One of the things I find lacking in the game is character. There are a bunch of factions around that have little or no reason for you to care about them.
Why not have players who have had several Gal Net articles posted gain a 'trusted reporter' tag and allow them to apply for spoke-person status for a faction they have high rep with, which allows them to put up news articles in that faction's stations.
Basically it would work like this:
Some of the problems I can think of would be:
It's a fairly small thing, but I think it could give some character to the factions and give player's a reason to care about which minor faction gains influence, without changing the ethos of the game - players will have no real control over the faction, just a way to add flavour to them, basically crowd-sourcing lore-creation.
Why not have players who have had several Gal Net articles posted gain a 'trusted reporter' tag and allow them to apply for spoke-person status for a faction they have high rep with, which allows them to put up news articles in that faction's stations.
Basically it would work like this:
- Player gains high reputation with faction
- Player also submits a good number of GalNet articles and achieves a trusted status for their contributions
- They then can apply for the right to become spokesperson for that one minor faction (like an independent system faction, etc.)
- With this they can then add new posts for that faction's stations only, make system wide announcements from that faction and maybe even edit the battle-cries of that faction
- If you wanted you could even have Spokespeople level up through a new reputation ladder, giving them limited access that increases over time, maybe even including some 'end-game' goals like renaming stations, setting up faction missions (maybe the algorithm that generates them would supply a set of options for the player, or they can customise existing ones), etc.
Some of the problems I can think of would be:
- What's the line where you can trust a player? If they breach the TOS, what kind of punishment is appropriate? Basically make the time to gain the access weed out the griefers, and make the losses incurred if you mess around with it enough that people wont risk it after investing the time.
- When multiple players have that status with a faction, can they all make posts simultaneously, or is it divided between them?
It's a fairly small thing, but I think it could give some character to the factions and give player's a reason to care about which minor faction gains influence, without changing the ethos of the game - players will have no real control over the faction, just a way to add flavour to them, basically crowd-sourcing lore-creation.