Consultation: Revised system for official factions

[Aingar]

There are plans to create a module allowing rearmament on a POB. It stands to reason that FDS would be fitted with such from the get go, with perhaps minor 'rearmaments' needing to be supplied every now and then to keep it stocked. Technical details are still up in the air.

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[Czechmate]

Neat, but the term "Forward Deployment Ship" gives the impression that at least part of the intent is to deploy from it.

In roleplay sure, in practice, it's a thing you siege

anywho, when it boils down, the only benefits you cant perk already are

- no dock for all
- PoB (can and has been done through events)
- faction flair on models, guns
- faster new IFF acquisition

the big issue with the latter two is that you will nuke a faction after literally 4 months of people being busy IRL, and you will suddenly find yourself with a clogged server with IFFs and assets that nobody is using that you put a lot of effort into on the back end

[Kauket]

Neat, but the term "Forward Deployment Ship" gives the impression that at least part of the intent is to deploy from it.

- faster new IFF acquisition

the big issue with the latter two is that you will nuke a faction after literally 4 months of people being busy IRL, and you will suddenly find yourself with a clogged server with IFFs and assets that nobody is using that you put a lot of effort into on the back end

objectively wrong on the IFF part cus we have placeholders. They can be renamed at will on restart because serverside

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[Czechmate]

Fair enough - it's still an added staff burden, which is the number one reason why this proposal will never work
(sustainably, over the long run)

[The_Godslayer]

In roleplay sure, in practice, it's a thing you siege

The other side of it is spawning a random core 1 is just utterly worthless to K'Hara at the very least. If I spawn a random Nomad Core 1,

2.3- All IDs can:
Attack Alien IDs.

and every single faction in Sirius will arrive to kill it with no noticeable resistance because Nomads simply do not have that number of players. If you up the Core level, it becomes horribly overpowered for factions with little to no direct resistance. GC- spawning a random Core 2 or 3 is effectively the same as having an NPC base because there's not ever going to be enough KNF to siege it down.

There are plans to create a module allowing rearmament on a POB. It stands to reason that FDS would be fitted with such from the get go, with perhaps minor 'rearmaments' needing to be supplied every now and then to keep it stocked. Technical details are still up in the air.

Nomads may still be the only transportless faction, in which case I am only arguing this from K'Hara's perspective and its one faction down for literally every other one to be brought up. But powertrading on Ishtars is still 1700 cargo space, and ultimately is a terrible answer at least for us.

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I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.

"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"

[Lord Caedus]

I'm going to be asking questions within the quote in this color for convenience of formatting

4 - OFFICIAL FACTION MEMBERS

4.1.b - “Ninjaing”, or flying ships belonging to an Official Faction without prior roleplayed character membership, is prohibited.

Clarification on how shared ships are going to work would be nice here, though the initial change itself does look good. Presumable shared ships would have to be registered in some format as being shared?

5 - OFFICIAL FACTION RIGHTS

5.4 - Official Factions representing a given NPC faction may:[/pi]

5.4.a - Exercise a level of in-game and forum authority over players of the same IFF. They may enforce roleplay consequences on players of the same IFF, as long as the roleplay follows established canon.

This is a nice change from having to drag out your faction 1IC to have the option to "order" people to perform certain actions as an OF member, and is a good incentive for more people to join OFs.

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.

Another good change, but as I believe has been asked previously, this would be available to all factions, not only lawfuls, right?

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.

Another good change, nice to see things like this no longer needing the use of "faction perks" and simply being a codified part of the normal rights of an OF.

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.

Aingar already went in and ninja'd an answer to my question on this, but the post might need to be updated to reflect that probably change coming in.

5.5.c - Equip “faction flair pieces including insignia, logos, color schemes, et cetera, pending their creation and approval by the Art Development Team.

Is this going to include OF specific color variations of existing ships, such as with the XA version of the Rebel, and if so how exactly will it be implemented, as I doubt Haste would want to add a ton of bloat to existing ship sell locations for new entires on an entire shipline for example

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[Aingar]

5.4.c as it is written quite clearly states that all faction OFs would have access to /nodock which locks down docking to stations of their own IFF. In case of lawful house factions this would be extended to all other lawful factions, similarly to how it works now.

5.5.c bottleneck will be getting the assets done. People can always just ask someone on Fiverr though. As for the ship limitation, I'm in the process of cooking a permanent fix for the 3 ship-per-base limitation, but it needs a yet undetermined amount of time in the oven before it's truly ready.

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[jammi]

5.5.c - Equip “faction flair pieces including insignia, logos, color schemes, et cetera, pending their creation and approval by the Art Development Team.

Is this going to include OF specific color variations of existing ships, such as with the XA version of the Rebel, and if so how exactly will it be implemented, as I doubt Haste would want to add a ton of bloat to existing ship sell locations for new entires on an entire shipline for example[/pi]

[/quote]
Hopping in to answer this part specifically, but this is most likely going to be addressed through hardpoint mounted holo logos/roundels.

Basically, a small emitter looking thing (micro mine dropper style) that projects a slightly transparent image a fraction above the ship's hull. Like the flag hologram that was added to Liberty docking rings, but smaller and closer to the hull.

This avoids the issue of a logo or texture needing to be bespoke designed for every individual ship. The little icon can instead simply be mounted on an appropriate hardpoint. We'd still need to add those hardpoints to each ship, but that's more managable than retexturing multiple variants of Defender, for example.

Mind you, the sellpoint issue could also be addressed by making bespoke ships manufactured on POBs. This is all still up in the air in terms of technical implementation, really.

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News article library, feedback and content requests.

[Barrier]

Figured I'd reply to points that caught my attention.

2 - OFFICIALDOM APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Lord Caedus]

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.

As someone that's leading an intel faction, I can tell you that this concept has me very intrigued. GNI performing some RP with a local faction (Mollys are a good example) to establish a logical basis for one of these FDSs and then being able to plop down a base in say, Leeds (or possibly New London or Dublin) opens up a lot of RP opportunity as well as giving us more availability to actually have PvP with groups that are meant to be our adversaries.

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