As a bit of a warning, a lot of this post will be redundant, and I didn't read the whole conversation. I can't begin to propose anything that may edify the situation at hand, but I suppose I'm just dropping in to say that I support keeping Official Factions around. From the gist of what little I've read, it seems that the official factions are having issues with memberships, participation and a lack of good roleplaying in general. I like the whole system, and I enjoy the lore that's been created, paving the way for certain events in the whole overview of Disco. It's sort of like how events in EVE Online are sometimes wholly dictated by what players have done, rather than what the devs just tell the players "happened".
I'm new to this community, and to the Disco mod, but I really enjoy all of this storyline stuff and would be quite sad if it was just retconned from existence. If the problem behind the lack of membership lay within people just powergaming and completely forgoing official factions in favor of gaining a better statistical advantage, that's a bit of a problem that I wouldn't know any solutions of. Personally, I was really looking into making a Golden Chrysanthemum character, or maybe just a Kusari or Rheinland police officer (not navy) sometime, so hearing that GC doesn't properly exist as an organized entity anymore, and that no one else really wants to be in the police anymore is quite saddening. I can understand that the desire is to have cap ships and generally feel powerful, and that pirates run around in cap ships as well, but in the 60 or so hours I've played, the majority of pirates I've seen so far that were in the middle of pirating were actually in bombers—completely wonderful since I pilot an Osprey or a Conference Gunship—rather than a Legate or Praetorian as some people would imply is happening.
Anyway, perhaps lowering the upkeep requirements of the official factions would be a good place to start, especially during this time of year when people are either shuffling about in preparation for the holidays, or busying themselves with some sort of school work. Maybe even an official salary script (like automatic transactions for fulfilling certain missions that are either generated or created by the owners of the faction) for the lawfuls and a bonus system (small multipliers for smuggling items when you have a specific ID, or an applied multiplier for getting /sendcash'd by certain ID'd characters) for the unlawful factions would be good—though I have no clue if that's even possible or if it would be easy to implement, and I can see a few ways a system like that could be abused.
Also, it's not like I want indie factions to be nerfed, since my Zoner pretty much depends on being indie as OSI isn't a very good fit for her ideals, and TAZ just looks like some kind of odd cult that she may or may not occasionally supply /anyway/. Just that NPC/Official factions are really cool, and need some sort of new way to keep them fresh. I think they're really quite conducive to a good roleplaying experience, and that RP experience is half the reason I'm here, and not in some other Disco server.
