This suggestion is a fair question; however, calling it a "loophole" is misleading because it's a feature, not a bug.
Key Information:
Ally Rules: This new set came about
not to keep people from belonging to multiple factions, but to give Major Factions agency over their
own faction members. We had multiple situations (especially w/ the last version of the GA) popping up where Faction A would ban a member from their faction and then that same member would join Faction B with an ally slot to get around this, join the opposition, and then fight FOR Faction A while being allied to Faction B. This is why MFO's have to agree on allies. It's not intended to keep people out, but rather, to ensure that problem writers aren't given clearance through "loopholes" to continue to be a problem for Major Factions who have made it clear they want nothing to do with them.
It also got off for judgments because pretend Mandalorian A is going all bloodthirsty but fights
for the Jedi without their consent. Where does the credit go for their part in the story"? Do the Jedi take the blame for the Mando calling for blood? The other faction doesn't even really have anything to do with them aside from rubber-stamping...So it makes it convoluted.
Even in the past, before this issue, ally slots existed because of
other rules that were in place about new characters that no longer exist. If I recall, one of them was to keep people from stampeding with toons or alts where a new character had to exist for 30 days before they could take part in an invasion. Ally slots are there, primarily, to allow Majors agency but also to give people an option to join an invasion who don't WANT to join the faction. There are some people for whom this just makes more sense to them. It's a "Yes, and" situation, not an exclusion zone.
There are currently three ways to join an Invasion:
1.) Request an Ally Slot
2.) Join the Faction (There is no limit on this, save, the Major Faction deciding they do or don't want you.)
3.) Pick up a Bounty
There is nothing wrong with a character being in both GE/TIC, SO/TSC/Diarchy, or even just a few months ago, HR/GA/and The Foundation. Even before that, we had the NIO/Maw/and the GA. And before THAT we had GA and TSE in the "Endgame" narrative that gave the website things to write about for months on end. All of these factions have had significant crossover with the same characters for STORY purposes. It's important to distinguish the truth of conversations like this, to have all the information, and not to make baseless assumptions of "character loyalty" to one group or another, based on a VERY slim differential. If people didn't join on the "same" character, they could just create a new one, and the effect is the same. The difference there is that some people only write one character, or they swap characters in and out depending on their muse. Should they be banned from participation based on their RP availability and mental bandwidth? Should they be banned from joining multiple factions based on a shaming stigma, even if it makes sense for their story? Do we really want to see people creating throwaway characters by the dozens rather than enriching a character they actually care about?
(I can tell you...That trend was horrid. Ask your faction about the time when people created new characters to join a faction for an invasion and die for story points. No one wants to go back to that.)
It's free form RP for a reason, and none of this is new.
There's a lot of thought behind this, but there are a few key elements of why it exists this way. This is NOT an all-inclusive list:
- Placing limits like that is anti-RP.
- It is a form of gatekeeping, which often destroys more than it creates.
- Blocking people from invasions because they have not demonstrated significant "loyalty" to a faction is a bad idea.
- Who polices this? Who decides whether characters are eternally "chained" to one faction or another? I think it was
Soundwave
who brought it up, but who polices this book-keeping in a more practical sense? Do we put that onus on the Major Faction, on Staff, to check EVERY faction every time it comes up? Where does it end? Can you not join Dominions/Junctions anymore if the faction allows it? It's a slippery slope of elitism, and none of it benefits or supports RP in the slightest. It would take MFO's away from managing their faction and Site Staff away from managing the Site to do pointless inquiries. And even if we go light on it...Who decides which character's story is important enough to allow it?
- We like invasions being free-for-all events because the enjoyment of them is not based on the number of people someone has in their faction. It's based on the narrative, the story told. A larger faction with people all over the place has just as much chance to lose as a smaller one could win because their narrative is tight. Many members are hard to coordinate; they go off-script. Numbers do not win invasions, nor do individual duels, period - It's a group effort.
- The MFO's have been doing a BASED job in recent years in keeping their people on the up and up. We let them decide if they want certain people/characters in their faction, and they are FREE to curate their member lists as they see fit. If they think a member is being "weird" by joining their faction. (Ex. Pretend, just pretend that I had a character in HR and SO, and the HR suspects I'm there to cause problems, not to facilitate engaging RP or narratives.) They are free to remove me.
- We're all here to tell stories, not stir salt farms, or limit people/characters and their creativity beyond what can objectively be considered in the spirit of "Star Wars"....And even that, we're really gentle about.
www.starwarsrp.net
