Intra-Faction Contest/ Competition!

[Progflaw99]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q89MLuLSJgk​

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[member="Natasi Fortan"] | [member="Ludolf Vaas"]​

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Friends, First Order Citizens, Writers, lend me your ears!... er.. Eyes!​

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Okay, so real note.

It's been discussed, the idea of doing either a couple (that's two!) or a few (Threeish or more) T1 dominions in the "Tel'erra" Hex (I will list all the planets in the hex below) OR possibly in the "Red Nebula" Hex, South of Dosuun. Arguably the Tel'erra Hex would be preferable as it would set us up for a T3 into Endor Hex eventually. Here's the premise:

This would be an intra-faction contest, basically consisting of two (or more) 'teams' of 5+ writers competing against each other in two separate T1 dominions. It might be a fun way to both complete some dominions as well as writing with new people or at the very least collaborating for a somewhat unified objective, you all know how fragmented some of our T3 dominions can get with stuff flying everywhere!

It would be up to the teams to collaborate and tell the best story, criteria for judging would be along the lines of "Best Story, Most Dramatic, Funniest, etc!"

In order to really flesh out this idea, we'd have to know about how many people planned to actually write in the T1 doms, that way we can determine who's writing where etc, but it might be a possibility to write in multiple T1's, it really just depends on the interest level and how it is agreed upon if we end up doing it in the first place!

Now, as excited as I am for this idea, I think it could be a fun and entertaining way to collaborate some writing away from the Omega event and away from a T3 (I believe the plan is to convert Quintas to a T3, which is a sound tactical decision IMO) and instead do some more fun, laid back T1's where the focus can be story, writing out from start to finish which could help provide that sense of completion without worrying about reaching a post cap quickly.

There arguably, are some down sides to this idea, and it would be unfair to not mention them.

T3's are a lot less work for the space, especially when you're talking about multiple planets and you would arguably have to do more posts for less reward if we were to split up what we could get in a T3 into smaller T1's. The fear here is that it would cause some people to burn out.

I know a few people brought up ideas and adjustments in chat and here would be a great place to put those because I'm sure I've forgotten some of the things that were mentioned.

Thoughts?

PS: I'm listing the Hexes in question below, and by no means do we have to take all of these using T1's, but it could be fun to choose 2-4 (Depending on the amount of people interested in writing in a T1) to write in!

Tel'erra Hex:
Trenwyth
Tel'erra
Xal 3
Annaj
Cong Prime

Red Nebula Hex:
Mephout
Seoul
Gehenna
Red Nebula

 

[Davin Jusik]

Digging it.

Will you be on my team? <3 [member="Rolf Amsel"]

 

[Atlas Kane]

I love this idea. I'll be glad to join a team that would accept a slightly slower-posting member, though I'll give my best to contribute!

 

[Marzena Vaas]

I like this idea too! You can count at least one of my characters in.

All I know for now is that [member="Valessia Brentioch"] and I have plans for Seoul. Oh yes. Plans.

 

[Roderik von Brinkerhoff]

This is a super solid idea. You can count me in for Roderik, and an as-of-yet-to-be-named upcoming stormtrooper of mine. Also Daxin, for good measure.

I get the efficiency appeal of a T3, but I really love the idea of a bunch of well-written T1's. You can anticipate my activity in whatever is necessary.

PS - I think 4 is the right number of T1's. Come on, First Order! We can dig deep and find the activity level to sustain it! Especially with so much fresh blood.

 

[Darth Veles]

I have to join, naturally. In theory, my posting rate should be at least a post per day if it's enough.

 

[Zef Halo]

Intel would be game, I assume.

Btw, let's T3 like crazy.

[member="Sentiri"] @TheRestOfTheFools

 

[Ludolf Vaas]

I do like the idea of making an intra-faction competition of sorts, just for fun. I also enjoy the idea of writing purely for story purposes. However, not to be the humbug here, but I do have concerns about efficiency.

Doing four T1s is equivalent to 400 posts. While that would be really awesome to create four great stories for each planet, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that it is rather inefficient. By contrast, two T3 dominions would net way more planets, for 100 less posts.

We are more active now than we've ever been, but I don't want us to get too far ahead of ourselves... yet. I don't want us to bite off more than we can chew and burn out on dominions. The problem with 100% cohesive story-driven Dominions where everyone is working as an integrated unit is that they are *quite* slow, due to the fact that they are usually DMed by one person. The Quintas dominion is a good example. I would like to see us at least finish that first before we try anything super ambitious like this.

I don't want to poo-poo this idea, because it's really good. I would just like us to be a little more realistic. Instead of us trying to do a whopping four dominions at once, let's start out with 2. And why not make them T2 dominions? There's very little difference between 110 posts and 100. That way we are still writing for the story while still retaining some efficiency, and not biting off more than we can chew.

Also, might I suggest the Zonama Sekot hex as a potential target? [member="Elensa Jari"] pointed out its potential usefulness as a planet. Not to mention, the First Order has made some ancillary interest in creating "biological preserve" worlds. Could be fun?

[member="Rolf Amsel"]

 

[Asharad Graush]

Zonama Sekot Hex is the way.

Tell me where to post and I'll do it yo.

 

[Roderik von Brinkerhoff]

I'm not too personally concerned with efficiency or economy of posting for the dominions, considering what the rate of the galaxy map updating is. If we all collectively managed 100 dominion posts per week, for the entirety of the month, we could achieve that with very little difficulty before the next round of updating occurs.

We don't necessarily need to consider it a race to beat the map, either. Realistically we're not considering this map expansion as a matter of immediate defensive needs - we're not, most likely, going to get invaded any time in the immediate future. Because of that, I don't think we should really consider it a rush to complete these stories, if we did move forward with multiple T1's.

If we pushed ourselves and completed 2 this month and 2 next month, for a total of, what, 50 collective posts per week, for two months? Do we consider it an imminent need to get these hexes before anybody else tries to shore up the same planets?

I hate to rush ourselves because we're fearful of another faction going after our planets, but maybe it's possible we even communicate a bit with the GA in terms of what planets we want to try and swing our way, and see what planets they have a desire for expanding to after this Omega business is complete? It's possible we could get assurances that no rushing is necessary on either side, and perhaps even try to incorporate ways to help each other's dominions rather than have us constantly fearing the other is going to meta-maneuver to cease our fun vibes?

Just a thought from the optimist in the house.

 

[Roderik von Brinkerhoff]

If we were able to get 20 writers involved and split them into 2 teams of 10 each, with each team member being responsible for 10 posts of a fully self-contained story which encompassed their overall team's objective, we could knock out a T1 in very little time. I would envision it being like this example:

Players 1-10 decide to sculpt a dominion based on finding a dormant hyperspace beacon leading to a previously uncharted system with a planet ripe with resources. Each of their stories will involve an individual piece of the narrative.

Player 1 is the leader of a TIE fighter flight or squadron, escorting transports containing engineers/construction workers/etc to the planet.
Player 2 is a stormtrooper sergeant leading a squad on a patrol along the perimeter of a prefab garrison.
Player 3 is a government official landing in a shuttle to oversee construction in a remote zone that will eventually be an Intelligence listening post.
Player 4 is a Knight of Ren/Sith/Force User, with a mysterious mission to do mysterious things.
Etc, etc, etc.

I know it may not seem as sexy a traditional dominion, and I'm not discounting interactivity within peoples objectives, and overlap in their writing, but I kind of really like the idea of people stretching their sea legs and writing a story from start to finish, individually, as well as collectively. NPC'ing the antagonists of their stories could be up to themselves, or could be provided by the faction admin/designated assistants, etc.

I think this would allow us to try something different and unique, while also providing for a perfect avenue for [member="Rolf Amsel"]'s original design of awards for different things. "Funniest Story", "Quickest Completion", so on and so forth.

Just some further spitballing for you all!

 

[Progflaw99]

Doing four T1s is equivalent to 400 posts. While that would be really awesome to create four great stories for each planet, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that it is rather inefficient. By contrast, two T3 dominions would net way more planets, for 100 less posts.

Fair point, as far as efficiency goes, yes. Two T3 Dominions would provide more planets gained for the posts. Efficiency certainly isn't at peak here, I can't argue that but I do want to point out this. The proposal in and of itself isn't exactly banking on "How many planets can we dominion the fastest?". The idea here being it's unorthodox, it's not strictly about efficiency but rather story and intra-faction collaboration to develop our planets as well as pick up the extras that we don't have already, you could say it's "Filling the gaps".

We are more active now than we've ever been, but I don't want us to get too far ahead of ourselves... yet. I don't want us to bite off more than we can chew and burn out on dominions. The problem with 100% cohesive story-driven Dominions where everyone is working as an integrated unit is that they are *quite* slow, due to the fact that they are usually DMed by one person. The Quintas dominion is a good example. I would like to see us at least finish that first before we try anything super ambitious like this.

As far as this point. If the argument is that we shouldn't bite off more than we can chew, then why the rush to do so many T3 dominions for hexes? Sure, doing the hexes as you said nets us more planets for less work but take a look at the GA. I use them as an example because look at their cloud, it's huge. That being said, can you honestly say they've really taken ownership of them by fleshing out their development and providing legitimate "points of interest" on each planet? Even a capitol city?

Take for example, Lothal or Kro Var. How much effort into developing those planets has the GA taken? I may be ignorant to what they have done there, so by all means correct me if I'm wrong but my observation is thus. If we expand too quickly and develop a cloud containing too many planets without any sort of development efforts they cease to hold any value, they end up being "Shell" planets. Husks that really we don't do anything with but wave our fingers at and say "Hey, that's ours".

A compromise here would be rather than create dominions, we develop some plans for what we want developed and design two threads for two large projects and then split up as teams to develop those particular objects, stations, bases, technology etc. That way we can still do some competition but we get tangible and useable locations/tech from it. This would allow us to dev on some of the planets we don't have things on or maybe don't have much on. That could be a compromise here, but if we're talking about not over-reaching, I think it's important we keep ourselves aware of how wide we expand vs. how much development we have on the planets we already control.

I don't want to poo-poo this idea, because it's really good. I would just like us to be a little more realistic. Instead of us trying to do a whopping four dominions at once, let's start out with 2. And why not make them T2 dominions? There's very little difference between 110 posts and 100. That way we are still writing for the story while still retaining some efficiency, and not biting off more than we can chew.

I think the above, changing the topic to Development rather than Dominion might be a decent compromise, at least for now. We could try doing two T1's once things settle down faction wide and we deem it unnecessary to continue with T3's. Alternatively T2's would also be an option if we still want expansion.

That's about my thoughts on it, I think we should be able to find a middle ground that lets us try something new but doesn't break anything and that would be great I think!

[member="Ludolf Vaas"] | [member="Natasi Fortan"] | [member="Roderik von Brinkerhoff"]​

 

[Ludolf Vaas]

[member="Rolf Amsel"] Quality over quantity basically. Your point is well made, and I can get behind it.

Here's the thing. We're going to need to first do an important T3 Dominion this month to solidify our map position and protect against our enemies (more on that later).

After that, we will move forward with your approach. In the meantime, if you guys would like to start making a list of the planets you'd like to go for with this idea, and why, that would be great.

 

[Davin Jusik]

[member="Ludolf Vaas"]
Coruscant

 

[Sentiri]

I have a suggestion that you are free to use or ignore.

A majority of our dominions up until this point have had department specific objectives. The majority of our faction threads have consisted of dominions over the past several months. So that means a lot of characters have settled into a few distinct writing groups (unless they have multiple characters that span multiple branches). Which means there are lots of writers I simply have not had the chance to write with unless I create a separate thread for that purpose (and honestly I just don't always have the capacity to run eight threads simultaneously like some folks can). But I still want to write with our faction members, even if they aren't FOSB.

For this series of dominions, could we have non-department-specific objectives? Or, perhaps the teams of people assigned to an objective are deliberately more diverse?

Once I know more about our targets I could probably come up with a more concrete example, but this is all I've got for now.

 

[Roderik von Brinkerhoff]

could we have non-department-specific objectives? Or, perhaps the teams of people assigned to an objective are deliberately more diverse?

This is something that I've thought would be a boon for the faction for a while. I occasionally bounce ideas back and forth with [member="Nils Brenner"] about inter-departmental role-play scenarios that I think would be kind of fascinating to watch unfold. One scenario we had come up with was an objective for the Starfighter Corps to conduct a search and rescue mission after a shuttle containing a government official crash landed on a world we intended to conduct a dominion on.

A scenario I had been brainstorming separately is a good example of overlap between the SFC and Intelligence branch too -- the current NPC leader of the SFC, a shady-ass General by the name of Breyer, has been short-changing squadrons with equipment and financial resources, and pocketing the change to enrich himself. A small group of SFC officers realize what's probably going on, and start a discrete unofficial internal investigation, only to realize they're in over their heads and need professional assistance - in comes Intel to conduct a sting operation*.

Stuff like that may not necessarily be viable for a dominion -- but would be perfect for an inter-faction thread of any kind, really. I think if we start working on how to realistically acquaint our characters and their branches together it will become just that much easier to come up with future plans that incorporate everybody equally -- and most importantly, in a fashion that makes sense. Otherwise I fear [member="Sentiri"] is right, and we may maintain some level of cliquishness (although I don't really fear that too much, considering most of us have a character in at least 1 other branch of the First Order for the most part, and we're pretty vocally supportive of each other so the main complaints that come with cliques are somewhat unfounded for us, I think.)

*I also had a second idea for SFC and Intel cooperating together, along with the Navy and Army. In the future, if FOSB guys want to do a thread starting up an undercover agent or something, we could do a thread where an agent inserted with a smuggler group are 'randomly selected' for a First Order customs inspection. SFC fly close escort just in case they try to run, and the Navy/stormtroopers conduct a boarding and inspection of goods. Which is where the inserted agent could ingratiate himself into the smuggler ring or whatever, by 'successfully' bribing the First Order's forces into looking the other way. Or a whole host of other options. That's just an idea I thought would be kind of cool, and thinking back on it just now made me want to reference it, so I just did.

 

[Avicus DuSang]

[member="Ludolf Vaas"]
Coruscant

This is the main goal. What drives me.

FO control of Coruscant.

 

[Doc]

I like been looking for something beside faction thread were I can focus on charter development and story.

 

[Visser Chernykh]

I'm behind the idea proposed by our man [member="Roderik von Brinkerhoff"] who is actively trying to include even us greasy politicos.