Discovery Gaming Community

I just spent 5 minutes reading through the server rules on Official Factions. They talk a lot about the rights of officialdom and the subordination of non-official players to the Official Faction, but there is nothing of significance stating the obligations of Official status.

What, exactly, does being an Official Faction entail?

I see many Officials ignoring non-official players, not RP-ing with them unless it is convenient and more or less pretending that they don't exist. It seems there is no standard of conduct required for what amounts to the people that have volunteered to be the governing powers in the game; privilege without obligation.

Chance Wrote:I see many Officials ignoring non-official players, not RP-ing with them unless it is convenient and more or less pretending that they don't exist. It seems there is no standard of conduct required for what amounts to the people that have volunteered to be the governing powers in the game; privilege without obligation.

Official factions can mop indies around and even FR5 them if they see it fit. Being threatened by official faction if you do not fulfill the official faction's roleplay is something that successfully fends you away from roleplaying indie faction IDs.

Being victim of such a threat by official faction in the past, I can tell this is not the way to provide healthy roleplay enviroment to indies.

The big problem why many official factions don't spend as much time on indies as they do on other official factions is rather simple. I was hugely trying to treat indies the same as official faction players once and I slowed that down myself.

There is many independent players who use their independence status to avoid any sort of roleplay consequence or to do "whatever they want" disregarding standing roleplay and lore. I've seen that many times where players just stopped playing their characters the moment they didn't enjoy where the interaction went or just renamed them. An official faction cannot do that, nor can an srp holder. That's why people are more open to interact with official faction members, SRP ID players or characters known to be active for years.

As an OFL leader, I'll say this.

OFLs have a certain amount of responsibility to generate activity for their house, to press the concerns of indies in mod updates and changes, and to set the overall diplomacy, rep and style guide for Indies in order to stop RP from being completely incoherent, whilst still letting indies do what they like. OFLs have a greater ability to shape mod story, physical content, and set up events. They share responsibility with the devs for defining how each IFF can be played and roleplayed.


I tell all my members to treat indies with respect, however, two thirds of all the indies we run into use roleplay tokenistically - as a means to an end - be it an unspeaking Solaris carrier who can only type in the cyrillic alphabet or a trader who sends PM insults at us after he rejects a piracy demand. We're meant to help, not hinder, independent players, but there's a certain amount of give-and-take.

Aside from what other people here said, one thing to note is that now (as in, after the activity checks were removed) once a faction gets official, losing officialdom is rather difficult.

But then we shouldn't push indies into same bag and overgeneralize. I know several indie players who have top-notch RP but doesn't want to join official faction for different reasons. Those reasons are usually dislike towards the faction leader or certain members within the faction - or simply wishing for more freedom from official roleplay and/or explore potential of the lore unused by the officials.

The latter, however, are the main reason why there's are serious grudges between indie-official relations. If an indie wants to explore area that wouldn't harm the official's lore, the indie player is shunned - or even insulted and threatened with outright FR5. And that's wrong.

Sure, if the player's idea is just ridiculous with no basis within lore - then it is something to be shunned upon. But it's a wholly different case, if someone is shunned for doing sort of a roleplay that is logical from the enviromental and political point of view - in short.

Thank you to the various commenters.

I cannot say that I appreciate your stances, but I appreciate you taking the time to write.