Posts: 873
Threads: 73
Joined: May 2020
Staff roles: Story Developer
Garbage? We treat OFs as any other players. Anyone can post a dev request, there's no gatekeeping (which is good) for how significant or insignificant an author of such dev request is (which again, is good). Individual players can also become story contributors as long as they are easy-to-work-with (yeah, imagine devs wanting to collaborate with positive-enough people).
Any official claim of a stake in development by OFs in the current state is not healthy. Not until there is a complete change in what "OF" actually is and means.
We should ditch the checks and official factions along with them. Designing incentives for people to play forumlancer and process administrivia for rewards isn't a game; it's a job. Just playing the game is reward enough, and there's more time to play the game if you aren't angling to prove your worth to the community with forum records of in-game play.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
When I joined Discovery, the Official Faction check-ins were an absolute highlight to read. Not necessarily for entertainment, but I found it very helpful as uninvolved player. Faction leaders would list the roleplay they did and make comments on what they are doing and what they wish for. To me, this was a great indication of who are the people who are motivated to play the game, and who are motivated to play the game and provide instead of just demand. A lot of faction leader kept complaining about "We need x and y so we can continue to roleplay or play the game", which showed me some people are designing their official factions around what they demand instead of what they can actually already do.
Not only that, but it gave people an incentive to impress and show off what their factions are actually doing ingame - which is something that most players never get to see, because you need to be logged into the game at the right time in the right system with the right people. I loved the transparency it provided and helped me finding out which factions are interesting to play with or even become a part of.
Ever since the Official Faction check-ins got abandoned and the only thing to keep them tracked are the hour counts, I have no idea what most people are doing. Now it means you need to keep your eye on the sidebar and see if someone posted something on the forum, or you browse to find specific things. I don't think that is good. Official Factions have a status that sets them apart from regular factions. They feel like they can actually represent an NPC faction in some degree, and they certainly love to do it. Official Factions give it a meaning when you send a transmission to an NPC faction, instead of a random alt account answering your comm because someone once had a character of that faction or someone just made one up on spot to respond (which, for example, is currently happening as someone tries to rally players to destroy PoBs).
I know people complain about the maintenance of Official Factions and that Official Factions keep demanding things or never make use of the perk system at all, or really just wither apart only to log some powertrader to keep the tracker alive, or log a smuggling party that mostly flies off-grid, just to keep the tracker high without exposing oneself to dirty shadowloggers, but as person who hates being in any kind of factions and thus avoided it most of the time, the Official Faction reports provided an incentive to actually prove the value of an Official Faction, while giving players outside of these factions a way to look at their work, their activities, their plans and possibly ways to interact with these factions by knowing what they are looking for.
