Imagine if your tasks had a direct impact on the affiliated group. The more you 'do' the bigger the area of space they control. The more patrols are sent out. The better that group's negotiation posture would be. Which means access to other affiliation's higher tier goods. But there might be a breaking point. Encourage your affiliates to expand too much and, tho there are tons of patrols, no one ever shows up in time to defend your interests. Let's say that because your group is in so well with the Merchants that the Scavvers refuse to sell you anything besides food and water and even those at an ungodly markup.
The Trading Guild could be a neutral faction that nobody can join, but are custodians and managers of the galactic market. Each period (perhaps a week), the other factions are ranked based on the progress their members have made by doing tasks for their factions. Rewards are calculated and assigned for the next period, then the ranks are reset to zero for a new period. Rewards could include:
- First access to trade goods
- A better price for goods
- Access to special goods only available through this system
- Usage of a unique object (a special planet or station)
- Respect of pirates (pirates flee from members of that faction)
Whatever the advantage of being higher rank, there must be a counterbalance. Task rewards could give Prestige in addition to whatever else they might entail, but the Prestige reward (and only the Prestige) is multiplied by a factor that scales inversely with rank, so doing tasks for your faction earns less Prestige at higher rank. Depending on how valuable being top rank is, maybe winning rank 1 disqualifies that faction to win rank 1 in the following period (or two or more periods).
Or maybe there's a mission players can do to spread their faction's influence in a particular system. Say there's a system that is adjacent to other systems already claimed by different factions. Players in all those factions can do an Influence Expansion mission (could be a variety of things), the reward for which is Influence Points assigned to that system for that faction. At the end of the ranking period, Influence Points for every contested system are compared and the winner claims the territory. With our new ranking system, the Leading Faction gets a smaller Influence Point reward per completed mission (some fraction, maybe fixed, or maybe scaled based on other factors) so they can still work to claim it, but it takes more work. The task should possibly have a cooldown for how often it can be performed, maybe allow multiple players perform it together so everyone gets credit from the same instance of the task, to prevent swarming.
Obviously, to prevent faction hopping, changing factions should have some kind of steep penalty, like losing half your Prestige and being forbidden to join a new faction for some period.
Ooh, and best of all, there could be PVP and PVE missions! PVP missions could include something like participating in randomly occurring combat between NPC fleets, that anyone from the fighting factions could join. But players that prefer PVE can still contribute to the faction in other ways, like doing missions involving mining, shipping goods, transporting passengers, cataloguing flora and fauna, scouting star systems, and plenty of tasks that would provide support for PVP efforts. This could be the perfect solution to getting PVPers and PVEers to play together. I'm sure there are players like myself that might like the occasional PVP experience but are not interested in being perpetually flagged.
The coming Universe update will hopefully make it possible for factions to have planets as home bases. The character of each faction could be further distinguished by whether it has a homeworld, how many planetary colonies it has, and what sort of resources exist on those planets.
