Discovery Gaming Community

When I was leading [TBH] and in the command team of the [LN], I didn't want indies to join factions. It is their choice whether to do so or not, and not everybody will like what they see. In fact, the [LN] was a faction that at one point, had too many active members and was on the cusp of being told by the admins to close recruitment - if you are old enough, you will remember that the [LN] did actually close recruitment once or twice. During these periods, we still had many more indies than faction members.

There is a capacity issue with the idea of getting indies to join up with factions. Even if they all wanted to, you would quadruple some factions member bases. For leaders that like to personally know every member in their faction, this is incredibly taxing on their memory. There are also human resources and deployment issues to consider, as well as the difficulty of keeping tabs on everything that's happening.

The problem is not having indies in factions, the problem is that factions do not possess any means of controlling and regulating the actions of those indies. This is the same problem, whether a faction only has one indie or one hundred indies - the only difference being the scale.

Most factions interactions with other factions concerning indies tends to be "they're indies, we can't control them, sorry" followed by "we know your problem, we have it too".

(01-03-2014, 11:16 PM)Sabre Wrote: [ -> ]

(01-03-2014, 11:06 PM)Tibbles Wrote: [ -> ]how amazing can be tag along and do convoys, etc.

here's the problem. those arent official only things. anyone can do them.

thats the point a lot of people are making, its hard to recruit for official factions when everything can already be done by indies.

Yep, you're right here, but isn't more difficult to find players to tag along if you even don't know if they wear your same ID, I mean how they manage to tag along. My game scheme is, log, look for tags in game and try to get interaction. If i see a BHG tagged ship i ask for escrort for instance, how can i do with random names in random systems without knowing their Id's O.o

You are not being ambitious. Like, at all.

You say "it is difficult for us factions when indies can do it all already, take away their ability to do so", when you should really say "indies can do it all, but we do it better and have more fun - come join us".

I mean really, what the hell happened to faction players?


Things might have changed but I remember IMG was always hugely popular, and they used to go "sure you'll get rich as an indie, but we will make you even richer". Any other faction can do the same if they put an effort into that rather than into complaining about random things.

I think you should find some other way to measure RP and get rid of the activity tracker, it seems to be getting in the way of both roleplay and fun.

How can official factions say they can do it better? What does better mean to your prospective recruit?

Does better mean more freedom? Factions don't have that.
Does better mean teamwork? You can do that in an unofficial faction.
Does better mean providing RP direction for the faction? Devs seem to decide that these days.

What does better mean?

What can a faction based around combat offer recruits that an unofficial faction or being a true independent player can't? We cant offer riches like a trade faction, we can't offer adventure because we don't often go on field trips outside our ZoI. We can't even offer a salary, because that would require those paying the salary (the leaders) to trade a lot more and manage/play with the faction a lot less. I did some salary calculations once upon a time just to see if it was possible, and it turned out that even a minimal rate like 100k/hour turns into some big numbers at the end of every month.

Quote:

Do like the successful MMO's of these days, utilize their key points that actually call people into the game, and make them stay there.

You want a shinny toy? Join a faction and learn to be rp, for instance.

Actually give something worthwhile to the main source of roleplay in this server.

No, not the silent traders.
No, not the gazillion pob's.
No, not the lowut battleship captains that can barely string a sentence before firing all missiles.

The official factions that are here, and were built from the ground up and that gained their officialdom through roleplay, activity and gaining the blessings of the admins and playerbase after 6-9 months.

How's that for an start up idea?

AND YOU STOLE MY FONT! T_T

<3

+1, well said

I looked once again in the faction activity table.
although the list of warned factions is impressive, many old factions are there, but the number of active factions is much bigger.
so I came to a conclusion that meybe there is too many factions comparing to number of players on the server and simply some of them should, like Spazzy said at the beginning of this thread, disband with dignity.

Tyro you are not right. You are not right because the proportion of indie/faction players in the server is broken for years. From my PoV if there are indies playing faction X then it is more logical that there should be official faction. The problem is not the official factions here, the problem is that there is 0 intensive and pragmatical reason one indie to join the official action that toys and lore he is already using

My experience as faction member and faction leader is that it just takes too much time to deal with side things and that leading a official faction actually reduces your game time by half for 0 in-game rewards. I am up for 2 or 3 ID levels that allow Indies to have fun with basic stuff, second ID level allows half-faction members that have access to more stuff and can form their own lets say squads/clans etc something like todays unofficial factions with some freedom to do whatever they want within the day to day RP. I see no reason why for example SFC is with not [LN] in front and SFC in back of the names while the LN can go with something like P for primary at their back or whatever. The different squad numbers that were used in the huge events two years back can work here quite nice. In Kusari-Gallia event most of the people that play together used the KNF tag in front and created their own imaginary military suqdron using different numbers like 5th,7th,99th etc.
The third level IDs should be limited to 4-5 and they should have some exclusive toys. Lets say LN leader would have 1-2 to his disposal and SFC leader would have 1-2. The faction minimum time must be 60 hours and the minimum active members must be 10 for big factions and 8 for smaller ones.

Edit for Haste under me:
The activity checks could be made once per two months.So the the total time of the two months can be used instead of each single month. Also the warnings actually work since it give grace time for factions in trouble to fix their numbers.

Factions must be classified because it is likely that house military to have more members then some minor faction so the gains and the requirements for the bigger factions should be higher.
This system allows the players to play their own thing and to progress in order to get the shiny exclusive stuff, so they are more interesting in playing the game in RP and in faction development.

I wont go deeper because it is really sad how some indies just consume and use the stuff that the official faction members worked hard to add to the mod like ship models and diplomatic relations.

http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=77482
http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=63307
In my previous post I gave 2 links that lead to two different discussions over the same problem. One is mine PoV that is 4 years old the other is Del's PoV that is two years old and he made it when he was active admin asking for input how to change the official factions in order to make the people actually join them. I guess they are worthy to read instead of writing the same things leading to the same results over and over again each couple of years or till the server is totally dead because the people that set the stage cannot see and address the problems.

One problem I don't think has been mentioned is the way activity checks work. Activity is not a constant. One month, a faction may have ten active members. The other, three.

We need something that promotes activity for official factions, kills off factions eternally on life support, but doesn't "punish" a faction because its members didn't log on as much for a month.

(01-04-2014, 11:21 AM)Haste Wrote: [ -> ]One problem I don't think has been mentioned is the way activity checks work. Activity is not a constant. One month, a faction may have ten active members. The other, three.

We need something that promotes activity for official factions, kills off factions eternally on life support, but doesn't "punish" a faction because its members didn't log on as much for a month.

Perhaps activity could be stack-able over the year, so that a faction could already beat March's quota during January?