. OFFICIAL FACTION QUARTERLY CHECK OVERHAUL PROPOSAL

. . 'Sup, everyone. First of all, this is more or less an expansion or revival of this thread. Though this is a newer idea, that's somewhat related to my old one. I have had a chat with a few people about Official Factions and what the ins and outs are of what you actually get once you become official. We have all seen the quarterly checks at one point or another, this post is essentially serving as my suggestion on how this system can be overhauled and changed into something that may enable more factions to come to officialdom. The basic idea here is that when you apply to become Official, the Moderation and Administration teams decide which kind of faction you most resemble. This isn't a way to circumvent the quarterly checks to remain official easier, though the "passive" one may appeal to a lot of you. It's more so meant to enable people to bring to life factions that may not require a ton of in-game presence, but can function primarily on the forums. As I have listed two here (as examples) the idea would be that if there's any dispute, by default you'll be classed as "Active." Having too many of these classes would only make this more convoluted. Both of the classes below have different roleplay articles and activity we look out for to pass the check. Now, these lists don't include all the tidbits, it serves to make the reader understand by point, or my proposal here. Please don't take this as final by any means, it's mostly just to get the conversation going so we can reach an end point that we're all happy with. Any feedback is welcome. .

. . "Active" Official Faction For those factions who would realistically be seen having a stronger presence in-game compared to on the forums. Primary examples (but not limited to) being House Militaries, Logistics Corporations and Mining Organizations. Major Checks Log Time (72 hours every Quarter) Official Event Participation Bounty Boards Recruitment Minor Checks Message Dumps Faction Projects Mission Boards PoB Activity Communication Channel Permit Requests .

. . "Passive" Official Faction For those factions who would realistically be seen having a stronger presence on the forums compared to in-game. Primary examples (but not limited to) being Scientific Organizations, News & Media and Insurance & Financial related groups. Major Checks Log Time (48 hours every Quarter) Faction Projects Mission Boards Recruitment Minor Checks Official Event Participation Message Dumps PoB Activity Communication Channel Bounty Boards Permit Requests .

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The idea is great, but sadly even in the past when we had the OF checks, nothing really changed.

1iC's complained, searched for help and most of the time got ignored. I was leading a OF at that time and we were struggling hard, in the end we got 0 help even tho we posted our concerns and issues.

If that can be changed, sure, bring it back.

Ps: I would remove the recruitment part, some factions just rarely get new members, and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it.

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I personally would move the recruitment to a minor check as Major pointed it out some OF just don't get that many recruits.

Moving to the best part for me personally that is the idea to include RP as activity especially for minor factions as we do lack groups that fit into that description.

To be honest anything is better then just powertrading for activity.

I've already been hearing talk about upcoming changes to the way the OF system works, so while this looks good in some ways, I don't think this is going to get much traction since changes are already more than likely incoming.

That being said, having bounty boards be a check for factions in general is just, not exactly a good look. It's either going to end up with a faction paying people to play on ships that aren't part of their faction, or it's an internal bounty board, which is just a poor excuse for paying your own faction members to go log time in exchange for credits, but at a lower rate than one would make powertrading.

As was said above, recruitment isn't particularly viable until OFs actually get a benefit over indies, which the vast majority of the time isn't the case. POB activity isn't a practical avenue for activity in several locations, Gallia being a prime example as it's extremely inefficient to use a POB to produce eqipment or weapons there.

Official Event participation is going to happen naturally for factions involved in the region the event is happening in, so making it a seperate check isn't really viable since the vast majority of factions can't participate in any one event, or for inRP reasons wouldn't be expected to take part.

Seeing lowered flight time requirements for factions that don't necessarily rely on interaction with other players compared to factions that do is also odd. If anything time logged requirements should be lowered across the board, to reflect the overall lower player count and general lack of activities available to most factions within the areas that they would naturally be playing in.

Doing permit requests is an odd choice, because unless this is factions submitting a permit request then it's basically worthless as the vast majority of permits are issued by house governments and not the OFs that form those governments. Would an approved/denied request simply be credited to all the OFs that make up a house government?

Rewarding factions for making inRP forum posts is certainly a worthy goal, but I think the issue with that is determining what a forum post is worth. Does a post directly count as a certain amount of flight time, or are factions going to be expected to make a certain amount of forum posts in a quarter? If the latter is the case, is a short post that's no more than a paragraph worth less than someone writing a post that's pushing the 2000 words mark? Is quality of RP on a forum post going to be considered, or the amount of effort required to make one type of post compared to another one?

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You cannot be adding extra requirements without adding extra benefits too - OFs don't give you much unless you want to deviate from indie ID +lore.

There's no differentiation specified between 'Major Checks' and 'Minor Checks', how'd they differ in your explanation?

Many of these 'checks' could merely be on an optional check-list for whoever's addressing faction activity, wherein they're simply little additional factors that can go into the consideration of officialdom, those few little things that carry you over. As opposed to being hard requirements that is.

Food for thought.

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