Hi, Makoto! I didn't want to get into a qualitative analysis, but I think you're right that this could be improved by one.
One thing is that some arcs exist on an axis of conflict between two factions. While clearly there end up being imbalances in agency and complexity of presentation, some arcs do allow for inter-faction play; using the latest uprising arc as an example, deeper drilling-down into Amarr factional interplay and court intrigue contrasts with a fairly simple Matari 'we come for our people' message, but we've certainly seen a lot of interaction on both sides. Contrast this with, say, Lirsautton or the intra-State lawsuit shenanigans, which don't exist along any particular fault line. It might be worth ISD and CCP making more of an effort to allow for nuanced inter-faction play with arcs like this.
I don't think you're wrong here, but I'd hesitate to use the Kahah fallout as a template for FedSta, because the relationship between ImpRep vs FedSta is profoundly different. If the Fed fell into chaos, you wouldn't see the State arm up and prepare to invade. Likewise, you wouldn't see the opposite.
I think it's important to note that in these things, point of origin and point of conclusion are important. Where an arc starts (and this is less a physical location in New Eden than it is an actor, some entity which starts moving) and where it ends (again, more a receptacle that receives motion than a physical location) has more lore permanence than a name drop or a pit stop. Some factions are more "active" than others. They either are, or they're host to, entities which start things and do things and have more consequence.
I don't believe this is actually reflective of the themes inherent in the lore of different factions as it currently exists. I'm pretty sure this is just because there's not a lot of faction articles being written, and it's never been fairly divided.
Likewise, I'd be inclined to say that while all factions participated in the Kyonoke Inquest arc, it's predominantly a Caldari-Gallente story, given the shenanigans gotten into by the Templis Dragonaur, FIO, and all the rest; the articles around core events are not purely Caldari in impact, then. While 2017 certainly looks to be a very good year for Caldari stuffs, the high concentration of articles for the Kyonoke arc and its petering out unfinished in May means that the high article count didn't really have a meaningful impact on the world in the end. I'll admit this is part of the motivation for ARC's various lawsuits. 
I wonder how much your perspective has been informed by your ability to participate in the Fanfest LARP. I admit jealousy. I would extremely disagree with your assessment that the Kyonoke arc was Gallente and Caldari, as opposed to Caldari - though, as you can see, I did divide it up like that for the sake of the analysis, because there's some room for debate there. Again, I refer back to the concept of actors and receivers; the action started in the State, with the actor being Templis, and ended in the State.
Here, too, it would be useful to go into depth as a concept. Imagine - I might do something like this, but it would be a pain in the ass and take a lot of time - Imagine that I went across each faction's core fiction portal pages. Imagine I looked at the pages and selected "key words" for each faction, and I would assign a numerical weight to each key word. I might go into the Caldari State core fiction portal pages and decide that our key words and their weights would be:
[spoiler]Caste: 3
Seituoda: 4
Creche: 3
CBD: 1
Caldari State Armed Forces: 2
Here is my rationale for these weights: articles about the Caldari State Armed Forces or affecting the CSAF will likely have a consequence on an entire generational swath, given that all State citizens will serve in them in their lifetime. The concept of a creche, a caste, and the consequences of things that impact them may not be so far reaching, but they do have an immediate, personal, intimate consequence to a subset of the State that does interact with it to belong to one. The Seituoda Great Family is a very specific example of a small population which makes decisions that impact every aspect of the lived experience inside the State, and they are one of two examples we have of that group. CBD is the lowest, though still on the list, because as a Mega their behaviours/decisions/attitudes have an immediate, personal, and intimate consequence on a wide swath of the Caldari State population, but an article that mentions CBD is pretty likely to just be namedropping.
I talk about populations because, as roleplayers with interest in faction lore, consequences on populations are what we make our stories from.
Now, in contrast, here's an example of key words and how I might weigh them for the Federation:
Senate: .5
Member state: 2
Mannar: 3
Identity: 1
Artificial Habitat: 1
The Federation Senate has nearly no immediate, personal, or intimate consequences on almost any portion of the Federation population. At most 20% of that population votes, and the Senate's jurisdiction is set up in such a way that even if it wanted to have a consequence like that, it would really be a district or a member state that would cause the consequence to happen and decide what it was, and that would likely be after several months or years. I rate member state as a key word higher because it is a very specific and niche concept, which has immediate, personal, and intimate consequence for a subset of the population. There are few references to member states (individually or as a concept) in news articles. I rate the Mannar highest because they have a fair amount of lore and lore consequence on the fiction portal, but they're almost never mentioned in articles, and they're still 10-15% of the Federation's population. I dropped artificial habitat on there because while it's not immediately a Federation-specific piece of lore, the Federation supposedly mastered the science on it and makes the highest quality examples of them, so examples of them and uses of them will reveal something about the Federation. Besides that, they're niche, and they're not referenced very much, although they should have this (immediate, personal, intimate) consequence on a subset of the Federation population.[/spoiler]
I think that's enough examples for you to see where my priorities would be. Then I go through articles and I count up all the key words and assign in their weights. We could theoretically determine the "depth" an article goes into a faction's lore. (Separate from the quality. I have the *worst* article on creches as an example of how depth doesn't mean quality, if anyone's interested.)
That's when we come to this fact: you cannot approach writing each individual faction the same way. The FIO is a shallow example of Federation lore, and the majority of the Federation population doesn't think about it on a day-to-day basis. Whereas Hyasyoda (and of course, the Pit) is a deeper example of State lore, because it has more consequence for a greater amount of people on a more immediate, personal, and intimate level.
If you wanted to write an interaction between FedSta that had equal depth for both sides, you might look at these keywords and generate this headline:
Seituoda Repudiates CBD's Targeted Marketing Campaign inside Mannar Member StateI... I would read that article. Anyway, that's why I would argue that the Kyonoke storyline is mostly just a Caldari State storyline.
On Upwell: while Upwell's domination by ORE and Mordu's Legion put it into the 'other' category, the organization has corporations from all the various states. Right now, Upwell's portrayed as monolithic, a bit of a black box. What if CCP were to do more to explore the inner workings of it, or to empower the smaller players, portray the politics that are involved? For instance, Propel Dynamics is a State corporation that wears Ishukone livery but has major funding from KK, Wiyrkomi, Perkone, and the State and Region Bank, and was evidently an important contributor to the latest Upwell navigation push. Exploring that'd be fun! Likewise, Eifyr & Co is an Upwell member: but they're also tied with Arek'jalaan and with the Sisters of EVE ship design effort. Exploring the shadiness there might be very interesting thing indeed.
If this happened, I would say that Upwell would suddenly become faction lore, and we could divide up Upwell articles - or, ideally, faction lore would be so healthy it would be pointless to divide. I say this with the qualification that any lore impacting Caldari State corporations is automatically more in depth than lore that mentions the corporations of other factions, so even if Upwell's faction-to-faction split was equal, the Caldari State may still come out with more usable and deeper lore. Propel Dynamics is where some portion of the Caldari population was born, will be educated, work, live, and die. Corps is mother. Corps is father. Eifyr & Co's employees, meanwhile, are probably applying to a new, better-paying job as we speak. Maybe several different jobs.
You'll additionally note CONCORD goes into the "other" category. It doesn't help that Upwell is monolithic, but even if it wasn't, some of its articles might still be "other."
On cross-faction articles, I'd love to see more that muddies the water for the traditional cross-faction 'grr' play. While grr and conflict are important content drivers, muddying the water gives players more room to explore their own stories. For instance, what if MIO and FIO cooperated on cross-border Blood Raider purges? The differences between GalFed and Amarr responses to Sanist stuff would be put on display, and it might allow for a less-utopian expression of what happens when the normally open Federation is forced to deal with the demons of others, like actual Blood terrorism. 
Can't really do anything but agree here. I like your idea. We should be seeing different kinds of cross faction play in general, something more than just "I've remembered I HATE you" conflict. Again, this is a place where I would say FedSta and ImpRep are two different formulas, and they should be treated as such - to repair the damage that was caused by TEA, we should be getting lore developments that make it clear that the FedSta relationship is not a zero sum game. That is to say, we should be getting cross-factional lore that demonstrates that what's good for the Fed can be good for the State, and what's bad for the Fed can be bad for the State. But that's a separate issue, I think, from the fact that we're not getting enough faction lore articles and there's serious discrepancies in the numbers. Maybe it's a solution.
Lastly, I do wonder how much the numbers would change if this were stretched over years progressively further into the past. YC117, for instance, was heavy with Drifter and Amarr stuff; YC116 had Templis Dragonaur shenanigans early in the year, and SoE/Sleeper stuff in the latter part with Thera; YC115 had the Midular assassination, Dust stuff, Caldari Prime, so is a giant mixed bag.
I want to do this, but we're missing large amounts of news articles from the community site. I don't know if anything prior to YC116 has every news article that was published during that time. Besides which, the further back we go, the more we get into live events, which were never catalogued - a live event that concludes a series of news articles but doesn't have a matching news article would make the data seriously dishonest.
Would it be fair to say, though, that YC115 was the most recent really good year for Minmatar events/lore?
I'll check this and compare it to our current averages.
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Topic: Statistical Analysis and the State of Faction Lore YC118-120 (Read 6307 times)