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.
Two instead of three months to apply for OFdom will encourage more people to do it. And it's still long enough to judge RP quality and activity, since most good factions exist unofficially for a while before the OFdom app.
Good on further reducing anonymity and streamlining recruitment. All factions exist within the game, so oorp info about them should be available just as it is about any game component. They are not clans in a competitive MMO. And if anyone believes that staff is biased against them, it's time for them to take a good hard look at their conduct in the community. The bias does not come from nothing.
(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote: 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.
Very much agree with the statement. But I am also concerned as other are about the time investment. I can understand this timeframe for OFdom apps, but what is its purpose for established OFs? From personal experience, changes due to different leaders, patches, etc. take a while to reveal themselves, for better or worse. To me, four months is a better target, and easier on the admin team. Alternatively, more admin apps should be considered, but I don't even know if people have applied for the role recently.
The report created by the faction itself will be inherently biased in its favor. To get a more accurate quality of the faction, it's always going to be better to observe it from without. But I do think it will go a long way towards simplifying the review process, if admins are willing to lean on it to make their decision. Arguably, a badly-written report should be a big ding during this process. But that would mean the onus of the review falls upon the factions themselves, which is another layer of responsibility piled upon faction leaders.
(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote:
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.
General toxicity is doing some heavy lifting here. I can think of a number of OFs who fall under that umbrella. And while I personally wouldn't be interested in interacting with them often, others do so and will continue to do so. I would think making examples of particularly toxic community members is enough to send this type of message - no need to excise whole factions. They will re-organize themselves after any toxicity-related player ban in any case.
(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote: 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.
There's a bit of a grey area here. A lot of factions have minor characters that serve a specific role for which they were created. They are rarely seen in recruitment posts, where only the player's primary character posts inrp. While it is relatively easy to make individual posts for these characters, I don't see their purpose. Rather, let there be a recruitment trail for the player's main character. It is then understood that this player may also create minor characters and fly shared ships, as long as these are listed as such in the faction's public roster. As a brief example, I have four RM characters, three DSE characters, and five SEO characters, all of whom have been developed with various degrees of involvement.
(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote:
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.
With the amount of responsibility implied by the rp prep required for perks, report writing, and often government or other diplomatic ties, I would find it surprising if any single player could successfully lead more than one faction. I speak also from personal experience as having bitten off more than I could chew before, and this is before these additional perk mechanics. Really people, focus on one faction, and remain as 2IC or within a HC structure in the others.
(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote:
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.
The economy boost of priority commodities is not to be understimated. In the cases of places like contested mining zones, such boosts will easily swing the refinery calculations in the official faction's favor, resulting in traffic to their station as long as they can maintain supply. This is arguably a good thing, as their competitors will be encouraged to apply for OFdom themselves and put in the rp work to come out with their own perk. However, I believe that in a lot of cases, people will simply not bother and abandon their project due to not being able to compete with such a perk. Obviously time will tell, but I hope that this will be closely monitored.
Ironically, I can't currently see a huge benefit of the forward base. It's quite neat, but there are already plenty of opportunities for conflict within the current ZOI of factions who may want to take advantage of this perk. Interestingly, this perk also seems to encourage RP that is at odds with established faction canon - since if you're going somewhere where you don't have ZOI, what are you doing there? It should open up some creative scenarios, but I hope that these will not be shot down too often, thus rendering the perk meaningless.