Did you guys have a contest to see who could come up with the most convoluted, and confusing game rules?
Imho that wasn't intended, just a minor data model flaw with far reaching consequences. This looks more like the kind of thing that looks perfectly reasonable on paper and ends with "damn, this is not good" when it's published and thousands of people start to hammer the system.
The problem is that something like this is very ressource intensive to fix.
(This is pure speculation)
The way I see it, the state information and cooldowns have to be moved to the place where the faction influence in the system is stored, probably a n:n relation entity between minor faction and star system.
Then you need to
- do a data migration for all state info and cooldowns
- Adjust the background worker process that handles the state changes (like daily influence update)
- Adjust where the state info comes from in the system map
- Adjust where the state info in the Cockpit UI info comes from
- Adjust where the whole game accesses any state info for the factions, like station prices (demand / supply) or spawn of special state related zones, mission generation process, and whatever features are state-related that we are not aware of
- Have a concept how to handle ship ownership (faction based? systemfaction based?)
So to fix this would be a LOT of work. Probably around a week of work, maybe two, and then probably another week or two to handle bugs that were introduced in the process.
On the other hand...
If this doesn't get changed, my experience in matters like this tells me that it will turn from a minor nuisance into a major one someday. And it will be harder and harder to fix with every faction or state related feature that gets introduced.
