We Have Enough Factions (For Now)

In the last few years Star Army has experienced a flood of new factions, including several playable ones. This has introduced some issues for the site:

• The number of active players has not increased to keep pace with the addition of new playable factions
• New factions have been introduced which don't seem to relate to the other factions in the site
• It's a lot of work to maintain and grow factions
• A lot of recent conflicts between members are closely related to development of new factions (in particular, arguments over submissions)
  
• I feel like the site has lost some focus and we seem to be trying to do too much at one time
• We also have an ongoing issue with people creating a new supposedly "NPC" faction and then jealously guarding it to the point where the GMs who would like to use it don't feel comfortable using it.

In response to the above difficulties, we've been discussing putting a hold on accepting new factions for a few months now. At the community meeting in May, we discussed setting a cutoff date for the submission of new playable factions. One date suggested was September 1st but we already have Yamatai, Nepleslia, the Hidden Sun Clan, USO, Iromakuanhe, Gartagens, and the Erestu, plus Asteria. That's 8 active playable factions. Based on feedback, most people think that 4-5 would be ideal. So we already don't need more.

So, here's my plan:

1. Star Army will not accept new playable factions after the end of July, until at least the end of the year.
2. Old Playable Factions that aren't being played anymore are going to be transferred to NPC/non-playable status. (e.g. Neshaten, Lorath)
   
3. New NPC factions will have to have a plot plan for RP to get approved.
4. Don't let people "backdoor" factions by claiming their species is for NPC use and then trying to start a plot for them. I can think of recent examples where this happened.
   
5. Make it more clear that submitting NPC background factions is for all GMs to use, not for personal use. This is a character-based RP, not a nations RP.
   
6. Clarify the difference between people who submit NPC factions and people who actually run playable factions (FMs). Maybe different banners?
   
7. Don't be afraid to remind people that the Star Army RP is primarily about the Star Army of Yamatai and while building out the universe is welcome we shouldn't lose focus on the core of the site.
8. Figure out ways to reward people for building on to existing things instead of making little islands.
9. Shift focus from making Star Army's universe "wide" to making it more "deep."
10. Put more detail into the existing playable factions and try to set them up for long-term success.

tl;dr: Hold up guys! We got enough factions; focus on RPing what we got!

As always your feedback is welcome.

 

[Jack Pine]

So each FM selects a mediator from a plot featuring their faction to make sure the characters are portrayed correctly. And a FM doesn't tell you how to run your plot, that's not there job. They just want to make sure that you are portraying their faction correctly, which if you want to involve that faction in your plot then that is a must.

 

[Syaoran]

This is a feature, not a bug. It means players have an interest in making sure they and their GM don't do things that will cause their actions and stories to be ejected from canon, so they can put pressure on their GM to play it straight and not abuse their position.

So now you want a third party mediator -and- players responsible for making sure GMs stay in line...instead of just leaving it up to the FM. You're giving more and more people this 'responsibility' instead of leaving it up to the person that pretty much signed up for it. That's just ridiculous, obviously, there is no point in continuing this discussion with you because to you anything is okay as long as it's not NPC FMs being able to have some power in protecting NPC factions.

@Wes I will now be getting back to the original topic of this thread.

To summarize what I suggested earlier before things got off track, I think the problem SARP has is not that we have too many nations, but rather that none of these nations are truly working together, so you have several places going in several different directions. If we start encouraging true alliances and having different nations working towards the same grand goal, we'll start to see real 'factions' develop, and things won't be as 'confusing'. It'll feel more like being Yamatai, or HSC is like being from a different member country of NATO. As opposed to Just being in your nation's own bubble.

Edit: Quoted the wrong line, fixed that

 

[Jack Pine]

"United we stand, divided we fall."

 

[Legix]

So now you want a third party mediator -and- players responsible for making sure GMs stay in line...instead of just leaving it up to the FM. You're giving more and more people this 'responsibility' instead of leaving it up to the person that pretty much signed up for it. That's just ridiculous, obviously, there is no point in continuing this discussion with you because to you anything is okay as long as it's not NPC FMs being able to have some power in protecting NPC factions.

I was trying to find a way to tell Jack that it wasn't a good idea, so I'm glad it was summed up pretty clearly.

Adding more parties is a stupid idea. FMs and GMs SHOULD want to communicate directly and they SHOULD have to do so. Putting people in the middle only tempts issues and miscommunication.

Mediation wouldn't be needed if people just realize that you can either work to compromise, a decision, or simply not work together. Just like in real life...

 

[Navian]

I'd like to move toward the community being less political, not more... and I think having representatives for every faction debating their image would be a step in the wrong direction--a step toward more chaos, bitterness, and acrimony--when we can instead have independent moderators make the decisions.

If you thought you were signing up for a position of power when you became a content creator, you made a huge mistake, and it's better to fix that now rather than later.

It's true that factions can combine into greater factions and form alliances, and so they do. This is only really relevant for determining how many factions we have. If we have too many factions, we can merge some, if we had too few, we could split them and recombine them instead of only creating more.

 

[Jack Pine]

@Legix tell me what was a bad idea?

 

[Legix]

So each FM selects a mediator from a plot featuring their faction to make sure the characters are portrayed correctly. And a FM doesn't tell you how to run your plot, that's not there job. They just want to make sure that you are portraying their faction correctly, which if you want to involve that faction in your plot then that is a must.

 

[Jack Pine]

Yeah i realize the mediator idea was probably not the best now i'll admit.

 

[Arieg]

Ok I'm going to go ahead and sink in my opinion on this and it will apply to both player character factions and non-player character factions. That opinion is at the end of the day we have to many two or five page factions floating around, now thats fine if your a corporation either on your own in the void or under a major faction's banner (though we should differentiate these now due to recent issues) but for full blown alien races? Its simply not enough. In my book unless you can front the time, the money, and above all the effort to create all the associated setting articles, equipment, history, and form it into a cohesive concept and KEEP IT UPDATED you have no business making a faction. Is it cruel to those who can't make art or who can't afford to commission? Yes but that is the investment you have to make and we've always let it slide at the cost of all the derelict species and factions.

So at the end of the day whether or not there rubber forehead aliens and flying spaghetti monsters matters little, what matters is that we raise the bloody standards to the point to where only those who can make it will make it. Then most of the issues will go away as far as to many factions. Faction rights and the conflict between FM and GM is a whole other kettle of fish.

 

[Navian]

While I'm in favour of raising the standards and having more complete namespaces, I don't think this would solve all the problems. It could even compound them in some regards, since someone who's put a lot of effort into a faction is more likely to expect to get rewarded with power... which is not how this system works, or should ever.

On the other hand, the process of producing more complete articles and namespaces would reduce the danger of content creators having too much room to maneuver, so long as they didn't engineer enough ambiguity into their articles to ensure they still got to say what they wanted about their faction, whenever they wanted to deploy it against someone else...

Okay, come to think of it that's not much of a mitigating factor. We want complete works that get finished--by someone, anyone who can do it well, not necessarily the first person to start working on it--but we don't want to encourage that by rewarding the creators with power, because that defeats the purpose of introducing new elements to the setting. They only get introduced conditionally. We can't allow those conditions to be arbitrary, instead we need to make sure that all content is held to the same standards.

Even if we assume that no FM will ever go too far in defending their creation, which is absurd, there will also be creations that don't get that much attention and may be left defenseless, and all the same arguments for why creations need to be defended apply to the ones that don't have vociferous FMs, too.

 

[Jack Pine]

Why does power keep coming into this, in the almost three months i've been here, i have yet to see someone lording over someone about a faction.

 

[CadetNewb]

You should count yourself lucky Jack; it's happened before.

 

[Jack Pine]

I really don't feel lucky, I had ideas, but with all this arguing they'll never happen at this rate.

 

[CadetNewb]

Just take my word for it; it's happened, and it's never pretty. Otherwise, they wouldn't be discussing it with this much fervor.

 

[Jack Pine]

@Syaoran seems to have the best solution in my opinion, less arguing and more connecting could go a long way

 

[Navian]

I don't believe Syaoran's suggestion would result in 'less arguing and more connecting', instead it would lead to 'my way or the highway' situations. That could result in less arguing--that's the essence of 'my way or the highway'--but it only leads to 'more connecting' if they choose 'my way', and only for so long as 'my way' remains preferable to the alternative.

It seems my suggestion still isn't clear, so I'll try to explain it again: We can have an independent moderator, a staff position, responsible for overseeing how factions are used in cases where the FM doesn't have the last say. This moderator would serve to make sure GMs don't abuse their power, but also to make sure FMs don't, either.

Since it's a staff position, they won't be able to abuse their power, because Wes would strip them of the position if they did. As long as Wes can find a suitable candidate, it should work out.

 

[Syaoran]

@Syaoran seems to have the best solution, in my opinion, less arguing and more connecting could go a long way

Yep, that is ideal. People aren't so bad that they would just constantly abuse power, some will, but that happens no matter the situation. We have the Setting Manager to regulate things as well if they get out of hand. Literally, the only reason not to go with it is that someone would want NPC FMs not to be able to protect their stuff, that's why I suggest getting back to the point of "There are too many factions." All 'reasoning' has been put on the table, at this point it shouldn't be an argument but an exercise in weighing pros and cons, but that still hasn't happened, so logic has been thrown out the window. Nothing will progress in this field unless it's forced or delayed for now until a later time.

Our efforts are better served to try to figure out a way to still allow the fun of nation/organization creation, without pushing SARP further from where it's focus was.

 

[raz]

it would lead to 'my way or the highway' situations.

That's how the details of factions should be. Either they're canon representations or they aren't. It's not an inherently adversarial exchange and becomes such too often lately.

FMs shouldn't be telling GMs how their plots must progress, no. Beyond character submission threads, they shouldn't be trying to direct how characters themselves are played. But when an FM says "oh, hey, this background flourish that you mentioned would be more accurate like this," it's not an FM asking to run a GM's plot—it's an FM giving the GM information so they can tell a better story—and that advice should be either accepted or rejected knowing that the plot doesn't live up to canon.

I made this fun infographic to describe how the setting has functionally been managed for years. Of course, I'm not Wes so it's not like my word is law here, but it's what I (and I'm sure others) have observed during our time here. Being a creator doesn't give you direct power over GMs, no. But it does give your thoughts on canon representation a strong sense of finality.

 

[Navian]

knowing that the plot doesn't live up to canon.

This, this, this. 'Word of FM' is not a level of canon, Raz, this is the problem. When an FM says something it means nothing if canon doesn't back it up, this is the problem. If you're not saying they should be given this kind of power, then you're admitting that when an FM says something that's unsupported, they've made a mistake. If you are saying that they should be given this kind of power, then you're admitting that you believe they should be able to wield their power arbitrarily, at least until someone strips them of their FM position (how would that even happen, for this kind of abuse?)

This is the essential problem--we seem to be giving FMs too much power, because the power we're giving them (or trying to give them) allows their word to be treated as if it's equivalent to harder-than-hard canon, when it comes to their own faction. Presently, only Wes explicitly has that authority. I'm not even suggesting it be extended to moderators, just that we rely on them to interpret canon.

 

[Syaoran]

@Navian we're not saying FMs can't make mistakes. But that's what the freakin' SM is for. Why can't you get it through your skull that no one is saying FMs are all powerful. But they know how their faction is supposed to be better than anyone in the majority of the cases. You to think we're encouraging FMs to just do whatever. Stop trying to 'win' and sit back and actually listen, especially since you have almost no stake in this since you have admitted that it won't really affect you. Stop banging your head against a wall that was never there.

We never once said FMs should be given the power to "Decide what is canon for the site" we said FMs should be given the power to stop people from doing things that aren't canon using their factions. No one said anything about changing the rules of 'canon'. And the setting manager is still there to ultimately determine what is and isn't canon if an agreement can't be reached in case of complicated situations.

You are dragging something out with nothing but poor conjecture because you want to ascribe a motive to those that are against you because you can't accept that people disagree with you without some agenda behind it. However, never have we said we want to give the SM's power to the FM, or elevate the FM above the SM.

Is it that you don't believe people will ignore the wiki, and that if a GM does something then it obviously has to be an idea they got from the wiki? If that's what you think that's naive, sometimes people just plain don't read, sometimes the don't care, sometimes they've misunderstood, and sometimes there are 2 different pieces of information on two separate pages. Either way, no matter how it happens, people have and will in the future, try to do things that the wiki says are not canon.