Consultation: Revised system for official factions

[Ravenna Nagash]

It's nice to see an active Staff-led discussion about changing the OF model. This is an area that could benefit a lot from a change. I could write a lot on this topic but I will try to keep it to the essentials.

- What do you want official factions to be? What do you feel their purpose is?

To promote server and community health first and foremost:

• By playing the game and creating activity.
  
• Generally trying to have a good time, have fun and enjoy the game, in simple terms having a positive atmosphere.
  
• Supporting new players and trying to help with retention.
  

- How do you feel this can be achieved?

This needs to happen from the community itself. What staff can do is to support this change/model by:

• Changing the OF model to support this vision more clearly - incentivizing positive behavior (which this thread is in line with).
  
• Supporting groups or people that act in ''good faith''.
  
• Removing bad elements from the community. This is debatable and I am sure people would have a different definition. For simplicity - actors that do or support actions that aim to bully or make individuals, groups, sides leave the community outright. Pattern-recognition is important here. A single act is one situation, a series of repeated actions is another.
  
• Be more lenient (here's one example of where it goes wrong) on new players, sanctioning new players creates an inherent negative first impression that will likely cause someone to quit.
  

- What are the failings and / or benefits of the current system?

I don't think the current system has anything positive. It's not inherently bad, it's just not fit for purpose with what I think OFs should be.

• It keeps what I would argue dead OF groups on life-support afloat.
  
• It actively punishes groups that have a lot of activity and who onboard new players. These groups are likely to have more sanctions on average by virtue of playing the game and having more new players. Luckily, I think current Staff wisely understands that supporting such groups despite the increased likelihood of rule breaking is a good policy. People can say - ''OFs need to teach their people.'' I can definitely attest that excruciating amount of effort goes into creating guides, constantly reminding people, fostering good behaviors on a daily basis. The fact is people will make mistakes. More people and more active playing correlates with seeing mistakes more often. This is not an issue as long as there's willingness to get better, to teach people, to promote learning. It takes in some cases months/year for people to gradually grow and evolve.
  
• It doesn't really provide any benefits for OFs that put in the work. The control mechanism after the initial application is non-existent.
  

- What benefits to being official do you feel are needed to balance out obligations and duties?

I think the current proposal is very much an improvement on the existing system, particularly 5.5.c as I know the guys and myself included would love if our ships reflected the faction theme. Even a simple darker re-color or red engines would be a great addition, let alone actually adding our logos to ships, banners, etc.

As far as the model change, overall I think it's good. Some suggestions:

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.

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.

These two are good in-so-far as they promote or check actual in-game activity. Good RP is always nice, but in my view a faction that has no actual in-game presence is not really an OF. We are after all playing a game and not a literal fan-fic club. Yes, it's an RP server. But if you have zero presence in the actual game, if nobody sees you anywhere, you don't actually impact in any tangible way. Naturally, the opposite end of the spectrum is not ideal either (but one could make the argument that it's better to have 0 RPers and X players, than it is to have 0 players and Y RPers). New players (with new skills) don't come to dead games.

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.

This is fine, as long as it doesn't mandate someone to have a forum account or to do forum RP. There's a decent number of players in DTR for example who do not have a forum account. One of the reasons DTR is so successful in onboarding and retaining players relative to other groups is that when I created the onboarding process/model I treated forum roleplay as an activity. DTR is a casual jack-of-all-trades kind of group. In DTR, people:

• know RL is always first
  
• can come and go as they please if RL demands long breaks, they can instantly come back when they are active again
  
• can enjoy raids, smuggling, POB logistics, PVP, RP in-game and in forum, etc.
  
• forum roleplay is completely optional
  
• people join DTR sub-groups based on preference, no one is mandated to do X,Y,Z. As long as they contribute to the team's goals in some way or to some of our metrics at least minimally, they are fine.
  

No problem in being completely transparent about our roster or who is who. We can even discuss potentially providing Staff with access to our discord channel where we list our ships (excel file became too difficult for one person to regularly update and self-service is always more efficient if people can update their posts/ships on their own). DTR has always been transparent in terms of who's who, what's our motivations, etc. It would become problematic though if there's an expectation for all our members to make a forum account or do forum RP. That impacts the onboarding journey and makes it mandatory for people to do forum RP. Not everyone likes to do that and I would respect their preference. If that became the case - I would instantly suggest DTR to become an unofficial group as it would impact the community element (which we value very much and above all other metrics) in a detrimental way. Bottom-line, people should be able to do what they like and enjoy.

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.

We discussed this in DTR's discord and my only concern here is that one does not end up seeing Staff supported coup d'etat. How do you discern difference in vision vs. genuine mismanagement? @Luminium brought a solid point where you could have an absent non-playing leader holding the keys to the fort and that's a definite use-case I can imagine where I would agree Staff can get involved. But I think outlining specific thresholds where Staff would get involved would be good here.

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.

I hope this applies for unlawfuls as well patrolling and policing their spaces, as it's a pretty cool idea.

That's all I can think of at present moment. Overall, I think it's a step in the right direction.

EDIT1:

Different people have different vision for what an OF is. Staff should agree on the definition internally first and then implement a model that is the most likely to achieve the expected behavior depending on what you define.

As in if you are expecting to push a certain behavior from OFs (which in turn are expected to influence the rank and file), different steps are to be taken if you want:
A) more new players and lively community
B) higher quality RP
C) higher quality events
D) whatever else

Align on what outcome you are trying to achieve first if you haven't already.

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.

Thank you for the kind feedback.

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Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.