Even more difficult to understand when a faction is just being "supported" but claims all the recognition of a PMF. Almost like a BGS group wants all the benefits of moving into a system without any of the effort of using the expansion mechanic - "I want system X, Faction Y are already in it. Why bother to expand when we can just 'support' Faction Y and take it over"
And this is why I've
always insisted that us Commanders have
zero control over PMFs in-game terms. In out-of-game terms FD have claimed certain things groups who submit PMFs can do with those PMFs compared to rando people, but to be honest, I think FD were utterly foolhardy to allow PMFs in the game at all, so FD's action's there are shaky ground to start with.
When FD first announced player-factions, or adopting existing factions, I instantly thought it was going to be like herding cats for FD, alongside community Galnet articles and player-submitted Community Goals. Of course, I submitted stuff for all three of these, mostly because I wanted to try my hand at some creative writing and who knows, get some nifty activities in the game. "Claiming" my group's own faction in the game and trying to exert "dominance" with it was never part of our intent, it just fell out that way.
Look where we are now. Players can't submit Galnet articles anymore because the left hand could never talk to the right hand, and who knows what Community Goals will look like, but if anyone ever wanted to claim the BGS was ever a "strategic chess game" with factional ownership, they certainly couldn't do so while supporting player-submitted CGs existing just for the significant impacts and advantages they can have, depending on their outcome. I would argue the only reason PMFs continue to exist is that player activity surrounding them is so entrenched these days, just like with Powerplay which, let's face it, just needs to be burnt down and started again.
A squadron, regardless of how it's pledged, is still a group of
Independent Pilot's Federation Commanders who, for one reason or another feel that furthering the political power of that faction is a good idea, and have arranged themselves as a group of such pilots. And that's the case for any of us... regardless of which factions we support, or how many we support... we do not own those factions, we are not members of them, and we do not control them, no matter how thick we layer the RP. Factional representatives will always continue to refer to you as an outsider and offer you just "mercenary work", because that's all you ever are to them.
This is the only thing we are members of. It's as inescapable as the fact that in, say, EVE Online, you're a clone pod-pilot and revered in the galaxy as a demigod.
I remember a quote from one of the FD staff in a livestream, I believe it was the first one they did about the BGS, and paraphrasing it, but they were "surprised" about the emotional attachment people got to the minor factions in the game, which suggests to me that they never thought factions would be anything more than background noise for the player's activity. That's furthered by the fact of the many oversights they had when the first tranch of PMFs went in, being putting them in:
- Permit Locked systems
- Rare good systems
- Lore specific systems
etc.
There's countless examples of FD tripping over themselves with this, and even in the more recent BGS livestreams, and
definitely in the first livestream, FD talk about how the background sim should be in the background... if it's in the forefront of your mind (which for probably 100% of us in this forums, myself included, it is), then they've done it wrong.
Urgh.... *throws that soapbox out the window, goes back to Factorio.