Consultation: Revised system for official factions

[jammi]

In the spirit of me doing secretarial bits to push things forward, I'm sharing a draft text for a revised official faction system that the mods and admins have been considering. The intent here is to gather community feedback before anything moves forward.

The core purpose of this proposal is to try and push for quality improvements in the server's official factions. This means rewarding factions that provide an engaging and entertaining presence in the game itself, and potentially clearing away the ones who don't.

This evidently means the current system of monitoring activity alone isn't going to cut it, and a more qualitative approach is needed. Zombie factions that clock in their hours and then go into hibernation really aren't good exemplars of anything worth promoting.

This fundamentally cuts to the core of what official factions are actually for. It means you're a sub-community within Discovery that staff feels happy promoting and recommending new players join.

They should be exemplars of their NPC faction or chosen role, providing a friendly, welcoming environment for new players. That should also include a willingness to teach and improve, while also driving interest / catalysing activity in the regions they inhabit.

We want you to be groups where people can see a tag logging into the server and automatically know they can look forward to a fun interaction. Currently, I couldn't in good faith say that this is a common reaction to many official factions.

This proposal also looks to tackle other low effort behaviour from both players and factions, such "ninjaing" - people being anonymously drafted into factions for the sole purpose of using shared ships for combat, with minimal interest in the group's roleplay or playing an actual character.

So, without further ado, here we go:

Official faction system proposal

1 - ACTIVITY TRACKER REQUIREMENTS

1.1 - Any faction with a unified faction tag, ID, and IFF may pay 5,000,000 credits to be listed on the Faction Activity Tracker.
1.2 - Any faction that fails to maintain (1) one day of activity within a two-month review period will be stripped from the tracker.

2 - OFFICIALDOM APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

2.1 - In order to apply for officialdom, an unofficial faction must:

2.1.a - Have three or more active members, including one designated leader and at least one designated second-in-command.
2.1.b - Have been listed on the Faction Activity Tracker for at least one month.
2.1.c - Have the following information posted publicly about their faction:

i - Faction Description, Diplomacy, ID, and IFF
ii - Public Roster (members may be anonymous, but they must be revealed to staff during the officialdom process).
iii - Public Recruitment
iv - Feedback Thread

2.2 - Officialdom Applications will be judged on the same standards as all existing official factions, during the next full Official Faction review period. If a faction application is denied, they are welcomed to submit an application during the next review period addressing the staff and community’s concerns.

3. OFFICIAL FACTION REQUIREMENTS

3.1 - Official Factions are groups that the Discovery Community and Staff are comfortable advertising as high quality sub-communities to enjoy the game, mod, and server in. As such, the Discovery Staff will routinely review the activity and behavior of all Official Factions every two months.

3.1.a - As part of this review process, each official faction will submit a report detailing a broad overview of their current in-roleplay and out-of-roleplay goals, ongoing events, and challenges. Links to ongoing story threads and in-game footage of events are encouraged.
3.1.b - Factions who have their officialdom suspended will not lose any of their official faction rights, but are expected to make improvements on issues noted by the staff in their previous review period. Failure to do so will result in a loss of official status.

3.2 - All Official Factions are expected to:

3.2.a - Have three or more active members, including one designated leader and at least one designated second-in-command.
3.2.b Have the following information publicly accessible and up-to-date:

i - Faction Description, Diplomacy, Tag, ID, and IFF
ii - Public Roster (members not in a leadership role may be publicly anonymous, but their identities must be revealed to the staff team).
iii - Public Recruitment Thread/Channel
iv - Feedback Thread

3.4.c - Maintain Community Standards. Factions are expected to promote good behavior both in-game and out. Repeated sanctions, general toxicity, and unwillingness to address feedback are grounds for loss of official status.
3.4.d - Promote Faction Activity. Factions are expected to maintain a level of in-game and forum presence, and should strive to promote events and activities with other groups to foster activity across the game.
3.4.e - Exemplify Faction Quality. Factions are expected to remain consistent with vanilla and Discovery lore, where possible. Factions representing an NPC faction should generally act in a manner befitting that faction’s lore relationships and objectives.

4 - OFFICIAL FACTION MEMBERS

4.1 - Membership of an Official Faction requires a character (or characters) played exclusively by one person to be listed on the public roster of the faction. This means ship names and their corresponding character should be listed, even if the name of the actual player is not recorded on the public roster.

4.1.a - Unless the character is a founding member of the faction, a recruitment post or other documented, publicly accessible roleplay should explain their entry to the faction.
4.1.b - “Ninjaing”, or flying ships belonging to an Official Faction without prior roleplayed character membership, is prohibited.

4.2 - Players may be members of as many Official Factions as they are comfortable with, however they may only hold a leadership position in one Official Faction.
4.3 - In the case that members of an Official Faction disagree with the direction of the faction, they are advised to handle the dispute privately with faction leadership. If this fails to resolve the issue, faction members may ask for a Vote of No Confidence, whereby staff will privately poll all members of the official faction as to whether or not they believe the Faction Leader and/or Second-in-Command(s) should be replaced.

In the case of a successful vote, or in other cases of gross inactivity or misconduct, the Administrative Team retains the right to remove the leader(s) of an Official Faction and replace them with other member(s) of the community, as needed.

5 - OFFICIAL FACTION RIGHTS

5.1 - Official Factions are entitled to the creation of a custom ID representing their NPC faction, or a unique faction if no NPC faction exists. In general these IDs are not more powerful than indie IDs, but may offer tweaks to better align the ID with the faction’s playstyle.
5.2 - Official Factions are entitled to the creation of a subforum in the “Official Player Factions” section for their faction’s usage.
5.3 - Official Factions are entitled to the creation of a player faction IFF to represent their faction, if desired. This is required for factions with no representative NPC faction, factions representing a Generic ID NPC Faction (Freelancers, Pirates, Zoners, etc.), or factions that wish to deviate heavily from their affiliation’s established canon. Accepting a player faction IFF relinquishes any control the player faction has over any NPC faction or its players.
5.4 - Official Factions representing a given NPC faction may:

5.4.a - Exercise a level of in-game and forum authority over players of the same IFF. They may enforce roleplay consequences on players of the same IFF, as long as the roleplay follows established canon.
5.4.b - Request that an individual player or faction be set hostile to their represented NPC faction. Players and factions set hostile in this way may treat any player of the requesting faction as a hostile target within their ZOI.
5.4.c - Temporarily restrict the ability of individual player ships to dock on their NPC faction’s bases with the /nodock command. House Police factions may additionally prevent player ships from docking on any House Police, Military, Intelligence, or Corporate faction base.
5.4.d - Act as a representative in the House Government if they represent a House Police, Military, Intelligence, or Corporate faction.
5.4.e - Enforce RP consequences upon players, factions, and bases breaking House Laws within House Space.

5.5 - All Official Factions may, at any time:

5.5.a - Create an Official Faction restart locked to members of the Official Faction, starting on a base of the faction’s choosing with a fully equipped fighter and the Player Faction ID.
5.5.b - Deploy a single Forward Deployment Ship (a Core 1 POB with two weapons platforms that may be deployed freely once every two weeks). While deployed, an FDS extends any ID with a matching IFF’s ZOI to the system it resides in. FDS deployment location must make in-roleplay sense given the Faction ZOI and ongoing RP. Staff reserves the right to refuse deployment if the desired location is found to be impossible to achieve inRP.
5.5.c - Equip “faction flair pieces including insignia, logos, color schemes, et cetera, pending their creation and approval by the Art Development Team.

5.6 - Official Factions may, on a monthly basis select one of the following:

5.6.a - Select one mineable commodity as a “priority”, conferring a 3.5x Mining Bonus on the Official Faction ID. Factions with no mining bonuses may not apply.
5.6.b - Select one non-mineable commodity as a “priority”, conferring a discount for purchase and/or profit bonus on sale while using the Official Faction ID.
5.6.c - Select one refinable commodity as a “priority”, conferring an enhanced POB manufacturing discount and / or increased refining speed.

Some questions you may want to consider when responding:

- What do you want official factions to be? What do you feel their purpose is?
- How do you feel this can be achieved?
- What are the failings and / or benefits of the current system?
- What benefits to being official do you feel are needed to balance out obligations and duties?

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News article library, feedback and content requests.

[TheSauron]

5.1 - Official Factions are entitled to the creation of a custom ID representing their NPC faction, or a unique faction if no NPC faction exists. In general these IDs are not more powerful than indie IDs, but may offer tweaks to better align the ID with the faction’s playstyle.

Can you provide examples of what the staff sees as a tweak as opposed to increasing the ID's "power level"?

Beyond that the proposal looks pretty good, on a first read anyway.

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One MD Admiral

[Darius]

Excellent proposal, I've already told the rest of BAF| to begin working over implementing this in full. We'll see how the final result is in a few days -- helps that we have some staff oversight already present.

[Mephistoles]

You can barely process requests and violation reports, both of which go unanswered for extended periods. The development requests subforum is a black hole of ignored threads that the community is gaslighted into believing is a forum they can make genuine requests that will be genuinely considered. I can see it. How long has it been since I asked why Rheinland's laws have been updated in a way that is not actually permitted under the existing server framework and is actually in violation of the server rules? Not a violation report, but a player request - a month? Official factions are not going to be reviewed to the extent you propose every two months, it's just not going to happen, and that's before we even get to merits of the proposal itself.

It's late tonight and I admit I'm not going to read the full proposal right now. I'll give it a go another time and try to feed back, but before we even get to this point, we have, as always, a mostly inactive team of people who for the most part just don't, or can't, deal with posts that are anything more than "this man swore at me in PM" or "can you move my core 4 pob to the other side of the game and dump it on hostile factions who don't get a chance to do anything about it". I got/get a lot of flak for being a moderator, but one thing I did do was actually pay attention and put in the effort.

From a decade's experience in this community I expect my post is going to be taken as an attack and sour my personal standing with whoever, but it's not intended to be one. The point is that the vast majority of staff, not a personal attack on anyone now, but in general both past and present, did and do not put in the effort. With this in mind, no review process is going to be done properly, even if it was the best proposal ever that every single person on Discovery can agree is an improvement.

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Sigma & GMG Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/d4j3W4v

[Czechmate]

4.2 - Players may be members of as many Official Factions as they are comfortable with, however, they may only hold a leadership position in one Official Faction.

So you target Ice Princess and me nice

The system fits into staff philosophy - better for serious and regularly forumlancing vets, off-putting towards casuals and beginners, you add a lot of annoying red tape, make people actually play the game a lot less, but have a presence on forums etc instead. This will not promote helping beginners, you add a lot of admin work needed for every new player, whose % retention isn't very high, to begin with for a LOT of effort in each one, instead of throwing all on teaching them ingame first and foremost.

I see OFs in the current player numbers as someone who should drive activity for the server, actually make people play the game and give them the tools for roleplay - DTR being the best OF example and role model.

On average this will lead to lowered player counts inevitably on the server - but it will be rewarding for forumlancing vets, people who enjoy forums more than the game, and VERY attractive and a huge improvement to all generic faction IDs trying to forge their own path.

EDIT: Really, you should have two tiers as @TheKusari suggested
- One as is, with adding some stuff on top, with 2 days per 2 months
- Other for RP factions that looks like your draft - the automatic IFF is huge for them, a total non-factor for Navies etc.
Forum RP is also way more important for them - e.g. a police faction is much more useful actually patrolling in-game as much as possible, driving activity that then goes into reports - you don't need to reinvent the wheel there - where a unique faction with own IFF should be fleshing out more forum stuff with advanced stories.

You could even give the factions a choice of which path they take, or simply pass them either on A or B

[Czechmate]

Official factions are not going to be reviewed to the extent you propose every two months, it's just not going to happen, and that's before we even get to merits of the proposal itself.

This is inevitable and will 100% happen - you will in practice have a lot of arbitrary passes and denials because you won't ever have the capacity to review everything in detail, besides maybe the 1st couple months when you'll be excited about this.

[The_Godslayer]

ii - Public Roster (members may be anonymous, but they must be revealed to staff during the officialdom process).

Doesn't account for some faction members concern of OORP hate from staff. If you'd like non-current examples, I'll refer you back to LH~'s problems in I think it was 2018 of the same flavor.

5.4.c - Temporarily restrict the ability of individual player ships to dock on their NPC faction’s bases with the /nodock command. House Police factions may additionally prevent player ships from docking on any House Police, Military, Intelligence, or Corporate faction base.
5.4.d - Act as a representative in the House Government if they represent a House Police, Military, Intelligence, or Corporate faction.
5.4.e - Enforce RP consequences upon players, factions, and bases breaking House Laws within House Space.

For non-House factions, do these still apply? And if so, in what capacity?

4.3 - In the case that members of an Official Faction disagree with the direction of the faction, they are advised to handle the dispute privately with faction leadership. If this fails to resolve the issue, faction members may ask for a Vote of No Confidence, whereby staff will privately poll all members of the official faction as to whether or not they believe the Faction Leader and/or Second-in-Command(s) should be replaced.

In the case of a successful vote, or in other cases of gross inactivity or misconduct, the Administrative Team retains the right to remove the leader(s) of an Official Faction and replace them with other member(s) of the community, as needed.

This will cause a "replacement theory" versus "hostile gatekeeping" problem. There's no real way to solve it, either, so just cross said bridges when we get there.

5.4.b - Request that an individual player or faction be set hostile to their represented NPC faction. Players and factions set hostile in this way may treat any player of the requesting faction as a hostile target within their ZOI.

Thank you for maintaining the "FR5ing" colloquialism.

5.5.b - Deploy a single Forward Deployment Ship (a Core 1 POB with two weapons platforms that may be deployed freely once every two weeks). While deployed, an FDS extends any ID with a matching IFF’s ZOI to the system it resides in. FDS deployment location must make in-roleplay sense given the Faction ZOI and ongoing RP. Staff reserves the right to refuse deployment if the desired location is found to be impossible to achieve inRP.
5.5.c - Equip “faction flair pieces including insignia, logos, color schemes, et cetera, pending their creation and approval by the Art Development Team.

For combat-focused factions, this may be bordering useless with the restriction from accessing Connecticut for regens and ammo. Handstocking munitions and regens on bases becomes ultra tedious, especially in the case of factions without transports. An NPC base of such a nature would serve the combat factions better, but I believe that being siegeable is one of the main reasons for it being a PoB. Also, an NPC base would require an infocard and a staff-approved lore tab, and would be subject to the patch cycle for movement unlike a PoB. Finally, the question of base models comes, because for Nomads, there's very limited base models that could be used.

3. OFFICIAL FACTION REQUIREMENTS
3.1 - Official Factions are groups that the Discovery Community and Staff are comfortable advertising as high quality sub-communities to enjoy the game, mod, and server in. As such, the Discovery Staff will routinely review the activity and behavior of all Official Factions every two months.
3.1.a - As part of this review process, each official faction will submit a report detailing a broad overview of their current in-roleplay and out-of-roleplay goals, ongoing events, and challenges. Links to ongoing story threads and in-game footage of events are encouraged.

I doubt there is more than one staff member (you) who is even willing to read multiple pages of my schizophrenic and autistic Nomad ongoings. This specific requirement will wound either staff or factions, and most probably both, viscerally in the psychological department. The intent is clear, and the idea is almost objectively correct, but without a staff member dedicated to each faction or at least each significant alignment in each region, this will inevitably become tedious for all involved and will collapse.

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I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.

"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"

[Czechmate]

The POBs you'd just deploy with the intent of provoking a siege while gaining Zoi etc - a great idea, and a total waste to restrict that to OFs - this should be event team department

[Kauket]

4.1 - Membership of an Official Faction requires a character (or characters) played exclusively by one person to be listed on the public roster of the faction. This means ship names and their corresponding character should be listed, even if the name of the actual player is not recorded on the public roster.

How does this work with shareds? Do we just say it's a shared ship or cap? Thing is with caps and some shippies, u can have different characters.


Also with incognito/untagged characters? These are mainly done to prevent meta (especially when ur doing piracy) but this seems to do away with it?

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[The_Godslayer]

Neat, but the term "Forward Deployment Ship" gives the impression that at least part of the intent is to deploy from it.

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I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.

"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"