The Staff would like to get Community input regarding this proposal to keep floundering official factions from losing their officialdom.
The proposal involves allowing forum RP to become a mitigating factor in determining whether a low hour official faction should stay official. Currently, forum RP is being used, in part, to evaluate a faction applying for officialdom. Forum RP is looked at when a player requests a Core upgrade for his POB. Forum RP is looked at when evaluating the merits of an SRP. Forum RP is an important factor in determining the merits of all these requests.
Additionally, there might be some other forum based factions that never seriously entertained the idea of becoming official because in-game play doesn't reflect much of their activity.
The proposal for the Community to consider is this: If an Official Faction is struggling to meet the hourly requirement, and is at risk of losing their officialdom, the Official Faction Leader can post their answers to the following questions in a specified thread. These answers will help the Staff to determine whether the faction is deserving of remaining official.
1. What is the main reason for not meeting the hourly requirement?
2. What efforts have been made towards trying to generate activity, either in game or on the forums? (Provide forum rp links)
3. What efforts can the staff make to help you remain official?
If the official faction leader can provide satisfying answers to these questions, there may be no reason to remove their officialdom, especially considering the current state of Disco right now.
The goal here is not to remove officialdom from factions, but to reward positive efforts in Disco's currently challenging environment.
I am personally in favor of any idea where the staff tries to support people and provide compassionate understanding. I think this could be really good for the server as a whole. And I think that trying to problem solve with OFLs is a great way to go with factions in general, rather than making it a strict cut-off. This seems like a healthy idea to me.
I think its a good idea to exhaust all options before cutting an official faction. If true effort was made then they should keep their status. Forum rp is required for almost everything in disco. Why shouldn't it help factions keep official status?
Sounds like a great idea atleast some activity in-game should still but needed though.
Certainly a good idea. I think the percentage of in-game activity to forum RP should be about 70% in-game and 30% forum RP. Arguments would be made for 60/40 depending on server activity at the time though.
All around, however, a wonderful idea to help those struggling to remain official. All things should be considered before people being cut just because the server population is low.
~Leo
I am probably the person that will be number one most impacted by this in the game. My thing is taking any faction from Zero and getting them to and/or keeping them Official, and I have flawless record in this. I post a ton of forum RP and organize events, RP raid, calls for log etc. More than anyone. So this will be very good for me individually as most of my time logging is to make sure factions stay afloat.
And I must say - I am against this. The biggest issue with factions is the complacency of leaders - burnt out people that don't enjoy logging and playing the game anymore remaining in Hcs, and sitting on 1iC positions. This system weeded them out and/or forced them to handover the faction to others. It forced me to not seek 1iC positions and hold power because I know my passion and commitment wasn't there. Official factions with leaders that don't enjoy playing the game are meant to fail, and that's a good thing. The 48 minutes of log time per day should be the bare minimum.
Officialdom Decline
On the other hand - official factions don't matter as much. You have almost no control over your NPC faction in terms of story, even FR5 requests get denied and your faction ignored. It's not a big deal if many factions lose Officialdom as they can do the same thing on non-OF all the same - story and faction influence operates on a buddy system now, not OF system - having OF is nice to have but not really that necessary except for a few select factions (wild, factions that deviate from the defaul, often outdated indie IDs - this is why my Mollys aren't even on tracker and Maquis keep officialdom)
Losing OF is not as big a deal as it used to be, I don't think the 3 days is the reason why Ofs are failing. It's lack of incentives to be OF in the first place alongside complacent leaders unwilling to handover power and/or play the game anymore.
1. Lack of the interest in game, especially in dead regions. Lack of quality interactions to spark the interest
2. in discord is counted as an attempt?
3. Advertise the community and game to make it more dynamic and less static (bring new blood in)
If anything, I'd put a system in place where some sort of minimum forum RP quota has to be met quarterly to maintain the OFdom on top of the online time (which could be relaxed to compensate)
(06-01-2022, 09:57 AM)Aingar Wrote: [ -> ]If anything, I'd put a system in place where some sort of minimum forum RP quota has to be met quarterly to maintain the OFdom on top of the online time (which could be relaxed to compensate)
Hard pass.
We don't need more paperwork.
But we should accommodate for style like in the OP
I'm fine with giving struggling factions a way to get an extra chance to salvage their situation when they thin out. But I hope this won't turn into RP in exchange for actual activity. The best way to help factions is create some real valuable activity in game that entices all sides to get online and get involved.
With a few rule changes and a team dedicated to operating an organized system, factions would have a lot more meaningful activities to jump into at any given time. Every faction could either be buying sci data, or mining it to use/sell it, etc, to be used for making big faction moves. Loosen some reigns rule wise and let player factions drive at least some story, mainly in building up their territory, if they can. Do that, and this place will have too much to do, not too little, giving factions a lot more to work on in the long term.
I think of it like this. When there are 20-30 people online during the weekdays, I ask, why is there not more online right now?
Because of lack of circumstantial interest. Ships and systems alone never sold the game, it was what we can do with all these things we earn, and how we might effect the space world in general.
Why a lack of interest? Events prove time and again something will get all those peeps with the mod still installed online. Is it really the age of the game? No. We have proven that within reason this place holds up quite well due to the ability to mod and customize. Yet we have really low interest for a free to play game.
Time to stop listening to those who reject all change here and reject pixel empire building, it's what people want to do, just organize it in advance to keep it fair. That provides some real necessities that can be filled by other roles that revolve around the major factions. It is greatly needed to keep things ongoing, which is needed to keep the place alive. Even weekends are slow these days.
Discovery needs the 'free floating factor'. It's like allowing a floating dollar, or changing market values caused by supply and demand. With OF's having an official right to challenge for control of places on their own, they'd be able to build up and use that ability as they choose, and that would change everything here. Not as much would be ruled out, opening up a random factor making developments here exciting and interesting.
Why? The bottom line is, the current way things are done leaves us knowing for sure what won't be happening, what we have no say over, and the point of playing outside events is defeated from the start.
Not knowing what could come next will mean there is some unpredictability here again, and not as much is ruled out at any given time. Who needs to maintain capships and big fleets if you know you will never really need them? Its the same for every role.
So, factions should be able to earn sieges of most NPC locations as long as it fits to their ROE's and lore. Then, people would get mining, trading, etc, and we'd need to get online to care. We'd need to patrol for scidata miners/dealers, need escorts again, need to keep trading normal commodities to pay to keep the ball rolling. Constant costs mean a constant need to earn more and keep the cycle ongoing. Once its allowed, and a system is set for all to see and use, players will get online again, and hopefully it will cause a surge for a while we can use to bolster our numbers more and more as time goes on. We'll never need registration only events to worry about balancing sides ever again, and normal server rules can be what we play by for important battles/sieges.
And as far as I'm concerned, we have relied too much on forum RP to propel story. It occured to me a while ago, we should require most meetings and negotiations to take place online, in-game, in local or system chat only. Imagine! But to me, battle events and siege/supply events should unfold over days, weeks, not a couple hours on a Saturday. Use those hours on Saturdays to meet and negotiate in-game, like an event, where eavesdroppers and party crashers may pop in. You can meet wherever, space is big, but can you keep it a secret? Keep it secure? The story would still get posted afterwards.
Be brave enough to accept, if we want people online playing, we need to keep the things needed to get anything done also online.