: 1. favouritism based on friendships creeps in because there isn't a straight forward indicator of what is "good" and what is "bad", there are just personal opinions; and 2. officials that do not do anything hog the slot and there's no way to dislodge them or spur them to activity.

And in the end, whichever way we put it, the most important thing is the server activity. Forumlancing is just a speck compared to the importance of actually logging in and doing stuff. That's where the real lore progression happens as well, not in idea skype chats nor unilateral story posts. At least that's my take on it.

[Treewyrm]

And in the end, whichever way we put it, the most important thing is the server activity. Forumlancing is just a speck compared to the importance of actually logging in and doing stuff. That's where the real lore progression happens as well, not in idea skype chats nor unilateral story posts. At least that's my take on it.

Heh, that's some marginalizing right there I see. But whilst that's your take on it, however quirky and rather boggling I find it, my experience tell me that while in-game is sure nice there are whole lot more ingredients to the recipe of making changes around, pre-planning is one such to name and just so it happens is mostly a result of skype chats, among such would certainly be the developer chat. Few ideas make it through, others die in the crib, such is the way it goes.

[SMGSterlin]

I both agree and disagree.


I agree that a faction's impact goes much further than just time spent on characters with that specific tag, and actually is rather irrelevant when it comes to impact on the server/lore. Most of the time, the RP progression that matters in the end is actually done on the forums, not on the server.

However, ingame activity is still very important, and not just because it's the deciding factor in whether a faction loses or stays official status. It also matters because it's a direct correlation to the life of the faction, a dead faction will have no impact.

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