If friendly fire issues are resolved before anyone starts tinkering with the faction system, great. But the current faction system is still the only available mechanism to avoid the FF issue.

This change to faction is rather extensive. I think every preexisting character should have an option to change nationality (one time option, on character log in), with a complete reset of the major faction's standings.

The valk and prom are both in high demand, if the UIT can get either, the Itani/Serco populations may suffer. If the UIT can get niether, the UIT population may suffer. Make a UIT specific ship that will keep the UIT happy, without threatening the Itani/Serco populations. It would be nice if a player's choice of nations was based on something other than who has the best ship.

I personally don't care much about the serco/itani thing. I'll pick a side when the time comes.
the only thing i have issues with is not being able to maintain good standing with the corporation factions. Two nations at war is one thing, and quite understandable, but for a free agent trader, or >.> coughpiratecough that is UIT should be able to keep their faction, no?
This may sound out of the question, but seriously. a pirate that has tanked all nation standings should atleast still have access to ships besides corvus ships(which i've never been fond of).

The serco/itani faction thing only makes sense. when i first joined VO i thought it was pretty strange when i saw an itani, piloting an SCP and attacking a serco in greyspace.
in some games, the opposing sides can't even speak to each other for reasons of info leakage n' spys.
[/brainfart]

My suggestion to this is regarding corporate relationships and UIT citizens. I believe that while the corporations do run the Union, they have self-imposed standards of conduct that they cannot openly violate.

Thus, for example, while a UIT player may piss off Orion enough that they will deny you various services up to and including docking at their stations, they are forbidden by law from opening fire against a UIT citizen, or otherwise preventing safe passage by that citizen through their space. This would mostly apply to mission-based reputation issues, as when the player completed an espionage mission for an opposing faction.

Of course, this wouldn't stop a corporation from acting extralegally to discourage a much-hated player from coming around.

Sooo... I've been KOS with all 3 factions for ages... can I finally either Align with Corvus/Become Unaligned?

One interesting side effect could be that you could have missions which become available only if you have a certain range of relationships.

For example, while Valent and Axia hate eachother's guts, if you can get only mildly hated by Axia, and mildly liked by Valent, Valent offers you a mission to land with axia and do a little sabotage.

However, as a result of this, you get something IN ADDITION to faction loss with Axia and Faction gain with Valent, A black mark on your record, this is a separate object, which can, with a proper mission tree become removed, but as long as one is on you, you cannot land at stations which dislike you, and as you acrue more and more, factions begin to be very wary.

On the other hand, the faction which you were working for when you got the black mark, will start to offer you deeper and deeper mission trees. Some missions may ask you to commit an action which will cause another mark on your record. You could then turn these down for a small faction hit.

(IDEA: Also the faction loss with Axia would be double the faction gain with Valent, since Axia is going to be more pissed off with you than Valent is happy with you)

However, this is an extreme, while there definitely SHOULD be special mission trees for people who make themselves POS, or KOS with a faction, there should just as often be special missions for people who are in various midranges.

Everyone shouldn't be on this line:

Love<-------------------->Fear

(if you don't get the reference, you need to watch more space-time warping superhero movies)

hiya Inc, long time no see. I'll offer my two cents again since I can't find my post from sometime in 2005 or somesuch about this topic. :-)

I'd like to see standing gains be persistent with mild decay. all the reputation I build up is stored and only decays with a certain amount over long periods of time. some actions affect both your Serco and Itani standing (ie, they represent actions which both nations know and care about), some actions don't. ie, if you do a spy mission and you're not caught, there is no reason for the other faction to know. however, if you gain *enough* standing one place, you'll be shut out from the other side as your name becomes obviously familiar. as such you can't get *very* high standing both places.

but, the big thing for me is that it's not +1000 to -1000. last time I played it was hilariously easy to dump and gain 1000 standing. if you were at +600, dropping to -400 didn't really matter as it was a nights work to fix it.

to explain this messy post a bit better, your standing is a relative difference between your good and bad standing with *the same faction*. not with the enemy. if I pop a Serco transport I gain -1000 Serco. if I do some missions, I gain 1000 Serco and I'm at 0 again. the determining factor of my Serco standing is the ratio of good vs bad Serco standing, until my Itani standing becomes "popularized and visible" (close to POS) it doesn't, by itself, affect my Serco standing at all. Sercos might be at war with Itanis, but nations at war don't care who the other nation likes, if you're a well-known pop star the other nation just might not care. if you're a big shot trader, meh, Sercos might not hate you *just* because Itanis like you.

this allows you to be a peace broker (you can get pretty good standing everywhere if you're extremely careful) but you mess up once and you have to work your ass off to fix it again. if you need a 20:1 ratio to get Admired, and you pop a transport costing you 1000 standing, it's no longer a matter of just doing 1000 standing worth of missions to fix it. you need to get 20.000 standing to redeem yourself. if you take a trade mission that hurts one side the slightest, meh, it'll hurt. badly.

now, if there was no decay this could be abused as you'd eventually get to a point where popping your own convoys (forget friendly fire protection and bear with me) without problems. to solve this there is decay, and the decay is progressive. older events fade away, but good stuff fades faster than bad stuff and larger single blocks of standing fade faster than small ones. this means you have to do some upkeep of your standing and it also means that big events you do fade faster so you can't just do a few big things and be done with it. you have to show commitment and keep it -- especially if you seek to get anything like POS.

the goal of this system is to pretty much appease everyone. yes, you can get very high standings with everyone, but you tread so carefully you can't really do anything except maintain your standings. it becomes what you do. almost no "special" mission for any faction in the game becomes doable as the repercussions make it horrible to account for. on the other hand, play a Serco warrior, blow up Itanis left, right and center and your good vs bad Serco rep quickly gains you Sercos admiration. you'll get the ships, you'll get the missions and you'll get to play it all. -- for Serco.

to expand on this you can quickly see missions that aren't just bipolar (+100 Serco, -500 Itani etc) but much more complex (+200 Serco, +200 Xang Xi, -250 TGP, -50 Itani etc) which would add great depth to the relationships of the factions and demand a lot more care about what missions you do. the slightest change in your favorite factions standing might not make it worth it to boost your third choice by a lot. of course, you don't see the numeric values for such missions, you might however hear some hints about who'd care and who wouldn't.

also, remember the ideas about people seeing events in grey being able to report them? mmm, tastes really yummy with this scheme. you pop someone in grey, noone notices, noone knows. you're fine. someone sees the event, they get a datapad with the information on it that can be delivered to any faction in return for a small reward. you can now opt to buy that datapad or pop the guy with it to ensure your saftey. if he runs off somewhere and stores it, hello blackmail. of course, they should eventually decay so permanent blackmail isn't doable, but hey, you get the idea. but all this requires standings to be a bit more than just a simple "gain some lose some" to be worth it. otherwise you shrug it off and trade for a few hours and you're fine.

okay, that was more than two cents, but hey, I don't post that often anymore.

TRS said: If you expand on this system, every character that frees himself from the artificial friendly fire system, will suffer extreme handicaps... the current faction system is still the only available mechanism to avoid the FF issue.

Yeah, part of this is that I think the devs are FINALLY eliminating the "Friendly Fire" system, so no worries.

TRS also said: The valk and prom are both in high demand, if the UIT can get either, the Itani/Serco populations may suffer. If the UIT can get niether, the UIT population may suffer. Make a UIT specific ship that will keep the UIT happy, without threatening the Itani/Serco populations. It would be nice if a player's choice of nations was based on something other than who has the best ship.

I don't think any Serco should ever be able to get their hands on an IBG or a Valkyrie. Nor should an Itani be able to dock at SkyCommand and get himself an SVG or a SCP. It'd be like an 80's era Soviet Russian General walking onto Area 51 and purchasing an F-117 Stealth fighter to use in combat against American Naval forces. Ridiculous.

Now, a UIT character... could MAYBE get enough faction to get himself a Valk X-1, and then "smuggle" it over to SkyCommand to sell to a Serco citizen. BUT - you'd need to have the capability to sell ships between characters, which seems like a pretty major change to the game. That would definitely make playing a UIT (Or, hell, a Corvus) faction pilot LOTS more fun. Dunno how you'd handle the faction hit if someone found out WHO sold the ship, but this does open the door for some fun Black-market smuggling.

Shape said: One interesting side effect could be that you could have missions which become available only if you have a certain range of relationships. For example, while Valent and Axia hate each other's guts, if you can get only mildly hated by Axia, and mildly liked by Valent, Valent offers you a mission to land with axia and do a little sabotage.

Exactly. That kind of thing would be completely and totally kickass. The factions will "play" you, depending on your standing. And if Axia is, say, closely allied with Orion, then perhaps your Orion standing will dip by a small amount once they find out you sabotaged an Axia station. And perhaps a well-liked Axia player will be contracted to give you a little payback. Nice.

And terjekv has a great idea (Hi Alamar, Happy New Year BTW) with the decay thing. Say each faction/nation has a "default" setting that your faction artificially degrades (or upgrades) to. If you stop taking missions and killing things, and don't do anything to adjust your faction standings: Slowly, over the course of weeks and months, the changes you have made to your faction dissipate and you tend to balance out back at your "default" nation/faction settings. You know, the ones you started with as a n00b pilot. Since even in 4435, stereotypes will probably still rule the day.

And I know this is getting WAY away from the whole "keeping it simple", but I love his idea of "reporting" of faction-hit events. In grayspace, no one can hear you scream. BUT, if you blow up an Itani convoy and leave a few stragglers to report back to base, your Itani standing will take a hit. (I dunno about the datapad thing, why can't they just broadcast the fact that they were attacked? UNLESS you have the super comm-jammer widget equipped, then it's a race to the nearest station to save your standing...)

Starting with the basics (i.e eliminate the FF rules and implement a simple version of this for Serco vs. Itani), I think this could grow into a very interesting aspect of the game. As long as there is mission content to back it up.

TRS, the UIT have the neutrality advantage - they don't need better ships to keep it; they'll still outnumber Serco and Itani once they become exclusive factions.

wow... nothing like another forum brainstorm, I'm positively singin' in the rain :D

..I love Lex's ideas of dynamic inter-faction relationships and terjekv's ideas of separating faction gainloss into independent + and - categories..

....why not tie these ideas together by computing the interfaction values based on the personal standings of each faction's members? i.e., average the ratios of +Itani/-Itani standing across the Serco nation, and +Serco/-Serco across the Itani, and alter the Serco-Itani standing sum based upon these ratios? If the good/bad rises below some predetermined negative integer the sum might decrease, or increase if it falls above some predetermined positive integer (assuming a LOT of inertia would need to be overcome first); we could also have a different Serco-Itani sum for each nation, as the Serco certainly seem a lot more suspicious and belligerent than their rivals..

..as long as we're editing the basic structures that determine social interaction across the VO universe, why not make it as flexible and interesting as possible, as well as create more opportunity for player action to influence the wider political situation?

If I were a Serco wishing to defect to the Itani Nation, I would start by doing whatever necessary to gain citizenship with the UIT, then try to cover up my past while doing work for Itani. I guess I'd never truly be considered an outright Itani citizen, but meh.

Would it be neat if there were a method to change your citizenship from Serco or Itani into UIT?

"but you mess up once and you have to work your ass off to fix it again. if you need a 20:1 ratio to get Admired, and you pop a transport costing you 1000 standing, it's no longer a matter of just doing 1000 standing worth of missions to fix it. you need to get 20.000 standing to redeem yourself. if you take a trade mission that hurts one side the slightest, meh, it'll hurt. badly."

That just sounds like it'd make the game a pain in the ass to play. Making the game harder or more work to play and have fun with doesn't necessarily make it a better game. Not everybody enjoys doing endless bulk procurement missions. Now if there was a way to advance corporate faction that involved some action like say "Help defend our disabled trident from the hive until repair are complete." it might actually be a non tedious and boring task to raise faction. Currently the only efficient way to raise faction standing is doing one of the same 3 bulk procurement missions over and over and over.

ignore the current mission base, it's not representative for what VO will offer in the future[tm]. beyond that it's about your actions actually affecting your gameplay which when they don't give me a feel of, well, a total lack of immersion.

besides, you don't *have* to mess up. and if you do it's still fixable. you just can't make a habit out of changing your alliances like today.

Currently I don't make a habit of changing my alliances regularly. I just don't want to see much of anything take days of work to fix, simply because it just seems like it would be annoying. Maybe this is because I'm ALWAYS working on fixing half a dozen different things in R/L.

requireing time to fix it is the only way to avoid people using rapid faction changes to their advantage. during my time in the game I did actions that clearly abused the faction systen, and I wasn't the only one. :-)

(the funny thing is that the worst abuse came after I got POS with both Serco and Itani, running CtC for the Serco side.)

Everyone shouldn't be on this line:

Love<-------------------->Fear

Donnie Darko

I don't think any Serco should ever be able to get their hands on an IBG or a Valkyrie. Nor should an Itani be able to dock at SkyCommand and get himself an SVG or a SCP. It'd be like an 80's era Soviet Russian General walking onto Area 51 and purchasing an F-117 Stealth fighter to use in combat against American Naval forces. Ridiculous.

Now, a UIT character... could MAYBE get enough faction to get himself a Valk X-1, and then "smuggle" it over to SkyCommand to sell to a Serco citizen. BUT - you'd need to have the capability to sell ships between characters, which seems like a pretty major change to the game. That would definitely make playing a UIT (Or, hell, a Corvus) faction pilot LOTS more fun. Dunno how you'd handle the faction hit if someone found out WHO sold the ship, but this does open the door for some fun Black-market smuggling.

Ah yes, Mr. LeberMac. I do agree, for the most part, what you are saying. Once in a long while, however, you will find an honest-to-goodness defector (remember Dragon of Fire?). Such persons should indeed be mistrusted and treated with a great deal of suspicion at first, but after an extended period of good behavior the leash should loosen a bit.

[...] the UIT have the neutrality advantage - they don't need better ships to keep it; they'll still outnumber Serco and Itani once they become exclusive factions.

It should be noted however, Mr. Cunjo, that UIT neutrality is oft violated--and not just on the Union side of the equation. As a matter of basic defense, we need a combat ship of our own.

Although the Union is not a military power, it is nonetheless relatively on-par, technologically speaking, with the Serco and Itani. That said the Union does not extensively use such craft, more often opting to utilize more cost-efficient security measures, but is by no means incapable of making a competent combat craft. Any such Union ship would be slightly less effective than either the Prometheus or Valk (few UIT engineers have experience in designing combat craft), but it should be able to hold its ground and be able to seriously wound an opponent before it bites the bullet.

The Warthog TD once occupied this role, but has since fallen out of favor since it was beaten to death with the nerf stick.

Currently I don't make a habit of changing my alliances regularly. I just don't want to see much of anything take days of work to fix, simply because it just seems like it would be annoying. Maybe this is because I'm ALWAYS working on fixing half a dozen different things in R/L.

Look, Mr...err....'no hands', switching factions should take at least a few days to accomplish. Going turncoat is a practice likely to to be abused, and the best way to balance this is to make the ordeal more difficult and/or time consuming. Preferably both.

I think that Aeolus should have something more to offer than... nothing.

I said, in a moment of lucidity: I don't think any Serco should ever be able to get their hands on an IBG or a Valkyrie. Nor should an Itani be able to dock at SkyCommand and get himself an SVG or a SCP. It'd be like an 80's era Soviet Russian General walking onto Area 51 and purchasing an F-117 Stealth fighter to use in combat against American Naval forces. Ridiculous.

vIsitor said: Ah yes, Mr. LeberMac. I do agree, for the most part, what you are saying. Once in a long while, however, you will find an honest-to-goodness defector (remember Dragon of Fire?). Such persons should indeed be mistrusted and treated with a great deal of suspicion at first, but after an extended period of good behavior the leash should loosen a bit.

Well, that should not prevent honest-to-goodness defectors like DoF. I think the (well, actually Phaserlight's idea, come to think of it... THANKS Phaserlight) "sliders" idea would allow a "traitor" Serco to get -1000 Serco and +900 Itani standing, no problem. It would only limit the ability to have BOTH be positive. I think that there would be a long and difficult mission thread, once you reached these kinds of faction standings and maintained them, for the pilot to essentially "become" a member of the other faction. Getting away from -1000 for their original faction should be almost impossible to do, and gaining faction in their "new" faction should be rather difficult. As befits traitors...

Remember, I think the original point of this thread was to prevent the capability of pilots to "game" the faction system, specifically Serco vs. Itani, in order to get EITHER Proms/SVG's or Valks/IBG's. That doesn't exactly fit with the backstory or within the bounds of logic. Limiting the BP and BS missions to "proper" faction-standing people was a good beginning, eliminating the dual-positive people from participating. However, it also eliminated UIT from it as well. Taking this a bit further, and incorporating it as the basis for the new faction system is an excellent step forward in my book.

Oh, and yes. All factions should have a reason for existence. Aeolus and Ineubis (I think) offer nothing. Every faction station should offer a benefit, whether it's ships, weapons, rare ores/goods, value-priced ores/goods, cheap repairs, special missions, or whatnot. Otherwise... WHY is the station there?

"The Warthog TD once occupied this role, but has since fallen out of favor since it was beaten to death with the nerf stick."

Unfortunatly yes it might as well be removed from the game now. does it even have ANY advantage over the hog3 or 4 it had its last redeeming feature its 250 m/s turbo cut down with no change in drain same thing happend to the CV lost all its getup and go with no drain change. In general I liked the speeds they had a year ago better.

I like this topic! Let's focus on Itani vs. Serco faction standing schemes here, people!

tbh, Itani vs Serco faction standing is a special case (a noteworthy one but still a special case) in the game. a proper faction system shouldn't have any specific understanding of different *factions*, just their interaction. IMHO of course. =)