Personally the suggested changes seem good enough for a new player like myself. They're obviously not airtight and can be refined and clarified further, but that can be worked on before actual implementation as it is definitely an aspect of Discovery that is sorely in need of a do-over.

Currently I don't see OF's as anything other than PvP groups, with everyone huddled behind a million discord severs, waiting for a raid to happen to log in. Honestly, not worth bothering to make a character that would join the faction if I can get the same amount of fun as a nameless indie. A lot of OF's setup seems also archaic and outdated given how few are actually left and what they can/cannot do. It would be nice if joining an official faction would feel more meaningful than it currently does.

As for some complaints that this would create too much admin work in the background from both players and staff - It's kinda hard to disagree. Both sides would actually need to show proper and consistent commitment for this to work.

Just my 2 cents

To be clear, I've probably only read the highlights through this thread, as well as the proposal in the OP. That being said, overall what's being proposed has some fairly spicy potential, although there are some parts I'm not comfortable with.

For starters, this..

(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote: 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.

In the case of a successful vote, or in other cases of gross inactivity or misconduct, the Administrative Team retains the right to remove the leader(s) of an Official Faction and replace them with other member(s) of the community, as needed.

Members of a player faction voicing their opinions in a medium to replace an ineffectual leader I can maybe get behind. Staff doing it for whatever reason they damn well please is an automatic nope. This I feel is a matter that should be left to faction members alone. Should a leader not step down, the staff's only power should be to suspend their faction's officialdom until they step down.
If these factions are to be 'pillars of the community', then they should be trusted to police themselves, or staff should reconsider their recognition.

(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote: 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.

This I feel like should only be required if asked by the staff during activity check periods. Some factions quite frankly speak for themselves, and shouldn't need to bother justifying their existence if they're plenty active on the forums or in-game already.

(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote: 4.1.b - “Ninjaing”, or flying ships belonging to an Official Faction without prior roleplayed character membership, is prohibited.

I'm very interested to know how the staff plans on enforcing this without driving their workload through the roof. On top of that, I fail to understand how 'ninjaing' became synonymous with multi-boxing and setting your FPS above 155, especially when the factions that largely allowed for it didn't need any extra time ground out by non-members flying their tags.
I get the interest in having a dedicated list of everyone that's part of a faction, but flying an official faction tag already necessitates being capable of decent quality RP, and official faction leaders wouldn't have given a ship out to use if they didn't have trust that said quality wouldn't be adhered to.
Furthermore, this essentially makes emergency appointments for events and the like a rule violation, which can make a quick patch job for an event's time flow end up at best creating an unnecessary delay and at worst ruining an entire event for everyone, all because the event coordinator wasn't able to hand out a ship to someone to use for, let's face it, probably a half hour at best.

tl;dr
This isn't a problem, and I don't understand why the staff think it needs to be.

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(08-31-2024, 10:59 PM)TheSauron Wrote:

(08-31-2024, 10:38 PM)jammi Wrote: 5.1 - Official Factions are entitled to the creation of a custom ID representing their NPC faction, or a unique faction if no NPC faction exists. In general these IDs are not more powerful than indie IDs, but may offer tweaks to better align the ID with the faction’s playstyle.

Can you provide examples of what the staff sees as a tweak as opposed to increasing the ID's "power level"?

Beyond that the proposal looks pretty good, on a first read anyway.

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