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Member-Submitted Playable Factions / Submissions Forum

Hey Star Army,

Due to recent events, it's clear we need to come up with a smoother process for integrating people's ideas into the setting. I will be working on new rules for how to submit a new faction that are aimed to avoid confusion and negativity. In the meantime, I am temporarily placing a hold on all member-submitted playable factions; we will not accept any more until further notice. When we start accepting them again there's going to be clear requirements for them. I will also be looking at how to continue to make the submissions process friendlier.

I'm gonna be real with you, people are leaving the site because of the submissions forum is a toxic dogpile of rude people shitting on other people's imaginations, and it's not cool and makes me sad, and we need to fix it to keeping Star Army growing. We need to unfuck the situation.

Now there's only so much I can do by updating the submission rules, because when it comes to the emotional experience people have when submitting stuff, it's about the people interacting with each other more than the rules. The guide to reviewing submissions literally tells people to be friendly and helpful but it can't make people be those things. So we need to deal with the people situation too.

@Alex Hart (mecha meme): You've been super rude both to submitters and to the staff (Ame in particular) and seem to be a constant source of complaints sent to me by submitters, my staffers, and even the guy who just left last night...these have piled up for months while I've been busy, and I've tried to talk to you privately about this on Discord but it hasn't worked out. So I'm just going to put it here so everyone can see it's being addressed. Your services as reviewer are no longer required. You are also restricted from holding any FM position. I can't have people represent my site who are acting like this to people. We'll talk more privately.

@ everyone else: If you think you can do a better job of reviewing submissions, I'm accepting applications.
 
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As far as playable factions go, this is a question I'm posing for the not-so immediate future, since I still have a plethora of work to do which I sadly haven't gotten to yet to realize it.

But on to the question.

As you might be aware, I've created the Tsumi race as a subfaction to Neshaten. Now they're not really affiliated with Neshaten yet - but they will be since they'll settle in a Neshaten system. But is a sub-faction like them becoming independent exempt from this rule, or does it apply to this as well?
 
Generally speaking: If people are already playing in plots in a faction, then no I won't apply the rule, but if it's just a wiki creation so far, then unfortunately yes, they'll have to wait. The whole concept of a sub-faction that later becomes independent is basically, and obviously, an OOC loophole to introduce factions in a way that circumvents the restrictions.

In the future I think we should treat new playable factions like MMORPGs treat them - they should probably be reserved for major expansion events, and be ready to go and play when they launch, and the staff should be involved in making them.
 
Honestly, Wes: If people were angels, we wouldn't need rules or all these guidelines. We'd RP perfectly, we'd all achieve that standard of kindness, and everything would be fine.

As people are very obviously not angels, we shouldn't expect kindness. This is not to say we should try to make them angels. We're humans, and that's all we are until we unlock the ability to create cybernetic augments. Then we become cyborgs, but that still isn't an angel, so instead we should be approaching humans as humans. Not everyone from the inside will be nice to the ones outside due to a multitude of reasons. This is a two-way street, however. Not everyone outside will be willing to sit down and learn and be nice. Not everyone will want to comply with certain setting elements like DR and such. That was the situation we faced last night.

A more realistic goal would be to have everyone willing to understand and learn, taking things slowly, but that was also the issue we faced last night: Said person who left was not willing to learn and take it slow. He wanted to inject himself into the setting and instantly make a displacement in it large enough to overturn many of the things we as a community agreed on, such as the humanoid species restriction and the FTL restriction.

So an even more realistic goal would be to only make rules we can actually enforce. If we can't guarantee that you aren't allowed to make another humanoid species, we shouldn't have it as a rule. If we can't guarantee that a person must be RPing for three months before they make a faction, why is it a rule if we can't enforce it.

SARP cannot be an RP site made of rules, Wes. This is what it's turned into. People are angry that they're trying to tell people the rules and how it works, only to see everything overturned instantly in favor of one person, thereby invalidating everything they've been following. They think it's an exception, but then the exception turns out to become the rule and so that invalidates one of the rules in the list. As such, they don't respect the rules either because of the fact that the rules as written are not being enforced as written. This is not something you can tell people, to simply "respect the rules." You know children. They will not follow rules that their peers are not bound by. It's what we call "unfair."

Why not start with making SARP a place about the enforcement of rules? Cut down on the bloat and the things we can't enforce. Adamantly enforce the things we can.
 
You speak of exceptions but the rules were enforced. The species he submitted was not approved because of the 3 month rule, for example. No humanoid species were approved either. The 3 month rule for factions doesn't exist (at least not yet) so that wasn't an exception either.
 
It's worth mentioning, for the vast majority of things involving the person who left, the rules -were- enforced. For instance, there is no rule that you have to wait 3 moths to make a faction, that is for a species. And no species ended up getting approved before that. Also no article was approved that actually went against the site rules as written at the time of their approval. It is true that we need to get rid of rules we can't enforce, but that isn't the heart of the problem SARP is facing when it comes to matters like this.

Yes said person had an attitude problem, but we can't attribute that solely to him, because someone on the site pretty much kicked him in the teeth right from the get go. The reason I held back so long from joining SARP's NTSE, was because SARP's NTSE does not have the attitude of helping people make something for the setting.(THere are people who have that attitude, but the NTSE system and a huge portion of the site do not) Something we see much too frequently is people trying to find reasons something -shouldn't- be approved, and often times they are entirely petty things. We've had articles held up before because of they weren't named super carefully, we've had articles stopped because it's a -single- item said faction has that tops another faction, we've had articles held up because some things were or weren't in a chart.

Yeah, we shouldn't let people change the site just because it suits them, but also we shouldn't try to -stop- things from getting approved, we should try to figure out ways to approve them with keeping as much of the author's original intent as setting allows. That's what the NTSE is for, and that's an ideal that has been missing for quite some time. As some people clearly demonstrated in the past weeks. Yeah the new person wasn't perfect either, but if someone isn't going to help make an article better, they need to comment on the sticking point they believe is there, and then leave the discussion. WE don't need people constantly hammering in points and being negative to new members. If their attitude is a problem report it and leave it to the staff, don't chase after everything a person does and find the most tiny reasons to get it unapproved.

But the truth is that is the kind of environment the NTSE is, and the worst part is that the site as a whole has been complaining about it for years. But the moment someone new shows up that's a bit abrasiveness and wants to submit stuff, people take full advantage of that, and the majority of people sit back and watch, and stop complaining about the awful atmosphere the NTSE has. That is the reality we are currently facing.
 
On the topic of rules, ye. I think there should be a more or less intensive checklist/guide for faction building.

Faction building also floods the NTSE which many of us have been saying is over-tasked lately. So i think, No matter how excited they are to make their faction. Should be delivered piecemeal no matter how excited or how much they want to just shove it all through at once.

There should be a guide that more or less says:

Heres everything required to have a faction (Government pages, CCG, military, specific FM-NPCs like the leaders etc, home system and planet, History.)
Click to expand...
And that they should have these specific things done and all the sub articles that go with them before they start flooding the NTSE with other stuff related to their faction like weapons and ships and this and that. That way their attention is on their factions skeleton before they try to pile on the meat and other stuff (They can still make these things! but perhapse just keep them in the wip: on the wiki until their faction is approved.)


I Want to make a faction. Ive been planning on it and prodding and working on it piece by piece for close to a year now and a lot of people on the discord have seen that. And every time i find out someone is already doing X, Or in some cases has just Done Y knowing full well i was talking about and planning that. I change my faction stuff slightly to accommodate that change because i dont want to steal anything from anyone else... And im even fine with a faction ban even if it lasts a couple years because i just have more time to work on it without fearing that in that time 10,000 more factions are going to pop-up and ill just be inserting them into a setting with a significantly diminished interest because of people who can type out articles 10x faster than me. And ill have that much more time to bother you all on the discord and show them when they're ready. But i have no intention of them coming into this setting like everyone else, As some kind of sector powerhouse fit to bare-knuckle brawl with nepland or yamatai right out the bat, Claiming planets left and right to expand their buildup limitation. I dont like doing that, I like playing the underdog that starts out small and weak and doesnt have the tech that rivals any of the larger factions. And its because of this im not a super big fan of an expansion. Tho i cant really put it in words.

If i have to work with staff or honestly bother wes every single day about something to make it happen and make it right, i will if thats whats required. But i know that all those people are often busy and maybe we should spitball a bit before we settle on any one idea. Since wes has the final say, Ye, but i think thats why the community is here to give their support for/against ideas. And when the community can agree on an idea it makes wes and the staffs jobs 100% easier because it wont be a system they disagree with!

I also think a faction submission forum is a bad idea because it will see no use 99% of the time since we dont want to get flooded with three player factions...

I wont comment on the kind of person rascaldees is/was. I think i was one of the first persons he came to on SARP. He reached out to me in DMs on discord and told me from the start this was the approach he wanted to take and i warned against it for this very reason. I tried my hardest to not look like the great naysayer i was portrayed as lately and i genuinely meant him no ill will except for a few choice interactions i couldnt avoid, Where i said my piece and then left it at that. But i think this kind of thing has to be avoided in the future.

The communties rights and rules where followed pretty well through all this ill say as well. There are submission rules that allow us to voice our concerns in submissions. And things only ever got heated, Even after saying that, When rascaldees decided we where all actively trying to sandbag him and became extremely toxic and abbrasive at others which then in turn brought out the worst in people. I dont think thats alex's fault for being a passionate person trying to do his job as NTSE and then being lashed out at by other NTSE mods, Staff, and the community. Maybe he didnt go about it the right way, I cant say. But i personally didnt see alex acting like the pariah hes being portrayed as when 9/10 times he was quoting rules and pointing out things as an NTSE mod. And the other 1/10 was him defending himself against personal attacks.

I think there was a lot of loopholes exploited and a lot of bias for/against certain people and when something didnt go someones way they immediately lashed out and either rallied up their posy to attack or defend on their behalf, Even from members of staff and the NTSE. And its this kind of clique behavior that literally caused the asteria schism that plagues us to this day.
 
Syaoran said:
it's a -single- item said faction has that tops another faction
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Which starts an arms race.
Syaoran said:
that is the kind of environment the NTSE is
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Back when I still worked for the NTSE, I regularly went out of my way to help people build their articles in the hopes that they'd learn and next time build an article well by themselves. Instead it trained over-reliance on me and just created massive workloads.
As much as I'd like to help people make their articles, it's come to my realization that doing so is just giving the man a fish. We try to teach them how to fish by helping them fish, and they just continuously come back to us, over and over again, asking, "Hi, could you teach me again today?"
I've taught you what you need to know. Just do what I told you. This is what causes NTSE burnout; either we tire ourselves out scrambling to practically build articles for them or we stop caring and just become the finger pointing man that has come to be attributed with the NTSE.

Maybe the problem isn't how the NTSE approaches people, but how we approach the NTSE. Have you ever considered that? Every time an issue has appeared, we've essentially taken the stance of "Let's restrain the NTSE mods and people who frequent it." Every time, without fail, the same issues appear. I believe this is the definition of insanity.
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Thank you, Albert.

Maybe these reactions we see in the NTSE aren't out of pure "I'm going to get you" malice, but instead, it's the backlash we're seeing from community members being told to shut up and stop voicing their opinion because they're mean.

Well, guess what. Sometimes they're right. These people who keep blasting their mouths in the NTSE? They're the ones who know the system to an incredibly keen degree, and because we keep smashing them across the head, and they feel like things aren't right, they have no choice but to shout louder.

Yes, the NTSE is toxic. But it's not them who have made it toxic, we've made it toxic. I, who had to teach the same lesson too many times and essentially write the article for people too many times. I've set up a bad expectation for these creators. I, who let things slide a little too often because "hey, it's within the same ballpark and I think it's funny." I didn't teach them early on that the rules are the rules. There may be fault in the people of the NTSE, but their fault was acting human. There's a fault in me as well, and that fault isn't simply being too human -- it was failing to be the teacher I was meant to be.
 
@META_mahn One article does not start an arms race. An arms race starts when people are continually allowed to one up each other. But it's not weird for a faction to have one thing specifically they're better than Yamatai at. As long as they don't make themselves better at everything.

Now about the NTSE, I'm just going to say this out right to be clear. You entirely misinterpreted everything I said here. Literally all of it.

First, I am not saying that we should hand hold submissions and 'help them fish'. I'm saying as a community our first priority should not be-rejecting- something that doesn't fit, but rather seeing if it's possible to make it fit. An example, the discussion me you and Rascal had about how to make the 'alternate universe' thing less 'random' and make the faction's origins still in SARP. And we came up with an idea that we all found pretty acceptable.

Next, you're misunderstanding how I'm saying the NTSE should be handled. The NTSE board is a place for working towards approval. If someone see's a problem, they can point it out, I'm not saying they can't. But after they point out the problem, if all they're going to do is make negative statements with no constructive feed back, they should not be allowed to continue talking. If you want to talk about trends, if you look at all the problem threads in the NTSE, the majority of them have more post with negative commentary and less post focused on being constructive.

Sometimes it's the new person's fault, sometimes it's the Vet's fault, sometime's it's the NTSE's fault. But if people show up and just keep fanning the flames the situation becomes more and more difficult to control. Something -really- annoying is when people like post that are insulting the submitter. Do you guys have any idea how rude that is firstly, and how much harder it makes to keep someone from blowing up? I don't know how many time's I've wished I could throw out mutes to people who did that. It's downright disgusting and unnecessary.

People wouldn't be told to 'shut up' and that they're mean if they would learn how to phrase things in a way that's not mean. And I get some things need to be said, that's why I'm an advocate of "Say your peace and then leave." Because it doesn't matter who started it, being antagonistic is wrong.

And lastly when I say "The mood of the NTSE" I'm not talking about the NTSE mods, I'm talking about the situation that is presented to a person submitting to the NTSE. So no I'm not saying the NTSE mods have made it that way, I'm saying the site community as a whole has made the NTSE area this bad. And I hate hearing excuses like "It's because of people have been treated badly before" We're not animals or computers. WE are not forced to act out retaliation, or play tit for tat. Be the change you want to see. If we want things to improve, someone has to be the first one to start acting better. And insanity is expecting the first person to be someone new to the site. We can't expect new people to behave at a higher standard than we do as a community.

And @Charmaylarg Dufrain I don't know if this is the appropriate place, but this needs to be made clear. Someone on NTSE, who I'm pretty sure we can all piece together, straight up called Rascal's idea "Bullsh!t" to his face without even hearing it when he first heard about it. So yeah, there was a very big reasons he thought the site was against him, because he was being judged before even being given a chance.
 
Okay so I have some thoughts, though I'm extra spacey today so they might be rather vague or something idk.


First off: I think one major issue in general is the distinction between a faction and a species. People usually mix the two together to be one effective "entity", when, by the rules, they're not the same. Having some sort of clear disclaimer or note about a faction not being a species and vice versa, preferably in multiple places on the wiki, would help with that specific problem. Additionally, I think that a "3 month species denial" timer... Thing, should be for a faction instead of a species. Allow people to add aliens and stuff in as either "pure independents" (no effective faction, but they show up sometimes) or as part of an existing faction's "species roster" without having to wait a seemingly arbitrary amount of time, but the timer on a faction should be set up to be seen as "you need to be experienced before you are allowed to make major site/setting changes" (which a faction is more likely to make than a species would).

Secondly, I've noticed a lot of the more "stressful" new arrivals who wanted to make their own factions start with their military really early. I think that this is because, for some reason, SARP appears to be a "faction roleplay" site as opposed to "personal roleplay". By that, I mean that people seem to have their own factions and technology and effectively get full control over them, but with the bonus (not a core feature, a bonus) of being able to RP individual people. I guess I could compare it to a Warhammer tabletop versus D&D tabletop: One is focused on the idea of you being an army commander moving troopers and war machines around, the other is a group of individual people fooling around together. That's a comparison on an extremely basic level, mind you. I think we should look into ways to encourage people to think of SARP as "personal roleplay" rather than "factional roleplay", where being able to personally control significant site assets - a faction and their associated articles - is a side effect of roleplaying a person in the world, not the opposite.

I really do like the idea of a "primer" that was mentioned in another thread, by the way. That certainly could help things!

Here's an... Idea: If somebody wanted to create a new faction, they should put up a "minimum word" description of that faction, without being able to reference a franchise or similar. For example, Yamatai could be "High-tech catgirls with energy weapons" (but not "Star Trek with catgirls"). Elysia is "Angels with biotechnology". Nepleslia is "Cyberpunk humans and mutants that kick butt". A simpler description allows a person to see what their faction's general... Set-up is, what they might bring to the setting that's unique and can fit well, and so on.

I'd like to loop in a bit of what Char was saying earlier, as well, with the "skeleton" idea. A lot of roleplayers are more likely to look into the core of a faction or species they'd play a character from. Rather than paying attention to "Heavily armed military ship #670" or "Assault rifle #501", they'd want to look at "what sort of society would my character grow up in", "what can/can't my character do", etc. Focusing a faction's creation on the core concepts, which matter more to someone who just wants to play a person - which is what SARP has been focused on for a long, long time - would help give the faction some proverbial weight, bolth in the NTSE and in out of character in general. With an actual core to branch out from, a person's faction can actually take roots into SARP for growth.
 
@Arbitrated said, "SARP appears to be a "faction roleplay" site as opposed to "personal roleplay"..." and that really strikes me. It something that, if avoided, can help us grow as a site, in my opinion. How can we make it more clear to new arrivals and even existing members that this isn't a great place to make a new faction but to play in an existing one? This isn't just to Arbs but to anyone that thinks they have an idea on the subject!

We won't always have a stop on new factions, so when that hold is lifted, how can it be more clear to all members that playing characters is more conducive to roleplay than creating a faction?
 
I feel like a very obvious option, which has been said many times before now, is to have a minimum time spent on the site actively playing in an existing faction before they can make their own. And that means joining and actually getting involved in the site which will benefit them as well as us as it gives them the knowledge and understanding of the site while keeping a new player from separating themselves right off the bat.
 
Well I think one thing is what is presented to them first when they enter the site. We have the RP space divided up into factions, then we also on the wiki have everything broken up to factions and factions are always put out front. This in itself isn't that bad, but one thing we don't have is a single thing highlighting significant characters.
 
Sorry for double post but it'll get missed if I edit. But people keep mentioning a 'time limit' before making a faction. But I don't think that's really the right answer. Because 'time' doesn't really mean anything. 3 months could be 12 post in a slower pace RP, and someone still might not understand anything. If we actually have an effective working premier, someone can easily learn the important things of the site in a month. I really think we should have some kinda litmus test for potential FMs, that doesn't involve time, but rather involves their understanding of the site, and whether they will be dedicated to their faction.

I understand that this doesn't help with the issue of appearing like a faction play site, but I don't think much about the rules of when you can make a faction will change that, because people likely join before they see that in the first place.
 
I think a faction start-up time/time limit is needed because it existed back when I joined and things were flowing/healthy. It wasn't until we started loosening up/openly encouraging new factions that we ran into an absurd amount of hiccups (IE new factions that weren't good and only proved to be divisive or repetitive to current factions); faction roleplay permeates because (IMO) we don't do a good enough job pushing the fact that factions aren't needed. SARP isn't factional unless you're part of the old vanguard who views it as "Nepleslia vs Yamatai".

I just think the best way to curb the problem is to start telling people to use the Open RP board for "new" stuff and beat it into skulls that new factions should be rare. Back in the day, AFAIK, new factions didn't sprout up without a lot of pretext behind them. The few that did were often bad and poorly thought out (with a few exceptions).

If we want a better experience, then we shouldn't take random internet hobos and promise them the moon for "new factions" that are just reskins. We need to stop taking factions and make it about the experience. The best way to move away from factional roleplay is to discourage new factions and promote non-factional plots; limiting or even banning it to new members for a set amount of time will be a hard-ruling that at least partially pushes that agenda. Make new incentives for players who make new plots -- regardless of faction association or whatever -- and make it apparent that new factions need a lot of investment. Too many factions are built on closed-door JPs with zero outside interaction. Factions are meant to spread out and make associations, not seclude themselves; the latter is what people have been thinking and it's why it comes off as "factional" versus open.

This isn't to say that people can't say no to interaction (I know I didn't want to have Nepleslia join some new order of randos and I suspect everyone would want that choice as an FM) but there's definitely a refusal to cross borders and open up channels AFAIK. I don't think I (or my Co-FMs) have been approached once outside of this most very recent case; to my knowledge, we've been the ones entirely trying to bridge gaps and communicate with other factions for ideas.

TLDR: Rant is all over the place because my daughter decided to vomit on me. Point is that we need to change how factions are run and definitely need to institute better standards + restrictions on faction creation.
 
Yeah, time doesnt equate to experience on a 1-1 in an environment where you dont have a minimum amount of work to complete, having a sort of test and the primer article would definitely help but personally I still believe that some sort of minimum time on site would still be useful to avoid people joining and instantly making a faction, this would basically be automatically created if we also incorporate chars idea of then needing to have the skeleton all done before submission without doing the meat.
 
Syaoran said:
Well I think one thing is what is presented to them first when they enter the site. We have the RP space divided up into factions, then we also on the wiki have everything broken up to factions and factions are always put out front. This in itself isn't that bad, but one thing we don't have is a single thing highlighting significant characters.
Click to expand...


Hmm... Okay, I don't know a damn about coding a wiki. But what about a "character of the week" sort of page, where a random number generator chooses from a staff-approved list of characters to display on the front of the forum and/or wiki? Similar to how there's a "page of the day" for other wikis. At the least, it'll make characters seems more prevalent/important, I think...
 
I can agree that we do need better standards and a better way of going about deciding if a faction is approved. Right now, by rules, regardless of what conditions are needed to be allowed to make one, the only real 'limit' is "Try not to make another human faction". I also think with tightening up factions, we should instead encourage people who want to make something, to make either a company, or organization. We don't have enough RP'd corporations and organized groups in the setting. Of course there will hit a time when we have enough of those too, but right now we only really have Section 6 and Origin to my knowledge, and Section 6 is turning into a faction.

I also do like the idea of having to get all the wiki work for the core things done before submitting them, it keeps them focused but also will delay things a bit and keep them from submitting right out the gate. And it'll also encourage them to dig into the setting if they have to get all the core stuff approved before they can do anything else with the faction.
 
feels bad when Horizon is ignored
just kidding, I don't exactly advertise horizon all that much but it does have an active plot and a catalogue to somewhat rival origin.

But from personal experience making a corp can be easier and just as fun as running a faction, the only difference is that as a corp you effectively work from within a faction, other than that you can run plots, have powerful figures, make weapons and jetppacks.
 
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