Official Status

[Ace_]

I'm against removing official status. If it gets removed, there would be no goal when it comes to factions and people might lose motivation. Personally none of that stuff matter to me, but I don't think that the majority would like such a decision. 

 

The leaders should follow faction management's guide and work together in order to make everything even better. 

[Guest]

The official status, like stated before, is a carbon copy of other servers and I’d like to reinforce my statement that we are GTA World, not any other server we all came from. We are our own unique concept and we aim to keep our features unique, hence our proposal to change the official status to something else that isn’t a direct replica of another server.

 

It allows us, by removing the status, to focus our attention on factions in a more controlled and tailored approach. Allowing every faction to aim for a list of goals would not only make every faction dull and boring, it would also eventually burn people out and bore them because they aren’t receiving things that benefits their factions - they’ll be receiving a package that benefits every odd faction and not every single faction.

[Portz]

I create factions purely to strive towards clocking GTA World (getting official). Without it, what’s the point in playing campaign mode? Might as well just stick to GTA Online and shoot 12 year olds all day.

[Portz]

Anything that keeps people motivated is good in my book.

[Guest]

Sure, it might keep people motivated - but what happens when they get official? What’s left to achieve? Nothing.

 

With the removal of that status and a re-introduction of a more controlled and sensible option, it’ll make it a whole lot easier for factions to get the attention they deserve.

[Crayons]

It really depends of what is being referred to when you talk about an official faction in my opinion. It's not necessarily the benefits a faction would get, but what and how the faction is. For example, if a faction is getting their status due to their quality of roleplay, I'm all for it. Additionally, you can decide whether or not it's related to your character to join or not. Yes, factions should have goals to reach, but for me it should just more be like the appreciation a faction would get from the community. This way it would be presented more to the faction, which might result in people who want to join and be a part of that faction. And it shouldn't be (just because of) the privileges.

[Rust]

The whole non-official vs. official system is outdated, simply put. Speaking from past experience, becoming official back in the day was mainly a reward for a faction chat, the 'factionization' of properties/vehicles, and access to a warehouse for either guns/drugs -- all of which, you can currently achieve without official status. This initial system may have been efficient in past servers & communities but the ideology is a decade old and could be vastly improved, if not completely reworked to better mesh with today's roleplay standards and server expectations. It's also a piss-poor system for immersion, and like many in this thread have stated, historically most official factions (98% in my opinion) have a tendency to take their foot off the pedal once they achieve official status - whether intentional or not. Complacency most definitely occurs, in a decade of GTA roleplay I've only ever witnessed one faction (that I was apart of and later led) maintain official status for years (yes, plural) and not get complacent (at least not noticeably). 

Factions shouldn't be striving solely to achieve official status -- nothing they produce is ever genuine or organic in that case. The whole "it's motivation" reasoning is fine but shouldn't be any faction's main priority or driving factor for leading a faction. I never understood the whole craze over a glorified label. I've seen it time and time before: obtaining official status doesn't always translate to those factions being superior in terms of roleplay or productivity. 

As far as altering the current system, for all intents and purposes, I support @Pascal's suggestion of an 'official-less' faction system. Personally I would call it the 'Recognition Process' or something along those lines.

20 hours ago, Pascal said:

There's potential to an 'official-less' faction system. With the way it works on most servers, there's usually a lengthy period before factions get bumped to official. With an 'official-less' system, factions can get judged on merit relative to what they've done recently. Groups could work hard on their RP towards a specific goal and apply for a certain thing (i.e. gun warehouse), which guarantees more consistency in long-term. This creates constant incentive to create quality - whereas currently once 'you're official, you're official', there's no guarantee they'll work as hard once they have the (often) permanent official status. 

 

As it stands factions that are deemed 'better' (official) usually have to be here for a long period of time. New factions can show up, create incredible RP in a short space of time, but not be able to get the full benefits a faction can get for a long period. Imagine a scenario where a really good faction showed up, and the next official review or w/e wasn't until July - they'd miss out on a lot of potential RP for a long time. With this system, big impact factions could simply apply for benefits and use their RP threads as a justification. This could really change up the pace of the server - one week one faction has a very comfortable monopoly on the arms trade, then a high quality faction springs up and within two weeks has its own arms operation competing, because they've had the chance to apply direct instead of have to wait for official. 

I'm a huge proponent of rewarding quality factions based on merit as opposed to arbitrary time periods/time in grade - as that's always seemed like a fallacy - and I've experienced both ends of the spectrum. Again: the whole non-official vs. official system is severely outdated and not very efficient when you take in all current resources available to factions (supplier status, construction/property requests, leasing system, etc.) -- the old system is merely a concept familiar to most of our players due to past servers & communities. I believe a reworked system would better suit GTAW's needs. What I especially like about the proposed 'official-less' faction system is that it continuously provides incentive for factions to consistently improve, which at the end of the day is our only collective goal as players -- forget 'pinned threads' or any other fancy aesthetics official status provides.

This proposed system also helps with overall immersion (i.e. preventing gun traffickers from owning several drug warehouses, for instance) and provides more of an even-playing field for all types of factions, whether legal or illegal. Additionally, it prevents criminal monopolies & saturation in underworld markets as quality illegal factions wouldn't need to wait ridiculously long and arbitrary time periods to obtain similar perks to an opposing quality illegal faction. This isn't to say I'm an advocate of factions obtaining major perks only after a short duration such as a few weeks, because it's entirely possible for players to ride out a muse for a bit and then fall off the map, but I support the idea of splitting official benefits/perks up per individual & faction.

Edited December 3, 2018 by Rust

[Guest]

I've personally always disliked the official - non-official system. I believe the system is outright archaic and people merely consider it to be a must-have, a need, simply because it was part of the way LSRP managed its factions. To those of us that played there for years, I believe it's clearly shown that in most cases, the factions will strive to achieve official and then slowly wither away, be it through inactivity, through festering an elitist/aggressive mentality or simply through out-of-character power struggles resulting in the faction being stripped away of its status or shut down.

 

I also dislike the term official. To most, obtaining the official status means that they are a representative of the server, something that needs to indicate the quality of the server. Personally, I think that any and all factions are representative of the server's status, be it official or unofficial, legal or illegal, gang or racer. Slapping a tag on them for administrative purposes or for a pseudo-identification makes no sense. No one will look JUST at the official factions, no, they will look at every single faction on the server.

 

I believe this also extends to the way our server currently operates, by whitelisting / "accepting" factions. The way LSRP operated was merely mashing all factions together, quality or horrendous factions, hiding behind the fact they were unofficial factions so that there was a smaller amount of work required. I think that all factions should be held to the same standard and not be given an arbitrary tag that essentially says "this faction is more representative to the server than this faction".

 

I think that all factions should be given tools to facilitate their roleplay through different assets; access to the supplier program, a way to obtain / produce narcotics in house, construction and property requests.  I believe that people should broaden their views, because here we have alot of tools that you simply did not have on LSRP and or RCRP. We did not have the construction requests which directly tie in for white-collar crime through construction companies. For legal factions, I think that our acknowledgement system is far more extensive, see the Coroners faction which required minimal (albeit it took abit of time) interaction with FM, then handled the 'administrative' and 'funding' part with the local government and then simply kicked off.

 

I dislike the gun warehouse system, as simple as it is for all sides. It allows for monopolies and saturation. It also does not make sense realistically since most of the weapon trade in the USA is in-house; those guns don't arrive by boat from China or Ukraine, no.

 

All in all, I think its time we move past the official-unofficial systems. Its simply outdated and does not make sense, atleast not to me.

[Hollywood]

7 hours ago, Maca said:

It allows us, by removing the status, to focus our attention on factions in a more controlled and tailored approach.

 

In short, this is a good 'working' concept. How will that attention be given, though? Players still need goals to strive towards, that's a simple fact. 

 

 

24 minutes ago, the_criserk said:

I think that all factions should be given tools to facilitate their roleplay through different assets; access to the supplier program, a way to obtain / produce narcotics in house, construction and property requests.

 

These are all fantastic ideas and creates a more 'IC' approach to faction development, rather than OOC 'perks'.

 

 

 

 

I suggest that the Faction Management team consider ways to implement milestones or checkpoints for factions. There should still be some sort of 'gate'. For example, after one month's activity you can gain access to one perk of your choice - supplier program, drug production or a construction contract. After another period or milestone, you can select another.

 

A system like this still allows for flexibility in creating your faction how you want and picking the script perks your group thinks will benefit their style of RP the best. It also continues to give incentive to stay active and keep things moving. 

 

A veteran, year old faction should have some 'perks' that distinguish it from a newly formed faction and the newly formed factions still need something to work towards on a 'gameplay' level. 

 

 

 

 

Remember, while there are players in EVERY faction that are more than happy to just roleplay there will always be folks that want to work towards something. A faction leader may be in it 100% for the RP but his/her members can't all be kept interested purely on that platform alone.

[Nervous]

Closing this on Monday as people don’t seem to care about it as much as I thought they would.

 

Final opinions would be appreciated.