Thoughts of the future, and what the community may bring. (mix of doomsday scenarios and cool possib

[FlyingDebris]

So, most of you probably know me, for those of you who don't, hello, this is FD, co-leader of the DFN, along with Creeper__God. My purpose of this post is to find out what people think might happen to us, and the splendid game our community surrounds.

1.) The Big Guys-

I often wonder what will happen to the faction scene if and when this game hits minecraft-like popularity. Will the current superpowers be drowned in a sea of competitors? Will newcomers simply decide to join the current factions? What if Schema decides to do away with factions as a whole, or removes an official forum as traffic increases?

My thoughts are that the current factions will remain dominant, but the amount of important factions will grow, maybe twice or three times the amount we have currently. However, a situation like the thousands of clans in minecraft may become a reality, should superpowers lose their grip on their large portions of the community. Still, it'd be nice to see some diversity. Now, even if the number of large factions grows, the numbers of the current ones will as well. My estimate is the factions will eventually cap off at 500-1000 members, due to leader overload, unless the faction has an excellent chain of command, and well established ranks. (The TE is an excellent example of this.) However, as these factions grow, espionage would become a more pressing problem, as new members would be practically flooding in. Factions and forums would have to develop an IP match checking system, or other means, to cope with potential espionage. (Euro-Corp is an example of a faction already employing anti-espionage precautions.)

A thought that came to me a while back was the possibility of the new website not having forums. Many factions would fall apart, or the community itself shattered due to the new lack of inter and intra-faction communication, outside of servers.



2.) Planetside...in Space?


Another thought that occured to me was the possibility of some of the current superpowers to end up becoming so large that almost the entire community is controlled by them, and those factions being nearly at a constant cross-server war with each other, much like the game Planetside 2.


3.) The Civilian Sector-

As factions grow, member roles become more and more specialized, with positions such as Harvester, Project Manager, and Merchant introduced, as roles specifically for the acquisition of resources, shipbuilding, and trade. Perhaps these roles would not immediately be part of the mainly militaristic hierarchy of current factions, but as they grow, specialization in some parts is needed to accomplish goals as a faction. Think of the faction as a human. At birth, it is single celled, with only the leader. That cell splits into two cells of the same type. (1st recruit.) The cells are not specialized yet, and no real organization is needed. However, leading up to birth, and beyond, cells become specialized to perform certain tasks, like muscle, (pilots/captains) the brain, (command staff) the mouth (harvesters) eyes, (agents) and vocal chords. (politicians) These organs were not necesary in the small faction/fetus, but became necesary to support the whole organism as it grew.






Please leave ideas for topics in the comments.
-FD

 

[FORGE9unsc705]

Merchants would defiantly become big in the world of Star Made should it get this big. And I, Forge of Granduer, hereby proclaim the first merchants clan. The United Merchants Guild, or UMG for short. This is simply a calling of the shotgun so to speak, as making a purely economic faction would be pointless at this stage.

 

[Zodapop]

I don\'t understand the concern here. There are more servers than NASS, Illusive, and HMZ. The superpowers there ARE NOT \"The Superpowers\", they\'re \"The Superpowers of Those Servers Over There\". Sure, those servers are the ones most commonly discussed by the users of the website, but the point stands. If Starmade \"goes big\", there will be even more servers. Sure, current servers may grow, but they might also die. And really, 500 members is far too great of an expectation- people aren\'t going to want to enter an enormous faction like that, they\'re going to want to play with their friends. Nobody is going to enter a faction to become a miner, or merchant, or \"project manager\" because that just blatantly isn\'t what this game is.

The illusion of you guys having empires is pretty strong, and that\'s an issue. You can\'t try to make this game about running a faction\'s economy, and fleet, and politics, because then the people not running factions, i.e. MOST PEOPLE, wouldn\'t be experiencing the game. Though I certainly understand why you would want this, still. Also, \"agents\". Lets face it. Information in this game is really unimportant. It doesn\'t matter if you know when your enemies are going to attack, or from what direction, because if you have the better guns, you\'ll win. It doesn\'t matter if you hear that some people are going to try to buy out all stock of a certain material, because they can\'t. There are two examples of having agents being useful that I can think of, and I quite honestly doubt that either of them would happen.

Returning to the base idea of you thinking you\'re more important than you are-listen. These \"Superpowers\" don\'t run the community. And they won\'t. There are too many sub-communities, and, you know, non-conformists in your specific sub-community. This one sect of starmade players gets all of the light because they\'re active on the website, but they are by no means the only players, and they aren\'t going to become pillars of the GAME, no matter how much they think they will.

Also, you are right about the \"espionage\" problem. If factions get too inviting, they will be eaten from the inside out.

Now, those of you that know of my affiliation with the Lazarus Imperium know that I\'m being a total hypocrite right now, but that\'s because I too relish the dream of badass space politics. Unfortunately, this post is entirely right.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Here\'s my point of view-

1st paragraph- I get your point, but I am referring to the factions on the forums, noy serverside ones. I know there are capable factions on individual servers. As to the faction sizes, there are clans with well over 500 members in minecraft, among other games, and their members are often specialized as well. I recently implemented different roles into the DFN, and people have selected support roles more often than combat roles, e.g. Miner over Pilot.

2nd paragraph- I understand your point, but if it was true, who do people still apply to large factions, like Lazarus, in the first place? As to agents, enemy attack plans can be quite handy. When they\'re attacking, who is coming, how many are coming, the types of their ships, if they have someone prepping to defac the homebase, etc. Spies are more useful than you realize.

3rd paragraph- My idea that megafactions ending up encompassing everyone was a theory, and I doubt it would actually happen. Food for thought, really.

 

[kiwionthemoon]

Recently the quality of new factions is dropping significantly. Its become norm to have one or two lines of description and the rank list. This is mainly due to people not understanding a faction shouldnt be created overnight. However, i think more and more of these factions will come. Flooding everything out of its way. The current super powers are, lets face it, probably not going to make it to the final game. So what we are left with is tons of shitty factions created by new people with 0 experience. The faction scene will likely become nullified unless some major quality change in new factions occur.

 

[FlyingDebris]

I agree with you on that, but so long as these current factions stay better, and their leaders devoted, they can stay ahead of the pack.

 

[ridik_ulass]

we call this moment \"the eternal september\" . It is what the Odium pact was created for.



this community is so small that any kind of immigration or mass accumliatiion of player base will just drown out the voices of established community members. if we don\'t establish some sembelence of order, where even enemies can work togeather towards a better community, we will all be washed away by the oncoming tide.

 

[42828]

Guy that is REALLY in the future. Try and keep your factions together for now then think of the future. Doomsday plans mean nothing if you die before the Doomsday.

 

[ObiShawnKenobi]

Is that so? Two factions allied in one \"grand alliance\" attempting to make a better universe isn\'t working out so well.

On this whole topic, I believe that someday the largest factions, even mine, may fall due to inactivity, defeat, or because the community got too \"boring\". There will only be very small factions that may only last for a week. Heck, even some servers might close up shop. The community seems unstable enough already with all these brags, battles, danger, whatever. The factions aren\'t even that powerful...yet.

 

[kiwionthemoon]

But that is because they were shafted by the entire community. The point is that the pact was created to set a standard for other factions to look up to and one day join.

 

[ObiShawnKenobi]

It would be difficult to accomplish since the Vaygr like their \"fresh meat\".

Besides, if the community acts like the U.A.F. once did, then that may restore some hostilities.

 

[Claru]

\"What I think of all the factions\" threads has to be the forecasting threads~.

Thanks flying for your take on the future.

 

[MrNature72]

It is quite possible that, yes, we will be drowned out by the influx of members. However, I believe that such is not a pre-determined fate of all the factions; in the end, it is dependent on how the faction is built, how reliable the chain of command is, and its ability to operate and mantain order.

I do not believe the factions will simply be drowned out by an influx of members; I believe that some factions will begin to \'take on water\' as they try to bring more members than they are constructed or prepared to handle in a feeble and unplanned attempted to rapidly expand, while others will try to survive the onslought of members by shutting their doors completely and working purely with the members they have.

I believe both of the above methods are ridiculous and will fail.

Part of planning a faction is knowing how to mature your faction; Knowing how many members you can take before you start to lose faction effeciency per member joining. This number can vary and change depending on how you design your faction; A faction with only a single leader may be able to lead a small squad of members effeciently, but a massive faction with 25+, 50+, and 100+ members will need not just a primary leader, but a chain of command, a set infrastructure, and laid-out rules to help guide the faction.

Yes this site will continue to grow; However, in my opinion, we will see some \'major\' factions currently in existence be nothing but history book information in a year or two, while others will have prepared for the future and still be surviving, if not not thriving. It\'s all about how you expand as more people join the forums; You have to balance your intake with your infrastructure.

And on another note, yes, there are always going to be people outside of factions. But as factions grow, they will still have to exist alongside us. And as ways to control territory grows, people on the primary servers (which will no doubt also grow in scale) will learn to coincide, if not join, factions impeding on their territory.

 

[marcus87]

people will join and stay in a faction in which they have fun. Whatever this is mining, building, trading or fighting. This is a game we play for fun, if that involves some mayor \"super powers\" is to no concern to the community as a whole. When we find something which is fun we do it.

Whatever a faction will manage to grow big and survive, will probably depend on how they will be able to make an specific play style that fits to its members.

I am quite thrilled to see what comes in the future of starmade. Say can we link Servers? Like with wormholes which actually connect them, a server breakdown would simply mean the wormhole closes. Then we could really have inter server wars. I would love that :D

I will post this in the suggestions immediately :D

 

[NeonSturm]

I think most factions will be less factions and more friend-groups.

Something like a group of people together vs the universe...



Though some factions may be big enough to own planets and assets in the \"inner\" sectors. These are well known trade stations, have newbe-trainers, etc and many role players...



But most factions are not tied to a single leader, but more to some kind of \"goal\" or alignment.

The primary (faction) alignments are:

• Evil (Pirates, Thiefs, Spys), Mercenary, Lawful
• 24/7, 5/2, 1/7, chaotic (online times)

Secondary (player) alignments are:

• Farmer, Fighter, Role-Player, Ingenieur, Trader, \"balanced\", other.

Teritary (role) alignments are:

• BountyHunter, Mercenary, Pilot (mostly fighters and small craft), Commander (big craft, leader of pilots), Admiral, ...
• you can have more than one and change them from time to time - or even change for a quest.

Lawful Role-Players and Ingenieurs very likely join a big alliance like inner-sectors or traders.

This alliance may have some fighters to defend itself or hires people from the Mercenary-alignment.





I think Inner-Sectors, Traders and Role-Players are very important alliances which should be run by the system. You get kicked out if peoples vote you out and banned from re-joining for some time.

Especially if you kill other people\'s ships - or Astronauts.



Bounties should also be managed by the system. Take a screenshot with the kill message is fake-able. It would be good to have a credits-limit for your used ship for Role-Players and bounties on NPCs/AI ships.

You should be able to make bounties which force you to kill a player until he lost x of credits or some ammount of his ship\'s blocks are salvaged/killed.



I think it will depend mostly on what the game and server offers - events, economy, scripts/mechanics.

 

[platinum467]

Well, comparing this to other faction based games



lets take roblox for an example

clans with 500+ members usually have 30+ online people on a good day

usually what happens with the chain of command is that the leader makes their clan as self suffecient as posssible, get a few good highranks and then let it snowball from there on



eventually depending on the community it draws, it either falls into inactivity, or the leader keeps a tight reign on his high ranks and it runs smoothly.



So I\'m guessing it will be more like that, with a few exceptional factions.

the only problem with that is that 30+ online members at a time isn\'t enough to run that many servers at once and still be powerful. So as someone mentioned earlier, as of now, it looks like a bunch of sub-communities rather than 1 over arcing universe.



which sounds pretty crap to be honest, but this game needs a much needed faction system revamp to avoid that, and allow factions to grow to a decent size without becoming unstable and then become an empire that can control land in multiple important servers.

And I do believe espionage is a problem because what\'s stopping people from joining a faction, and then deleting everyones work once they make it in?

NOTHINGWHICHISWHYWENEEDAFACTIONUPDATE

 

[NeonSturm]

http://star-made.org/content/rcon-module-acceleration-modifiers-shield-adjustments-advanced-build-mode

Talked a bit about passwords for ships and a faction keyring or keyrings that you own and can let others have access to it. I think we currently have too few ways to restrict other faction-mates to steal our stuff. Even the lowest rank ones.

If we use passwords, decide which one can access how many / which of our key-rings, espinoage will become more an annoyance than a problem. Both - to do it and to prevent it.

You can still hide your stuff in far-away sectors. But that requires a password-protected gate/node/teleporter network to let you take the trip from your hidden sector to your faction\'s base, spawn or some PvP-meeting point in time.