The requested goal of IND was to be more 'off grid', detached from the faction conflicts and faction systems so as to operate as more independent pilots in the game (exactly more like a ghost in the play environment and less like a labelled and faction bound entity). Other factions could be a possibility, but then it goes back to the problems complained about with Mercenary (which you can read more about the hows, whats, and whys of the two faction system on the development page here:
http://www.starwraith.com/evochronlegac ... opment.htm ). You can also read a bit of a summary of the design and purpose behind it in a response I posted here:
http://www.starwraith.com/forum/viewtop ... em#p192017 And with more factions in play, an issue of new players unfamiliar with how to link or delink from contracts would be compounded and become worse.
Additionally though, the problem you describe doesn't really relate to how many factions there are, but how the contract linking system works.
In the example you provided, that would only happen if the following conditions were met:
- You accepted a contract with the other player already in the same sector as you (they aren't linked in if they come in later with a contract being active).
- The other player did not delink from the contract, so remained bound to it to be part of it. Then once failed, they grabbed another contract.
- The other player was aligned with the same faction and perhaps wasn't aware of factions linking for contracts in the same sector?
So the only remedies in that scenario currently available would be:
- Completing contracts in other sectors.
- Making sure any other players are aware you are there also and check with them if they want to join together or split up.
- Have the player(s) who do(es) not want to participate delink from the contract.
If it's too much to expect players to be able to manage auto-linking contracts in this regard (and manually unplugging from ones they don't want to be part of), then the only viable alternative would be to force/require manual linking into contracts. That has been proposed in the past (including by me), but has generally been shot down when discussed due to the preferred simplicity of automatically joining together when players are of the same faction combined with the requirement of being in the same sector. The idea of having to instruct new players to 'join the link by doing XYZ' rather than just 'show up in the same location I'm at' seemed to be an undesirable compromise.
That said though, it has been something I've thought about for quite a while and I could require an approval step for linking into contracts, even with something as simple as pressing F4 to link into it when an alert is displayed. It'd probably help to have pretty strong feedback support to make a change like that which has already been discounted in the past multiple times. However, I'm certainly still willing to entertain the idea as players may be interested. And I'll likely prototype some ideas to facilitate that kind of operation anyway and see how it might pan out in testing since the issue still seems to surface periodically in comments like yours above. Might be a practical and effective route to go at this point.