I think they've closed the applications... if you like criminals, we have plenty of abandoned PMFs for adoption.
I hope they haven't closed them, already came up with the backstory for mine
Also, how do I adopt these abandoned factions? Or is it just a symbolic adoption where I don't actually own the faction, but I just help them grow
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dang it just checked they closed it 2 months agoI hope they haven't closed them, already came up with the backstory for mine
You jump on and you do things for them. That's it.
Nobody owns factions, you simply work for them, and potentially have your squadron pledge allegience... but neither of these things have any tangible purpose.
FWIW, "adopting" was only a result of people who already supported a proc gen faction, and wanted it treated the same as a PMF (e.g placement rules etc. )
Grow like cancer...
We need more players standing up to these imperialistic factions, returning control of systems back to their own people.
As @Jmanis said above, no one owns factions... but within Archon Delaine's space we are aware that there's a number of formerly owned PMFs which have been abandoned by their initial founders/ownders and no one is actively managing them anymore. There's a good variety of them, I mean some have only one (home) system, others have many etc. etc. very depending on what kind of effort you want to put into it.
On a side note: a squadron can litterally adopt any faction out there, even if already owned by some one else... because the game doesn't put any constraint at it.
Please make sure the abandoned faction is not in a system being controlled by another bigger group. That is the quickest way to make people not like you. Use https://inara.cz/elite/news/ to research the faction and system etc to make sure you aren't stepping on toes.
Anyway, player made faction requests are going to be closed I think forever because FDev wants to make a better system since the current one is just bad because most PMFs are crapped into the game and die on arrival.
And this is the exact reason why player factions were a mistake.
They were implemented wrong. Anyone could of faked the requirements to get one into the game. FDev just now seems to see the issue and wants to fix it how ever long that will take. Hopefully the fix purges all the dead PMFs and unneeded NPC factions cause there's too many of those as well.
I don't care how players got their PMF, faked requirements or otherwise. Frontier should have known that gamers be gamers, and the territoriality and entitlement that comes with PMFs. It is just bad and a mistake. Now you have to ask the largest neighbourhood gang for permission to adopt a faction? Give me a break.
Personally, I hope they scrap the whole concept. But that's never going to happen.
Two fundamental design decisions that FD made and ultimately botched were.
- An assumption that players wouldn't care about factions, and instead would align their interests with what superpower was offering; whether or not it was Blah Silver Corp or Blah People's Society was considered irrelevant.
- An assumption that accepting PMFs was simply "allowing players to add some colour to the galaxy" and not a vector for player agency... in the same mindset that player- submitted galnet articles were supposed to be "just some flair and colour" and not a similar player-agency vector.
FD failed the first point by putting absolutely no game loops or vectors for interaction around the major factions... the only thing that ever existed at first was superpower rep and rank, and the system permits that unlocked with it... meanwhile Factions were the day- to- day interaction point... you didn't talk to the Empire for a mission, you talked to Blah Silver Corp... Your actions didn't affect the Empire, they affected Blah Silver Corp.
It's essentially the antithesis of the original concept... we were meant to care about the superpowers and not the factions, but everything was about the factions.
The second point was just a gross misjudgement. When i heard them announce PMF apps, my immediate reaction was "How on earth are they going to maintain this in a reasonable way?"
Fast forward to today and looking over the history of things... we've got our answer: It's not maintainable. This ties back in to the idea that the BGS and factions were never meant to be at the front of player minds when playing the game in FDs design intent.
Given PMFs were announced after the first big player effort to flip a system, the writing was on the wall... players were getting behind factions, not superpowers... and in that regard, PMFs should never have been allowed.
It will be interesting to see how the rework of the PMFs will play out.
I'm sure it will go swimmingly . They have had plenty of time to look at issues and will be more thoughtful on where to place PMF more in line with the superpower values . Also make it harder for the bigger PMF to bully those out who have the audacity to be within" their " backyard . And stop PMF's controlling in game assets . And possibly cut down the amount of systems of area "Controlled".
But then again I can always dream
But then again I can always dream
If there hadn't been PMFs, the largest neighbourhood gang would just have been backing "HIP 1234 Silver Corp" (67 controlled systems) rather than "Bob's Corporation" (67 controlled systems). Back in the Dangerous Games, most of the entrants qualifying based on size of their BGS faction were supporters of adopted factions, because back then the 6-month head start that not having to wait for Frontier to invent PMFs gave them was pretty significant. And, of course, a lot of the harder-to-spot bad spots for PMFs/adopting factions recently have been ones where the local gang doesn't care which faction controls the system as such ... but for Powerplay purposes they're going to stomp extremely hard on anyone trying to make it something not of the preferred government type. The Communist Interstellar alliance claims over 1000 systems controlled ... most of which are controlled by non-PMF adopted Communist factions.
You don't have to ask permission from the nearby groups. But you're choosing to take part in a minimal-rules territory warfare game that players have essentially invented on top of some background mechanisms, so you also have to expect that it's a territory warfare game and there are other sides, some of which are much bigger than you and know what they're doing and are under no obligation to feed your ego by accepting your plans for the region. That's just the flip side of the complaints from some of the more entitled PMF supporters that people can attack them without necessarily needing to care about a faction which can be counter-attacked as a distraction.
The game has been going long enough that despite the bubble's excessive size, the space for new groups to turn up and get their own little 10-system empire without having to fight someone for it is long gone, and that'd be true PMFs or otherwise.
Already has, essentially. The only distinction between a PMF and an adopted faction, once added to the game, was that further PMFs couldn't be added to systems which already had one present (but people could adopt factions in those systems, of course). Now that no PMFs at all will be added in future, that right has effectively been extended to all the other factions. The concept of a "PMF" is dead - any group or individual can adopt any faction it likes and get all the rights and privileges (none) of doing so, regardless of how that faction was added.
The only further step they could take would be to scrap the entire Political BGS layer ... which would be an interesting move, since so much of the rest of the game depends on its background existence.
PMFs are just another missed opportunity for the game... baseline problem IMHO is the total lack of any kind of "diplomatic" mechanic in the game [that makes PMFs and factions in general quite dumb in their behaviour] as well as any kind of gameplay advantage of being in system XYZ instead of ZXY for the owners' group [apart for having the "name" over a system].
The PMFs are among the biggest trolling instrument in the game... negative side, I mean one can even troll PG/solo players' groups using BGS
Not considering the hundreds of mistakes they've done in placing PMFs in overlapped/overcrowded places or in wrong ones (i.e. unfavourable gov PMF placed in the heart of a power controlled bubble).
The PMFs are among the biggest trolling instrument in the game... negative side, I mean one can even troll PG/solo players' groups using BGS
Not considering the hundreds of mistakes they've done in placing PMFs in overlapped/overcrowded places or in wrong ones (i.e. unfavourable gov PMF placed in the heart of a power controlled bubble).
I know. But the addition of a PMF kind of legitimized the territorial claims.
Again, I know you don't have to "ask permisson"
. It was hyperbole to make a point. Also, I have seen posts like the above with advice to "make sure not to upset the neighbours" so many times it feels like "asking for permission".I dislike the concept of player group territoriality and claiming space as "theirs". But that's just me, and I know there is nothing to be done to change this. I also dislike how there are so many suqadrons and PMFs that try to shoehorn third party SciFi franchises into the game, but that is another topic.
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So... on that... if the BGS was really meant to be the "background" sim, instead of the "foreground" sim, then direct hands on levers to control it shouldn't have ever been present. And by that, I mean coordinated players very much have agency over pushing a faction into war, expansion, boom, bust, lockdown[1] whatever.
If players were meant to align with superpowers... in a rewrite I'd ditch direct actions which affect influence or state effects with factions entirely.
So towards that end:
- You can take missions from Factions (and would be an entry-level activity), but the only gains are reputation, materials, credits and effects related to extant states.[2][3]
- You can take alternate missions from Superpowers (which are more challenging and more rewarding) which do affect state/influence... but it does so for any faction aligned with that Superpower within a particular radius, so you can't concentrate your efforts, but instead you can broadly support that superpower.
- Introduce a new Superpower to represent criminal interests[4]
So that way, you interact with Superpowers to indirectly support factions aligned with that superpower, but you seek out factions to exploit favourable states that arise organically.
There's a lot of tweaking that would be needed.... but yeah... if the goal was to get people favouring the superpowers, the influencing actions should be at the superpower level, not the factional level.
[1] Notwithstanding my usual rants about the lack of antagonistic actions in the game.
[2] This part is important in consideration of things I've said in the past about T2 NPCs
[3] By this i mean, if there's an Outbreak for a faction, you can deliver medicines or run outbreak missions to resolve the Outbreak, but don't change influence or econ/sec sliders. There's definitely more nuance to it, but I don't want to dive down that rabbithole atm.
[4] Again, nuance i'm going past here, but this is just spitballing something new.
This is why I tend not to have diplomatic channels with anyone. I just act, and if someone cries, problem bilong them... I play with the expectation to lose it all.Again, I know you don't have to "ask permisson"
I dislike the concept of player group territoriality and claiming space as "theirs". But that's just me, and I know there is nothing to be done to change this. I also dislike how there are so many suqadrons and PMFs that try to shoehorn third party SciFi franchises into the game, but that is another topic.