How about letting official factions go outside the ZOI, or better yet let them lead offensive strikes outside their ZOI. Then you can force indies to stay in a prescribed zone, while letting the group that proves dedication to the game to cause trouble in a way that is hopefully responsible and structured.
' Wrote:What would make official status actually worth having?
- Control over their ID. If they want to change something, it gets changed.
- Control over their own rephacks.
- Control over how other factions are rephacked towards them. Would involve three way dialogue with affected factions and administrative team.
- A system that gives the faction power over what their infocards say, what ships and weapons they have added or removed from future updates - but only a say in how they'd like them to be balanced (Fast and weak, slow and strong, armoured with a small cargo hold)
You said this comes with more oversight from the Admin team, and the above rights merit such oversight and the associated consequences.
' Wrote:Okay so I'm looking at a radical redesign of the official factions system, more power, more responsibility, more checks and balances. Basically the idea is to streamline how easy it is for factions to lose status and thusly open up room for a replacement. This means greater oversight from the Admin team, issue is the current system offers very little oversight, for very little rewards and oft times official status isn't worth the hassle of having me on your case.
and all this when all the good people have gone
' Wrote:and all this when all the good people have gone
In all fairness, from what I've been told, the admin team has been mulling over this for some time trying to figure out how to rework the faction system.
' Wrote:- Control over their ID. If they want to change something, it gets changed.
- Control over their own rephacks.
- Control over how other factions are rephacked towards them. Would involve three way dialogue with affected factions and administrative team.
- A system that gives the faction power over what their infocards say, what ships and weapons they have added or removed from future updates - but only a say in how they'd like them to be balanced (Fast and weak, slow and strong, armoured with a small cargo hold)
You said this comes with more oversight from the Admin team, and the above rights merit such oversight and the associated consequences.
Well, it turns out that Official Factions now do have control over their own rephacks, and how others are rephacked towards their ID. Read: Disco Dev Forum; Aeternus' thread on rephack and technerf settings to be applied on the next mod update (hopefully soon).
We did have opportunities to offer suggestions for our IDs, which were considered and either accepted or rejected. It's better than nothing, but it's not total control.
Official Factions also had an opportunity to submit changes to the NPC faction infocard they represent a while back. Pancakes posted a thread about it somewhere (I forget exactly). Contact Friday or Xoria for changes; alternatively, Error (Space) or myself, but we can't guarantee that things will go through, only be discussed.
Tech is possibly the touchiest issue here. As with the rephacks, all the official factions have had a chance to submit their tech-nerf cell requests, but are not 100% guaranteed to get exactly what they want, if balance Devs deem a combination to be too "OP". As to balancing a faction's own tech... yeah, balance Devs do that for the most part; factions usually (sadly) have little sway unless something is really broken. We also can't get ships added unless models exist for them already.
Down-edit: Allow me to keep that nice little snippet saved;)
' Wrote:Echo is right.
...
Echo is right. Faction do have input on the list snoozer provided. It all comes down to making sense in request and having balanced influence on whole NPC faction.
' Wrote:and all this when all the good people have gone
If they left on that note, they can hardly be that "good"...
Official factions already have a lot of perks - aside from the direct benefits (FR5, legislative power for some factions, some control over the ID and rephacks), there's the "under the table" perks - skype cronyism, quid-pro-quo deals with other groups (regarding docking rights for instance, in the old days tech-requests), getting treated differently in-game (for instance some choose not to pirate official faction members because they can FR5, whereas they prey on indies with the same ID) and apparently the right to feel very self-important and have your back padded by other people feeling the same way.
Don't give factions more power, instead allow for more factions pr. ID and figure out a structure of governance that works, so factions within the same ID can keep each other in check.
EDIT:
: They already do. [LN] appears in Leeds.
' Wrote:EDIT: : They already do. [LN] appears in Leeds.
That is militaristic trade wing. Navy happens to provide everything you can hope to do in Disco besides plain piracy. But you can always demand to stop someone and if they don't, fine them for breaking law.
' Wrote:That is militaristic trade wing.
Highly militaristic trade wing, I'd say... Considering that the ship I personally met was a dreadnought:)