The problem is that you cannot request a temporary ID, SRP-style, for the construction of a faction before officialdom is reached. This means everyone uses FL ID, which, whilst granting significant freedom, does chain people to prescriptive activity types. Or you have to use an individualised ID and accept the associations there.
Unless you're a tenuously connected fraternity like Forlorn Hope, the idea of a 'Faction of Freelancers' is pretty nebulous.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Legitimizing ('canonizing' is an absolutely awful and borderline offensive word to use in this context) non-vanilla factions will only lead to overall drop in quality of factions played on Discovery.
Every single non-vanilla faction, with the exception of Gallic ones, that was incorporated into Discovery storyline over the years was either bland, poorly thought out, powergamey, edgy, unreasonable or a combination of the above. Indeed, one can easily estimate the amount of times vanilla lore and vanilla factions were complained about compared to non-vanilla ones and the comparison is not favourable for the latter.
Further, this will deincentivize reviving nice and interesting vanilla factions in favour of people trying to inject their power fantasies and self-inserts into the canon.
I think this is a terrible idea and should be abandoned.
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Freelancer ID factions should never have been allowed to become official without heavy modifications to their official faction IDs.
The “go everywhere and do everything while being neutral with everyone by default” makes most other IDs obsolete when looking at factions. Individual use of it is fine.
My only concern is that non-vanilla factions usually get more power than vanilla ones. Developers attention too in fleshing out some story progression. While Coalition and Hellfire are really old and established, I always find their full shipline and their own systems as a spit on the face for some of vanilla factions that are struggling with players and assets.
(12-21-2018, 02:29 PM)SnakThree Wrote: My only concern is that non-vanilla factions usually get more power than vanilla ones. Developers attention too in fleshing out some story progression. While Coalition and Hellfire are really old and established, I always find their full shipline and their own systems as a spit on the face for some of vanilla factions that are struggling with players and assets.
This is because there were ship dev members of both factions and people make ships for their own factions because they understand their needs better.
Although I agree that non-vanilla factions shouldn't -ever- be buffed above vanilla groups. Unless we start bringing back faction-created systems.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
I can agree with Prot here. Sadly a lot of people here in Disco think playing a pitiful power game is needed. I am curious to see how this system may work out though, if it is handled with caution it might bring us a wonderful new addition one day, not another failure.
(12-21-2018, 02:29 PM)SnakThree Wrote: Developers attention too in fleshing out some story progression.
I think you've participated enough in the development process in the past six months to realize that this is flat out untrue, unless you're talking about Gallia which is a prominent story arc which requires resolution. The factions I'm pretty sure you're talking about haven't had any major developments since Harmony was given an NPC base as far as I'm aware.
Well, unless you count the CR getting a carrier deep sixed.
As a more general statement no, we're not looking to canonize factions which are going to outstrip vanilla ones overnight. But we are going to give them chances to progress, and yes, occasionally that leads to the eventuality of people actually growing beyond the scope of the Xenos or Bundschuh.
I'll never be able to understand nor support the argument of "but it takes away from vanilla," when the fact of the matter is that people are going to roleplay what they're going to roleplay. If a group is dead, it's because someone hasn't come along with interest in bringing that group to life. Creating a glass ceiling for people who are interested in their own vision, IF it adds something unique to the mod and doesn't negatively impact the existing lore, is not going to encourage them to simply pour their blood and sweat into a different faction, nor is it going to encourage them to stick around Discovery at all.
The bottom line is that people are going to keep making non vanilla factions, and it is a key attractor to the mod. The only thing which has now changed is that we have introduced a standardized process instead of the previous status quo which was basically the staff running around going "oh my god they want an IFF what do we do!?" while tearing our own hair out.