Right now all sub-factions of the UIT essentially like each other, with the exclusion of Valent and Axia for story reasons. What I propose is a method for players to interact with these sub-factions in a manner that would affect how well they like each other, which would provide a shifting balance of political relationships.

In a manner similar to the Trade Guild missions, players should be able to take missions targetted at another sub-faction. Depending upon the type of mission taken, it's outcome could have a positive or negative affect on the relationship between the nation of origin and the target nation. Some examples would be assassinations, espionage, and aid missions.

For each pairing of sub-factions there would be a shared standing scale. The high end of this scale would indicate a high regard for each other and players would be able to have Pillar of Society (POS) standing with each faction. The low end of the scale would indicate a high level of enmity which would force a degree of mutual exclusion requiring where if someone is POS with one faction they would be forced to be Kill on Sight (KOS) with the other. Any point in between the two extremees would allow for greater flexibility with the mutual exlcusion.

It should not be easy to shift these sub-faction relationship scales, but require multiple missions over a long period of time.

For example, with a scale of 10 points, it should take perhaps 1000 net positive missions to move the scale up by 1 point and vice versa. So two groups working against each other to better or worsen the relationship between factions could wind up requiring many more than 1000 missions.

Obviously the types of missions and even some diversity within each type would need to be fleshed out to make it interesting.

+1

+1

If VO was a different type of game, possibly. But as it stands now, heck no on this. There is absolutely nothing interesting about our mission system -- adding this would just expand the boredom to new unforeseen levels and repell away even more people.

+1.....

Look my understanding of reading through incarnates various forum posts and combining that with his kickstarter videos is this is exactly the kind of thing that is planned for the faction system after dynamic warfare comes in. If you don't know what i'm talking about then you should have a look at the kickstarter videos on the official youtube channel where incarnate talks about this broadly.

If anything we should consider this an explanatory for the kind of dynamics that we're going to see with the faction system into the future rather than a suggestion. That is just my view, but it's one i've formed after looking through all the material extensively.

-1 as it currently stands. First issue is we should have mutually exclusive standing for the two warring factions, after we have that... this can happen.

I think this type of thing is planned. Good idea, nonetheless.

+1 ryan reign. Slap-slap-kiss level mutual exclusion has been in for a while and nothing exploded. Now crank it up to click-click-boom levels where it belongs.

While I don't disagree with the sentiment about the current state of mutual exclusion between the Itani and Serco, it is offtopic from the thread.

A further thought on the current topic is that it might be more interesting to have clandestine missions given out by some of the persistent NPCs that should be available Soon(tm) hidden off in other sectors, rather than everything grouped under a single mission ala Trade Guild missions. Assuming that will also be worked into the mechanics of them. Cranking up their AI a little so the fight is more challenging and allowing them to be killed would make it possible to disrupt attempts at relation adjustments.

Factions should have mood swings as well just to keep things changing....

A lot more mutual exclusion needs to be worked into the system as well.

Perhaps one day we will get the big faction update.....