I should probably chime in here. Better late than never, eh? As one of the founders of the RDD, and thusly, of the whole subfaction movement, you'd probably expect me to be rabidly pro-subfaction, and vehemently opposed to their removal. However, I can and do see both sides of the argument. I'm going to take this from the RDD side though, since it's the only one I have experience with - I don't pretend to speak for the AWC, and this is in no way the official view of the RDD. Just mine.
Probably the biggest gripe about the subfactions is the effect that they can have on the community. Burn said 'segregate', that's a good word to use. And he's right. He's also wrong. Yes, they do segregate the HMW community, to an extent. There's the subfaction's own message board, ours having been created by Nemesis Prime. It's their for a number of reasons.
One, to kick back and relax in a way that simply isn't allowed here. This isn't a slight to Seibertron.com, but merely a statement of fact - with this site's more serious approach, and the PG-13 (that's a European 12 rating, I'm assuming?) tolerance that have been agreed on, a lot of what goes on in Neo Kaon might not be allowed over here. Case in point being the old RDD threads. They were fun, but the level of silliness and the at-times adult humour didn't work here. Which is why they were, understandably, done away with.
Reason two is something which, to be honest, could be achieved on the Decepticon board which is here now, and that's Decepticon game planning. Especially useful in the old tournaments, and probably even more useful once V2 kicks in, planning together is something which the RDD was founded around. The reason this happens off site is pretty simple. It's not that we don't want it on Seibertron.com - merely that when Neo Kaon, our site, was created, there weren't any faction-specific boards here. There wasn't the privacy from prying Autobot eyes. Now that there is, some of us stick to what we have gotten used to. Old habits die hard, I guess.
Reason three is the rebuttal to the 'segregation' concept. Having a smaller number of people doing something together, with a common goal (winning
), it's always going to foster a sense of community and belonging. The sheer size of Seibertron.com can scare people when they start - looking at Burn's twenty-thousand-strong post count, or even seeing that mid-range players like myself have several thousand posts each, can really intimidate new players, making the seem like the little fish in a very big frigging pond. And I'm speaking from experience here, as although I started the game in December 2003, it was another few months before I started to post on the message boards - and even longer before I really came out of my shell here. Getting people to know each other in a smaller subfaction removes a lot of that feeling of being 'the new guy', or even one of the hundreds of 'new guys'. You can ask a lot of the subfaction players, knowing a few names around here can greatly help your initial integration on the boards. And games are always more fun when you can interact with the people playing them too.
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